I’ve been thinking about comics. Because that’s basically what I do with most of my free time. In particular, I’m thinking about Grant Morrison’s (maybe not so) drug-addled, oft-quoted goal of making the DC Universe “sentient.”<\/p>\n
On the surface, that quote makes no fucking sense, but beneath it hints at the sort of depth that the best of GMozz’s ideas plunge into. It seems insanity and promises greatness. We like the idea because it embodies exactly what we like about the comics we read – especially if you are, like I am, a devotee of the really out-there Kirby, Haney, Kanigher and Mantlo stuff that may not make sense but is indisputably awesome<\/em> in the current and original senses of the word both.<\/p>\n After reading Final Crisis<\/em>, that zany quote from everyone’s favorite alien-abducted magus makes a bit more sense. Sense because the entire (if slightly veiled) point of the event’s endgame is that the story keeps going on without us<\/strong>. <\/em>It is its own entity, telling its own story. <\/em>Storytelling – or more aptly – a kind of Platonic ideal of Story – is the very premise that Superman Beyond <\/em>is constructed on. Final Crisis <\/em>#7 is framed as a bedtime story told to children.<\/p>\n The more interesting bit of meta-commentary seeded here is Morrison’s painting of the reader – the fan – as the enemy<\/strong> of The Story. In fact, DC’s been doing that since Infinite Crisis<\/em> when it revealed that the good-hearted fanboy who saved the universe in the first Crisis<\/em> had transmogrified into a sullen, nitpicking murderer hell-bent on changing the universe into what he thinks it should be\/needs to be (and ultimately decides that what he really wants is his universe back – an echo of the fans that say things like, “The Detroit JLA is my<\/em> Justice League and I won’t read any other version”). In Final Crisis<\/em> and its infinite lead-ins, the Monitors serve the same function – nattering and infighting over which version of which character or legacy is the canonical one.<\/p>\n Are we really the bad guys? Sometimes, when we lose sight of what we love about comics, we can sure seem that way. When we focus too much on the Creators (to the point of either trashing or deifying them unfairly) and not on the Story, or when we’re mean instead of actually critical about a plot twist that we don’t like, we are. Because it’s easier and more fun, I suspect we don’t celebrate what we love about the artform nearly enough. But then, maybe the creators need a thicker skin.<\/p>\n What do you think? Are comics fans hurting comics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been thinking about comics. Because that’s basically what I do with most of my free time. In particular, I’m thinking about Grant Morrison’s (maybe not so) drug-addled, oft-quoted goal of making the DC Universe “sentient.” On the surface, that quote makes no fucking sense, but beneath it hints at the sort of depth that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,69],"tags":[413,138,98],"class_list":["post-1599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","category-fandom","tag-comics","tag-fanboys","tag-final-crisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}