What's Wrong With Comics Today

A lot, actually, but this Lying In The Gutters column has a long series of remarks by Dwayne McDuffie that encapsulate a lot of my issues. McDuffie answered a lot of questions from fans, quite honestly, on the DCU boards, but there are 69 pages of that, so the excerpts are very useful.

I like McDuffie, who was a writer for the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoon series, as well as the JLU comic book. He also did a good turn on Fantastic Four recently. While I was looking forward to his JLA after Brad Meltzer's year as scripter (Meltzer's take on the Justice League completely turned me off), McDuffie was no more readable. It was no mystery why; editorial dictates about who was on the team and what to feature in stories, and of course the endless crossovers with big events at DC, were wrecking the book. You only had to read it with some knowledge of the writer and how comics work these days to realize that McDuffie had nothing to do with the editorial direction of the book, which seemed to veer from one unrelated objective to another.

This has happened before to books I enjoy. Back in the 1980s, the Earth Two books written by Roy Thomas were completely wrecked by Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the early 90s, back at Marvel, Roy's Dr. Strange series was similarly turned into a zombie dancing to the tune of one Infinity Gauntlet crossover after another, until it was all simply unreadable. Thomas, of course, a superlative professional, toed the line and coped with it all; so does McDuffie now. But this is no way to produce good comic books.

I was just contemplating earlier today how comics used to be written. I saw (well, was in the room for, anyway) X-Men 3 last night for the first time, and was recalling the old Claremont-Cockrum-Byrne classic set of storylines that introduced and then disposed of Phoenix, the second superheroic identity of original X-Man Jean Grey. Claremont's pace and approach would never work today, as writing for the trade limits ongoing plots and characterization in a way that has changed the basic storytelling format of comics.

As I've mentioned before, I'm rapidly shifting my own reading habits, choosing to buy (discounted at Amazon) trade paperbacks of good stories for my bookshelf instead of continuing to read the zombiefied superhero comics of today. Incredible Hercules and Captain America are the only ongoing books I'm really getting a kick out of now. Lately I've been compiling all the available trades of Fabien Nicieza and Tom Grummett's superlative and underappreciated Thunderbolts run from a few years ago. More about that later.