"#Adulting" or "#Kidding"?

I don't feel like quoting Bill Maher, because that's like quoting from the court jester. His remarks on the reaction to the death of Stan Lee and subsequent follow-up to the public reaction to his reaction...It's all done in jest. His shots at Kevin Smith are also entirely in jest, since Smith is a funny cat in his own way. Both these clowns are for sale and not ashamed of it. They live quite well.

I'm more impressed with the eloquence of "Adulting", the essay by Maher that got the ball rolling. It's just three paragraphs. One page of notebook paper. And this essay will likely not be done in three. If Stan Lee's legacy is, according to Bill, that he created characters that appear in movies and put buns in theater seats, then the legacy of this "dumb culture" is that it kept big-budget movies in business. Quite an accomplishment from comic books being a medium born as a money-laundering front by gangsters shipping loads of booze, drugs & cash back-and-forth via a Canadian printing company.

If you've ever been keen to learn the history of the comic book "industry" and understand why it's got the social stigma that it has, then you're aware that the bulk of comic books in existence are trash. Bill Maher is right, but everyone hates it when he seems to be saying that adults should stop reading comic books because...the only people buying comics in the 21st century are adults. Kids and teenagers are more likely saving money to pay their phone bills. Adults are the only ones in the shops spending thirty or forty dollars a week buying comics until their piggy banks have been smashed, then the comic shops hope a new generation steps in to begin spending after the last one quits. This is not casual spending. The worst excesses of the medium that we saw in the 1990's - variant covers, crossovers, redundant characters, watered-down concepts, diluted brands, price increases, relaunches - keep popping up...because they still work. If there's any "good stuff" amongst that, well, that's nice, but the gimmicks keep the business afloat so that some good stuff can be found...you take what you can get, you read what you like, avoid the stuff you don't care about, know when to take a break, or know when to walk away. It's not going to get better if you collect 'em all. It's all junk. But it can be good junk.

The consumers who still hang in there? You'll find they're not buying as much.

In the past, Will Eisner tried passing off comic book illustration in technical terms as "Graphic Storytelling"...which would've taken off if he was actually any good at writing dialogue. I'm convinced Carl Barks was the only Golden Age-era cartoonist who knew how to write, but his work is marginalized because it's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, which shouldn't make a difference in distinguishing it as excellent storytelling in the medium, but that's not an opinion shared by people only looking at the superhero books. If comic books are ever going to get respect as an art form (and it seems awfully late in the game to bother thinking about this...this is all bull $#!+ in it's own way - always has been), then any talk of it needed to be more democratic..and, unfortunately, that ship sailed a long time ago. There's a lot of trash disguised as treasure. It's been that way for over 80 years, so Bill's just repeating what everyone's mother used to say from under his smirking stance.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the quality of comic books, I don't recall anyone who's ever read them say they wasted their time. But it was never an activity that people own up to doing with dignity, as it's stuck with the stigma of being the stuff of misguided adolescence...and adults who've become attached to it by habit. It's not going to be taken seriously. It can't be.


And there's always talk that it's almost over.

It's like the old saying: Even a broken clock can tell the correct time twice a day.