Love In The Asylum

Here's a disclaimer: I love my dad's family very much. They've always been there for me, financially and non-financially - my aunt lets me spend Thanksgivings with them since I can't go home, my other aunt buys me clothes every time I'm in the state, my grandmother is responsible for my love of art and opera and let me live with them for two years when I couldn't live my mom and her boyfriend anymore. They are pretty much decent people.

Here's some bitching: I hate hate HATE when they get on my case about my weight, which both my aunt and my grandma have done CONSTANTLY for the last ten years. And I know they do it with the best intentions because they worry about me and think I'm not healthy, but they seem to be under the impression that if they just nag me and lecture me and give me diet books enough some day it will randomly snap into my head that hey, I'm fat, maybe I should do something about that, and I'll start going to the gym five times a week and eating nothing but salad.

It doesn't work. It's never worked. It never will work. Because being told what to do doesn't motivate me; it just makes me dig in my heels, even against my own best interest, because you are not in charge of me and my decisions and I will screw myself over to hell and back just to prove it to you. Because being told about my "weight problem" all the time, as if it's not something I'm aware of, as if it's not something I have to deal with every day, just makes me feel guilty and stressed out and miserable. Because I CANNOT lose weight for my grandmother, or my aunt, or my mom, or the stores that don't sell my size or the girls who make me feel awkward or the guys who made fun of me in high school. I can only do it for me: for my reasons, with my plan, on my timeline. Just me. 

I am working on eating better and exercising more, because I don't think I'm healthy right now and I want to change that. I'm on a not-a-diet, which basically means picking one bad eating habit every quarter (not enough veggies, too many fries, too much red meat, etc) and focusing on changing that until it's become a good habit instead. I've been losing weight, and that's good. Maybe I'll keep losing weight, and that's good too. But if I keep making these changes and get healthier and stay more or less the size I am now? That's okay too.

Telling me all the time that I need to lose weight doesn't make me want to lose weight. It just means I have to spend that much more time telling myself that being skinny won't make me smarter funnier nicer prettier less lazy less shy more popular more interesting a better human being. Because I know that's a lie. But it's a lie a lot of people I know seem to want me to believe.

(This post prompted by the fact that in the last three hours, my aunt gave me a stack of Time magazines she "thought I'd like to read" that all featured prominent articles on weight loss, and my grandma grabbing my arm while I was sitting next to her and asking me if I was gaining weight again. Grrrrrrrr. Must...not...kill...)

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