heres a series of tweets I read as a response : I erased the names and such
In the vacuum left by the loss of reachable life goals, we 80s kids kind of figured: fuck it.
Why the hell should we give up what is good & joyful & rich of the art & accoutrements of childhood in exchange for a yawning grey void? How was that ever considered a fair deal?
The reason my generation still plays in ball pits & reads comic books & plays dress up is that contemporary society has made most of the good parts of adult life financially unreachable: home, family, travel, even theater is $500 a ticket
All that’s left is the crushing despair!
I want to say this.
Do you know why millennials “refuse to grow up”?
Because we finally figured out that the whole idea is bullshit designed to suppress human joy enough to keep them grinding for an uncaring company for 50 years in unhappy marriages until death is a mercy.
I think it was from the person LHOD was quoting above …
Cool, but in what world is 1979 a Milennial? Most people born 1980-1985 or so are only technically Milennial, but didn’t have a “name” until adulthood.
Sharknado 2: The Second One is pretty good, though technically ironic.
We need to put that in context. Lewis was a professor of English, an expert on such works as Paradise Lost, and a prolific writer on Christian hermeneutics. He saw the world as essentially serious and therefore wanted to leaven it with joy and innocence. The latter was a small part of his world. Maher was complaining about people who turned that world around and were essentially unaware of the serious and hypertrophed the childish to engulf the rest. Not about Stan Lee personally, as he repeated a dozen times, but the childish world he accidentally helped create.
This is a better critique, at least about his original tweet. Without the fuller explanation it came across as petty. Entertainment is valuable; constant entertainment without seriousness is bread and circuses - and that can be dangerous to a society.
When was the last time you read the Narnia books? They do have happy endings, yes, but there is no shortage of ugliness and violence getting to that happy ending. Never mind the detestable, thinly-disguised anti-Islamic bigotry in the later volumes. Lewis is hardly one to bring up in defense of comic books.
The Harry Potter books have ugliness and violence. So do eighteen zillion other modern and classic YA and children’s books. And so do fairy tales, which is what Lewis cited in his quote. Superhero comic books and movies are all about ugliness and violence these days. The other thing they have in common are happy endings, which are their point and purpose, unlike much of adult fiction and nonfiction.
Childish entertainment is like sugar. I can’t imagine a world without sugar. I also can’t imagine a world with only sugar. The American diet has way too much sugar and that’s led to a crisis of obesity and diabetes and other ailments. I don’t think the analogy to overwhelming amounts of sugary entertainment is much of a stretch.
There’s no need for anyone to “start on” the subject. The form speaks for itself.
*100 Bullets.
Sandman.
Gen Of Hiroshima.
Criminal.
Fables.
Powers* and *Powers Bureau.
Wanted.
Y: The Last Man.
Sin City.
The Last One.
Scalped.*
The second run of Death Rattle for high quality short-form horror fiction.
Hell, if we’re talking about short-form horror, 1970s Creepy and some of the underground horror comics like Skull and *Psychotic Adventures *achieved greatness more than once.
At this point in time, denying that comics and GNs can be quality literature is like clinging to the claim that crime fiction, horror stories, and SF can’t be quality literature, or that rock music is all trash.
Bill Maher has a massive platform. If just 1% of his platform came away from that show thinking less of people who like comic books, that’s a ton of people who think less of me because of something he said. It’s not a huge deal, but it does still matter, and that’s why people like me get pissy about it.
A shitty blog post that millions of people read. Millions of people who, for whatever misguided reason, take him seriously as an intellectual or comedian. And all of those people think less of me because of his shitty, uninformed, elitist opinion. And I shouldn’t care at all?
90% of comics is shit. That’s because 90% of everything is shit. But this broad-brush idea that comics are simplistic good-v-evil storylines… That didn’t even apply to the comics my dad collected in the 90s. It doesn’t apply to the comic book movies (Ant-Man 2, Civil War, even Infinity Wars had a hell of a lot of grey areas). And yeah, you’ll end up with some dross, but it’s not somehow most or all of it.
All love, man. Those are fun stories but there’s so much more.
Displacement
Maus
This One Summer
A Contract With God
Love and Rockets
Persepolis
March
American Born Chinese
Fun Home
All of these - and more! - stretch them medium beyond its reliance on escapist tales and show that there’s a way through graphic novels to explore life and what it is to be a person, good or bad.