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Saturday, July 4, 2009. New Comics were 3 days ago

 

You Forgot to Put Ammunition in the Canon

By Tucker Stone

Wednesday October 8, 2008 09:00:00 am

While the fight to determine who has the best comics blog or website on the internet is one that will probably rage as long as there's an opportunity for a political science major to start a site about the cultural ramifications of Frank Miller's depiction of a kitty cat being hurt by a SWAT team, the fight for overall best pop culture site is one that doesn't strike me as having much competition: it's the AV Club, hosted by the popular fake newspaper The Onion. Although their comics section is somewhat disappointing at times, as they've been known to rate another tired Secret Invasion issue the same as something like, you know, anything you can imagine being a lot better, they've got the best regular movie and music critic team online and with the constant cuts in newspaper staffing, they'll probably capture the overall title before too long. Over the last few years, the AV Club has apparently experienced some infusion of funding, and they've been able to add more staffers to the mix as well as allowing for what they call the "blog" portion of the site to operate as an ad hoc forum for whatever their writers want to do on the side. The results have ended up being some of the best pieces of non-fiction writing that's available—I'd put Nathan Rabin's "My Year of Flops" feature as one of the strongest alternative canons in film studies that I've ever read. (Sadly, I have to admit that I've read a lot of alternative canons in film studies, and yes, most of the time it's as pedantic as the title sounds.) While the AV Club's blog is rife with these kinds of features—besides Rabin's other weird studies in culture, like his "Silly Little Show-biz Book Club" that focuses on things like a rap video groupie's autobiography of her sexual encounters, the piece that's currently capturing my attention is Noel Murray's Popless. Basically, what Mr. Murray is doing is shutting himself off from every piece of music that's released in 2008—no mean feat, as part of being a regular music writer is the obsessive year round work to come up with a "Best of" list—and then going through his entire musical catalog, in alphabetical order. It's completely obsessive and about as far into the nerdier realm of record-store music snobbery as is humanly possible.

I pretty much wait for each entry with the hunger of a Uruguayan rugby team.

Whether you agree with Noel or not when he decides to cull stuff from his collection—a portion near the end of each entry that inevitably spawns confusion and anger in the comments section, when people can't comprehend why Noel abjectly deletes all his Stills songs without explaining why—the insane level of comprehensiveness of the project is one that's a delight to take part in, even from the spectacle of observer.

As so much of my free time is currently taken up with comics—which isn't a complaint, just a grudging acknowledgement that it's been a while since I downloaded everything on the top 40 Billboard charts so I could feel what it's like to be 14 again—I'm curious as to what a similar project would be like in comics. I already perform my own weird experiments in Rain Man level comics studies—currently I'm focusing all my non-reviewing reading on the library of specific creators, changing the cartoonist or writer whenever each month rolls by—but the idea of abandoning each and every new comic for a time is just as alluring as it is unimaginable. Still, the fantasy endures—after all, what would it produce at the tail end? What sort of bookshelf would it be, if each and every trade and single issue was examined under a similar criteria to what Noel is doing—the test of "Do I ever want to read this again?" I'm not one of those comic readers with the gross arrogance that I should be passing out my collection to those who didn't ask for it in hopes that they'll join me on my weekly subway ride to stores full of four-hundred dollar Thor helmets. The only thing that should be sitting there is something that I'll want to dive into again, whether that's now or in the future—and considering the current publishing output of most of the comics companies, that future time is going to be heavily cut into. What I might end up with—and this is what I'd really enjoy about it, most of all—might just end up being some kind of comic book canon. It would be a personal one, obviously—I'm not living in the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art, so there's a vast portion of the library that would end up without representation. But it'd be a canon, nonetheless, and the only way to start a canon is with some kind of major overhaul at the outset. The initial work—whether it was a year-long commitment or a six month work sabbatical—well, that's not something that could be shoved into a thirty minute block at the end of the day. (I imagine it could be, but that's sort of cheating, isn't it?)

There aren't a lot of very strong canons for super-hero comics out there. I'd hesitate to guess why—there's clearly some bright enough people writing both in print and on the internet about super-hero titles that could do the work—but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be something worth looking into. Most of the serious comic canons that show up don't deal with super-hero comics anyway, and if they do, it's usually the standard names checked: Kirby! Watchmen! Something Frank Miller wrote! That's indicative of a lot of variables—a portion could probably be attributed to snobbery, sure, but at least part of it will have to deal with the nature of creators who didn't really care that much about the subject, a lack of ethnic and sexual diversity, and all the inherent mechanics involved with stories that, by their very nature, can never reach true conclusions. (Of course, these same problems can show up in just about anything else in comics that isn't super-hero—Gasoline Alley doesn't seem to be over yet, there's not a lot of black guys in Goodbye Chunky Rice—but super-hero comics are, for the most part, notoriously cautious when it comes to changing anything from their roots (beyond the amount of violence) when it comes to the basic themes and structures.)

Still, while a super-hero canon that isn't beholden to a bunch of message board noise and voting may not be a current, actual product, it's one that would certainly be an interesting little jack-in-the-box to take a look at. (The top 100 list published by The Comics Journal back in 1999 remains one of the most polarizing examples of the form; unsurprisingly, it's also endlessly fascinating. Tom Spurgeon, he of Comics Reporter fame, recently published a canon of his own, tellingly calling his "The 50 Things Every Good Comics Collection Needs." Tom's take is certainly a beast of a thing—both because it's a fun read, and because of the discussion it spawned, wherein other notable comics fans took apart and created their own canons themselves.) Canons aren't, for the most part, the purview of the fan—even the largest hard drive and comprehensive bit torrent system aren't going to be able to compete with the amount of free stuff that ends up in the hands of the full-time critic—but that doesn't mean they aren't worth trying out, even from the fan side.

Which is a long way to get to the point, and the point is this: the only Green Arrow story you need, if you really need a Green Arrow story, is the issue where he gets his hand stuck in a bomb planted by an eco-terrorist group he's "infiltrated" and he then commits suicide so that Superman won't cut off his arm.

You're welcome!

Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.

This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008

 

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