The World Hates Comics: or, Does it ever depress you slightly that combining words and pictures together in a certain way makes whatever art you're trying to create automatically suitable only for ch

1) I am quite literate.

2) Don't mind the canon.

3) Unless the DKR praise is qualified in some way that acknowledges / wrassles with its cliched status in modern comic lore OR doesn't denegrate the rest of comicdom, treat such effusive praise as a DETOUR marker.

But, yeah, I felt vaguely pervy when I added the first issue of _Mary Jane_ (an "all ages" series revolving around a teenage MJ Watson, Spidey's future paramour) to my pile o' goodness this week. I blame society. And DKR.

Context: got through another of those bloody conversations where somebody asks you what you do, and you tell them, and then they take the opportunity to be very patronising and subtly slag you off. DKR came up in that wonderful way of "I flipped through DKR once, so I've read 'comics' and I'm qualified to dismiss everything".

After Bristol, coming back to the real world where you have to justify your life goals at every turn for complete strangers makes me feel a little down. And I haven't slept this week.

Grist for the mill, Vic.

True. I just need a good night's sleep for a change.

It could be worse. It could be the movies.

Man, this looked like a Calum thread from the title.

Would-be snobbishness is so ridiculous across the board -- with some people dismissing comics, others dismissing genre fiction, or fiction entirely, or television, or movies in favor of plays, or etc. etc. -- that I don't even really register its specifics anymore. It's just "ewww, that food sounds so gross, how do those people eat that?!" in another register.

I always get "not another comic review" looks when I pitch a comic-related article at work. Obviously, no one in the book section has a "not another book review" look...

That said, I am a fat illiterate onanist.

'Onanist' is a word that needs to be used more often.

I will countenance no thing that disparages Dark Knight Returns.

Who gives a shit about "the eyes of society"?
You like what you like.

so wait - where was 'dark knight returns' held up was 'what comics are capable of'???

Every college class on comic books to thread!

Less so now, maybe. And the novelty of "my God, it's a class on comic books" has worn off, so more of the people teaching them actually read comics instead of slumming amongst them. But even Delaney used DKR as the example of Comic Books As Art in his sci fi course at UMass, back in the day. (Well, a day.)

(One of the interesting things about living in Bloomington is that the comic store has a separate shelving unit for Comics Assigned For Classes, most of which are for a periodic class in the art department. Last time I remembered to check what was on it, it was like Understanding Comics, something by Crumb, one of the oversized Alex Ross DC books, Acme Novelty Library, and I forget what else.)

Coming to this topic with a clearer head now... there's an awful lot of good things about DKR especially in terms of layout and storytelling structure. But it reads like something ahead of a time that came nearly twenty years ago - and reads like a reaction to that time, which is long gone. Things have come a long way since - not even mentioning the small press/indy scene that's been chugging merrily away producing incredible quality work.

Also, I should have given this thread a shorter title. Call me impulsive and experimental. Maybe a mod could change it into something like 'The World Hates Comics' and save my blushes.

This only applies in the English-speaking world, of course. Go to France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan, etc, etc, etc, and you'll find that comics aren't looked down on. Heck, even in the Anglophonic world, it's only comic books that are looked down on; comic strips are reagarded as being okay, though admittedly not to the same extent as the thirties and forties when Americans read comic strips the way they watch TV nowadays ie everybody did it, every day.

I just visited my old home town and the two comic shops I lived at growing up are now run by not-unnattractive females.