What's Andy Cooking?

'My Life for the Last Month-or-so'

Part 2: The Revolution


Over the past few years, it's become strikingly clear that as I've grown and matured as a reader, and also as a permanent adolescent, the comicbook medium has matured in its own right.

Now, let me clarify that when I say 'comicbooks' I'm referring specifically to the superhero genre of comics, and not the Harvey Pekar, Bob Crumb style of 'real-life' or 'underground' comics. The reason this distinction is important is because of the relative acceptance of these two narratives.

While underground comics have already recieved a sort of Andy Warhol counter-pop-culture or beatnik fame, superhero comicbooks mantain the stigma of critics that they deal with insubstantial subject matter and show a certain lack of artistry. Superhero comics, because of their traditional target audience, are deemed childish, adolescent rubbish.

I bring this up (again) now, because in the last month, Jack put to words some of his thoughts on the subject, making a decisive argument about the growing force of the superhero comic as an identifying cultural icon (white male cultural, perhaps, but that's still a culture). As I really can't speak his point as eloquently as he, you'll have to read it here.

What I can speak to is my own prediction that in the near future, we'll be seeing a more critical dialogue on the subjects and stories of mainstream superhero comicbooks.

With multiple movies in the recent years that are taken straight from the pages of comics, we are beginning to see what a versatile media comics are. Think about how movies are written: they're storyboarded. They're written out in a comic form so that the production team can visualize what needs to be done with the set and where the cameras and actors should be placed. These storyboards are just comics that tell the story of the movie in images.

But this isn't the only place you'll see the parallels between the comicbook and other media. When we consider that children's books, with all the large illustrations and minimal text, are almost an extension of the comic art, here again we see an example of the versatility of comics. These books are truly just simplified and enlarged comic strips, because at the heart is the same principle: telling a story through a combination of words and images.

Of course, this still isn't saying much for the superhero genre. The problem with taking superhero comics seriously isn't one of technique, it's one of content. Comicbooks still do target a teenage male audience, it's easy to do. For teenagers, the story of Spiderman draws on some distinct fears of the demographic: being a high school misfit, a social outcast yet with a hidden talent that sets him apart. This story has an allure for any boy who's felt similarly, an allure in the same way that The Matrix does - it's the same heroic archetype.

Interestingly, the romance of these characters is surfacing in other forms of literature and media. As Jack mentioned, Micheal Chabon's 'Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' treats superhero comics with a certain respect, a reverence of a man who once identified with the misfit, downtrodden hero (and perhaps still does). But further, Chabon co-wrote the screenplay for Spiderman 2, bringing this reverence to help create a superhero movie based in complex characters wrought with internal conflict.

This is the beginning of a mass media revolution. A change in how the characters and stories once considered trivial and adolescent are taken seriously. Where the stories are respected as a part of our unique cultural heritage.