Posts made in June 20th, 2012

• Less Tights, and Hold the Angst

  Comics: Tights vs. existential angst
  

  Carol Wolf learned how to hold a quarterstaff from Willie Garvin

  You could sort the comics by color when I was a kid. The dark menacing covers, with the heroes attacking or being beset by awful enemies, and the pretty, silly bright ones, where cheerful characters got in to unmemorable difficulties, and out again without much trouble, but with some lesson learned. Flip the pages on the menacing ones, they’re full of threat gestures, and oversized shoulders. It was not a world that I cared to spent my time in. And the pretty ones are boring if you’re not ten.

  The bigger-than-life-sized heroes translate brilliantly to the big screen, and comic book stories make great action films. I am enjoying them very much in this new guise, distilled for the essence of story and character problems. And, bowing to modern sensibilities, some women who don’t exist solely in relation to the hero. Is there a single comic that passes the Bechdel test?

  My favorite comic is Modesty Blaise. I discovered her late, so of course I found the books first, but I track down the comics whenever I can. Modesty Blaise doesn’t wear tights. Survivor of a displaced persons camp after World War II, as a child she becomes the protector of an old Eastern-European

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• THIS ISH: Tights Vs. Angst! ‘Nuf said.

  Comics: Tights vs. existential angst

  True story: when I was 8, my father, the career military man, decided that comic books were bad for me and my two brothers.  One night, he descended on our rooms with righteous anger and a big green trash bag to throw away every comic book we had, leaving behind only the ‘Classics Illustrated’ magazines.  Protest?  YOU try being an eight-year old challenging a six-foot-three Airborne Ranger with two combat tours In Country in Viet Nam.  To this day I don’t know what set him off.  All I know is, I lost a lot of good times that night.

  Talk about angst.

  I didn’t start reading comics again until I was 19 and a bored security guard at Newark Airport.  My first comic back was this one, Detective Comics #526:

  

  Batman against all his foes, orchestrated by a then-new villain, Killer Croc.  What’s better than that?  (This story also contains one of my all-time favorite lines from a comic: when Ra’s al-Ghul’s daughter Talia complains that all the villains against Batman isn’t exactly a fair fight, The Joker responds, “‘Fair play’?  Talia, my sweet, what are you babbling about?”) 

  To me, the debate of  ’tights vs. existential angst’ in comics can be summed up very simply.  I was an adult before the explosion of indie comics, so although the Dark Horses and ABCs and other companies certainly have viable takes on this, when I was a kid it was DC (tights) vs Marvel (existential angst). 

  DC’s heroes were less complicated and more direct in their motivation.  The stories were straightforward and easy to follow, and every issue was pretty self-contained.  This was ‘tights’ at its finest: the messages were simple, the colors bright, the heroes good guys, the villains bad guys (although some not without redeeming qualities).  Nothing is too serious in the world of tights (for crying out loud, the heroes wear their underwear outside their clothes!).  Most of the characters–heroes and villains alike–based their powers and/or identities on simple things, with some sort of gun as their main weapon.  Captain Cold had a cold gun.  Green Arrow used arrows that were, uh, mauve?  (more…)

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