(Okay, so the title was just a cheap ploy to get you here, reading, and replying!)
Scott, I’ve been thinking about your recent segment regarding your being letdown by Marvel’s Civil War. Here’s what I’m thinking:
We all got into comics at different ages, but what most of us have in common is that at some age we longed for our hobby, our passion, to have relevance, to mean something. For me, that was the early 70’s when I was about 15. I had started reading Marvel Comics in 1967 after years of reading everything else. Marvel comics had something I’d never seen before, the fact that they fit into the real world. My favorite was the X-men, and is it any wonder that a group of teens that don’t quite fit into the world around them, appealed to a geeky teen? But it was DC that published the first relevant story that I read, it was an issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow, and featured a non-code approved story about Speedy being a drug addict. It suddenly occurred to me that comics could be more than entertainment. I was also becoming aware of what was going on around me, I was watching TV and seeing college students beat up and killed because they were against war, seemed pretty reasonable to me to be against war.
35 years later, I look back and chuckle at how simple the world seemed to me, I long for the days when there were two sides, the good and the bad, the white hats and the black hats. Unfortunately I’ve learned that everything is not black and white. But there is still a fifteen year old in me that likes to see things that way, and when I’m in that mode, things like Civil War appeal to me because they’re trying to be relevant and speak to me on different levels, show me that there is that grey area between black and white. But in the end, they are businessmen and they know that the comic has to appeal to their biggest audience which is those 15 year olds, be they actually 15 or the 15 year old within this 51 year old body. Sometimes that 15 year old is stronger than others. Sometimes I get tired of stories aimed at my inner 15 year old and it happens more and more everyday.
I will admit though that sometimes I want to appeal to the pre-teen in me and that’s when I delight to books like the Marvel Adventures comics, or some good old silver age books. Other times I want to massage my brain and then I look for something a bit more cerebral like Eddie Campbell, Warren Ellis, or many of the products of Drawn and Quaterly, Top Shelf and others of their ilk.
I guess that someone recently implied to Derek Coward that Civil War was simple and only simpletons would read it. I don’t feel that way at all. I think that we all have that inner 15 year old in us, sometimes we like to be there, and sometimes not. As we grow older, some of us spend less and less time there, some of us more, but I think anyone who is still reading comics has a pretty strong inner variety of ages within them, and I think that’s a good thing. Heaven knows I know enough folks who’ve lost it!
