Да, это немного жульничество: всему этому место в линкспаме.
Но я посмотрела на размер линкспама, посмотрела на эти ссылки и решила, что пусть оно будет отдельной историей.
Вот что случилось:
Worst Comic Book Ever! - Тим Мачман, журналист очевидной газеты в рецензии на посвящённую комикс-индустрии книгу Leaping Tall Buildings выписывает жестокую, на грани приговора, отповедь супергероическому мейнстриму.
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The people who produce superhero comics have given up on the mass audience, and it in turn has given up on them. Meanwhile, the ablest creators have abandoned mainline superhero comics to mediocrity.
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A lack of options kept artists and writers at the wheel, and the crude, pulp-derived fantasies born from the Depression were distilled into a pop mythology that bore something like the relation to the fine arts that rock music did to classical forms.
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For an industry that feeds on its own past to go 20 years without fresh characters or concepts is death. The most telling sections in "Leaping Tall Buildings" are thus those written about industry powers like Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Grant Morrison and Dan DiDio. These are the men most responsible for the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public's obvious fascination with men in capes.
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As Mr. Ware says, cartooning "has something fundamental to do with a constant sort of revision of ourselves and our lives, the same sort of resorting and refiling that goes on when we're dreaming." The superhero comic has for decades been the fixed point around which this vital American art has revolved. It may be exhausted, but it deserves better than to be reduced to a parody of a parody of itself."Worst Comic Book Ever"?... I Think Not (Editorial) - Джон Эпштейн категорически несогласен.
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Now, Mr. Marchman can be forgiven his ignorance, as he works primarily as a sports writer, but his article is so wrong as to be close to a hack-job on the industry. In fact, thanks to the expansion of creator-owned work and the mainstream's use of the independent publishers as a sort of farm system, the comic book industry and super-hero comics have been enjoying a renaissance in recent years.
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While the best super-hero titles may no longer be restricted to one or two massive companies, creators who made their bones on the independent market are doing beautiful work and pushing characters and concepts into heretofore unexplored realms. Fans who still love the lore of long-running worlds have titles which will offer them just that, while those that are looking to step into more mature or otherwise unfamiliar territory can find a veritable cornucopia of options, many of them quite good. In short, the comic book market is ripe with choices of quality material, and that's what every fan wants.Leaping Tall Buildings… Or Jumping to Conclusions? Part 1: The Fans, Part 2: The Creators - этот человек тоже несогласен, но его возражения представляются куда более... эмоционально-мотивированными.
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While I understand Marchman’s point, his opinion is actually quite insulting to both old & new fans alike. It perpetuates the Big Bang-esque stigma that all long time comic book fans are socially inept geek-savant’s, while assuming in equal measure that any new fan who wanders into a comic book shop is incapable of reading a blurb, performing a Google search or simply asking a member of staff for help.
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Marchman seems content to paint a picture that contains some very broad strokes but lacks detail. He makes no mention of the fact that DC has their own creator owned imprint in Vertigo, as do Marvel with Icon. Granted the Big Two were very late to the party in terms of creator owned books but the fact that they have turned up shows that they acknowledge the changes occurring within the industry. What’s more Marchman gives the impression that all creator owned books are made by writers who have become disgruntled with the Big Two & left. He makes no mention of the fact that creators such as Scott Snyder, Matt Fraction & Jonathan Hickman, amongst others, have all written creator owned books before going on to work for Marvel or DC.
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No one can deny that the Big Two still have a lot of work to do when it comes to working out a fair and equitable method for creator’s rights & some people have been dealt an unfair hand because of it. But back when the industry was in its infancy nobody could see that these works would become the powerhouses they are today. These characters have existed for longer than most the fans that read about them & as a result the legal complexities they are tied up in are as intricate & convoluted as the histories of the characters themselves. If the Big Two are as concerned with money as Marchman would have us believe then they will change because the only alternative is that the characters would disappear & not make any money at all. В какой-то момент, как
докладывает The Comics Beat, разговор переместился в Твиттер - самое подходящее место для спокойной и вдумчивой беседы. Там, как
докладывает уже Robot 6, Джей Майкл Стражински решил сказать Мачману пару ласковых:
“Your behavior was dickish. I became a better writer after He-Man. You will always be a dick.”Об этой части спора написал уже Дж. Кейлеб Мозокко:
JMS v. WSJ.
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One could quibble with the specifics, but overall, Marchman seems to have it about right, and most of the things he says are the very same things comics fans, readers, retailers, critics and creators have themselves said over and over and over.
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I think the JMS is to Alan Moore as Uwe Boll is to Martin Scorcese analogy works, whether you're looking at what JMS was doing in the 1980s vs. what Alan Moore was doing in that same decade, and if you look at the work of both gentleman in the 21st century. Hell, I think it's accurate if you put 2012 JMS up against 1989 Alan Moore. Шон Т. Коллинз думает обо всём этом мысли, с которыми лично я, при всей прохладности моего нынешнего отношения к мейнстримной супергероике, согласна больше всего:
The Wall Street Journal vs. superhero comics .
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Second, he’s writing his anti-superhero-comic piece from a position of openness to and familiarity with superhero comics, even if he goes on to reject them. To the extent that alternative comics are discussed in these big-name publications, it’s usually accompanied by sneering derision of the entire genre, with perhaps one or two exceptions thrown in to prove the rule. But Marchman knows enough about the field to articulate why it’s lacking in what could once have been considered its cardinal virtues, and that’s impressive, too.
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Marchman’s slam of Joe Quesada, Brian Bendis, and Grant Morrison as three of the four men most responsible for superhero comics’ sorry sales state is unjustified given how they turned Marvel around from bankruptcy with Bill Jemas. His comparison to the ’90s million-selling juggernauts ignores the fact that that boom was driven by speculation and fueled by comics far more incomprehensible and awful than anything being published today. And in general I’m wary of any argument predicated on the notion that comics could or should be a mainstream taste or mass medium at any time later than, say, 1970. But kudos to Marchman for adding this necessary voice of dissent to the conversation. Or more accurately, kudos to Marchman for starting the conversation in the first place.Upd. от 02.06.2012:
Worst Comic Book Ever! - Том Ивинг о том, что хотя проблемы, о которых говорит Мачман вполне реальны, глобальная проблема индустрии всё-таки не в них, и их решением ситуацию можно улучшить весьма условно.
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If you try and link the bubble-economy sales of comics in the 90s to their quality in the 00s, you’re arguing that the creators of today ought to be aspiring to the artistic heights of X-Force and Turok, Dinosaur Hunter. If you try and link creators’ rights to sales, you run quite quickly into the fact thatThe Walking Dead - a graphic novel sales phenomenon - is also a one-off sales phenomenon so far. Publishers Image, forged in the heat of the 90s sales boom, have always championed creators’ rights. Their comics now are - and I don’t think this is very controversial - staggeringly superior to their early 90s output. They also - Walking Dead aside - tend to sell around 1/100th as much.
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Marvel and DC comics are hopelessly snarled in continuity, for sure - the problem with Avengers V X-Men as new reader bait isn’t that you need to have read the Dark Phoenix Saga, but that it assumes you’re up on the more convoluted last few years/”seasons” of Marvel. But “snarled in continuity” as a diagnosis for them is much the same as “stuck with old business models” for the music industry: making it puts you on the side of the modern and innovative, so it legitimises your schadenfreude at how these exploitative companies are getting karmic payback. But as analysis it’s weak: it doesn’t really explain how Marvel or DC or EMI or Universal GET to this promised land given that every imaginable incremental step towards it fucks up their existing business. Wake Me Up When You’ve Impressed Somebody Who Doesn’t Want Something From You - Абей Хосла в колонке Такера Стоуна о Большой Двойке и аудитории одновременно. И о проблемах со Стражински. В основном о втором. Бонус: в комментариях комикс-снобы смеются над собой.
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Defenders of Stracynszki were extremely upset that the Wall Street Journal had opted to use as an example of Stracynszki’s poor work in comics a set of Spider-Man comics that Stracynszki had disowned, rather than the Superman run he started and then quit, or the Wonder Woman run he started and then quit, or the Thor run he started then quit, or et cetera. Oh, Straczynski had put his name on those Spider-Man comics, and Marvel was thereby able to trick his fans into buying those comics under the belief that they’d get a product he believed in, but as everyone knows, in comics, no one’s name means shit because everyone is a mercenary with no values that is completely for sale. Crossover comics that are only ads for other comics? Put your name on it. Selling people trailers for stories rather than stories? Put your name on it. Cash-in sequels created over vocal wails of betrayal by their true creators? Put your name on it. Comics whose content you will later attempt to disown because you have no belief in their creative worth? Put your name on it. To not put your name on such a comic, you’d have to give a shit about those silly human beings who care enough to use their hard-earned money to purchase things with your name on it because they believe in you, believe in you enough to want to generously spend the limited time they have on this miserable planet with your art, out of all the art that has ever been created. Or as they’re called by the comic industry, “fanboys.”
So, yeah, that’s exactly the kind of behavior the Wall Street Journal should be celebrating from Straczynski, because after all, if he didn’t grab at his fans’ money for work he in no way believed in, he’d have to get by on his paycheck as a, let’s see… “Hollywood screenwriter.” So. Yeah. He-Man’s really got a point….
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The argument goes that even if mainstream comics were to quit looking at its audience as a pool of suckers to be ripped off and drowned in endless hucksterism, and reward its most reputed creators by incessantly mischaracterizing them as angry, uncreative old cranks fit only to have their life’s work shit on by venal half-wits, then they would still have a hard time finding an audience. Are those people right? The long answer is we’ll never have to find out.Вот такая вот история.
Видите: во мне осталось человеколюбие! Если бы я действительно всех ненавидела, мы бы говорили о Скотте Куртце.