perspectiveshift
When Caspar Wijngaard sent me the first two issues of his The Power Fantasy with Kieron Gillen, I tweeted that it felt like we are moving into a new era of what superhero comics look & feel like. You can see it in that book. You can see it in Camp/Morian's 20th Century Men. The idea of superheroes as a militaristic/globalist metaphor isn't new. It snowballed through the 90s, culminating in Stormwatch and then The Ultimates- but those books tended to treat the topic with a snotty brattishness which spoke to their 2000 AD DNA. TPF and 20th Century take their subject seriously. And 'seriously' doesn't mean people's entrails fall out when they get punched by superhumans, or radioactive spider bites give you cancer, actually.
As I was reading The Power Fantasy, it struck me that these books feel to me like DeLillo novels; and it took me a minute to figure out exactly why. In books like White Noise, Underworld, and Cosmopolis, we find characters looking at the world around them- with puzzlement, amusement and anger- and asking "is that it? Is that all there is?" And then exploring as much of their world as possible to discover whether that is in fact the case (over either 800 pages or 90 pages, depending on how verbose Delillo was feeling at the time.)
And now we're seeing a breed of superhero comic with broad scopes, and broad casts. Comics that sprawl. Worlds that tilt away from our own to run parallel to it- giving us couldabeens, shouldabeens, and thankfuckinggodthatdidn'thappenabeens. Our perspective is dragged ferociously from one corner of these worlds to another, to be confronted with the consequences that the genre has wrought on them.
Perhaps we're at a crunch point in history where we're looking back at what we should have done differently. And so, in this genre, in this medium, wondering what exactly it is that the superheroes promised to us. And what they delivered us.
I know these aren't brand new ideas. I know you can throw examples of books at me that have done comparable things (Kieron's own Uber springs to mind.) But I think there's a new hunger for these kinds of comics. We're seeking out perspective shifts in the work. Readers want bold statements on the world, and they're willing to give a story breathing room to get there. I reckon that's an intrinsically good thing.
These worlds tend to be dark ones, of course. I don't think that's born of cynicism, but out of interest. I remember seeing a reader who had enjoyed DaNi and my Arkham City: Order of the World, but expressed some slight disappointment that we hadn't posited an actual solution to the mental health crisis in America. I don't have one. I write funnybooks for a living. I see the job as being to shine a light onto something complex, to turn it around and examine it from as many angles as possible. To inspect at it, rather than to try and bend it to my will. Fiction that promises utopia is lying to you. Fiction that doesn't flinch from paradoxes, contradictions, and uncomfortableness- I think it's probably good for you.
I guess all I'm saying is it's a very exciting time to be making comics. And you should definitely pick up The Power Fantasy #1 this week.
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