Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Political Slant

Hube has an excellent breakdown that explains why I don't read comics anymore.

UPDATE: John makes the point that many of pop culture icons seem to be poor at reading and artistic comprehension. It's very true, but often the thematically inept are not the writers. They're artists or actors who aren't so much creating the work as reading their lines or drawing the pictures others are asking them too. They aren't paid for critical artistic analysis of their subject, they are paid to act and draw pretty.

What really annoys me is not that the writers are crappy or that the artists and actors are clueless. What annoys me is that the people running the business who are supposed to be evaluating their work as good or bad don't seem to be paying attention, either. I remember when they did the great Captain America switcheroo in the eighties. I have an Iron Man comic with "the Captain" in it. It was very very stupid and I doubt it sold comics. I remember when they were fiddling around with Superman in the 90s because their crappy writers ran out of ideas. How do hacks like Chuck Austen keep getting hired to work on comics? A while back Chuck went to DC from Marvel and a coworker and I celebrated. Mostly because the only DC superhero we like is Batman and we didn't care how Chuck screwed up the DC universe.

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