I have to begin by thanking everyone for the good feedback on last week’s column. It means a lot, and I’m glad people are enjoying it’s slow evolution. I apologize for not having it on a steady schedule — it was supposed to be a Wednesday thing, but then I moved it to Thursday, but I waved that deadline goodbye too. (Actually, I woke up fully dressed in my bed, desk lights a-blazing, and realized it was now Friday. So it was less waving, more self-loathing. It’s gross to sleep in your clothes. Movies make springing up in jeans and a hoodie seem much cooler.)
Now, onto an actual discussion…
Over the short years I’ve been opining in long form, I’ve constantly flogged the idea of gateways — movies, video games, comic books, filmmakers, actors, and conventions — all leading into a wider and more delightful world of genre appreciation. Twilight fans will wander the floors of the San Diego Convention Center and discover Dark Horse books. Red Dead Redemption players will pick up Clint Eastwood Collections and Jonah Hex. Those who are Watchmen virgins will discover the delight of graphic novels, The Dark Knight fans will discover the world of DC Comics, and so on.
Does it ever actually happen?
I ask, because I truly want to know. I want success stories. My experience has been pathetic and paltry. It’s also probably a very limited experience, given my location and the amount of people I know, who range from “Well Rounded” to “Happily Ignorant.”
I’ve flogged the idea in my writing; I’ve acted on it for real. Hearing someone say they were a fan of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, and kinda liked the X-Men movies, I shoved Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men into their hands. “Try this! It’s a really good X-Men run for a beginner, and Whedon’s style is all over it. I can recommend other X-Men comics if you like it.”
They read it. They returned it. They gave me a polite “It was good” but they didn’t ask for more.
Last week, the release of Rango spurred a shocking and delightful interest in Sergio Leone and spaghetti westerns in my tiny circle. “Ok, I have to see more Westerns!” said one voice, and I said “Oh, I’ve got them all, you can totally watch them. The only catch is that I want to watch them with you!”
And so one night, they raced in to watch A Fistful of Dollars , and I had that delightful rush of seeing it through new eyes. The camera angles. The squint. The dirt. The sardonic gleam in the eyes of Gian Maria Volonte. The final gunfight.
I could tell that the enthusiasm was fairly one-sided (i.e., all mine) but it was late, my DVD copy has muddy audio, and A Fistful of Dollars might be underwhelming after so much hype.
They expressed interest in seeing more, and I waxed enthusiastically about Django, The Great Silence, and the hours we’d have to set aside for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In the back of my mind, I knew we’d never get to these, but I still fantasized about another thundering race to the television.
It didn’t happen. It hasn’t happened. And I know it won’t. I can tell the topic is now settled into dusty disinterest, exactly as it was before, with no further curiosity or appreciation.
If it was the one failure I’d experienced, I would brush it off, but the truth is that I’ve never actually had a success story beyond getting my sister into Jonah Hex and Fables.
As I look around ComicCon, I don’t exactly see new faces brought in by Twilight. They came for Twilight, they’ve returned for Twilight, but I haven’t seen them branching out into other areas of genre and geek thanks to their convention exposure. The geek girls I know have always been geek girls, and the flag-waving we’ve done just doesn’t seem to convert those that only like Harry Potter or Twilight. And why should it? You like what you like, and just because it exists in the same sphere of promotion (a Green Lantern display next to the Horcruxes) doesn’t mean you’ll go exploring.
I won’t ever give up, obviously. It’s what I do. It’s what we all do. Those of us fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on who is reading) enough to have a platform will constantly enthuse about this or that property being “a gateway” because it’s a tidy way to namedrop a bunch of stuff we love. But I’m not so sure such a thing really exists. As Blondie himself would say, there’s two kinds of people in this world — and the enthusiastic, all-consuming kind doesn’t really need a gateway (though they might hitch onto it to give their own journey an angle). They get to it all eventually. Those that we outline gateways for — “Look, kids, it’s the same thing as Rango!” — aren’t the ones who will take them. If they were, they would be unlocking it themselves, especially in these Wiki-makes-it-easy times.
Am I wrong? I hope so. If you’ve got any success stories, lay them all on me.
8 comments
I think it depends on the person. You could consider me a success story. A friend of mine has gotten me into a lot of different kinds of films that I might not have gotten to on my own. He’d recommend a movie and I’d either watch it be myself or he’d insist on watching it with me. From there I took it on myself to devour everything by that particular actor/director/etc. My love of certain movie genres have led my to various video games. Him introducing me to film noir has got me into reading Raymond Chandler and intensely looking forward to LA Noire.
I’ve worked with a lot of teens that think that “Boondock Saints” is the greatest thing ever, yet they hadn’t seen the movies that Troy Duffy had obviously seen/ripped off/been inspired by/whatever, which are movies that just about anyone older than that had grown up on, which we then loaned out, so us older late-20/early-30-somethings have taken to calling “Boondock Saints” a gateway drug to actual good movies.
I myself have been into comics since about 1992 or so when I was in junior high, and I can definitely see how my own tastes have changed over the years, and while I do still read a lot of the same stuff, my tastes have expanded quite a bit. I was originally hooked by the characters and artwork, but eventually started following writers more (man, does a LOT of that early 90’s Image art not hold up…). An example of that would be Captain America, where the book wasn’t great at the time, but it was eventually taken over by guys like Mark Waid and Ed Brubaker, who I followed to other books and genres, which led to me getting hooked on OTHER characters and creators, which I’ve been able to pass along to formerly non-comic reading friends. Garth Ennis’s Punisher run (both the marvel knights and MAX stuff), Preacher, and The Boys are really easy to get someone hooked on, as is Kirkman’s Walking Dead and Invincible, Bendis’ Ultimate Spidey and Daredevil (which was continued pretty seamlessly by Brubaker), and a lot of Mark Millar’s stuff. Much of Millar’s recent work makes for good, quick, self-contained reading, and even his runs on stuff like Wolverine and Fantastic Four are pretty accessible to non-fans. Speaking of westerns, Millar’s “Old Man Logan” is like a mix between Wolverine (OK, it IS Wolverine) and “Unforgiven”, so that’s a good one to pass along to fans of the genre who might only have even just a passing interest in the the Marvel characters.
Great article, at least up to the point I read to. There I encountered what is the inverse of a gateway for me, the name Joss Whedon. I liked the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer just fine, but never watched the TV series other than checking out a single episode to see what the fuss was about; I was treated to multiple instances of teenage girl-on-girl action, and then I understood. I thoroughly enjoyed Serenity despite an unhealthy overdose of Summer Glau’s anthropomorphic face, found Dr’ Horrible’s Singalong Blog cute to hilarious if a bit pretentious, yet was completely underwhelmed by his run of The Runaways. But that’s just me.
Unfortunately a very vocal minority act as if Mr. Whedon a demigod or something, so as soon as his name is mentioned I tune out and turn off – I have learned the hard way that fanboys create unrealistic expectations that can ruin otherwise good works of art and literature.
It’s too bad, really, because by backlashing against him I’ve probably missed out on some really good stuff, just I similarly did with early 90s alternative rock, MMORPGs, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to name a few. However, there’s a whole slew more that I did right by delaying or skipping entirely, such as Tim Burton’s Batman, The Simpsons, Wayne’s World, “The Macarena”, the Twilight phenomenon, and [sacrilege]Shaun of the Dead[/sacrilege]. But then again I suffer from a dopamine deficiency.
Still, I will continue to read Ms. Rappe’s excellent, well-thought out, grammatically correct, and properly spelled and punctuated articles.
I think your last point sticks: some people have the geek chromosome and others just don’t. I’ve tried for years to show people in my life certain comics and movies, and the only ones who really responded were the ones who likely would’ve found the material and liked it anyway. No “converts”. To speak to a related theme: I’ve never understood “backlash”. If you like something, great. If not, no biggie. But the idea of having a bad taste in one’s mouth about a thing simply because others are so enthusiastic about it escapes me. I know it’s not rare, but I don’t get it. Is it the fact that a person is gushing about something that is distasteful, or is it taking a person at their word that something is great and then being disappointed?
Okay, first off, when showing the Dollars trilogy to people who aren’t into westerns, start at the end and work your way backwards. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is far more accessible to your average moviegoer than A Fistful of Dollars. Dollars is a pretty typical Italian movie from the 70s from a technical standpoint (bad dubbing, bad sound, grainy bleached visuals, and an obviously near nonexistent budget) which is not to say it isn’t an amazing movie but you have to squint through it’s flaws.
I will however testify that the gateway drugs works. I go off on tangents all the time and in the past years I’ve learned to love golden and silver age comic books, martial arts movies, westerns, action movies, the Friday the 13th series (well… up to part 6), and a number of writers, film-makers, and artists. Of course part of this is just tastes developing over the years, but a lot of those Twilight fans will grow up and move on to less annoying fandoms (I think the Twilight fans in their 30s and 40s are lost to the world however, though I can’t be sure.)
I’ve actually been pretty successful in getting people into genre stuff – but I need to know the person beforehand. That’s what it boils down to, if the person is open minded enough to embrace something a little quirky. So in general “gateways” don’t work. The gateway is already in the person’s mind. Oooh that was deep! These articles are deep!
On a somewhat related note, I’ve noticed that most of the non-geek-chromosome-carrying people that have gotten on me about reading comics over the years don’t read ANYTHING themselves. Has that happened to anyone else? It’s like being made fun of for knowing how to read.
Whedon had never been a selling point for me either, though I really did like his Astonishing X-Men. Like you, I was incredibly disappointed with his run on Runaways, as that book had been excellent up to that point when it was being written by it’s creator, Brian K. Vaughan. It was sort of the beginning of the end for THAT series, as after it left Vaughan’s hands it switched creative teams every few months and also got so bogged down in whatever Marvel crossovers were going on at the time. I had only been picking up the hardcovers after the most recent re-launch, and I don’t think I even noticed when it was cancelled.
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