Nerd Alert, Redux

So last note I did I got kind of sidetracked by describing how comics aren't quite as low-brow and ridiculous as they used to be. I was supposed to be talking about how smart characters are portrayed, but as I mentioned my attention span has gotten a little, ah, shorter or something. Anyway, I wanted to bring something up before jumping back into the four-color brainiacs.

Why is this important? Why should we care how brainy folks are portrayed in comics? Well, you could be into comics, that's one pretty good reason. That's what got me going on this subject. But there's another reason why looking at the image of the smart guy is. In comics (and pop culture in general) smart people 'do science.'

Since people don't really understand that there isn't any such thing as 'science' but rather a fairly fantastical array of different sub-fields, most of which have little overlap, one guy can field any and all 'science questions.' This image of the 'singular scientist' is all over the place in pop culture because people don't really give a shit how their Toaster Strudel gets made, delivered or heated as long as each step along the way works. This has some really, really important consequences for social and political efforts.

Most people (I don't count myself in this group) don't really care about how things work. They just want them to work. That's all fine and good, but when you're dealing with a complex and nuanced piece of science (say global warming, stem cells, statistical analysis of security techniques, education and the like) it hamstrings the ability of the populace to react to the world around them. It often prevents them from determining what's actually happening at all.

Now, science used to be shiny. We all laugh now about those 'Science World' expos with the nuclear cars and the like. In fact, we're so damn comfortably cynical that we come up with whole belief structures that say 'science is just another way of looking at the world, just like post-structuralist gender studies.' I'm not shitting on gender studies here, it's just the first thing that came up. You could apply it to a hundred different little tribes of ideologies. We bitch about not having flying cars, about how there's no cure for cancer and about how science has somehow betrayed us, because we don't remember what it was like before we understood the little bit that we do now.

Why did this happen? Well, science promised a lot. Those expos I mentioned really did over do it. We also let science become the province of companies, none of whom actually benefit from actual science, just the tools it creates along the way. And there's the fact that we started to discover that each thing we learned lead to more questions. Look at cancer.

We bitch that there's no cure to cancer, but most people don't know that 'cancer' isn't a singular thing. There's no one thing called cancer, but a myriad of different conditions with different causes and different treatments. The tarnish on science is due to it doing its job too well. It got too hard and we stopped paying attention. Once that happened, public perception of the scientist was pretty quickly converted to a myth of science, which rapidly diverged from the actual science.

So looking at the mythology of our times (comics) can clue us in to the divergence between fact and fiction. Next time I promise I'll actually talk about smart people in comics (specifically the smartest folks in the Marvel Universe).

I don't care how hot Jessica Alba is, the movie never happened.

Nerd Alert

Okay, this one's probably only going to be interesting to people who have, to some extent, caught the comic book bug. More specifically, the super hero bug. I suppose it could be interesting for people who are into pop culture studies too. I'm going to be talking about the portrayal of smart people in comics, so if that tickles your fancy stick around.

I've been reading some comics lately. For the last couple months my normal reading pace has slacked off because my attention span seems to have shrunk. My guess is that I have some kind of late onset ADD or something. Whatever the cause, I've found the combination of short individual episode length and long running serial writing in comics to be just the right scratch for my reading itch lately.

Now, these aren't redeemable comics, like Persepolis or even the quasi-literary superhero genre. They're not even the hyper-self conscious examinations of thesuperhero genre. They're definitely not Y:The Last Man, either.

These are the big, bloated cross-continuity events that are the comic book equivalent of the summer blockbuster. To understand these things, you need to know a little bit about the way the comic book universe works. Lets look at Marvel (because besides Batman, Marvel's the better universe): every Marvel title takes place in the same shared universe. Everything that happens in a Marvel comic can potentially show up in any other Marvel comic. Leaving aside the parallel universes that seem to haunt comics like a case of the rickets, the most trivial element in one comic can become a huge plot point for something else decades down the line.

This, as you might guess, makes things pretty complicated. There's a reason why comic book nerds have a reputation for a certain degree of autastic behavior: you don't have to have aspergers to read them, but it sure helps. One of the ways that comic book geeks engage in male dominance behavior is with a command of esoteric trivia from the deepest depths of back-continuity. And lets not get into how seriously the question of 'cannon' is taken; suffice to say there's been a couple offCouncil of Nicea events over the course of the two major comics continuities (Marvel and DC).

(An aside: one of the neat things about comics is that these arguments over what is and isn't cannon actually show up in the narratives of the comics. The Crisis is an example of a place where the history of the shared universe was self consciously modified by the editors and writers through the use of their characters. This is sort of like the various church fathers using Jesus and the Apostles to act out arguments over what books of the New Testament actually happened but without the resulting bloodshed.)

One of the things that most people who read comics understand, but is very difficult to explain to those who don't, is how the format shapes the enjoyment one gets from a comic. When you read a graphic novel or trade paperback, this is the equivalent of a novel, story-wise. It may be one part of a series, but there's an expectation of a closed story arc with all the structural elements that entails. Reading comics month to month (or issue-to-issue, anyway) is completely different.

Sure there are long series of story arcs (which are often how collections get broken up for later reprinting) that conclude with the runs of certain members of the staff, but to those paying attention, its the fluidity of the creative team that shines through. A given title is run by any number of different people over its run. In Marvel's early days, nearly every title they had was run by a some combination of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (only a slight exaggeration) but over the years, hundreds of writers and artists have had a go at them.

Because the characters are franchises more than elements of a discrete story, they're inherently plastic and prone to changes based on who is writing or drawing them. The balance between writer and penciler often drives the creative process. This is another unusual element of the American Superhero comic. In Japan, nearly all manga is drawn and written by the same person. Ditto for most of the indy comics like R. Crumb . Like all franchises, they can go from being great to being terrible.

When I first got into comics (the true Golden Age of any geeky hobby) they were in what was called the Speculatory Age. Comics were seen as an inherent economical investment that, regardless of any other constraint, would inevitably increase in value each year. Does this sound familiar? It should, since it was exactly the same kind of irrational market effect that drove both the dotcom 'crash' and the real one we're all staggering through.

Economically, the demand for comics far outstripped the creative potential of the field. There were literally too many comics for the people who understood how to do good comics to possibly keep up. As a result, it was the era of the gimmick, where terrible artists wrote their own comics, slapped some hologram cover and poly-bag on the first issue and everyone had to have two copies so one could stayed sealed for later resale.
It was not a good time for comics.

I got out of comics because I was just self-conscious enough about them to feel nerdy reading them. It helped that they really did suck a great deal back then. Sure, there were interesting things going on at Valiant and Image but for the most part it was all Robb Liefield all the time.

The big thing that happened after that whole time period was the rise of a bunch of new writers who were a little more savvy about their position in the marketplace. They figured out how to write comic books that work on both a teenage dudes-hitting-dudes level and on a slightly higher level. They did it by doing the 24.

They went political as all hell.

The thing that got me back into comics was a thing called the Civil War. It was the big Marvel event where some heroes screw up and blow up a city. One of the things that usually gets averted at the last second in regular comics? in this one, the heroes blow up Stamford CT, killing several hundred. As a result, Marvel gets to have the safety vs. freedom debate safely wrapped up in a spandex metaphor. The gov't response is simple: tell us your secret identity and sign up for service or we'll throw you in Guantan- er the Negative Zone. Everyone picks a side, with the main teams being Iron Man/Tony Stark facing off against Captain America. Oddly enough, Cap is on the anti-establishment team. We watch power corrupt, a fairly large number of heroes bite it and end up with a totally changed shared universe.

Okay, rambled a bit on that one. If I'm still up to it, I'll actually get to talking about the portrayal of smart folk in comics soon.