(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

I've been reading bunches of comics lately, it seems, and I'm both beginning to understand their appeal on a level I never have and, at the same time, finding them every bit as bogged down in pretense and conceit as every other medium. This should not surprise me, but it does make me pause and reconsider.

My problem is two-fold because, though I love a good story, I like to be entertained as well. So, while Alan Moore kept me intellectually stimulated through Watchmen and V for Vendetta (which I took in one go last night), I find the art used in his work (artist is something like Gibbons?) just doesn't grab me. There are exceptions--I liked the classic noir detective look meets strange futuristic material that made up Rorschach's costume, and, while creepy, I did like V's mask--but for the most part, reading those trades could have been just that, reading. I could just as easily have been enamored of the characters without the graphics (maybe not so much with V--that mask is as creepily iconographic as the one from Saw), and really, what's the point of a graphic novel if the graphics don't factor into it?

Then there's the flip side: pretty face, empty space syndrome. This happened to some of my favorite Top Cow stuff--basically anything after the first year or two with The Darkness and Witchblade got dull and fast. I'm not asking that a monthly serial have the breadth, commentary, focus, and critique of graphic novel, but there are plenty of trades that bind serials and tell a good story, too. I can't name one off the top of my head at present because my comic reading is currently due to borrowing from the NYPL and friends. I dunno, I just have a tendency to go for the art when I look in the store (and a prejudice against older styles of drawing that means I will probably never like Gold-Silver Age reproductions no matter how classic they might be), and I'm frustrated that I can't find something that attracts my eye at the same time it engages my brain. The most obvious corollary here is to the cinema where I often have the same problem, but there, freed from the typed page, stupidity, unoriginality, cliche, they all seem so mundane. In comics, it's profane. What a waste of artist or writer talent not to have the other half to back it up.

Generally, I think I liked it. darkling1 asked me how I liked it and I could only respond with a lukewarm enthusiasm. I did enjoy a lot of it, though the art hampered my ability to recognize characters as different and the lettering and my own quick reading confused Gordon and Conrad a couple of times. There are bits of uncompromising integrity, the will to hold up a mystery and not reveal secrets that might have worked better had such lengths not already been invested in unravelling them. V's identity not being known is fine, even an admirable fancy, but when you slog through the first third where it's clear where he comes from but he's destroyed anyone who would know who he is and what he looks like, and everyone is concerning with unmasking him....to abandon that and never give an answer seems like a tease.

I did understand that by not showing his real face, there is always the mask that can stand for the idea and anyone can be the idea. I think that that kind of thinking is both the strength and weakness of V for Vendetta. Many heroes/anti-heroes wear masks. If who they were behind them was unimportant, we wouldn't have any of the major titles we do. Spider-Man 2 made the best case for that in movie history, I think. Even sagas of the Bat like No Man's Land, where the mere idea of Batman being in Gotham is enough to give hope, there is still great emphasis on the person behind the mask. The Huntress can't play by Batman's rules, so she can't be Batgirl; Cassandra Cain can and does, and she inherits the title. Return of the Joker has Bruce make the point explicitly to Terry--"It's not Batman that makes you worth while. It's the other way around," or something like that.

V, being the faceless, unnamed soldier, is a worth avatar for anarchy, I suppose, but it makes it hard to sympathize with him. When the novel started out, giving him a history we aren't fully apprised of, having his vendetta seem like mere revenge, all of this made him sympathetic. When the book moved past that to Evey's torture at his hands, he became a puppet of an idea rather than the embodiment of it, which is both less moving and less dramatic. That he dies needlessly to pass the torch on doesn't help--I tend to believe that, like when Bruce was out of commission and Dick took up the cowl, Evey would have been able to get there eventually when his death was not preventable.

Again, the book seemed so proud of itself and chock full of references to things I only half understood some of the time that I feel like my distance from it is artificial, that it's my ignorance that keeps me from seeing how brilliant it is, etc. I really hate when something does that to me--teases me with things but only makes me feel stupid for not knowing. I like surprises and mysteries, sure, but I don't like to feel like I'm being patronized, as if the author is whisking away half his work and patting me on the head as if to say, "You're not ready for these parts, dear."

In other news, I tried my hand at the whole Milliways RPG yesterday and am still talking to Michelangelo. Yes, that Michelangelo. He's a bartender and not currently an anthropomorphic turtle. Instead, he is represented in human form as Breckin Meyer, which I have no problem with at all. I saw Garfield for that man (well, okay, I saw Garfield because I was home, bored, and got dragged out to it, but I like my other version better--how many times could I say being an obsessed freak is the lesser of two embarrassments?).