Alasdair Watson muses on the nature of time and motion.
Seven o'clock in the morning does not exist for me. Not under the normal run of things, unless I've been up all night. But last Saturday, I found myself getting up at that ungodly hour and shuttling across London on a variety of trains.
I quite like to travel on trains. There's a strange sense of being disconnected, divorced from the outside world, existing in this state of change from point A to point B, from the past to the future. A train is lives in motion. In my odder moods, I've been known to claim that life is motion.
Except in comics, oddly enough. Life in comics is a series of frozen moments, totally dependent on the reader-god for its time and motion. Which is why I love comics - they let me be God. Or something like that.
Interestingly, I understand that Grant Morrison's original concepts for Hypertime were along those lines, so I'm either in the company of genius or I ought to cut back my drug intake. Possibly both.
Time in comics is a funny beast, an endless series of nows. Despite this eternal modernity, comics are all too often backward-looking things, filled with homages to the work of this creator, and stories that drag up 20-year-dead bits of obscure continuity. All of which tells me that something is very, very wrong. How can a medium that is so utterly up-to-the-moment survive while looking backward? Sure, the works of people like Kurt Busiek are good stories, but what's new about them? What are they doing that's not been done before?
This whole notion that the trend toward nostalgia-based comics may not be a good thing for the comics industry has been banged about in great swathes of articles and a huge number of fora, especially online, over the last year or two. I don't understand the fascination with the debate. It doesn't seem to me like it's something that needs to be debated - nostalgia comics aren't doing anything new, and thus probably aren't helping to pull the industry out of its current slump, because they only appeal to the "traditional" comics audience, rather than reaching to fresh blood.
Sure, there may be a market for them. But it's a market full of greasy little bastards who can't get a date. Exactly the horrible little fuckers who give comics fans a bad name.
A relevant anecdote, written on the train leaving Wycombe. Just to get the mood right, I'll include some notes that I took while having a coffee:
"Good god, what a revolting little town. Grimy little armpit, dull grey wash hangs over the place. Town centre is a pedestrianized hole, dead people walking with dead eyes into dull shops, slowly bleeding their lives away in the concrete and glass of this shitheap."
As you might guess, I'm not in love with my new home.
As I was leaving Wycombe, filled with this hate, I glanced through a shop window, and saw a couple of racks of comics. Maybe, just maybe, there was something bearable lurking under the hideous veneer of this town. I trotted in, and looked round the shop. It seemed to be an all-purpose geek-shop, with comics, RPGs, little lead figures, Magic cards, the whole lot. The bloke behind the counter was overweight, with a bad haircut and greasy hair, which really ought to have tipped me off. Browsing the racks briefly, I noted that they looked a bit behind - maybe they only order enough to fill subscriptions. After all, Wycombe doesn't look like the kind of place to find hidden hordes of comics fans. I picked up a copy of BLOODY MARY: LADY LIBERTY issue #1, which I'd missed, and was gratified to only be charged a quid for it.
I struck up a conversation with the fella behind the till. It turns out that they no longer deal in comics, and what's on the racks is just there until it can be sold. Why do they no longer deal in comics? Apparently, there are two reasons: A dispute with Diamond for one, but mostly because "comics aren't as good as they were back when I was a kid". See what nostalgia does for the comics industry?
Even the people who were fans of the old sixties comics, widely perceived as the target market for nostalgia-based comics, don't like this new breed as much. There are a lot of reasons why, I suppose. I think mostly because they've grown up since the "old days," though. They can no longer look at Superman or The Fantastic Four through the wide eyes of a child, no matter how hard they may try. They may not want to admit that they're adults now, but they are, in many cases.
Another reason: they've seen these things before. Yes, they may like them, but they've seen them before. When was the last time you thought that a cover of a song was better than the original? Unless you heard the cover first, that is. Nothing is ever quite as good the second time you come to it.
So, theoretically, these nostalgia books should attract a generation of kids in the same way that the comics that inspired them, right? Of course not; the books that inspire them, the themes they work with are about as relevant to today's kids as a book about ostrich hunting is to an illiterate Inuit. If you want to get new readers for comics, aim them at kids, and address concerns that are relevant to them. I'm not a kid any more. I've no idea what kids' concerns are, and frankly, I don't care. But if I were writing a books for kids, you can be damn sure I'd find out, rather than just assuming that what worked in the sixties will work now.
Times have changed. We've moved on. But most comics seem to have got stuck in an eternal yesterday.
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