"Our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet...he is also a character in our biography."[1]
I was away last week! Did you notice? I was on an actual 'turn off the computer' vacation. I brought some comics along with me--some old
Love and Rockets I'd been meaning to re-read, the first
Akira collection that Marvel published--but for the most part, I wanted to shut down that part of my life as well.[2] The other contributing factor to my light packing was that I had every intention of reading
Inherent Vice, the latest novel from Thomas Pynchon, and if there is one thing I know about Thomas Pynchon, it's that his books can fill up some time.
I was halfway finished before my plane landed, and all the way to the final pages by the next day. And yeah, I ain't gonna lie: brother, that made me sad. If there was one thing I used to be able to say about Thomas Pynchon, it's that Thomas Pynchon books took me so long to read that I'd usually see an entire relationship crescendo and collapse by the midpoint, which left their literary climaxes interspersed with personal versions of the same, punctuated by late night phone calls to "talk about stuff."
Comics though, you're thinking! Comics, you stupid comiXology columnist!
Here's the thing: I'll buy anything Thomas Pynchon writes. I'll read it a few times, and then I'll shelve it, tell myself I'll read it again later, and maybe, if I don't die for a really long time, I'll make good on that promise. But if he doesn't come out with another book for ten years, or fifteen, or twenty, my opinion of the guy won't change an iota. I'll still pick up his books, even if I'm number-two-ing in a bag. And yet, with comics? There's still a part of me that, like a dumb kid, gets ornery when my "favorite authors" don't pump out another comic for me to buy every couple of months.
Lately though, that's starting to change. Like a lot of you--yes, you, jerkbag--I'm buying more "graphic novels" or "comics with spines"[3] than I ever did when I was younger, and I'm getting more and more acclimated to waiting months and months for the latest chapter in whatever long-form soap opera series I've taken a fancy to, and, best of all, I'm getting a chance to see what months, and in some cases, years, can allow comics creators to deal out. Books like
Asterios Polyp--a book I've gone back and forth in my own appreciation for multiple times since I first read it--are arriving with years of preparation behind their pages. And that commitment--to the work, and not the deadline--is starting to show.
Let me get something out of the way, if it's what you're waiting for: i'm not going to say that
Asterios Polyp is better than
New Avengers. That's true, of course--but it's besides the point entirely.
New Avengers--a comic I keep up with more than I'd say I actually "read"--is absolutely fine the way it is: it's a monthly installment in the current flavor of a popular franchise, and gauged against the other monthly installments of other franchises, it's a relatively satisfactory one. But, like a huge swath of monthly comic books, it's a comic book that operates under some strict guidelines, almost of all of which are Completely Arbitrary and have little to do with the creators involved.
Why does it have to be a set number of pages?
Why does it have to come out once a month?
That's the thing: it doesn't. Nothing does. Comics--and if you look around, they're already fully on the way there--don't have to fill any of these categories whatsoever. They can appear, like
The Hunter, or Vertigo's new Crime line--as fully formed objects. If they want to be serialized, they can pursue the
Acme Novelty or
Love and Rockets annual route, giving the artists all manner of time to perfect whatever it is they feel the need to perfect. They can change course mid-publication, the way Jeff Smith decided to shorten the length of
RASL so he could put out more issues, and still choose to publish a collection that vastly changes the scope and aesthetic appeal of the work by toying with the finished size.
In other words: all that bullshit doesn't have to matter to the people who make these anymore. They can do whatever they want, because the market has spoken: it wants to buy Parker, and the only reason it can't buy Parker right now is because IDW ran out of copies. The market wants serious (or seriously whimsical) books like
Asterios Polyp. The market doesn't care if Chris Ware only checks in once a year or so, they're willing to wait for him.
It's that waiting that's the meat of it, though. The question of whether these types of work are desired--that's yes, that's done, that's an easy one. The question now is: how far do you want to take this? Do you want to see the Matt Fraction Iron Man stories he can do on a monthly deadline, the Geoff Johns Green Lantern epics that need five fill-in inkers to meet some arbitrary deadline, or do you want--and c'mon, don't lie, you want it--the equivalent length of story in a one shot, ready for bookshelf story that Johns and Mahnke were able to complete to their complete satisfaction, without having to toss off pages right and left to every random finishing perp in order to keep the DC editorial stopwatch happy?
Because brother, you--the comics buyer--you already made it clear that's how you prefer your Darwyn Cooke. That's how you want your David Mazzucchelli. We've spoken with our dollars, and we've said that we're willing to pony up the dough, and we're willing to wait--the same way that a nine-year-old waited for
Goblet of Fire--because we know what we get in the end is better than what we have to eat in the meantime.
Notes:
[1] That's something from Auden. I don't read a lot of Auden, and by "a lot", I mean "any". I found the quote in Pauline Kael's article on Bonnie and Clyde, which was in the New Yorker. I liked it. (I don't read the New Yorker either, though. I'm a grown-up. The New Yorker is a magazine for children and dead people.)
[2] I stared at the stack of comics in my "haven't read these yet" pile for 15 minutes before it clicked in my brain that I had absolutely no desire to take a chance and end up reading a comic I would not enjoy while on vacation.
[3] I keep trying, but you know what? I could care less whether or not the term graphic novel gets accepted or defined in my lifetime. If I never hear another discussion on the merits of what is, at its ultimate "thus-ness" a label created for ease of conversation, then I believe I will have lived a successful, non-boring life. The time spent thinking about that particular debate would be better spent doing absolutely anything else, except for the fact that it does seem to keep people occupied whom I have no interest in talking too. Potato? Potato.
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
