The shift actually has a lot more to do with a larger picture than any of that stuff. I mean, that's sort of anecdotal stuff. Especially hipsters. Hipsters are responsible for nothing, eff them and their misinterpretation of the word irony.
Okay, so comics have been on this ~*~journey~*~ through time or some shit. They were gory and awesome and all Adventure Comics and Sex and Decapitated Heads and Batman and Robin being really gay when my Dad was a kid, but there were also fears that Communists wanted to make all American children into homosexuals or something through Batman. (No, actually, I've read some of the comics from back then, and there are some legitimate complaints.) Anyways, the Comics Code was self-imposed, mostly, but it did shitty things like strangle out all comics that weren't superhero comics. Good bye horror, spy, western, and all the various kinds of comics that existed. It also made comics a "little kid thing" and it would be decades for that to change.
There were shifting epochs of awesome or not awesome depending on your perspective, but then in the 1980s/1990s because of economic fuckwaddery, old comics from those epochs became COLLECTORS ITEMS. Consider beanie babies and you will realize that the 1990s had some sort of compulsive hoarding problem.
Anyways, this gorged the industry with money and it started to take off again. But to take off, new people had to be hired and while some of that was good--NEIL GAIMAN--some of it was also terrible--ROB LIEFELD. Contributing to this was the aging of comic readers and the desire to not be considered a "kids" industry anymore. Thus the darker, edgier stuff. Which, y'know, had it's good--NEIL GAIMAN--and it's bad--ROB LIEFELD. (Note how these things sort of are the same.)
TODAY, there's a desire to get rid of the BAD and to also "set things right" ie. go back to the Golden Age of comics when the people who write comics now were reading comics as youngin's. Personally, I find it annoying and it says to me, who read comics in the 90s as a youngin, that my childhood was full of shitty comics. Which it most certainly wasn't. I was reading indie comics way, way, way before they started being seen as legitimate and delicious summer blockbuster fodder--another thing which puts money into the industry and gives cred to comics. Admittedly, somethings, like Alan Moore's comics, can be improved by making movies out of them, but then everyone is like "OMG, Moore is such a comic writing god." And I want to punch them in the face, because if you say that, or god forbid you are an aspiring writer and you say you want to write comics like Alan Moore and his homeless person beard full of evil secrets, I know you don't know jack about comics.
It's like people who are like "OMG, NARUTO IS THE BEST THING EVER." and you know they're totally serious and you sort of hate them.
And yes, it's currently popular in fandom to get all crit interp and sociological on works and fandom. It worries me more than it pleases me, because I mostly get the feeling that it's a lot of non-activists patting themselves on the back for learning the ABCs of something and then flinging it around like the bunch of self-righteous internet academics that they are. ... And nothing else. Maybe they're putting their money where their internet mouth is, but they're probably not even willing to peel themselves away from the keyboard to go, idk, VOTE or actually DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN BE ON THE INTERNET BEING ANGRY AT PEOPLE. Now, there are plenty of people, usually at the forefront of these sorts of things, who really do know what they are talking about and who walk the walk, talk the talk, and etc. However, I worry that it's just another fad and every time a fangirl claims slash fanfic is revolutionizing the world for gay rights, I am even more compelled to violence than I am by Alan Moore fans (because, well, some of them it's not their fault and obviously I don't actually hate him and his works, I just realize that they're flawed, but really enjoyable... even if OHMIGOD he really needed someone to tell him TL;DR good lord TEAL DEAR).
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Date: 2010-08-04 11:04 am (UTC)Okay, so comics have been on this ~*~journey~*~ through time or some shit. They were gory and awesome and all Adventure Comics and Sex and Decapitated Heads and Batman and Robin being really gay when my Dad was a kid, but there were also fears that Communists wanted to make all American children into homosexuals or something through Batman. (No, actually, I've read some of the comics from back then, and there are some legitimate complaints.) Anyways, the Comics Code was self-imposed, mostly, but it did shitty things like strangle out all comics that weren't superhero comics. Good bye horror, spy, western, and all the various kinds of comics that existed. It also made comics a "little kid thing" and it would be decades for that to change.
There were shifting epochs of awesome or not awesome depending on your perspective, but then in the 1980s/1990s because of economic fuckwaddery, old comics from those epochs became COLLECTORS ITEMS. Consider beanie babies and you will realize that the 1990s had some sort of compulsive hoarding problem.
Anyways, this gorged the industry with money and it started to take off again. But to take off, new people had to be hired and while some of that was good--NEIL GAIMAN--some of it was also terrible--ROB LIEFELD. Contributing to this was the aging of comic readers and the desire to not be considered a "kids" industry anymore. Thus the darker, edgier stuff. Which, y'know, had it's good--NEIL GAIMAN--and it's bad--ROB LIEFELD. (Note how these things sort of are the same.)
TODAY, there's a desire to get rid of the BAD and to also "set things right" ie. go back to the Golden Age of comics when the people who write comics now were reading comics as youngin's. Personally, I find it annoying and it says to me, who read comics in the 90s as a youngin, that my childhood was full of shitty comics. Which it most certainly wasn't. I was reading indie comics way, way, way before they started being seen as legitimate and delicious summer blockbuster fodder--another thing which puts money into the industry and gives cred to comics. Admittedly, somethings, like Alan Moore's comics, can be improved by making movies out of them, but then everyone is like "OMG, Moore is such a comic writing god." And I want to punch them in the face, because if you say that, or god forbid you are an aspiring writer and you say you want to write comics like Alan Moore and his homeless person beard full of evil secrets, I know you don't know jack about comics.
It's like people who are like "OMG, NARUTO IS THE BEST THING EVER." and you know they're totally serious and you sort of hate them.
And yes, it's currently popular in fandom to get all crit interp and sociological on works and fandom. It worries me more than it pleases me, because I mostly get the feeling that it's a lot of non-activists patting themselves on the back for learning the ABCs of something and then flinging it around like the bunch of self-righteous internet academics that they are. ... And nothing else. Maybe they're putting their money where their internet mouth is, but they're probably not even willing to peel themselves away from the keyboard to go, idk, VOTE or actually DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN BE ON THE INTERNET BEING ANGRY AT PEOPLE. Now, there are plenty of people, usually at the forefront of these sorts of things, who really do know what they are talking about and who walk the walk, talk the talk, and etc. However, I worry that it's just another fad and every time a fangirl claims slash fanfic is revolutionizing the world for gay rights, I am even more compelled to violence than I am by Alan Moore fans (because, well, some of them it's not their fault and obviously I don't actually hate him and his works, I just realize that they're flawed, but really enjoyable... even if OHMIGOD he really needed someone to tell him TL;DR good lord TEAL DEAR).