firby5@yale-comix.UUCP (Jim Firby) (06/16/84)
Comics are for Fantasy. (I thought I'd better get that out right off, before I started raving again.) That's right, for fantasy. That may mean a flying man, or a talking duck, or aardvark, or elves, or perhaps some evil smelling half- rotten thing that oozes from the depths to take its revenge; it doesn't matter. The point is comics does this type of fiction better than anything else, including the movies. Not all the footage in the world can convince me a man ca n fly the way one lone Curt Swan panel can. The problem is, people seem to think that the above mentioned are somehow childish and immature. I suspect there is some kind of Werthamian reasoning at work there, of the order "Children read comics, therefore comics are childish therefore it must be immature to read them". I prefer to think of the things comics excels at as feeding not the childish but the child-like in the reader. I am not ashamed to admit that there are times when I, like Ray Davies, wish I could fly like Superman. But other people are. Gary Groth, for one. So he goes around trying to force comics into what he would call a more mature form, and the comics companies eventually follow along, to their detriment, and perhaps their ultimate collapse I regret to say. What we end up with is a bunch of stuff which does not need to be in comics at all. Marvel is a prime offender, with its soap opera school of characterisation, although D.C. is starting to do the same. I always figured that superpeople should have different problems from us mere mortals. I mean, can you imagine the strain of going through puberty (bad enough alone) AND finding out you can suddenly walk through walls too? These should be special people. Well, I hope this gives some idea of my opinion on the subject. Of course, I have much more to say, but I'll save it for round 2. Don't forget to write. from the airtight garage of joanne f.