I'm very concerned about the negativity being tossed around over Nightwing #149. Using phrases like "torture porn" is very serious indeed, and shows a sort of viciousness against not only DC but comic books in general.
Comic books are not for children -- they are for adults. I don't understand what these critics want -- to go back to the days of Stanley and his Monster and Don Rickles? Is that what they want?
Bestselling books, video games, and movies are filled with gore, sex, and violence against women. What makes the comic book industry so very different? Do we want to live in our mother's basements forever? Don't we want to cast off the training diapers and crap in the big boy bowl?
Greg Burgas at CBR writes about Nightwing #149, "Sweet fancy Moses, this is yucky." What is his problem? Does he hate DC Comics or something? Would it have been so hard to find something of value in this comic? He goes on to write,
"Not only is this horrifying in all the wrong ways, it’s dull, dumb, and ugly. It’s everything we should think of when we think of offensively bad comic books. It’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with so much of DC’s output these days. It’s not even fun to eviscerate this thing. It’s just sad."
Again, I don't read comic book blogs so I can read HATE.
Caleb at Every Day Is Like Wednesday called Nightwing #149 "incredibly, spectacularly awful." While Burgas uses Caleb's review as the inspiration for his own review, he misses the one key word in that sentence: "spectacular." Yes, Nightwing #149 IS spectacular (and really, if it wasn't for this damn recession it would have been the first on my pull list but as it is I can barely keep up with Final Crisis proper). It is like Frank Miller on steroids, and if that isn't an image to keep you up at night rubbing your nips at the very potential, I don't know what is.
Finally, Laura Hudson writes, "picking up a comic book like Nightwing #149 feels a lot like shutting my hand in a car door." However, she goes one step further and uses the issues raised by the comic to question the worth of others of its ilk. Which brings me to my point:
"WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE TRYING TO DESTROY THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY???"
This Nightwing #149 hate -- and, by extenstion, DC Comics hate -- feels like a big pile-on, like one of those cheerleaders who try to make a pyramid but then fall into a big pile on the floor. Though instead of cheerleaders they are...HATEleaders!
Obviously, Nightwing #149's brand of torture porn is not of the quality and artistic value as, say... The Killing Joke. But if you give Nightwing writer Pete Tomasi the paycheck of Alan Moore, hands-off editing, and Brian Bolland on art, you'd be surprised.
Greg Burgos writes, "In a DC Universe that has recently been all about cruelty, this stands out. " But how about some props to DC for The Dark Knight, huh? Remember -- the best movie made in the last three years (though I also enjoyed Speed Racer)??
And that's what I really have to say: The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight The Dark Knight The Dark Knight. You might call it changing the subject, I call it keeping things positive. Because when we focus on the NEGATIVE, we become part of the problem, and then the terrorists win.
I'm Sarah Palin, and I approve this message.
The only thing I didn't like about it was the gas segment. I think that could've been handled a little bit better. As it was, it comes off like the ultimate villain team-up if they didn't keep bringing up the gas.
ReplyDeleteMy only comment upon this subject is: I thought Infinite Crisis was going to lead us back to a world where the violence and bad attitudes were missing? I saw more blood and killing than ever this month, it seemed.
ReplyDeleteRight on, Val! Sniping about quality in comic books has gotten way out of hand. DC Comics is merely reflecting the society we live in, where we can barely walk out of our homes without seeing people eaten by dogs. I can't tell you the number of times I myself have tripped over severed legs while walking down the street.
ReplyDeleteKudos to DC for being realistic in their depictions of violence, and for (fingers crossed!) showing children the horror they're likely to see once they get kidnapped by a psychotic guy who thinks he's a goddamn bat.
I applaud your crusade against Stinkin' Thinkin' and the Nattering Nabobs of Not Likin' Seeing People Viciously Tortured.
ReplyDeleteWay to put those unAmericanly Anti-Torture weirdos in their place, Val!
I think such displays against American Free Enterprise Capitalism are disgraceful. Every red-blooded citizen of these United States should go out and buy a copy of Nightwing #149. Not only would this save the comic book industry, but it would free up short-term credit to help our Great Banking System from becoming less profitable.
ReplyDeleteMay God bless you, Mrs. Palin, and protect you from the power of witchcraft.
LOOK A BIRDY A BIRDY!
ReplyDeleteSigh. Poor comic books. Sometimes they really are horrible.
you got me - I totally thought you were for real for a second there
ReplyDeleteI love you, snarky Valerie.
ReplyDeleteWhat critics of Nightwing #149 don't appreciate is the women also get hurt and tortured all the time in comics. To complain when it happens to man is just being hypocritical and shows people trying to assume special privilege through sympathy for their gender.
ReplyDelete....Christ, I don't even know what tone of voice I should be saying that in.
Obviously, I do a comic blog, so I can at least imagine how much shit you can get over talking comics, but man, I don't know if I can fully imagine how much shit you personally get for your comic blogging, with your background and all.
ReplyDeleteIf it was just the stuff I've seen, that'd be bad enough, but I'm sure it's much more than I've personally seen.
Sorry for the grief you get, Valerie!
Bastards! They must all have personal vendettas agains DC.. no.. against ALL COMICS EVER!
ReplyDeleteI...
ReplyDeleteHuh? Val, I know you're being sarcastic here, but you really disliked Nightwing #149?
Okay, I can see where there are some parallels between this and that awful Teen Titans issue with Wendy being chased through the tower, but I'm going to act as the defense of the issue in this case. All the death that we saw going on in this issue was a result of Scarecrow's fear toxin. The only bit of it that was real was that the woman Nightwing was trying to protect got killed, and her death itself wasn't even that overly graphic.
Yeah, the surreal visions of her getting killed were a bit more graphic, but it wasn't real in the same way her actual death was (I mean, her telling Nightwing how he failed while encased in a block of ice?). My complaint with the Teen Titans thing was that it WASN'T a dream, that Wendy got chased through the tower like a freaking snuff film or a slasher flick and then got mutilated for it. This just featured standard fear-panic running through Nightwing, even though he's aware of it.
It wasn't a GREAT issue, but it wasn't a bad one, either.
Clearly these people hate Dick and want his book to be cancelled.
ReplyDelete(in seriousness, I'm sad. I was thinking of starting to get Nightwing but it sounds icky)
Um, I'm getting lost in the snark here. Do you like Nightwing 149 or do you not? And is it killing the comics industry or not? I honestly can't tell.
ReplyDeleteWow! Moving into Swiftian satirical territory now, are we? This entry really cracked me up.
ReplyDeleteI feel Killing Joke is one of Moore's weakest works, by the way. The "normal couple" dialogue between pre-Joker and his unfortunately cipherish wife seems forced, as does the ending where Batman and Joker are laughing together. Trying too hard to restore some sense of balance or something, to pull back from the darkness. If you're afraid to go there, don't start the journey in the first place.
I like your shout out to the false dichotomy where fans accuse other fans of wanting some return to the most ridiculous examples of Silver and Bronze Age frivolity. They've put too much faith in this notion comics have grown up, when actually this obsession with gross outs and torture is very adolescent. So they don't see that there could be other iterations of mature storytelling that don't involve gore and lovingly detailed depictions of decaptitation, dismemberment and the like.
Comics can be grown up without being gross, can be fun without being silly. Although both gross and silly certainly have their place in the mix at times, too.
The Dark Knight, of course, being the movie where the female lead gets blown up two-thirds through the picture so her boyfriend can become Two-Face.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I stopped reading Nightwing right around the time they dropped an entire building on Blockbuster. That was AGES ago.
ReplyDeleteI can see that wasn't a bad move.
I have been thinking about violence lately. I adore violence. I love gore. I love my euro thrash horror and I will search the continents for that special uncut version from wherever. I deplore censorship.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, people, you just can't add gore and violence to something and expect it to be good! This seems to be a trend right now (saw and hostel and the like) and it is so amazingly boring I don't even know where to start. This seems to be exactly what is going on in the comics industry as well. The gore isn't the problem, the fact that it doesn't have a purpose is. It is 'edgy' for the sake of being edgy, not because the story needs it to be real. It's like the fridging... killing a female character in comics can be done in a good way. But just doing it to get an emotional reaction for the moment... *sighs*.
What annoys me is that things like this gives all us splatter/gore/adult fans out there a bad name.
I enjoyed Tomasi's early Nightwing issues - the stuff with Superman telling the cop "we're all on the same team" was just the right level of knowing cheese that no other book at DC seemed to even be attempting. Then there was the stuff with the woman baby-factory which I found a little sinister (but which I accept is probably just me) and the book sort of lost me.
ReplyDelete"WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE TRYING TO DESTROY THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY???"
I know you're joking, but I'll ask anyway, because there are those asking that question in all seriousness:
Do They/We owe the 'comic industry' any kind of deference at all? We've bought the books and are perfectly entitled to burn them if we want (but I'd rather we recycled them into toilet paper or something - if only so we could literally wipe our asses with them like we always claim), but comics are an industry, and thus the product is open to evaluation by anyone who pays for the it - and a lot more people than there were in the pre-internets dark ages now have a means of communally voicing their opinions with those of a like mind. Reviews like the ones you mention ("X is so bad it gave me cancer!") are merely the result of the relative anonymity and one-upmanship of the communal mentality of fandom, where it becomes a contest to see who can be the most scathing, the most colourfully deconstructive of the books they read - the same thing happens with movies, or is someone going to make a case for Battlefield Earth's critics exclusively being basement-dwelling trolls who ignore its merits and won't give poor old Hollywood a chance? It's always been a game to make fun of the faults of things we enjoy, as before I had internet access (and even now) it was a regular event to see a movie with some buds and then go to a bar and talk shit about it, even if it wasn't that terrible. It's premadonna behaviour to assume that comics should be immune somehow, but that's what some are seriously arguing, as there seems to be an attempt by industry workers (in television and film as well as comics) to dismiss TeH Internet as a single, cohesive entity to be vilified or dismissed, rather than a disparate consumer sounding-board - which seems to me like the attitude of people who can't take a negative review.
That's the best case scenario, of course - the worst case is that they're befuddled by all the technology and freedom of expression and want things to go back to the way they were when the consumer was silent and passive and took what they were given.
(To be fair, I have seen the DC boards, and I'm aware there are those who take things too far. These people are the exception, however, or are we going to argue that the stalker who breaks into Tom Hanks' house is the typical example of a movie fan?)
I'm really confused. There are people who don't like NIghtwing? O_o; It's finally becoming a decent book with a charming positive hero under Peter Tomasi. For once Dick Grayson is not emo or a jerk...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm really confused. This is no where near as horrible as that one Teen Titans issue. That stuff was demented. This one I found to be executed well. Or as well as a "failing to save the damsel in distress" story could be...
"I don't understand what these critics want -- to go back to the days of Stanley and his Monster and Don Rickles?"
ReplyDeleteI don't care whether DC publishes Nightwing or not, with or without rivers of blood, but that right there is a suggestion I can get behind. We need a Showcase Stanley and His Monster!
I have two issues of the 60's "Stanley and his Monster" comic and THEY ARE AMAZING.
ReplyDeleteVal: Awesome. Genuinely awesome.
ReplyDeleteJoel: While I agree with you, overall, in that I also feel The Killing Joke isn't deserving of the praise that's usually heaped on it, and (as well) agree with your assessment of the ending (so...they just...um...laugh? Really? Huh. Yeah. Paraplegia has never been so funny.)
I do have to say I disagree with your assessment of the dialogue between the Joker and his "wife". Or, rather, I agree, but think it's justified. See, I'm part of the camp that believes that these sequences were the result of an untrustworthy narrator...in this case, the Joker. I took the sequences as the memories of the Joker. And, since his memories are notoriously untrustworthy, the conversations between him and his wife are odd and forced. For instance, his weird joke about prostitutes making more than comedians, and his wife's odd comment about how he was "good in the sack." That whole exchange seemed like it was something created/manipulated by the Joker's perspective. When viewed from that point of view, his depiction of himself as victim, his relationship with his wife, even the visual transitions make a lot of sense.
I only mention this because, while the book deserves a good deal more criticism than it generally gets, that aspect of the criticism it does get (the Joker's history) is something that I feel it gets most frequently undeservedly slammed with.
Overall, it was a great book with great writing by Moore and amazing visual storytelling by Bolland.
Wasn't Nightwing dosed with fear gas during Dixon's run? I think it was within the first year.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. What's Val's position here? Sorry, I'm dumb.
ReplyDeleteAs for the comic itself, I don't think there's anything wrong with putting Nightwing in a dreadful, taxing situation that demands every ounce of strength, perseverence and will he has in order to survive. I don't think stories can simply have heroes trounce the villains with little effort or difficulty.
There are stories where you're expected to enjoy seeing someone assaulted and tortured. This struck me as a story where you're supposed to enjoy someone reacting to assault and torture and finding a way out.
The Dark Knight, of course, being the movie where the female lead gets blown up two-thirds through the picture so her boyfriend can become Two-Face.
ReplyDeleteThe love interest from the animated series was better.
"Good-bye, Grace."
Greyman24- That's a pretty interesting take on that scene and certainly a valid reading of it. It just rang fictionally clunky to me, and false, but it definitely could be the result of the "faulty narrator" device.
ReplyDeleteAnd you know what? I completely agree with you about Brian Bolland's art. I haven't seen the recolored version though, but I'm interested in his visual take on the hues and stuff.
But I'm not a big fan of that book. I think most monthly issues of Moore's Swamp Thing blow it away. I do like thinking about that Joker scene in a different way, though.
The word "hate" is a stand-in word for a much more unwieldy sentence: "Someone has made a true statement criticizing someone or something disgusting that I like, and since I can't argue rationally I will call them a hater." Example: "I know Obama actually does have a friend who is a communist bomber who killed innocent people in the past, and it's an obvious fact that I can't disprove, so instead I'll just call it...", then the H word.
ReplyDeleteBecause there's nothing that signifies "love" or "maturity" like pornography, gore, and profanity.
It might be that people didn't get you were being sarcastic is because the bizarre reasoning you used is...too true to life.
ReplyDeleteSigh... I miss Brian Bolland doing a full time book...
ReplyDeleteOh and "Bad DC, Bad Publisher!"
ArrrOOOooo!
When did Bolland ever do a full-time book? Sure, 12 issues of Camelot 3000, & ...?
ReplyDelete