No Pane, No Gain

I'll be honest and say that I love comics. I consider myself to be pretty well exposed to the various types/genres/eras/whatever you want to call them. They've never played a huge part in my life, but I love reading them all the same.

The thing I wanted to focus on the most in class today was the idea of the comic itself returning. We talked a lot about what the implications are of comics proliferating throughout the online community, but we only talked briefly about the future of comics as still being something that is printed on paper and read. It is my personal belief that comics is on the verge of being revitalized. I think McCloud was a bit too dismissive of Miller's Sin City, and he almost seemed to be taking an elitist stance against it. He seemed to view it as something base and unintelligent, but I don't really feel like it was his place to judge it as such. After all, the primary assumption that comics has fought against is the notion that they are simple sources of entertainment for uneducated people who can't understand and appreciate the finer points in life. It's the same battle that video games has been fighting. In order to win this battle, you need to refrain from waging it against your compatriots.

This being said, I am curious to know what McCloud's take is on the film adaptation of Sin City. In my personal experience, it has come the closest out of any film I know of emulating its comic predecessor faithfully. Marvel has cranked out some movies that have been entertaining, but have stuck very closely to the Hollywood mould. I have seen the Batman movies, the Superman movies, the Daredevil movie, but Sin City was the first in which I really wanted to go back and read the comic (yes, I saw the movie before reading the comic). Moreover, I know that I am not the only one. Several people I know have done the same thing. No matter what your personal convictions are towards the series, you cannot deny that this is a positive thing for the industry.

I also just want to touch briefly on the idea of comics being a medium targeted to the uneducated or blue collar individuals. Some really influential artists have been involved in comics. McCloud mentions it, but Neil Gaiman wrote the stories for The Sandman series. Yoshitaka Amano, a famous Japanese artist, has done the illustrations for many graphic novels (actually, I just recently found out that he did the illustrations for Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters). In short, comics is a serious and legitimate medium. Artists from other media know this and are exploring the possibilities that it provides.

So yeah, I like comics. After finding out about that Amano/Gaiman collaboration, I think I'll be hitting the comic book stores pretty soon... I just wish I had found out about it sooner.

By the by: THE SANDMAN: The Dream Hunters was nominated for Hugo Award and won the 2000 Eisner Award