This is why we're a backlist publisher, you know. For the weeks when one can't find anything to read, there's still HENCH, or SMOKE AND GUNS, or URSULA, or BAD MOJO, or CHANNEL ZERO, or AVAILABLE LIGHT, or LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS, or PLANET OF THE CAPES, or or or for you to pick up. We're here for you.
Anyway, this week's WARLORD #1 was rad. And PREVIEWS and WIZARD are always worth picking up.
The fact that it could be applied to comics doesn't mean that it should be applied to comics. For that matter, it shouldn't apply to TV.
Has it been two years already? Damn.
As of tomorrow, two years.
I guess I'm having a hard time stating my disagreement, except I don't really know what your point of protest is. Could you elaborate?
Yeah, it was a quick comment, and this is a quicker response still, so...
The piece conflates "bad" with lowbrow, which is why it isn't arguing for a better class of western but simply arguing that something more "responsible" should get airtime. Well, maybe so; different strokes and all that, and I like me some highbrow art anyway. But any argument that ends with someone protecting me from myself--especially someone viewing one segment of my cultural consumption in isolation (perhaps when I'm not watching moronic westerns I'm attending plays). I'd much rather argue for better westerns, or better superhero books, or better plays than to play the mug's game of cataloging art/entertainment on some rigged scale of moral/aesthetic uplift.
Two years is an awful lot of cussing.
It is an awful lot of cussing, but, you know. The hijinx of youth.
I won't doubt the man argues with that quaint early-60's sense of morality, but I do think he speaks to a larger problem of repetition and me-tooism that's detrimental to any art medium. Obeying the numbers is a toxic formula, for exactly the reasons he states: you'll only find out what's popular from a limited slate of product, and in turn focus on that to produce more numbers, and next season the ratings are taken on what of that is popular, and adjust and shrink accordingly... which leads into an endless cycle of reductive product.
What lies at the end of that cycle is four X-Men related titles every Wednesday, and that is what has turned comics into a "specialty" market.
You know me by now, and you're probably familiar with my tastes. You know I'm no advocate of All High Brow, All the Time. (I read Bullseye vs. Punisher, for god's sake. Talk about your reductive product.) But even I'm getting pretty fucking insulted by what I see coming out every week.
I don't disagree with what you just said, I just don't think that it's what Minow is saying, not really; I suspect his vision of marketplace diversity is pretty different from yours. The morality isn't incidental to his piece. It's the point of his piece; applied to the comics market, his solution is not more crime books, or horror, or sci-fi, or fantasy (which are all, at heart, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, and murder), but more Blankets, and more variations on Blankets, because that is, you know, uplifting. He's got a very narrow kind of diversity on his mind, I think.
But if you're just cribbing it for general diversity--or as a general injunction to stop making bad product--I'm right there with you.
Fucker.
Cribbing it for general diversity is one way to look at it. What I read in that speech is a call for intelligence to balance out what amounts to sugar-and-carbs programming. He's not afraid to couch this call (occasionally) in terms of morality, but it seems he's appealing to intelligence, as well. It's hard to argue that the broad swath of comics coming out are not far stupider than they should be.
Me, I don't believe low-brow has to be dumb. There's low-brow 40-Year-Old Virgin and low-brow Jerry Springer Show, ya know?
But I'm deathly afraid of getting into one of those "what is high brow?" conversations, so...
I'll end this comment by calling you a motherfelcher.
I will never, never, doubt your comment to intelligent vulgarity.
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