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From: firby5@yale-comix.UUCP (Jim Firby)
Newsgroups: net.comics
Subject: What Comics Are For pt 2 (honest)
Message-ID: <4022@yale-comix.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Jun-84 22:11:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: yale-com.4022
Posted: Fri Jun 15 22:11:01 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jun-84 02:07:17 EDT
Organization: Yale University CS Dept., New Haven CT
Lines: 37


Comics are for Fantasy. (I thought I'd better get that out right off, before I
started raving again.)  That's right, for fantasy.  That may mean a flying man,
or a talking duck, or aardvark, or elves, or perhaps some evil smelling half-
rotten thing that oozes from the depths to take its revenge; it doesn't matter.
The point is comics does this type of fiction better than anything else,
including the movies.  Not all the footage in the world can convince me a man ca
n fly  the way one lone Curt Swan panel can.

The problem is, people seem to think that the above mentioned are somehow
childish and immature.  I suspect there is some kind of Werthamian reasoning
at work there, of the order "Children read comics, therefore comics are childish
therefore it must be immature to read them".  I prefer to think of the things
comics excels at as feeding not the childish but the child-like in the reader.
I am not ashamed to admit that there are times when I, like Ray Davies, wish I
could fly like Superman.

But other people are.  Gary Groth, for one.  So he goes around trying to force
comics into what he would call a more mature form, and the comics companies
eventually follow along, to their detriment, and perhaps their ultimate collapse
I regret to say.  What we end up with is a bunch of stuff which does not need to
be in comics at all.  Marvel is a prime offender, with its soap opera school of
characterisation, although D.C. is starting to do the same.  I always figured
that superpeople should have different problems from us mere mortals.  I mean,
can you imagine the strain of going through puberty (bad enough alone) AND
finding out you can suddenly walk through walls too?  These should be special
people.

Well, I hope this gives some idea of my opinion on the subject.  Of course, I
have much more to say, but I'll save it for round 2.

Don't forget to write.

					from the airtight garage of
						    joanne f.