Getting Respect, by Dennis O’Neil
Well, it is certainly a superheroic weekend here in New York, and maybe where you are, too. The latest Batman flick has already set one box office record and who knows what others it may yet conquer? The second Hellboy movie is still kicking box office butt. And a while ago, I was paging through the Arts and Leisure section of my Sunday New York Times when I saw a familiar face staring up at me from a photo: my old colleague Frank Miller, grim and determined looking. The accompanying story was about Frank’s writing and directing of The Spirit movie, based on work by yet another old friend, the late Will Eisner, produced by yet another old friend, Michael Uslan. (Good heavens! Whom don’t I know?)
Last week, the loyalists among you, if any, will remember that I strongly recommended a book titled The Ten Cent Plague, by David Hajdu. Since then, I’ve recommended it in conversation a couple of times, and may do so again. Damn good book. One of the points Hajdu makes is that comics were the outsider’s medium: the first bunch of creators and promoters were primarily Jewish, guys who had trouble getting work elsewhere. This is one of the reasons the Establishment may have felt threatened by the four-color trash sprouting from the newsstands like crab grass on a lawn; these were not their kind of people and who knows what kind of anarchy these grubbies might promote, given the opportunity? Decent folk practically had an obligation to put them in their place!
When I entered comics, about a quarter century into their history, the field was still dominated by outsiders, or anyway at least ex-outsiders. As for my cohorts… maybe one of the writers who came into comics at about the same time after I slithered in may have been destined for a respectable career in respectable institutions among respectable citizens, but the rest of us were hippie-rebel, anti-establishment types. If that hadn’t been true, why were we there? Comics publishing didn’t have an established career path, there didn’t seem to be really serious money to be made, at least at the editorial level, and Lord knows we weren’t reputable; only a decade or so earlier, our chosen endeavor had been crucified in magazines and on editorial pages and even in congressional hearings. We weren’t exactly bracketed with axe murderers, but you probably wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of us.
That was then and this is now, and now comics have parity with the other media. I suspect that’s largely because of all those comics-based movies bringing in enough revenue to reach from here to Pluto. All to the good, I guess, though frankly I’m still hippie-rebel enough to be just a tad uncomfortable even at the rim of the Establishment. I mean, look at history. The Establishment has been wrong more often than right, and drab, and charmless. And besides, don’t respectable gents have to wear neckties?
I hate neckties.
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Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and The Shadow – among others – as well as many novels, stories and articles. The Question: Epitaph For A Hero, reprinting the third six issues of his classic series with artists Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar, will be on sale in September, and his novelization of The Dark Knight movie is on sale right now.
Denny,Kind of the same feeling I experienced when I got caught reading comics at school and I was given the 'don't read that crap' tude.Now people are happy kids are reading…anything.
I'm trying to remember if I saw anyone wearing a necktie at San Diego last year. Coming up empty.I know I see them at biz funerals, at least on the departed, but you can't blame death on comics. Sex, maybe.
There were a few people at SDCC wearing ties last year, not counting those who were in costume. That's pretty dangerous: with the massive crush of humanity, somebody could easily get Isadora Duncaned. As Gertrude Stein said, affectations can be dangerous.
And I didn't know that Gertrude Stein had even heard of me; now she's nailed my writing style.Glad to know you're off crushing humanity massively on behalf of all the fearless readers.
I completely agree with your outsider mentality of comics as a medium. It is still a fairly strong perception today that comics are the outside medium and only when the story becomes a movie does the concept and the cartoonist become "former outsiders." As a subcategory of comics, webcomics have an even stronger outsider feel even though they may have wider visibility in many cases. I find it a bit odd that when a webcomic becomes a print comic, that in itself is newsworthy — because printed matter is more "respectable" than online material. What if a webcomic goes to a medium that is "less respectable?" Would that be newsworthy too? Now however I am wondering what is less respectable than a webcomic? I will ponder that while I continue working on my own webcomic Silly Daddy.Joe Chiappetta http://sillydaddy.net
So you probably don't want to hear my pitch for a comic inscribed on the torsi of random attendants at a tattoo conference.
"And besides, don’t respectable gents have to wear neckties?"No. But, I'm sorry, Denny. They do still have to wear underpants.I think respect for comics has also come with their sometimes surprising recognition by mainstream awards. "Maus" getting the Pulitzer. "Sandman" getting the Hugo. "Watchmen" making Time's Top 100 Novels. "Persepolis" nominated for an Oscar.It's nice that educators have recognized comics as being another doorway into literacy, instead of the backwaters of reading or worse, the gateway to degeneracy. For instance, it's nice that Scholastic Books is publishing comics … and good comics too! There's nothing less "educational" than when adults try to foist second rate material on them in the name of "education." Yeah, money talks. It helps that Comic Book Movies are raking in skidillions of dollars. But sometimes success breeds it's own level of contempt. I think it's also nice when you can point to a movie like "Road to Perdition" or "History of Violence" and people are stunned that the source material was a comic.It's nice that comics, like "Persepolis" or "The Tale of One Bad Rat," now have a diversity that wasn't around when I was a kid. Heck, the quality and diversity here on ComicMix is more than what I saw as a kid! Comics have gained respect, in part, because there are a wider variety of respectable comics. It's hard to make blanket criticism of a media form that is producing more and more exceptionally good work in a widening array of genres.