How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Batman
Graeme McMillan has an excellent post over at CBR concerning the reputation of literary comics, and how readers may be unwilling to approach certain graphic novels because of the notoriety that surrounds them.
It's more than a little embarrassing to admit, but up until a couple of years ago, I'd pretty much successfully gone out of my way to avoid reading anything by the Hernandez Bros., and it was almost entirely because of the reputation of their work. Surely, I thought, nothing could stand up to the probably-hyperbolic praise thrown in their direction!
Which is an aspect that I believe most regular comics readers have sensed before. Certainly, price and availability are a huge factor in whether or not I buy a comic, or even if I'll try flipping through it at the bookstore café, but there are definitely books that have been bumped down on my "must-read" list based on hear-say or prejudices formed through other peoples' readings of a comic. A big one for me is The Dark Knight Returns. I feel like I've missed its moment of temporal poignancy, that I can't appreciate it after reading from a comics industry that's already taken so much from it. I'm not much of a Frank Miller fan anyway, with its dirty cops and neon cityscapes, but it's the weight of the book's name that keeps me from reading it. But Graeme concludes, correctly, that this self-restriction is a folly:
I was an idiot every single time I got scared of a book because of its reputation. For one thing, it's comics - You read it and it clicks or it doesn't, and that's the end of it
I wholly believe that we learn by taking in things from outside our established comfort zone, and I'm really impressed by this point. Guess I'll be picking up TDKR sometime soon, then. Anyone else avoiding the top shelf out of a silly fear?
Rubber Justice
Posted to The Higher Bookshelf Book Club on 19 August 2010
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: CBR, Frank Miller
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I never pay that much attention to who writes the comics I read.
I read comics for the characters. That means following their entire adventure. Even if they happen to not be so well written for a while.
It would be weird to just leave out an entire stretch of what happens to a character I like.
I'm all about specific writers and will find interest in a character a given liked writer takes up; likewise, I lose interest in favored characters if they're poorly written.
I am absolutely susceptible to being turned off on something due to over-hype. To some degree this happened to me with Scott Pilgrim and it has sorta kinda happened to me with Locke & Key. It definitely happened to me with Y: The Last Man, which I absolutely hated after it fell short of the endless praise I'd heard (I think it has serious issues beyond falling short of my expectations, but that is one factor in my negative view of the comic as a whole). I plan to read Locke & Key eventually but I'm in no particular hurry.
I probably shouldn't admit this, but it almost happened to me with Maus - not that I felt it was undeservedly over-hyped but because so many people described it to me as drastically changing the way they thought about comic books and/or as creating such an indelible mark on their psyche that I was just plain frightened of it. I am so, so glad I got over that.