taking sides: mainstream comics v. alternative comics

Mainstream I guess, in the UK. Abroad, it depends where your distinctions are.

For me, reading good indie comics can be fantastically stimulating but rarely offers much of a rush. But if you've not conditioned yourselves to look for that rush then you won't miss it.

Anyway, for me it's more of a genre thing. I don't read superhero comics as a side effect of reading comics; I read comics in order to read superheroes. Other genres I get elsewhere. I read three novels last week and three nonfiction books. I've watched four hundred movies this year. I don't really leave anyone out, not categorically.

But, yeah, I'm equally satisfied by both realms, albeit in slightly different ways, but even then it's on a genre-to-genre basis (cf. what I get from _Queen & Country_ vs. what I get from _Powers_ vs. what I get from _The Goon_ vs. what I get from _Astonishing X-Men_), so for me the only distinction between these two poles would be be on the level of distribution & availability. And critical cache, I guess.

Forgive my ign'ance, but there aren't many alt titles nowadays that fall into the "mature adult drama" category that typifies the damning schism between mainstream & off-mainstream. Most of the non-mainstream titles I read (if we qualify non-mainstream as "not being published by The Big Two") are really genre fiction, and the chances of suffering SIP-related whiplash are (THANKFULLY) next-to-none. (I think this is a distinction Tep made matter-of-factly earlier, but it might be worth dicussing...) (even if this press is simply an attempt to dissuade Dang of his unfortunate alt.stereotyping).

For what it's worth, the mawkish, heavy-handed, ineptly excecuted drama that typified SIP is the same sort of crap that turns me off most spandex books.

My local comic book dealer recommended I give SIP to my wife if I wanted her to start reading comic books. I did so purely as a social experiment and got the reaction I was expecting, namely "What the hell is this? Christ, I thought the superhero books were bad enough but at least I can UNDERSTAND why you'd want to read those! Do we need to have a talk?"

I've read and enjoyed many indie or whatever comics, but also read lotsa lame ones. I had a really adverse reaction to Joe Matt, for example. Even though, I think that was his point.

Joe Matt's stuff is interesting in small doses, but I hate it when he gets thrown around as an exemplar of the alternative/autobiographical movement. There's a lot more out there than insufferably twee comics and stories about compulsive masturbators.

That said, I'm not so much a fan of the autobio genre (though Yummy Fur was pretty damn good.) Any other recommendations of Mr. Brown's work?

that is the most OTM thing I've read in a long time. Thank you.

Even if they were available though, I don't how many I would really get into because I'm realizing how much I prize the fun factor. Taking that comics edition of McSweeney's that I read as an alt-comics sampler, I think Tom is OTM in that we wouldn't have nearly as much fun discussing relationship/hipster/autobio comics.

The superhero discussion I don't like at all though - in fact the attitude to superhero comics I don't like at all - is when it takes all the criticisms of 'alternative comics' fans and tries to apply them to the pulp stuff, i.e. "oh yes superhero books can have real emotion and strong characterisation and intricate storytelling too you know", it's conceding so much critical ground. I am about 100 characters away from the r-word so I'll stop now.

As for myself, I'm definitely a non-spandex reader. I don't say superhero stuff can't be good, I occasionally read it for the fun and the visceral excitement. I also read a lot of children's comics for the same reasons, though both superhero and the children's stuff can obviously a have a lot going on underneath the surface as well. However, I spend more time reading comics than, say, novels, and I do want to get something serious out of them too. And I've yet to come across a superhero comic which for me would reach the same heights as Corto Maltese, or Ghost World, or Valerian, or Maus, or the Nikopol Trilogy, or Stuck Rubber Baby, or the works of Ralf König and Claire Bretécher, or... That's how it is for me.

(X-post, though it kinda answers Huck's question as well.)

I suspect the main reason for the emphasis on mainstream comics on ILC is really the fact that there are no mainstream comics, in a sense. Comics themselves are marginalized in a way movies, books, television, and music are not; all but the most "mainstream" of them are purchasable only in stores set aside for that purpose, stores which are far less common than the other ones; it's only recently that free access to comics through libraries -- like the free access to books through same, and to music, movies, and TV shows through television and radio (free once you pay the initial investment, at least, which is practically negligible in broadcast-friendly areas) -- has begun to spread, and I'm not sure that's truly common yet.

Tom may be right about some genres being more discussable than others, but I think an at least equal factor is that the quasi-mainstream stuff is simply available, and most comics readers will have been exposed to it: it's like talking about American television shows twenty years ago, when with the exception of a blip here or a blip there, talk would have necessarily focused on three broadcast networks and MTV.

(Or to use an analogy from what I've learned writing about roleplaying games: it's the same reason I talk about Dungeons and Dragons whenever I need to use a game as an example. Even the people who haven't played it understand it, because it's an instigator, a gateway, a market determiner, and everpresent.)

(And there is no useful, reliable, popular online store for comic books that would serve as an analogue for Amazon or your favorite online music store, which would at least have a huge de-mainstream-izing potential.)

I was going to say that in my town, there are more comic stores than record stores, but then I remembered malls.

SIP, to pick an obvious non-Cerebus example, is just as continuity-driven as the X-Men -- it just has a lower accumulated pagecount; Dark Knight Returns doesn't require you to know anything other than who Batman is.

I kiss you.

Oh, and I would include manga under the banner of "mainstream" comics too. To me at least manga fills the same function as the superhero stuff; I occasionally read manga because it can be fun, but on the other hand most manga is pretty formulaic and clichéd (at least when you get used to it's own formulas and clichés, which are a bit different from their Western counterparts), so it never gives me the same excitement as "alternative" (read: non-manga, non-spandex) comics do.

And you can get a lot of variety within a formula, though it is in the end just a formula. An analogy I've always liked from Warren Ellis: imagine you go into a bookstore and 90% of the titles are nurse novels. Romance on the wards, murder in the hospital, examinations of medical ethics and their effects on society. You would probably get some good reading out of it, but it'd still be pretty fucked up.

(This is a tangent, but I'm about halfway through The Essential Dr Strange at the moment, and realized a few stories into it that they're not superhero stories. They're something like superhero stories, the way paralegals are something like nurses of the law -- and sometimes that "something like" gets enthusiastically pushed upon the reader; but they aren't superhero stories.)

The first thing I did was flip ahead to look at the non-Ditko artists, when I picked it up ... either I'd forgotten how much I liked Marie Severin's art, or it just looks better in black and white.

Oh, I just love those. Admittedly, autobiographical comics can be done in a bad way, but some of my favourite comics are the ones with an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical feel to them. Also, comics seem to be a perfect medium for short slices of life stories where nothing big happens. Could these stories be told on TV or cinema? I don't think so. Could they be in a book form? Well, maybe, but somehow comic books seem to be the best forum to tell such tales.

(I don't mean the casual "Oh I forgot to update again" bloggers, obv, or the ones who mostly blog about a specific range of subjects, but the ones who chronicle their lives exhaustively.)

I read RAW back in the 1980s/90s, having read about it in the music press. I did my time sniffing around the overground end of the alt comics thing back then and drifted away. (I drifted away from indie music too). I bought the Jimmy Corrigan book because my friends Pam & Mike had enthused me about CW's material. I was too tight to shell out for the proper comic books.

The other day, on a whim, I bought the McSweeneys volume to see what was going on in the world of comics (!! - I know, but it's true). I was amazed at how much of the work I recognised as being from the RAW generation.

So now you can see the level of my ignorance, here's my question: are these comics "non-mainstream" in the way that, say, Nirvana are non-mainstream, i.e. not (but setting themselves up as oppositional)?

The qn of the RAW generation is interesting - one of the problems the 'oppositional' comics have now is the lack of any kind of defining publication, like RAW or Weirdo was. But I'm sure none of the people making alt.comics would see that as a 'problem' at all - they're happy doing smaller scale stuff. But it's interesting to me if the people who did all that stuff (or their contemporaries) are STILL really identified with the idea of 'non-mainstream' comics.

Who was the last 'star' the underground produced? Chris Ware maybe? Anyone since? Kochalka I guess is a big name.

(I don't like Chris Ware's stuff by the way. That's neither here nor there though.)

On the other hand, how can comics easily found at a library be considered non-mainstream? If those two sets of comics -- superhero stuff, and whatever non-superhero stuff you can get at libraries and bookstores -- were the only comics, then fine, you can consider some of them less mainstream than others. But since they're not, doing so ignores the small-press, self-distributed stuff, the stuff you can't get through Diamond, the stuff published online, a lot of non-American comics (from an American perspective; no matter what else is true here, I think the mainstream in Finland is different from the mainstream in the US, and I don't know about the UK or Canada), and so on.

The well-known non-superhero stuff has been around long enough that I'm not sure it's even really set up in opposition anymore, the way Harvey Pekar's stuff was when he started out.

(I'm deliberately leaving manga out of the discussion altogether; nonsensically or not, it's really its own thing, in the US, separate from "comics.")

(xpost with Tom)

What we're calling mainstream, i.e. superhero comics, is the equivalent of the singles chart: individual comics that people are buying in numbers (but lots smaller numbers than they used to).

So upscale comix and graphic novels like Jimmy Corrigan or Shadow Of No Towers would be the albums market. But here's the twist - the albums market never really existed, individual flare-ups of interest sure but no real sustained market. And because the album format never took off there's no middlebrow (as there definitely is in European comics!).

In pop you have two effective mainstreams - the mainstream of radio play songs, singles sales, and the mainstream of 'proper albums' bought by people who want Quality and know about the stuff they read about in Q or the Observer. The two mainstreams cross over, a bit. In comics the 'second mainstream' never evolved, which is why the occasional mutation like Corrigan or Palestine or Maus feels mainstream, because it should be in that niche.

One sells more, as a rule, and has a higher mass-market profile, but every now and then something from the less-know world crosses over, like "Kind of Blue" or whatever.

Or is that nonsense?

Without an equivalent to radio play -- i.e. all exposure to comic books is willful, never accidental the way it can be for music -- how would the mainstream be defined? By publisher? Availability? Genre? Format?

The superhero=mainstream thing makes Vertigo non-mainstream, among other things that just don't work for me.

You can still find comics at some non-comics stores, but much less frequently and less reliably (they might have X-Men this month and then skip the next three) and in smaller numbers. They tend to be the comics aimed at younger kids, the cartoon tie-ins and whatnot. (Maybe that actually would constitute the true mainstream.)

When I wz v.small and wide open - in the days when a lot of culture required a lot of hunting down - I loved the "mainstream" US stuff I saw which wormed its way into ordinary comic-selling shops in the uk's rural west midlands in the late 60s and early 70s. ie a silver surfer ep where all he did was drift unconcious through some bit of outer space (which ahem i also found v.sexy) while in an entirely difft part of the multiverse, there wz this big empty mansion on a cliff except half way up the stairs there wz this mirror and OH NO in the last panel *in the mirror only* there wz crawling up the stairs a hideous lovecraftian* blob of glup

*(obv at that age i had no idea it was a hideous LOVECRAFTIAN blob of glup)

And every now and then i wd have sight of a thor comic or similar at a friends house: i always adored them

anyway there were two things which make silver surfer etc like jazz:
i. i had no idea how you found what wz what and where to get it
ii. the evident complexity of the backstory etc - knowing where and how to start AT THE BEGINNING - wz v.daunting: occasional visits to comic shops while at college only redoubled this feeling of no idea where to start or even how to track down a how-to-start guide. (I knew a little - more probably, since - abt underground Comix, as i had a buddy at college who wz obsessed w.esp.The Chequered Demon etc).

So basically though deeply attracted to the US mainstream I never followed through.

in the mid-80s i wz working on rock papers etc, so got good advance warning of the "new wave in comix" or whatever it wz then called, and loved it pretty quickly - love and rockets; hate; yummy fur; raw; cerebus; dark knight; fkn watchmen *ptui*; and also - being a professional crit after all - bought and read v.closely the Comics Journal... so absorbed an ideology and the history-as-it-saw-it

years of immersion: 86-95?

anyway, now i guess i can reason this as an indie-over-pop spasm (though i always found CJ's anti-pop attitude v.narrow and actually a bit dim-witted); i kinda liked the indieness of L&R's sensibility, for example ---> the attempt at living a punk life into adulthood, as a problem and a philosophy (as examined here)

HOWEVER ALSO: L&R also reminds me of the comix i DID get to read as a kid, viz beano and dandy -----> there is a clear connect between eg hopey and my lovely minnie the minx/beryl the peril; between hoppers and the bleak dundee streets dc thomson's artists let all their kids run wild in

(this is a uk punk link too, but beano/dandy are pop not indie!!)

i think i wz probably rescued by circumstance by being ambushed by punk *b4* i found out how to be a total shut-in geek: by learning that if you lived yr life right you got to be the "hero" in it, not by compensatory passive consumption, but etc etc

but the link between this realisation and that early unforgotten pull towards the silver surfer is deep and complicated and not to be sniffed at