comics in the 00's

So blah blah blah, decade ending and all that. One thing about comics is because it's not as universally acknowledged an artform as music, cinema, etc. you don't get as "official" a narrative as you do in those other areas. Most of the discourse is usually still along the lines of justifying the art or talking about stuff in very very broad terms (indie vs mainstream, basically); almost everything else is just reviews of individual works. In some ways this is quite liberating, but as a consequence I don't have a very big idea of what this decade has been "about", comicswise (and previous decades have been "about" stuff - 80's grim and gritty and birth of indie, 90's Image comics variant covers, etc.)

So this isn't a thread to list your favourite comics of the decade (although you can do that, too), but more about discussing what major trends the 00's will be remembered for.

some starters, feel free to shoot me down on any of these:

*Decade of the blockbuster superhero movie, obv.
*Infinite Big Events in big two superhero comics.
*Associated to this, a growing sense of Tradition and Respect for Important Characters and a sense of nostalgia for Silver Age FUN COMICS vs modern day grim & gritty (this pretty much encompasses everyone from Geoff Johns to Darwyn Cooke)
*The manga boom (biggest story of the decade, OR IS IT? I mean the triumph of anime is certainly the biggest story in animation, but manga has sort of piggybacked on that, it still feels like a specialist interest in many ways)
*Eurocomix - L'Association and the...not death, but loosening perhaps, of the album format?
*Indie Comics: the triumph of the sad-sack personal narrative (Chris Ware, Blankets et al); you might argue this is what they've always been, but I think this decade has been lower on the nastyness/misanthropy and higher on the emo)

smaller stuff:

*Frank Miller becoming both a genuine Hollywood darling and completley insane and ridicolous (I honestly wonder if the dude's canonisation won't fade away to a considerable degree in the coming decades; I mean it isn't just us contrarians complaining anymore.)
*Image Comics repositioning itself as a quality indie label in the style of Dark Horse
*I might be totally wrong about this, but...Fantagrpahics, Drawn & Quarterly, the championing of forgotten comic strip artists and big lovingly curated complete editions of classic comic strips - is this basically a 00's thing?

*which haha brings us to ONLINE COMICS

*Decade of the blockbuster superhero movie, obv.

This has been true for a few decades now, maybe to a slightly lesser degree. The 80s had the first Batman and the Superman franchises.

The Batman movies were certainly huge when I was growing up in the nineties, too, but I don't think there's been anything lik the boom this decade had before: three Spider Man movies, three X-Men movies (and a Wolverine one), two huge Batman movies, a strongly successful Iron Man movie of all things, and to that you add stuff like Ghost Rider and the two Fantastic Four movies, which may be as lousy as any DTV Punisher or Captain America flick from years bygone but still cashed in a lot better at the box office than any of those ever did. And then there's the stuff that's on the margins of the superhero genre but still made more mainstream impact than one would ever have thought possible say ten years ago - V For Vendetta, Watchmen, the Hellboy movies. Superhero movies failing used to be kind of the rule, not the exception - this decade all I can think of as total failures (if you count both critical reception and box office) is the Superman flick, the Punisher movie (though this has its grindhouse cult audience) and maybe the two Hulk films. I think there's definitley been more visibility for the superhero genre on a whole on the big screen than ever before. Doesn't Marvel basically get its main profits from movies these days?

I think one of the biggest trends has been the relationship between a few very vocal members of the literati and comic books -- the bringing of comics into places like the New Yorker (Chabon, Lethem), the Met (the Superhero exhibit recently), etc. This could also be because the children who grew up reading comics are now the adults at the forefront of American culture.

Everything you've mentioned is OTM, Daniel, but just this one thing....

*The manga boom (biggest story of the decade, OR IS IT? I mean the triumph of anime is certainly the biggest story in animation, but manga has sort of piggybacked on that, it still feels like a specialist interest in many ways)

The boom has absolutely been huge - it's astounding that you can walk into a Barnes & Noble nowadays and find a manga section as large as the Tech one. A huge contrast to buying experiences back in the 80s/90s, though you're right that anime has had an even bigger thrust from the boutique niche. My local library has complete runs of not just stuff like Naruto but XXXholic and Peach Girl, of all things. I actually think it's been downplayed in the traditional comics market and internet/fan followings - for all the talk about how the industry needs to get more kids reading so that the audience doesn't completely die off, this is where they're coming in for the last 10-15 years. I'd argue manga/anime is more of a gateway to comic reading than the Marvel/DC movies have been.

Definitely agree with the superhero blockbuster market becoming more gargantuan than ever though. I remember what it was like when the Burton Batman films came out, but it's really true, I mean how else could a $130-million budget Watchmen film actually be made? In our reality!

As Mordy says, and stuff like Penguin Classics getting comics artists to do their covers.

Trade paperback boom will be one of the big stories. This'll tie into decompression (a common reader irritation), perceptions of value in the face of $3.99 single issue, delivery methods (the marginalization of the single issue and the trade as the de facto story-unit). This also allows the big companies (and some of the small ones, to be fair) a chance to double dip with their content like music labels did with the rise of the CD when it hadn't yet eclipsed vinyl as *the* delivery system (only to be eclipsed by MP3s not long after).

*I might be totally wrong about this, but...Fantagrpahics, Drawn & Quarterly, the championing of forgotten comic strip artists and big lovingly curated complete editions of classic comic strips - is this basically a 00's thing?

well no, not specifically a 00's thing - on his blog recently, Eddie Campbell was singing the praises of a publisher named Woody Gelman, whose Nostalgia Press imprint brought out hardcover Terry and the Pirates and EC comics reprints in the early 1970s, and Fantagraphics in particular have been reprinting things like Prince Valiant, Thimble Theatre and Little Annie Fanny since the 1980s. But its certainly the case that, as far as American comic strips and comic books go, the 00's were the decade that it was at last possible to acquire relatively inexpensive reprints of almost every major artist/title/strip, including such 'foundational' comics as Kirby's complete FANTASTIC FOUR and THOR runs. I think this AVAILABILITY will, I hope, have a big influence on the critical discourse abt comics - the way that we can finally talk abt 'major works' like Herriman's KRAZY KAT or Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES w/ much greater authority than ever before, or go back and discover obscure greats like Fletcher Hanks. Just as the CD collapsed, to a large extent, the distinction between the old and new, the popular and the obscure, i hope that the 'graphic novel' explosion will, I hope, encourage a new generation of fans/critics to look beyond the immediate, the mainstream, the generic.

My hope for the 2010s is that non-American comics are finally accorded the same kind of treatment by people like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly (hope that Fanta's upcoming Tardi reprints represent the start of a trend) - its shameful that we STILL cannot read the complete works of Euro giants like Franquin, Jacobs, Crepax, Druillet, Breccia, Pratt etc in translation.

Oh, oh, that reminds me, another european comics trend: those giant L'Integral things, collecting the entire runs of series like Spirou, Lucky Luke, etc. in a few (well, "few" - the Spirou one is at seven volumes!) thick hardcover volumes. Not really comparable to Fantagraphics and such because this material has for the most part always stayed in print. I think it might be primairly a question of practicality, easier to have a few thick volumes than dozens and dozens of thinner ones laying around.

The boom has absolutely been huge - it's astounding that you can walk into a Barnes & Noble nowadays and find a manga section as large as the Tech one. A huge contrast to buying experiences back in the 80s/90s, though you're right that anime has had an even bigger thrust from the boutique niche. My local library has complete runs of not just stuff like Naruto but XXXholic and Peach Girl, of all things. I actually think it's been downplayed in the traditional comics market and internet/fan followings - for all the talk about how the industry needs to get more kids reading so that the audience doesn't completely die off, this is where they're coming in for the last 10-15 years. I'd argue manga/anime is more of a gateway to comic reading than the Marvel/DC movies have been.

Yeah. What I've noticed with the kids coming in my local comic book store is that they mostly see manga as an extension - the anime is the main attraction/hook, the manga is just a way for them to get more of their favourite hero's adventures. But I supppose that is no different than the comic book fandoms sparked by Super Friends or the 60's Batman, in that it can quite easily lead to devoted readers (more easily even, maybe, because the stylistic gap between the TV Shows and the comics isn't as big.)

Kitchen Sink was also reprinting bunches of old news paper strips from the late 70s through the 80s. Other than reprinting Will Eisner, that was the biggest part of their catalog.

Yeah--there was the NBM "Terry and the Pirates" series, the Eclipse "Krazy Kat" series, Fantagraphics did Popeye, etc.

It's certainly the case that the recent reprints are MUCH more nicely produced, though.

I think the biggest story is bookstore comics, and the enormous variety of stuff available outside the old pamphlet-based channels.

this decade all I can think of as total failures is the Superman flick, the Punisher movie and maybe the two Hulk films

This is because you have forgotten Catwoman (and Elektra? It might have made bank though). Continue to forget Catwoman.

also, the mainstreaming of fanboy culture which is hand-in-hand with blockbuster movies and comics in bookstores.

Two things stand out for me about the last decade (both of which have been mentioned)...

1. Publishers pretty much figuring out how to present the classic strips of comics past as well as possible and publishing lots of them
2. The overwhelming tide of manga finally making it out of Japan (the trickle started well over 20 years ago, but I certainly never imagined we'd someday be walking into mainstream bookstores with manga sections comparable to most any other category of books to be found in the store).

thank god that one dude stopped trying to destroy all of them this decade

I have this giant pile of comics beside my bed that over the last two years I've set aside as issues I'd like to re-read before I get rid of. Last night I read the three-part "This is your life, Superman" story that came out midway through Infinite Crisis. Felt like a particularly symptomatic example of mid-decade DC super-comics in that it was fucking terrible, continuity-crushed, pandering to the cannon, and entirely beholden to whatever BIG EVENT was going on. Also, like 18 different pencillers worked on the three issues.

BLACKEST NIGHT is the most emblematic book of main-line DC comics in the 00s that I could ever think of. And just imagine, the final issues of THE INVISIBLES came out from this publisher less than ten years before.

Not that I disagree, but is it really fair (to either of them) to compare DCU with Vertigo?

I never said I was being fair.

They did Final Crisis much more recently, which is as emblematic of continuity porn and according to Mozheads really good.

It wasn't really good. And I'd argue that DARKEST NIGHT is much moreso emblematic.

I dunno, haven't read it, but from the premise Darkest Night feels a lot more like how Marvel has treated the big crossovers lately (i.e. a lot of SHOCKS and FITES but at the end everything stays pretty much as it was) than the continuity-obsessec stuff DC does. I mean I'm assuming some people will die and some will be ressucitated during this x-over but, you know, at least there's no multiverse.

I don't know what anyone is even talking about anymore! I assume we're discussing Blackest Night (as I'm not aware of any event called Darkest Night), and Final Crisis was amazing and totally not continuity porn. By which I mean the continuity elements were not integral to the story in the way that they are in most big events. I'd argue that FC is probably the best recent mainstream, in-continuity story to drop in the lap of someone who isn't at all familiar with mainstream comics.

Black Reign?

Chocolate Reign?

Chocolatest Reign?

I am reading Blackest Night #4. I'm not sure I get it. Is there any subtext to this or is it all supertext? I mean, this is your BIG FUCKING EVENT and you put, I think, Copperhead on the cover? And the word ballons really need some kind of sequencing key. And is Kilowog dead? And is this going to end up dovetailing into Flash: Rebirth? And, oh, come on!

Hey, when did everysinglehighmindedcomicsblogger start throwing around formalist the way the shit ones still use iconic?

Like, was Scott McCloud's book a free download on iTunes last month and I didn't notice?

As a stan of the last several years' worth of GL-related comics, let me just say that Blackest Night is, as of the halfway point, pretty much just some straight-up trash. Anything good about this event is taking place in the GL books themselves. The rest is UGH-worthy.

So we can now say with authority that both Bendis and Johns are pretty good at setting up somewhat compelling and solid years-long story scaffolding only to gracelessly knock it all down in the 11th hour.

Haha - this is kind of true, but also kind of an impossible standard to meet, since these books always have to go on indefinitely - they're gonna have horrible arcs and endings all the time, even if they do a good one once in a while too.

Of course I'm trying to think of a solid event book from either of those guys (who I do generally like) that ended well and coming up blank... then again they always kind of end the same, don't they?

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/files/2009/10/bmwgy_3_dylux-4-copy.jpg

...The fuck was that?

I WISH that was an accurate summation of "comics in the 00's".

oh, kevin smith

Wow. Really? That's way, way worse than I thought it would be. And I've got a decent imagination. Or thought I did.

I don't know if comicraft is to blame but a lot of published comics nowadays look like someone did fan-captions on them, Kevin Smith dialogue notwithstanding.

yeah, i spent like 10 minutes hunting down the source of that, it is actually real

http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2009/11/02/kevin-smith-rolls-out-the-guest-stars-in-batman-the-widening-gyre-3/

sorry dr. superman

lol I actually thought that was nu-Batman Dick Grayson and Damian (nb I have never read a comic with damian in it.)

morrison run is tops, dude!

Sorry for what?