White light/white heat:
Jamie Rich's anger at the comics "mainstream" burns with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns, and you know what? It should.

It occurred to me today what a travesty, what an enormously fucking huge leap backwards it is to replace Grant Morrison's New X-Men with the braindead retroatrocities Marvel has planned. The corporate-mandated return to spandex...the Cyclops "body condom"...the return to the anti-golden age of 90s-style X-scripting (paging Doctors Lobdell & Tieri)...two monthly books in which Chris Claremont is free explore his bizarre metafictional parentosexual relationship with Kitty Pryde...allowing Chuck Austen to continue to use the franchise as his writ-large therapist's couch (or electroshock bench, take your pick)..."enabling" Rob Liefeld...revivifying concepts that have failed time and time again in the eyes of all but the hardest of the hardcore fanboy in the guise of giving the people what they want...do you think any of it will engender thoughts like this, or this? Hell, look at this massive Barbelith thread--do you think that any of the follow-ups to Morrison's run (even Whedon's) will lead to discussion with this breadth and depth, all supported by a text that spells nothing out yet adds so much in, said text having been written by someone smart enough and talented enough and big-hearted enough to think his work through on so very many levels? Fat. Fucking. Chance.

I don't blame Jamie for being pissed at all. Over the past four years the comics "mainstream" has had maybe its greatest chance since the early '60s to do something. Comics is a real Wild West medium--it's out in the hinterlands of pop culture, where anything goes, where the tools and the energy of the bona fide mainstream zeitgeist can be used and abused in any number of glorious ways, where art-world and Hollywood bullshit can be righteously and thoroughly pissed on and ignored. And a few years back a bunch of mavericks took over Marvel, and for a while it looked like they'd drag the whole superhero industry into the wild frontier.

And what happened? For every Sgt. Pepper (read: New X-Men) and Kick Out the Jams (read: The Dark Knight Strikes Again), we got about four dozen Nickelback records: joyless, pointless retreads of the Candlebox albums currently preserving the memory of the '90s shit-glut in discount bins nationwide.

Listen, Marvel did a lot of good over the past four years, and they're still doing a lot of good now. I think Marvel bashers really miss how the company turned things around for all the other superhero publishers--getting writers rather than artists acknowledged as the backbone of the industry warrants Quesada & Jemas's inclusion in the proverbial comics hall of fame all by itself. But take a look at Marvel's current publishing plans--those good books are something Marvel's moving away from now, not something they're headed toward. Do you think you'll see something like Jones's Hulk or Milligan's X-Force come out of the Reload initiative? Do you think anyone but Bendis will get a chance to write something as moody and risky as Bendis's Daredevil or Alias? For that matter, do you think Millar will be able to do with The Ultimates what Millar did with The Ultimates? Even the Bendis-centered Avengers-titles revamps, helmed as they are by solid indie pros, are being touted as back to basics. I'm not saying the experiments of the last few years have always worked, but good Christ, has no one told this company that its basics have sucked for three decades?

And oh yeah, did I mention that this latest bold new direction will continue the time-honored tradition of simultaneously ignoring and suffocating both the true mainstream (manga, other types of genre storytelling) and the vital underground? Because that's what's made American comics the picture of health that it is today!

I'll admit to being in a bad mood this evening. I had a terrible day at work, I hurt my feet, someone stole the front license plate off my pick-up, and it goes on. But the book that brought me back to comics is over, and I'm surveying the landscape, and there's just nothing out there, man. It's heartbreaking, is what it is. And I say this not because I hate superheroes and comics and superhero comics, but because I love them.

(Original link courtesy of NeilAlien. Look what you done, Neil!)