Today on the site I'm pleased that R. Fiore has returned to these hallowed pixels with a new column on a topic I can relate to: Snobbery!
I can’t really think of a better way to categorize my kind of comics reader than “comics snob.” By comics snob I mean the comics reader who, when introduced as a comics reader, instantly feels the urge to disavow any interest superhero comics. To the lay public this distinction will mean next to nothing. To the comics snob the superhero comic is the elephant in the room, who is your roommate, who happens to pay about 90% of the rent, and when you tell someone where you live they say, “Oh yeah, the Elephant House.” Any self-deprecating use of the term “snob” will open you up to charges of humblebragging, but the term comics snob carries with it a tacit admission that there’s something absurd about being a snob about comics. It’s the absurdity of saying, “I don’t read any of that superhero crap, what I like is Donald Duck.”
The problem for the comics snob referred to herein is the superhero comic that’s too good to ignore. The reference is facetious; good comics aren’t a problem for anyone. The problem is this: Ignoring mainstream comics is easy. Steadfast resistance is the line of least resistance. Once the comics snob concludes there are mainstream comics worth paying attention to, he faces the fact that they publish an awful lot of mainstream comics, and to truly have a sense of what’s happening in that part of the forest you’d have to look at a lot of trees. Lacking that kind of stamina all I can say about the state of mainstream comics based on the examples reviewed here is that an elephant sticks in the ground and is round like a pillar.
In fact, I’m uniquely unqualified to write about mainstream comics in any authoritative way. I stopped paying more than piecemeal attention at precisely the point where the X-Men had become the creative center of mainstream comics, a circumstance which in large part inspired me to get off the bus. In terms of modern mainstream comics history, this is like losing interest in the Bible when God decides that Adam needs a girlfriend.
Elsewhere:
Jessica Abel on the editing process.
Alex Dueben on artist Paul Johnson.
And finally, I've never seen this amazing video of Jack Kirby discussing his time in WWII.
