Post by freedomfighter on Jun 15, 2009 0:59:05 GMT -5
I was on his site, peterdavid.net (which is a fun site BTW) and he posted one of his old columns and it really struck home with me, especially about the current storytelling style with both writers and artists...
Image — Son of Sesame Street
Originally published July 10, 1992
I’ve been thinking…
Which is always a dangerous announcement.
I think I’m starting to realize–or perhaps dread–that the current new crop of comic book “wartists” may not be a simple aberration.
Comic books are presently being produced in which the concept of writing is not only secondary, it borders on irrelevance. Nothing is important aside from what meets the eye. And what meets the eyes is a series of images (so to speak), not always connected or flowing from one panel to the other, with little or not subtext or even a grasp of what subtext is.
Youngblood makes as much sense if you read it straight through without bothering to turn the comic over at the midway point; Spawn, which looks like some of the nicest Frank Miller work ever, is at least decipherable–but still there’s not so much story as big, flashy pictures that are loosely strung together.
Oddly enough, these may sound like criticisms–but in fact, to judge from various interviews with the creators involved, this is precisely what they set out to produce.
This makes a critique tougher. If someone tries to accomplish certain goals, and the critic says “You haven’t achieved it,” then that’s one thing. But the goals of the new crop of wartists are not to produce the types of comics that I’m accustomed to reading…or, for that matter, the type that all the people they cite as influences are in the habit of producing.
That’s why R.C. Harvey’s concise and incisive dissection of Youngblood–as accurate as it was, and I wish to make it clear that I agreed with every word–was also, by and large, irrelevant. It’s difficult to hold the new wartists to a critical standard when, as far as they’re concerned, those criteria don’t apply to them.
In People magazine, for example, Rob Liefeld blithely states that such notions as drawing with an eye towards proper perspective (you know–all lines angling to a single horizon line, that sort of thing) doesn’t factor into his work. He’s something of an anarchist in that regard, we are told. Whether this is because Rob knows correct rules of perspective, anatomy, etc. and simply chooses to ignore them or exaggerate them (which is one thing) or is, in fact, incapable of drawing a proper page of artwork even if you held a gun to his head (which is quite another thing) I don’t really know, and leave for you to judge.
Todd McFarlane, in various places, has stated that he never reads anything, which your average first grade teacher would tell you is absolutely crucial if you want to learn to write. But again it’s irrelevant, because Todd has stated that all that matters is that the page looks good. That is, above everything, what is important. Words, plot structure–all secondary to the pictures.
Why?
Why, I asked myself. Why is it so important to me, but not to them?
It took a long time for me to come to the realization that it was generational. But when I did, what quickly followed was the horrified realization that this might indeed be the wave of the future…which is not a pleasant realization at all.
I hadn’t really been looking at the wartists in terms of generational divisions, because I’m not much than a decade older than the youngest of them. A separation of ten years didn’t seem to me, at first glance, to be such an insurmountable gulf.
I mean, it simply wasn’t, to me, the same thing as when my father would be shaking his head in disbelief to the music of the Beatles or the Stones and saying, “That’s not music; that’s just noise.” The same way that I now look at the wartists’ work and say basically the same thing, except substitute “a story” for “music” and “pictures” for “noise.”
My God…am I my father so quickly?
Part of what got me thinking along these lines was Don Simpson’s “Oh So” letter. By and large it was silly (Don didn’t mention, for instance, that one of the creators engaged in the heinous game of betting against Image’s long-term existence was Jim Lee, who bet $5 Image wouldn’t make it a year; this all happened on Compuserv, and Jim’s wager should give an indication of just how seriously people were taking it. Just for the record, I stayed out of it) but what intrigued me was Don’s equating being concerned with traditional story-telling rules to something as quaint and old-fashioned as a bingo game.
Don may very well have put his finger on precisely what was eluding my understanding. The wartists, despite the relative closeness in years to many of their elders (certainly less than the traditional two decades) really, truly, are representing a new generation of creators.
But why, I wondered. What is it that caused such a drastic difference in priorities in a relatively short amount of time.
One of the most often cited influences has been MTV. I think that’s part of it, certainly. No longer was music appreciated for its lyrics and melodies; with the advent of MTV, songs were defined by the visuals. If heard subsequently on radio, the images that come to a listener’s mind are no longer pulled from their own experience. Instead the listener envisions the “definitive” version they saw on television.
But I don’t think MTV did it singlehandedly. You know what I think did it?
“Sesame Street.”
“Sesame Street” has been around for over two decades. It hit the airwaves at a time when most of the wartists (present day, and up-and-coming) were young enough to be influenced by it (whereas I was already a teenager, far more interest in females than large yellow birds).
“Sesame Street,” with its hypnotic high-speed technique, presented youngsters when they were at their most impressionable with a barrage of images. Its message was anti-intellectualism, anti-thought, anti-patience. Numbers and letters flew at young viewers, assaulting their senses.
The short-term gains were tremendous. Parents were thrilled that their children, at age 3, could recite the alphabet or count to ten. It gave them bragging rights. The fact that a parrot could be taught to perform in a similar manner was not taken into consideration.
This put teachers into a tough position. In the traditional school setting, teachers would spend anywhere from a quarter of an hour to a half hour on a given subject, teaching the kids to think and understand things before they utilized them. “Sesame Street” taught kids to put up fingers in sequence and say “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10″ before the fully grasped the notion of greater and lesser quantities.
Oh, eventually they would understand–either from school, or by continuing to watch “Sesame Street” and eventually garnering comprehension from some of the longer sketches. Nevertheless the cart had already been put before the horse, and kids were clutching on for dear life.
The creators of “Sesame Street” understood that, before you teach a child something, you have to get his or her attention. The rapid-fire imaging did that. Fine. No problem. Once the attention is caught, it can have very positive value if the avenues are broadened: If parents watched “Street” with their kids, or read to them, then that’s beneficial–using “Street” as a building block. But parents who simply used the show as a hypnotic babysitter (”Here, watch Cookie Monster. Mommy’s busy.”) leave the kids to dwell on the superficiality only. And kids who want all learning processes to be like that machine-gun introduction are going to be frustrated.
And once they were out of the “Sesame Street” years, the “Street” generation could then graduate, yes, to MTV and videos, where it was no longer necessary to do the most fundamental job of appreciating music–namely listen to it. Music was no longer for listening to, which requires thought. Music was for looking at, and looking requires no thought at all. Appreciation requires thought, but with the “Sesame Street”/MTV generation, there wasn’t time or interest in that–information and visuals came so quickly that there simply wasn’t the opportunity to assimilate and understand. Opportunity? Hell, it wasn’t even possible–the mental equipment wasn’t there.
Fast forward now to the era of the wartists. We have creators drawing without truly knowing anatomy; “writers” producing stories without any comprehension, or even interest in the foundations of story structure. Creators with no patience for the basics, and even outright disdain.
There’s nothing linear about “Sesame Street”–it’s a hodgepodge with no structure. There’s nothing linear about MTV–it’s one thing after another, with one thing no more important than the next. And with the emphasis of a series of cool images over the notion of a clear, cohesive story, there is nothing linear about the work of the wartists.
My (dear lord) generation would sit in front of the TV for an hour and watch a one-hour dramatic program. Heaven knows it might not have been good drama, but at least it made an attempt at having a beginning, middle and end. The thought of watching an hour of fast-moving pictures that required the attention span of a gnat would have been alien to me. But for the next flight of viewers, it’s the norm.
It’s not limited simply to comic books. Not only did “Miami Vice” make a big deal of incorporating MTV-style editing into the show, but now we have a new series called “Grapevine” which takes it one step further. Not a scene in “Grapevine” exceeds 90 seconds; most of them average around ten seconds as the characters talk to the viewer in rapid succession with the flimsy story ping-ponging all over the place.
There there are the readers of hypertext webs on computers can read stories that are nothing remotely like standard narrative. In web works such as Michael Joyce’s “afternoon”, the reader can jump all over the place, keying off whatever catches their interest in the narrative, and going off on tangents based on single words or phrases that–when highlighted–cue up entire related texts. It’s the ideal work for people who are unable to focus and pay attention to anything. You don’t even know for sure when, or if, you’ve finished with it.
It used to be that the work being read was the entertainment. No longer. Now the act of reading alone becomes the entertainment. We’re taken yet another step away from being able to think about something as a whole. Ideally, readers of hypertext should be able to assimilate all the strands and weave it together into something coherent. That’s the ideal, of course.
Granted, non-linear books and movies are nothing new. Woody Allen did it with “Annie Hall”; James Joyce did it with “Finnegan’s Wake.” But one must believe that they thoroughly understood the rules before the trashed them–and besides, their body of work was designed to make you think.
Are the wartists concerned about the notion of embracing the “What-you-see-is-what-you-get” philosophy and making it paramount? Not at all. Because not only is it what they set out to do, but they also point to the unprecedented sales figures and say, in essence, “Ha ha, see? We’re right. We’re the wave of the future, because our sales are so strong.” As if commercial success ultimately proves anything. If we keep with that logic, then “Basic Instinct” is a much better film than “The Maltese Falcon” because it’s made so much more money.
Never mind the thought of producing something that will last. The “now” is everything. As long as it makes money now, as long as it appeals to the commercial consciousness now, as long as it’s a success now, then that’s all that matters. Cream rises to the top, and wartists perceives themselves as the cream. This ignores the fact, however, that it’s milk that builds bones.
The world is hurtling forward at breakneck pace, and the new wave of wartists and their work is only the latest manifestation of a society that values immediate dissemination of information over everything else. Don’t dwell on anything. Don’t think about anything. Simply look and move on, because something’s going to be coming along in the very next second, and if you blink, you’ll miss it.
I’m certain, by the way, that there will be people who read this piece and view it as simply an attack on everyone involved with Image (which it’s not) instead of an overview of the elements of society that helped form a new breed of audience and creators with wildly different priorities than their predecessors. If the former conclusion is what you draw, then I’ll bet that either you’re under 30…or that you wish you were. Youngblood versus a bingo game? Well, I’ve read Youngblood. And I’ve played bingo. And if you ask me which provides more intellectual stimulation, my response is: N 32.
Image — Son of Sesame Street
Originally published July 10, 1992
I’ve been thinking…
Which is always a dangerous announcement.
I think I’m starting to realize–or perhaps dread–that the current new crop of comic book “wartists” may not be a simple aberration.
Comic books are presently being produced in which the concept of writing is not only secondary, it borders on irrelevance. Nothing is important aside from what meets the eye. And what meets the eyes is a series of images (so to speak), not always connected or flowing from one panel to the other, with little or not subtext or even a grasp of what subtext is.
Youngblood makes as much sense if you read it straight through without bothering to turn the comic over at the midway point; Spawn, which looks like some of the nicest Frank Miller work ever, is at least decipherable–but still there’s not so much story as big, flashy pictures that are loosely strung together.
Oddly enough, these may sound like criticisms–but in fact, to judge from various interviews with the creators involved, this is precisely what they set out to produce.
This makes a critique tougher. If someone tries to accomplish certain goals, and the critic says “You haven’t achieved it,” then that’s one thing. But the goals of the new crop of wartists are not to produce the types of comics that I’m accustomed to reading…or, for that matter, the type that all the people they cite as influences are in the habit of producing.
That’s why R.C. Harvey’s concise and incisive dissection of Youngblood–as accurate as it was, and I wish to make it clear that I agreed with every word–was also, by and large, irrelevant. It’s difficult to hold the new wartists to a critical standard when, as far as they’re concerned, those criteria don’t apply to them.
In People magazine, for example, Rob Liefeld blithely states that such notions as drawing with an eye towards proper perspective (you know–all lines angling to a single horizon line, that sort of thing) doesn’t factor into his work. He’s something of an anarchist in that regard, we are told. Whether this is because Rob knows correct rules of perspective, anatomy, etc. and simply chooses to ignore them or exaggerate them (which is one thing) or is, in fact, incapable of drawing a proper page of artwork even if you held a gun to his head (which is quite another thing) I don’t really know, and leave for you to judge.
Todd McFarlane, in various places, has stated that he never reads anything, which your average first grade teacher would tell you is absolutely crucial if you want to learn to write. But again it’s irrelevant, because Todd has stated that all that matters is that the page looks good. That is, above everything, what is important. Words, plot structure–all secondary to the pictures.
Why?
Why, I asked myself. Why is it so important to me, but not to them?
It took a long time for me to come to the realization that it was generational. But when I did, what quickly followed was the horrified realization that this might indeed be the wave of the future…which is not a pleasant realization at all.
I hadn’t really been looking at the wartists in terms of generational divisions, because I’m not much than a decade older than the youngest of them. A separation of ten years didn’t seem to me, at first glance, to be such an insurmountable gulf.
I mean, it simply wasn’t, to me, the same thing as when my father would be shaking his head in disbelief to the music of the Beatles or the Stones and saying, “That’s not music; that’s just noise.” The same way that I now look at the wartists’ work and say basically the same thing, except substitute “a story” for “music” and “pictures” for “noise.”
My God…am I my father so quickly?
Part of what got me thinking along these lines was Don Simpson’s “Oh So” letter. By and large it was silly (Don didn’t mention, for instance, that one of the creators engaged in the heinous game of betting against Image’s long-term existence was Jim Lee, who bet $5 Image wouldn’t make it a year; this all happened on Compuserv, and Jim’s wager should give an indication of just how seriously people were taking it. Just for the record, I stayed out of it) but what intrigued me was Don’s equating being concerned with traditional story-telling rules to something as quaint and old-fashioned as a bingo game.
Don may very well have put his finger on precisely what was eluding my understanding. The wartists, despite the relative closeness in years to many of their elders (certainly less than the traditional two decades) really, truly, are representing a new generation of creators.
But why, I wondered. What is it that caused such a drastic difference in priorities in a relatively short amount of time.
One of the most often cited influences has been MTV. I think that’s part of it, certainly. No longer was music appreciated for its lyrics and melodies; with the advent of MTV, songs were defined by the visuals. If heard subsequently on radio, the images that come to a listener’s mind are no longer pulled from their own experience. Instead the listener envisions the “definitive” version they saw on television.
But I don’t think MTV did it singlehandedly. You know what I think did it?
“Sesame Street.”
“Sesame Street” has been around for over two decades. It hit the airwaves at a time when most of the wartists (present day, and up-and-coming) were young enough to be influenced by it (whereas I was already a teenager, far more interest in females than large yellow birds).
“Sesame Street,” with its hypnotic high-speed technique, presented youngsters when they were at their most impressionable with a barrage of images. Its message was anti-intellectualism, anti-thought, anti-patience. Numbers and letters flew at young viewers, assaulting their senses.
The short-term gains were tremendous. Parents were thrilled that their children, at age 3, could recite the alphabet or count to ten. It gave them bragging rights. The fact that a parrot could be taught to perform in a similar manner was not taken into consideration.
This put teachers into a tough position. In the traditional school setting, teachers would spend anywhere from a quarter of an hour to a half hour on a given subject, teaching the kids to think and understand things before they utilized them. “Sesame Street” taught kids to put up fingers in sequence and say “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10″ before the fully grasped the notion of greater and lesser quantities.
Oh, eventually they would understand–either from school, or by continuing to watch “Sesame Street” and eventually garnering comprehension from some of the longer sketches. Nevertheless the cart had already been put before the horse, and kids were clutching on for dear life.
The creators of “Sesame Street” understood that, before you teach a child something, you have to get his or her attention. The rapid-fire imaging did that. Fine. No problem. Once the attention is caught, it can have very positive value if the avenues are broadened: If parents watched “Street” with their kids, or read to them, then that’s beneficial–using “Street” as a building block. But parents who simply used the show as a hypnotic babysitter (”Here, watch Cookie Monster. Mommy’s busy.”) leave the kids to dwell on the superficiality only. And kids who want all learning processes to be like that machine-gun introduction are going to be frustrated.
And once they were out of the “Sesame Street” years, the “Street” generation could then graduate, yes, to MTV and videos, where it was no longer necessary to do the most fundamental job of appreciating music–namely listen to it. Music was no longer for listening to, which requires thought. Music was for looking at, and looking requires no thought at all. Appreciation requires thought, but with the “Sesame Street”/MTV generation, there wasn’t time or interest in that–information and visuals came so quickly that there simply wasn’t the opportunity to assimilate and understand. Opportunity? Hell, it wasn’t even possible–the mental equipment wasn’t there.
Fast forward now to the era of the wartists. We have creators drawing without truly knowing anatomy; “writers” producing stories without any comprehension, or even interest in the foundations of story structure. Creators with no patience for the basics, and even outright disdain.
There’s nothing linear about “Sesame Street”–it’s a hodgepodge with no structure. There’s nothing linear about MTV–it’s one thing after another, with one thing no more important than the next. And with the emphasis of a series of cool images over the notion of a clear, cohesive story, there is nothing linear about the work of the wartists.
My (dear lord) generation would sit in front of the TV for an hour and watch a one-hour dramatic program. Heaven knows it might not have been good drama, but at least it made an attempt at having a beginning, middle and end. The thought of watching an hour of fast-moving pictures that required the attention span of a gnat would have been alien to me. But for the next flight of viewers, it’s the norm.
It’s not limited simply to comic books. Not only did “Miami Vice” make a big deal of incorporating MTV-style editing into the show, but now we have a new series called “Grapevine” which takes it one step further. Not a scene in “Grapevine” exceeds 90 seconds; most of them average around ten seconds as the characters talk to the viewer in rapid succession with the flimsy story ping-ponging all over the place.
There there are the readers of hypertext webs on computers can read stories that are nothing remotely like standard narrative. In web works such as Michael Joyce’s “afternoon”, the reader can jump all over the place, keying off whatever catches their interest in the narrative, and going off on tangents based on single words or phrases that–when highlighted–cue up entire related texts. It’s the ideal work for people who are unable to focus and pay attention to anything. You don’t even know for sure when, or if, you’ve finished with it.
It used to be that the work being read was the entertainment. No longer. Now the act of reading alone becomes the entertainment. We’re taken yet another step away from being able to think about something as a whole. Ideally, readers of hypertext should be able to assimilate all the strands and weave it together into something coherent. That’s the ideal, of course.
Granted, non-linear books and movies are nothing new. Woody Allen did it with “Annie Hall”; James Joyce did it with “Finnegan’s Wake.” But one must believe that they thoroughly understood the rules before the trashed them–and besides, their body of work was designed to make you think.
Are the wartists concerned about the notion of embracing the “What-you-see-is-what-you-get” philosophy and making it paramount? Not at all. Because not only is it what they set out to do, but they also point to the unprecedented sales figures and say, in essence, “Ha ha, see? We’re right. We’re the wave of the future, because our sales are so strong.” As if commercial success ultimately proves anything. If we keep with that logic, then “Basic Instinct” is a much better film than “The Maltese Falcon” because it’s made so much more money.
Never mind the thought of producing something that will last. The “now” is everything. As long as it makes money now, as long as it appeals to the commercial consciousness now, as long as it’s a success now, then that’s all that matters. Cream rises to the top, and wartists perceives themselves as the cream. This ignores the fact, however, that it’s milk that builds bones.
The world is hurtling forward at breakneck pace, and the new wave of wartists and their work is only the latest manifestation of a society that values immediate dissemination of information over everything else. Don’t dwell on anything. Don’t think about anything. Simply look and move on, because something’s going to be coming along in the very next second, and if you blink, you’ll miss it.
I’m certain, by the way, that there will be people who read this piece and view it as simply an attack on everyone involved with Image (which it’s not) instead of an overview of the elements of society that helped form a new breed of audience and creators with wildly different priorities than their predecessors. If the former conclusion is what you draw, then I’ll bet that either you’re under 30…or that you wish you were. Youngblood versus a bingo game? Well, I’ve read Youngblood. And I’ve played bingo. And if you ask me which provides more intellectual stimulation, my response is: N 32.
