Writer's Block: Traditional Pursuits

[Error: unknown template qotd]For a family that is a mix of atheist (mom), agnostic (dad), pagan (me), and low-key Christian (grandparents and assorted other relations), we have a hell of a lot of Christmas/holiday type traditions. Among my favorites are:

• going up into the mountains and almost dying in an attempt to procure a Christmas tree. The almost dying is the most important part. Nothing, nothing, beats the year my dad's snowchains came off and cut the brake line, leaving us brakeless and halfway up an incredibly steep, incredibly slick, incredibly narrow road with a thirty foot drop two feet away from the edge. Good times!
• decorating the tree with the largest collection of amazingly awesome yet completely random ornaments ever. We have everything from Harry Potter ornaments to Cowboys balls to metal frogs. Win.
• Dim Sum Christmas Eve. So much wondeful food, none of it ethnically appropriate!
• driving around the Bosque and Old Town to look at all the pretty lights. Some of the houses down there are huge, and most of them decorate lavishly. The best part is always seeing the lizard house, but there are also carols, tiny little Old Town shops, hot cocoa, and family members being psychotic.

Don't Get Me Started On Annie, Though

Dear Self:

Okay, I'll concede that for a Disney show of the early '00s So Weird was kind of awesome. It had good music, good characters, good plots, and it was about the supernatural, always a big draw for me. But it is 2 in the morning. I have a final exam tomorrow. Is this /really/ the time to decide we absolutely no arguments must go on an epic search for Jack/Clu and Jack/Carey slashy fanfiction?

Seriously, what the fuck?

(they were totally doing it though)

ETA: So far the only fic I've found involves corsets. Why have you failed me, fandom?

There Goes My Hero

So it's Wednesday. And that means new comics! And it's been an exciting few weeks, comics-wise: the end of Secret Invasion and the start of the Dark Reign in the Marvelverse, and the end of Batman RIP in the DCU, to name the really big storylines lately. And all this shiny newness (and way too much free time during finals) has had me thinking about comics.

Now let me lay this out right here: as far as comics fandom goes, I'm pretty much a total noob. I've read comics on occasion my whole life, but I've only been in fandom for reals for about a year. I don't have the encyclopedic and impressive knowledge of back-continuity most of the denizens of scans_daily  of seem to have; I don't have a closet full of old issues dating back to the 80s; I don't even buy comics outside of the rare trade, since I would have to take a train to get to my closest comics shop. So I read fanfiction, and I read scans, and I download cbrs and read those, and I read as much meta as I can, but really, I'm not an experienced player here.

But I do love comics, I really do. There are so many things about comics, specifically superhero comics, that I get tremendously happy about - archetypes! Myths! Heroes! Sacrifice! Angst and loss! Banter! Team dynamics! Buckets of gay! There are very, very few buttons I have that comics don't push. I'm not a huge art aficionado, but I enjoy the visuals, too, and it allows for some unique means of storytelling that I can appreciate. I find reading comics enjoyable, relaxing, entertaining, and even, often enough, thought-provoking. Comics are good!

But I can't help but think that this is a really bad time for me to be discovering this huge, wonderful world of comics.

Don't get me wrong; the modern art of comics has a lot going for it. Not for my life would I go back to the eye-gougingly ugly days of 90s art (pouches and buckles and mullets, oh my!), even if I'm not entirely crazy about the trend now for photoshopped art effects. And the current storylines are a vast improvement on the Silver Age crack - gay jokes about Batman and Robin and Superman forcing Lois Lane to marry an ape aside, the stories just aren't that well-written or compelling. And comics have gone a long way in opening up the genre to women, people of color, and LGBT people, although there remains a vast amount of work to get anything close to what I would consider equality. So yeah, modern comics are good in a lot of ways.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, somewhere in the last 15 or so years, someone in the comics business figured out that comics weren't just the purview of drugstore shopping middle-school kids anymore - they were being read, maybe even the majority of the audience consisted of real live grown-up people. What do you do with that knowledge? Well, if you want grown-ups to keep reading your comics, you write to your audience, and so you end up with more mature, more adult comics.

Except that's not what happened. Someone (or rather a lot of someones, because while it's fun to curse Dan Didio and Joe Quesada to our dying breaths, they aren't the exclusive players here) got their wires crossed, and decided that grown-up comics were synonymous with dark, grim, gritty, realistic comics. Because you see, in the grown-up world, everything is hard. No one is nice to other people. There are no moral absolutes, and certainly no moral high ground. Every action, even the most pure-hearted, can end disastrously. Goodness is naivete and violence is the only answer.

Take that assumption, that you have to write grim and gritty stories to make your world adult, and put it in the hands of people who aren't the best at what they are doing, who don't know their characters that well, who try to work out their own issues on the page, and you get modern comics. You get story after story about characters who are supposed to be heroes who are instead tortured, conflicted, self-righteous, cruel, or just plain assholes. You get storylines that put your characters through an unrelenting series of setbacks and falls and failures that don't really serve to advance their character development, just to make to make them suffer. You get characters who are nice, or fun, or playful, or good, and end up twisting them beyond recognition or just killing them off. You get crossover after multi-book event after Crisis.

The frustrating part about this criticism is that I don't think comics should go too far the other way, either. Like I said above, the Silver Age comics, which are high on random insanity and low on plot and angst, don't appeal to me at all. Comics that really are written for children are lacking in dramatic weight. Part of me does want realism in comics, because when everything goes perfectly there's always a little niggling part of my brain that says 'the world doesn't work that way!' In the real world, sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes you can't save everyone. Sometimes trying your hardest and wanting to do the right thing just isn't good enough. Sometimes relationships go badly and friendships break up and people get hurt. Sometimes the hero really is just a little boy who wishes he could get his parents back. A comic book that tries to pretend that none of this ever happens, that there are no consequences to our actions, that there is no suffering in the life of a hero, would and does bore me quickly.

But there has to be a balance. There has to be a way we could write comics that would find that place between garishly bright and achingly dark, between realism and escapism, between heroes who never falter and heroes who do nothing but. There has to be a way to write comics about complex, flawed heroes who are, nonetheless, heroes at the heart of it all. Booster Gold has its flaws, and plenty of them, but I think this is the middle it is aiming for (and a few times even finds). Marvel Adventures is written for kids, but it's one of the best books out in Marvel right now, and it probably gets the closest to this balance.

But for the most part, this balance doesn't exist. And to be honest, I don't think the editors at either major company are even trying to find it. Because modern comics are for grown-ups, you see, and they know what grown-ups want.

Now feel free to tell me how terribly, horribly wrong I am about everything. :D