Newsgroup: it.arti.fumetti
Titolo: [lungo] #10 Master of the Obvious by S.Grant

Ecco il nuovo articolo che S. Grant scrive regolarmente nella sua rubrica
MotO su: 
www.comicbookreources.com
 .
--------------------------
Master of the Obvious, #10 Wednesday October 6th, 1999
One of my favorite jokes:
A little man walks into a tavern, sits at the bar, and orders a shot of
whiskey. The bartender brings him the shot. The little man downs it in one
gulp, stands up, wipes his mouth, announces "I'm not going to pay for that
whiskey, because I can beat any man in the house!" Then he turns and walks
out.
The sight is so comical that all the bartender can do is laugh. But the next
night the same little man comes in again, sits at the bar, and orders a
shot. He downs it in one gulp, stands up wipes his mouth, and announces "I'm
not going to pay for that whiskey, because I can beat any man in the house!"
Then he turns and walks out.
Now the bartender's a little irritated, because he sees a pattern forming.
He calls up a boxer he knows, a huge musclebound mankiller, and asks him to
come by the next night in case the little man shows up again.
Sure enough, the little man walks in the next night, sits at the bar, and
orders a shot. While the bartender's pouring it, the boxer saunters over and
sits next to the little man. The boxer says, "I hear you can beat any man in
the house."
The little man looks him up and down, swallows hard, then says, "That's
right."
The boxer puts his face right in the little man's face and says, "I can beat
any man in the house too!"
"In that case," says the little man, "Bartender! Make that two shots of
whiskey!"
Variations on that joke have been around forever. Lemmy Caution tells it in
Jean-Luc Godard's film Alphaville (1964), where I first heard it. I didn't
get it until years later. The moral of this story is that no joke is an old
joke to someone who hasn't heard it.
But even old jokes aren't necessarily funny.
When I started writing for Marvel c. 1978, the operative philosophy in
comics was that the audience turned over every four years. As the comics
industry has never been very big on market studies, I don't know that there
was actual evidence to back that up. The theory was that the bulk of the
market was boys 10-14, and after that they stopped reading. I'd spent the
years prior to writing working for a bookstore and a distributor, and while
my view was skewed by working in a college town, I thought they
underestimated the general age of their audience. (A curious observation
from my bookstore years was that an awful lot of post-grad feminists loved
the CONAN comic. Go figure.)
"While petty theft has always played a role in comics ... it wasn't
institutionalized until the 70s."
As a result of the "rollover" philosophy, it wasn't unusual for some writers
to "rollover" old plots as well, revisiting old stories in the guise of new
stories. While petty theft has always played a role in comics (DC sued a
competitor for ripping off Superman almost as soon as the feature debuted)
it wasn't institutionalized until the 70s. (The concept of "homage" -
basically, winking at your own theft of other people's ideas and expecting
the audience to play along with the joke - came into vogue then as well.)
Now it's almost de rigueur. It's hard to even pitch a concept that doesn't
play off someone else's pre-existing property. Publishers consider it too
risky. Many readers tell me they prefer projects more comfortable than
adventurous.
This isn't unique to comics. Derivative product runs amok on TV screens and
in movie theaters. Syndicated TV shows, though cooling now, had become such
a hot field that producers are hunting down the rights to anything with a
hint of familiarity, from Red Sonja to Amityville. I have a joke about the
pop music scene: the difference between my generation and my parents'
generation is that when they heard what we were listening to, they screamed
"How can you call that music?!" but when we hear what our kids are listening
to, we mumble, "Y'know, it was better the first time." In a bookstore the
other day I discovered an anthology of new Philip Marlowe stories by modern
authors.
But comics are a special case. Since the rise of the independent publishers,
particularly during the black and white craze of the 80s, the sheer volume
of comics published burns up content at an alarming rate. When hundreds of
titles appear from dozens of companies each month, many more or less
covering the same ground, that's a lot of fiction spat out. While parallel
developments in comics aren't unheard of - two similar concepts, Marvel's
X-MEN and DC's DOOM PATROL, debuted the same month in 1963, while 1972 saw
the near simultaneous appearance of DC's Swamp Thing and Marvel's Man-Thing
(written, respectively, by Len Wein and Gerry Conway, who were roommates at
the time and claim never to have discussed their projects with each other) -
since the early 90s, theft has been considered a survival tool.
One of the more popular parodies of T.M.N.T., Adolescent Radioactive Black
Belt Hamsters
Art by Ken Meyer Jr.
We're a paradoxical business. We tend toward extremes, obsessively
conservative and absolutely refusing to let go of anything, yet willing to
throw away everything for whatever handful of beans seems likeliest to make
money right this instant. This happens when money runs a business - you see
it all over Hollywood since bankers took over in the 80s - and money has run
comics since forever. (The Jim Shooter Principle: if it's not your money,
it's not your company.) While theft was popular in comics in the 80s - how
many witless variations on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did we suffer
through, how many jackass parodies of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS? - it was an era
of innovation, creatively and in marketing, and there was, for a time, a
sense of talent and companies competing with each other to develop new
things, to expand the field and in that way expand the market.
"Theft was popular in comics in the 80s - how many witless variations on
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did we suffer through, how many jackass
parodies of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS?"
When truly big money came in with the 90s, innovation pretty much died; only
tweaking remained, to see who could pump out the most multiple covers or the
goldest gold edition. The black-and-white boom and bust of the 80s should
have taught publishers a lesson: if you milk your audience with copies of
other people's ideas, the audience gets sick of it quickly. But money has
only one goal - make more money - so companies now operate without strategy,
except to cash in on whatever's "hot." Except money always waits to see
what's hot, and, combined with goldrush rapaciousness, nothing turns a
market colder than that.
Not that the audience isn't complicitous. Not that the talent isn't. Both
groups adore the past far too much. While it's understandable, and in the
case of the audience forgivable, there's something creepy about the
reverence much of the talent has for old material. Talent shares the
industry's paradox: obsession with the past and the desire to grab whatever
brass ring anyone else has. One well-known artist used to lecture that a
"true" comic book was 32 pages long on cheap paper with low-rent coloring,
as when he was a boy, and all else was pretension, but that didn't stop him
from demanding equality every time someone got a project on slick paper, in
full color, in new formats or lengths. Some writers spend their careers
strip-mining the work of their predecessors in increasingly minute and
tedious detail, while some artists' whole styles are blatantly lifted from
other artists.
We beat ideas to death. Remember when it was novel to have your character
die, be replaced by a newcomer using the same name, then return from
afterlife to set everything right and reclaim his rightful place? It was
unique when Steve Englehart did it in CAPTAIN AMERICA in the mid-70s (okay,
Cap only retired, but the effect was the same), interesting when the
Superman books added death into the mix in the 90s, "Everybody steals.
Everybody. I've done it."
and bludgeoned into boredom since. Yet talent still tries to pass it off as
an exciting way to resuscitate dying books, as if they just thought of it at
breakfast.
Everybody steals. Everybody. I've done it. I did a THOR once that was a
thinly-veiled reworking of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight. (I don't think
anyone caught it but I had the rare pleasure of seeing the issue denounced
on the 700 Club.) I purposely set out to pastiche Gardner Fox in an Adam
Strange short I did a couple years ago. Sometimes it's what the company asks
for. Sometimes it's innocuous, an application of an old idea to a new
context to see what happens.
The "Doc Savage" cover for Planetary #5
It's a curious sight to watch Warren Ellis and Alan Moore both doing
variations on Doc Savage, it's interesting to witness Grant Morrison nicking
Michael Moorcock. It's more unsettling (particularly in the light of the
inventive MIRACLEMAN) to watch Alan xerox Weisinger-era Superman motifs into
SUPREME. Artists? How many artists reworked their styles to imitate Rob
Liefeld c. 1993? How many got anywhere doing it?
And sometimes it's just fannish conceit, the sense that you can somehow
latch onto glory by mimicking it. This is particularly prevalent among Jack
Kirby worshippers, who claim his legacy is sacrosanct while busily
plundering the temple. Much of the comics style of the past 30 years is
built on Kirby's work, and whatever was vibrant and original about it has
ground to cliché through endless degenerative duplication, to the point
where a lot of artists today don't even know they're ripping off Kirby's
viewpoint, because they're working on copies of copies of copies of Kirby.
Not that I have anything against Kirby. I should say I never liked his art,
though it turned out what I disliked wasn't his after all. When I first saw
it, in FANTASTIC FOUR #10 in a Red Owl supermarket in 1962, my tastes in
comic art had already been formed by the sleek modern ink lines found in the
Julie Schwartz comics at DC, and the clotted black inks surrounding every
figure in FF struck me as gross and primitive. My opinion changed in later
years, but not my tastes. But I don't deny his extraordinary achievements
and justified influence on the business. When Jack died, the eulogies flew
thick and meaningless, and largely missed the point. I generally don't write
eulogies, but when asked to I wrote this for Jack:
 "People like to say that Jack was a genius. I don't think that's true. He
had as many bad ideas as good, but that's because he tried everything he
could think of. The lesson of Jack Kirby's life was not that what he
accomplished was genius, but that anyone can do what Jack did.
But Jack did it."
Why people consider it a tribute to work and rework Kirby's characters is
beyond me. What's the point of Philip Marlowe stories without Raymond
Chandler? "Why people consider it a tribute to work and rework Kirby's
characters is beyond me."
What's the point of Kirby characters without Kirby? From my few meetings
with Jack, I got the idea he would have considered it more of a tribute had
talent followed his example rather than used his creations. And this applies
across the board. It's time to stop stealing from each other, because that's
really what it comes down to, no matter what we call it. If Kirby's legacy
really means anything, it means that we should be trying not what's safe or
what's expedient, not homages to what has gone before. We should be doing
whatever we can think of.
As much as I hate to sound like a broken record, it also means we have to
finally let the past be the past, and get on with the future. Endless,
repetitive theft and bowdlerization of old comics have reduced everything
that was once original and entertaining about them to jokes - worse,
in-jokes - and the old jokes just aren't funny anymore.
 --------------------------------------
Direi che si inserisce bene in alcuni thread che riguardavano la Bonelli e
la situazione del fumetto attuale, con uno sguardo anche alle cause dello
stato attuale del mercato.
Cmq il vecchio Steve, una volta prese le misure, ha iniziato ad affondare il
coltello nelle varie piaghe.
Lode lode lode.
P.S.
Il solito invito alla traduzione resta sempre valido.
--
Hellboy
Dove c'č molta luce, l'ombra č piů nera.
   W. Goethe



Hellboy, nel tuo sempre meritorio post, ti sei dimenticato di aggiungere il
"grazie per lettura" (sic) che Steven rivolge ai suoi lettori italiani.
--
Posted from [194.243.102.130]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - 
http://www.mailgate.org

 "grazie per lettura" (sic) che Steven rivolge ai suoi lettori italiani.
-------
And to my Italian readers, I'd like to say "grazie per lettura." And I hope
I got that right.
-------
...non lo avevo visto, lo ha messo in fondo insieme ai oliti annunci che fa
sulle sue produzioni...mea culpa.... ^_^''
