And Again With the Comic Books…

If you didn’t care for last month’s griping over critical adulation for Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen, you might want to just skip ahead to the next item… because now Dave Itzkoff’s NYTBR review is bugging me. Not so much for its critical take on the book itself—I’m pretty well resigned to being in the minority ther, and it’s not like he’s declaring Watchmen one of the greatest novels of the 20th centurye—or even for its characterization of the modern comics field as dominated by “writers and artists who share [Moore's] fascination with brutality but not his interest in its consequences,” because, yeah, there was a lot of that going around. Nah, what nags at me is the concluding assertion that, having proved what he wanted to prove with Watchmen, Moore “rarely returns to the superhero genre now.”

Oh, really? Granted, much of Moore’s best work in the last 18 years is in different genres, like the Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, but he was working on superhero titles for Image throughout the ’90s, including some pretty amazing runs on WildC.A.T.S. and Supreme, and then launched a whole line of superhero books called America’s Best Comics in 1999 which continues (though with decreasing involvement on his part) to this day. Even ABC’s best-known title, the 19th-century pastiche The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, could loosely be interpreted as a superhero parody…* Okay, okay, I know I’m being a fanboy pedant about this, and Itzkoff’s piece was at least miles away from Peter Schjeldahl’s cranky befuddlement. But I guess it works back to something a friend said to me once, “If they’re getting easy stuff like this that I do know wrong, what am I supposed to think about the stuff I don’t know?”

*And, when you get right down to it, reasonable minds can differ as to whether the ABC books are “real” superhero comics or “pastiche,” but that opens up a line of discussion I usually can’t face without at least two pints of beer in me first.

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