100 Things to Like About Comics

[Augie De Blieck Jr.]

It's been a meme spreading through the comics blogosphere for the past month or two.

Ken Lowery just got to his this week. And it wins a special place in my heart for just this entry:

8. That comics is the only place where a story about a 150 year-old dude with claws in his hands who is a samurai, a spandex-clad superhero, and a feral beast is considered passé and creatively inert.. only in f&rking comics, man. You'll be lucky if TV shows add even a slight shade of dimension to their usual sh!t ("it's a cop drama, but this time, he's BLIND!" "Write that man a check!")

(I apologize for the censorship, but I did substitute a couple of characters to keep the paragraph PG-13. Please note that the list at the link is not similarly Safe For Work.)

The whole thing is filled with mad brilliance, and more links than 95% of these lists.

-Augie

[Scott Beeler]

8. That comics is the only place where a story about a 150 year-old dude with claws in his hands who is a samurai, a spandex-clad superhero, and a feral beast is considered passé and creatively inert.. only in f&rking comics, man. You'll be lucky if TV shows add even a slight shade of dimension to their usual sh!t ("it's a cop drama, but this time, he's BLIND!" "Write that man a check!")


Heh. In my opinion, the basic character is fine. What's killing it is the fact that people have been telling stories about him for decades, to the point where *of course* they are going to get repetitive and cliche. It's not that he's a bland knock-off of other characters, it's that his current stories are often bland knock-offs of his previous stories. Any fictional scenario that goes that long is going to be at great risk of getting stale. Superman, Star Trek, James Bond...

BTW, I caught about ten minutes of Saturday Night Live last week which was an amusing "Blind Justice" parody. ("Coming soon: 'Deaf Judge'! 'Idiot Doctor'!")