One of the weird things about reading about comics online is the seeming disconnect between the intellectual, high-minded comics fans and the fanboys. I know every medium has this kind of disparity--movies have Pauline Kael disciples vs. the people who thought Transformers 2 was AWESOM DOOD--but with comics, maybe because the fanbase is so small, it seems like it's all or nothing. Either the people commenting are intelligent sophisticates, or drooling cretins. You don't seem to get casual fans whose tastes veer towards the mainstream but who are willing to dabble in more unusual stuff.
I mean, I was reading a comics board a while back--it wasn't CBR, but it was similar--and the superhero fanboys were dissing Scott Pilgrim for being too weird and "manga". Seriously--they seemed to feel Scott Pilgrim was some kind of self-absorbed indie book in the style of Seth or something. And they'd clearly read the thing, their minds just processed it that way. What's crazy is that you can almost see their point on a purely superficial level--it's a black and white book about relationships published by an indie company. That's how stark the divisions in the comics medium have become.
Kim Thompson wrote a great article a few years ago called "More Crap is What We Need"--go read it, it's short. The gist of her argument is that we need a better selection of middlebrow comics that aren't superhero books: solid, well-crafted books that aren't trying to reinvent the medium but do a good job for what they are.
I'd argue the same basic affliction affects the fans themselves. Again, it's probably because comics have such a small audience, so it's down to the passionate hipsters who are smart and cool enough to see the value of the medium (LIKE ALL OF US HAW HAW) and the brain-dead fanboy zombies who are still buying out of OCD. If the medium is going to get a wider fanbase, we need more of the casual fans, people who are understandably intimidated by From Hell and the like, but are open-minded enough to read something that isn't all-tights all the time.
What I don't get is why the comics fanboys are so resistant to trading up like that. It's one thing to have a wheelhouse, it's another to literally be terrified of anything outside it, especially when "outside of it" includes most of the genres they would enjoy in another medium.
I mean, I was reading a comics board a while back--it wasn't CBR, but it was similar--and the superhero fanboys were dissing Scott Pilgrim for being too weird and "manga". Seriously--they seemed to feel Scott Pilgrim was some kind of self-absorbed indie book in the style of Seth or something. And they'd clearly read the thing, their minds just processed it that way. What's crazy is that you can almost see their point on a purely superficial level--it's a black and white book about relationships published by an indie company. That's how stark the divisions in the comics medium have become.
Kim Thompson wrote a great article a few years ago called "More Crap is What We Need"--go read it, it's short. The gist of her argument is that we need a better selection of middlebrow comics that aren't superhero books: solid, well-crafted books that aren't trying to reinvent the medium but do a good job for what they are.
I'd argue the same basic affliction affects the fans themselves. Again, it's probably because comics have such a small audience, so it's down to the passionate hipsters who are smart and cool enough to see the value of the medium (LIKE ALL OF US HAW HAW) and the brain-dead fanboy zombies who are still buying out of OCD. If the medium is going to get a wider fanbase, we need more of the casual fans, people who are understandably intimidated by From Hell and the like, but are open-minded enough to read something that isn't all-tights all the time.
What I don't get is why the comics fanboys are so resistant to trading up like that. It's one thing to have a wheelhouse, it's another to literally be terrified of anything outside it, especially when "outside of it" includes most of the genres they would enjoy in another medium.
