Comments on D Nye Everything: Fan journalists and journalist fans

I'd agree with those basic points. I can see t...

2009-12-09T19:00:24.300Z

I'd agree with those basic points. I can see the feedback loop idea, but I think that's true of a lot of media, where you do a story about how people are going crazy anticipating Twilight, then more people get into it because of hearing about how many people are into it. But, on some level, the interest is a consequence of what the media chooses to focus on.

And, yeah, the 'cross over' of comics is much more concepts and general perception of the medium than the books themselves. It's crazy to me that Seaguy, a book by Grant Morrison, could sell about 10,000 copies in its single issue release. Similarly, the numbers on new Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stuff are really low, and these guys are as big names as are out there. Comics may be cool and have cachet now, but it's more the ideas and characters than the books themselves. You can buy a Green Lantern or Flash t-shirt in more places than you can buy a Green Lantern comic book.

As for your definition of crossing over, books like Persepolis have sold a bunch, but in terms of viewers and buzz, there's no comparison between the Persepolis film and something like Iron Man or The Dark Knight. So, as you say, people love Batman, but no one reads his comics. Hell, DC knows so few people read the comics that they let Grant write Batman getting dosed with heroin and running around with Batmite in a purple and yellow costume when The Dark Knight film comes out.

Ultimately, at this point, and Grant talks about this in the doc, is that comics are one of the few media left where you're able to do stuff without significant corporate interference, and that may be why they remain an idea factory for other media. Movies would never take the risks that Grant's Batman does. I loved The Dark Knight, but it's not as bold a work as Grant's Batman or even Miller's All Star Batman. What movies do is take the ideas that work in comics and hone them into an easily digestible form for the masses, so you don't have to read thirty years of Spider-Man comics, you can just see the two hour film. And, I think for most people, that two hours of Spider-Man is all they need.

The short version is that there are certainly peop...

2009-12-07T23:03:11.693Z

The short version is that there are certainly people who will want to see an authorised long-form documentary/interview with Grant Morrison, shot in a documentary style, and best of luck with the production and release (and to reiterate, if it's a fan phenomenon I certainly don't see that as in any way a bad thing). I think that the element I was more picking up on was that the feedback loop started getting tricky when the existence of a long-form documentary/interview with Grant Morrison was being cited as an example of and a first step towards the conquest of other media by comic books, and specifically by comic book creators- I don't think that the release of the documentary on Alan Moore had much of an impact on the mainstream perception of Alan Moore, and if there were a documentary about the life and creations of Frank Miller, (a) it would have to be directed by Associate Producer Mike from the Best Show on WFMU and (b) it probably wouldn't much affect the perception of him by people outside the catchment area.

Also, which has nothing to do with your documentary at all, there's a risk of forgetting that comic books have in many ways crossed over into the mainstream- just not in the US and not in the specific genre of superhero comics (or, if we want to spread the net a bit, colourful representations of action and violence by inhuman or superhuman characters). Persepolis, which was not just using Marjane Satrapi's characters but was written and directed by her, was a successful film, Fun Home won a passle of awards and was serialised in Libération and so on. If you were asking me to venture an opinion (and you're not, but it's my blog, so...), I'd probably suggest that it's not that superheroes are making a comeback driven by the work of Morrison, Fraction, Slott et al, although these are all fine writers of comic books. People have always been interested in experiencing the moral and dynamic bigness of superhero narratives - just not in large numbers in the format of 28 pages a month for $2.99. What is changing is the technology of representation elsewhere - you can make superhero films more quickly and more cheaply (for what you're getting) which look more impressive. So, more - vastly more - people are going to see the next Batman movie, or play Arkham Asylum on their XBox 360 or Playstation, than are going to read Batman and Robin comics, and that's probably about right and logical within the culture

Yes, definitely; I think that's absolutely an ...

2009-12-07T23:02:36.186Z

Yes, definitely; I think that's absolutely an imponderable - and the line between fan culture and the quote-unquote mainstream is more friable than ever given that the geeks have sort of won the culture wars, at least on some fronts.

What I find interesting about comics is precisely that they have a disproportionate impact on other media - disproportionate in terms of their own sales, that is: I think that Final Crisis (from memory) sold something like 150,000 copies a month, and I'd suspect that the sales of many other superhero comics in the same month came from that same set of people. Something like We3 - well, I don't have the figures, but somewhere in the mid-tens of thousands? So, you have this relatively underwitnessed medium, which nonetheless punches above its weight in terms of the IP it creates for films, TV series, Saturday morning cartoons and so on.

Personally, I find the medium more compelling than the lives of individual creators, but I think that's a matter of personal taste; I belong to the school that sees the biography of the creator as essentially marketing collateral to the work rather than an integral part of how it should be viewed, although it's not a simple line (whether or not Morrison was abducted by aliens, the language of alien abduction crops up as a recurring motif in his work - along with advertising, memes, hallucinogens and mood-altering headgear, to name but a few). However, biographies are written or filmed across genres, so that in itself certainly isn't unique to comic book culture. People are interested in people, and long may it continue to be so.

As the creator of the doc in question, this was a ...

2009-12-07T07:24:06.939Z

As the creator of the doc in question, this was a pretty interesting article to read. In response to your question about "Dude, really? Aliens?" I did try to delve beneath the surface mythos of Grant and figure out, what was actually perceived when he says he was taken outside of time, on what level was it experienced. Grant himself is very self aware of how crazy this stuff sounds, and qualifies things with the fact that it's his experience of these events that matters, so he was abducted, but not in an X-Files way, it was more internal.

As for the loop of fan commentary, I can't deny I'm a fan of his work, that's why I chose to approach him as the subject for the doc. But, I'm trying to make something that would work just as well for someone who's never read his comics as a long term fan. Will anyone who doesn't know his books want to see the film? I don't know, but I guess we'll see.