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Who Watches the Watchmen (and Misses the Point of the Series)

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Who Watches the Watchmen (and Misses the Point of the Series)

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This is a really interesting article about Watchmen. When Alan Moore set out to write the series, he wanted to give a critique of superheroes, as well as authoritarianism (the idea that anybody has the "right" to have moral superiority to another person). Moore had written Rorschach with the intent of him being unlikable, and drawing attention to how psychotic redemptive violence can be. Contrarily, Rorschach became the favorite "hero" to many fans, many relating him to a darker Batman-like figure. This article asserts that people who view Watchmen as a superheroes, and idolize Rorschach, are missing the point of the series. It makes me wonder if the idea of "superheroes" is so engrained into our minds and culture, that even something that intends to critique the genre winds up becoming a part of it.  Moreover, while I agree with some of the points in the article, for me it raises the question of, once a creative property is out there and out of the hands of the creator, can it really be interpreted "wrong"?
-Rachel Levine

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a20889505/watchmen-alan-moore-damon-lindelof-hbo/

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I found this article to be very interesting. Why are there so man people that see comic book movies but dont read comics. For me its always been because im not much of reader and love movies. This class has made me want to read more comics though so that will change. But I cant help but wonder why people who love comic book movies dont every pick up a comic book itself.

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And I mean that as a viewer of movies and reader of comics.

This is a difficult point to source with hard data short of pointing to the previously mentioned sales data, so I'll source myself for this one.

As an owner of a comic shop for a decade now, I can say with firm confidence that the number of people unaware of the existence of the comic book industry is significant. On a number of different occasions I've had interactions with people who have discovered my store and exclaim, "I didn't know they still made comics!"

It happens a lot. It's proven to be a challenge as a store owner to break through the noise and remind people that yes, comics exist, and they're worth your time and money. No small task, to be honest.

Here we have our first barrier: a lack of awareness.

Logically you would expect the wild success of a film like Wonder Woman, or Avengers, or any number of films would lead people to become aware of and interested in comics, right? Yet as we've seen, that simply isn't happening. And this makes a degree of sense if you think about.

When was the last time one of these films informed the audience that it was based on a comic?

Sure, there are nods and winks about the source material now and again in a movie, or even with Marvel films where rapidly flipping comic pages become the Marvel logo (the comic motif has since been replaced with scenes from the films, so that's not even a great example now).

There is rarely any kind of directed advertising that says, "Hey audience member! Like this movie? You'll love comics! Go buy them!"

To compound the problem of awareness, we have another issue: Complexity.

Another question! Quick, what issue number is Amazing Spider-Man currently on?

Turns out it's #30.
But wait, didn't Amazing Spider-Man start in 1963?
Why yes it did, hypothetical enlightened reader. But the number has reset a number of times and the total number of issues will be #789 this fall when they return to the original numbering. (Source: Comic Book Resources).

Well, that's confusing, isn't it?

So let's say you just got out of a screening of Spider-Man: Homecoming and it was so great that you desperately want more Spidey and you decide right then and there to get into the comics. You're new to them, so you use your impeccable Google skills to find a friendly local comic shop. You walk in and take a look at the shelves where you see that Amazing Spider-Man is on issue #30.

Is that a good place to start? Where's #1? And what about these other titles like Peter Parker: Spectacular Spider-Man and Spider-Man? Are they related?

If your local shop is up to snuff (and if it's Level Up, you're in good hands) you'll get all the information you need from the staff. But if you don't use a local shop and you hit up Amazon or another retailer you're going to need to do more research. Or just blindly jump in.

That's not very consumer friendly and it presents a major problem to new readers of comics (which is enough for a different blog post entirely).

We've now got two major factors for why your average Joe and/or Jane will flock to the cinema for Wonder Woman but be statistically unlikely to become a comic reader; complexity of getting into comics and lack of awareness. Those two alone would be sizeable barriers to entry for any medium, but they're not the only problems facing the comic book industry.

Related to the complexity of comics, but different enough to warrant some individual attention, is the difficulty of reading a comic versus watching a film.
Reading a comic takes effort.
To explain: if you choose to watch a film, your biggest impediment to doing so is staying awake and keeping your attention on the screen. Regardless of how successful you are with those tasks, the movie moves on independently and at the end of 2+ hours, the film is over.

Contrast that with reading a comic and you're looking at a much more engaged and demanding entertainment experience. Not to say that reading a comic is particularly difficult, because it's not, but it does demand that you commit.

You've got to hold the comic, look at it, read it, turn the pages, finish it. It doesn't progress unless you remain engaged. Sure, that's not a huge deal, but again it does demand more from you than a movie, and when the average person only has so much time to dedicate to entertainment it's no wonder people choose the path of least resistance.
If you just want to veg out in the evening, it's a lot easier to put a movie on than grab a comic.
That last point is probably the most debatable and subjective, as it requires the hypothetical reader to overcome the other barriers before it even becomes an issue, but it may very well contribute to the drop off that comic sales experience over time (#1 issues always sell the most with each successive issue dropping off until reaching a baseline of sales).

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Superhero Movies Vs Comics: Why One Booms While the Other Busts

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Summer is here and the weather is hot, the days are long, and comic book movies dominate the box office once again. Comic shops too must be bustling as movie fans young and old leave the cineplex and flock to their friendly local comic shop, eager to read anything they can get their hands on.

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Comic book movies have been soaring lately with big hits like Blackpanther and Avengers Infinity War. While movies and media on television have been taking off, it is apparent that Marvel struggles with sales for the actual comic books. Marvel is not competing with other comic book companies to keep the #1 spot, but they are competing with their past sales. Today's comic sales sell about 1/10th of the number of their comic sales in the 1960s (Boucher 2018). This could be partly to that amount of specialty comic book stores that have been shutting down across the country thanks to online merchants. In times like the '60s, comics were easy to come across as they were sold at most corner stores and for cheap prices. Another problem is the younger consumers are used to electronics and watching movies and video games from devices, instead of paperback comics.

Daniele Melina

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There is no hotter commodity in pop culture than Marvel Comics superheroes. They're the powerhouse behind four hit films this year (including the top two in global box office, Disney's $3.6 billion tandem of "Black Panther" and "Avengers: Infinity War") and on television they're featured in 10 live-action series spread across ABC, Fox, Netflix, FX, Hulu and Freeform as well as five more animated franchises.

Don't expect a break during the commercials, either, where Marvel creations are the costumed pitchmen for Ford, Geico, Infiniti and Rocket Mortgage.

There is one sector, however, where Marvel heroes are not soaring to new heights, one in which they struggle to find new fans - and in a wry twist, it's in their original medium, in the pages of Marvel Comics.

Marvel comic books, which introduced the world to such characters as the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Deadpool and Venom, is still the brand to beat in its sector - over the past decade, Marvel has locked down the No. 1 spot in its annual market share competition with rivals including DC Comics, Image and Dark Horse.

But the picture is less rosy when Marvel competes with its own past. Today's comics sell one-tenth the numbers Marvel expected in the 1960s and 1970s glory days when comic books were cheaper than candy bars and just as easy to find at the nation's newsstands, corner markets and drugstores.

Now, a new comic book costs $4-$6 and the only shelves they reach are at the 2,500 comic book specialty shops doing business in the U.S. and Canada - and even that number is in decline as stores (among them Meltdown Comics, the Sunset Boulevard landmark of 25 years) lose their leases or downsize to online merchants.

There's an even steeper challenge: For young consumers, could any comic book ever stack up against video games, smartphones and Pixar films?

All monthly comics by Marvel, DC and other leading publishers reach readers through Maryland-based Diamond Comics Distributors, which reported that in 2017 single-issue sales were down more than 10%, while graphic novels (which reprint the most popular multiple-issue storylines into the "trade paperback" format sold at bookstores) were down more than 9%.

Next week, the New York-based Marvel Comics will bring its top creative talent to Comic-Con International in San Diego, the largest pop culture convention in the world. Fans will hear about major new publishing directions for Captain America and the Fantastic Four as well as plans for the company's 80th anniversary celebration in 2019.

Marvel will be thrilled by any celebration after a bumpy 2017 in which it endured a minor retailer revolt (due to ordering policies on high-demand releases) and then sparked a cultural debate (when an executive blamed diversity efforts for sales setbacks).

The year ended on a happier note with respected industry veteran C.B. Cebulski taking the reins as editor in chief, a move hailed widely as a good step toward energizing a brand that, in recent years, has been vague in its editorial vision amid notable talent defections.

The panel presentations will put Marvel editors face to face with impassioned longtime fans (many of them dressed in tights) who, like "Star Wars" followers, veer between fawning or furious but are never apathetic.

The diehard Marvel readership were nicknamed "True Believers" back in the 1960s when the publisher promoted itself as "the House of Ideas" and boasted a legendary staff bullpen (led by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and John Buscema). They introduced a level of melodrama, humor and trippy cosmic mythology that instantly reinvented the staid superhero template that had been set in the FDR era by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman over at archrival DC Comics.

Like today's Marvel films, the energy of those 1960s comics issues won over a wider and older audience than previous superhero fare; in a 1965 poll of college campuses by Esquire, both Spider-Man and the Hulk joined Che Guevara and Bob Dylan in a ranking of favorite counter-culture icons. Marvel in the 1960s energized the entire comics industry by winning over an audience that was more grown-up but now (with a fan base of collectors in their 30s), the publisher's readership is growing old.

The monthly comics are written to appeal to longtime fans, which means they often have very little in common with the current storylines of films such as Disney's just-released "Ant-Man and the Wasp" or television shows such as "Legion," "Daredevil," "Punisher" or "Jessica Jones."

The movies aren't rescuing the comics; they're replacing them.

Curious fans of the screen heroes that manage to find a comic book store might not recognize the heroes they find in their namesake comics. (In the case of Netflix's "Luke Cage," the same character that merits his own television series wasn't popular enough to hold to his own monthly comic book.) At Comic-Con, the Marvel television shows will be packing fans in to panel presentations with stars, but they will be separate and unconnected to the panels for comics readers. (The cinematic Marvel stars and filmmakers will not attend this year's expo in San Diego at all, a testament to their secured spot as a commercial dynamo that no longer needs the promotional opportunities of Comic-Con.)

It adds up to a frustrating disconnect, according to Heidi MacDonald, editor in chief of the Beat, a comics industry blog.

"With Marvel Comics, they're definitely down from where they were five years ago even as the movies have gotten huge," MacDonald said. "But over that time, they have also been No. 1 in the direct market for something like 99% of the time. So their point of view is, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

"The movies and, to a lesser extent, the television shows have made Marvel a household brand name and when you have a film that is tied closely to a specific storyline - like [the Fox film] 'Logan,' which was based on the graphic novel 'Old Man Logan' - there is definitely interest in that title. But when you see the brand power outside of comics the question people ask is 'Are they doing as much as they could with that?'"

Few people in Hollywood have more history with comic books adaptations than Michael Uslan, who began writing comic books in the 1970s and used that expertise as an executive producer on Tim Burton's "Batman," the 1989 hit that launched a new generation of superhero movies. Uslan recalled recently that top Marvel Comics executives treated him to a lavish Manhattan meal after the movie stirred fan interest in all comics and gave Marvel a hefty spike in sales.

"That was the case for years, big superhero movies brought new fans to comics, but it's not the case now," Uslan said. "The biggest comic book movies now have little or zero impact on the comics sales. The movies aren't rescuing the comics; they're replacing them. So now I really worry about comics. Any entertainment medium that can't connect with new generations, doesn't it have one foot in the grave?"

Uslan and most longtime observers agree that on paper, at least, the future of Marvel appears far smaller than its past but that's not a world view shared by Dan Buckley, the president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment and an industry veteran who responds to the chorus of doomsayers with a survivor's chuckle.

"I've been managing over the demise of the print comic book business since 1991," Buckley said. "That's all anyone has talked about - how this is going to end. I find it fascinating that there's a certain cynicism built into the beast. I've been fighting against it for a really long time."

The truth, he says, is that, "it's a pretty fabulous business to be in."

Buckley cites history and experience to back up that opinion. Marvel is a company that has endured bankruptcy, a disastrous debut effort in Hollywood (remember "Howard the Duck" in the 1980s?) and certain death back in the Reagan era when "funny books" lost their best chance to reach youngsters across America. When glossy magazines and retailer priorities pushed comics out of mainstream stores in the 1980s, the industry was saved by devoting itself to the "hobby market," as Buckley calls it, adding that "the hobby business is a wonderful business to be in too, one we're thankful for."

The superhero comic book is (like jazz, baseball and hip-hop) a uniquely American creation, but it's a foreign object to most youngsters today.

There are few places where kids might even bump into one by accident - Marvel's monthly issues aren't sold at Target, Barnes & Noble or even 7-11, where, in recent weeks, you could have found Marvel's fan-favorite character Deadpool on every Slurpee machine in America but nowhere on the magazine rack. At movie theaters Fox's "Deadpool 2" is the biggest R-rated film of 2018 - but would his comics sell like popcorn if they were available in the lobby?

Privately, some comics creators say they view themselves as the R&D departments for Disney (which bought Marvel for $9 billion in 2009) and Warner Bros (which owns DC Comics) and judge their content's value as intellectual property, not as a publishing venture.

DC Comics is challenging the status quo with a just-announced Wal-Mart partnership. The retail giant will sell four different 100-page monthly anthologies of comics stories (mixing reprints with some new and exclusive content) that will not be sold to comics shop. The move was met with complaints from the comics shop community and curious interest by rival publishers, making it a topic of high interest next week in San Diego.

Technology has helped somewhat in the form of digital comics, but after a decade on the scene, the screen versions of comics have been a middling success at best and even there, again, the in-demand product is primarily tailored to the sensibilities of longtime collectors, not newbies.

When Marvel got into the digital game back in 2007, a reporter for The Times asked Buckley about the key challenge facing his company. "We don't have a natural lifestyle interaction point for kids anymore," he said. Reminded of the quote by the same reporter, Buckley admitted that not much has changed over the past decade. "I was right when I said that and, you know, I'd be right if I said it again."

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Superheroes are thriving in movies and on TV - but comic books lag behind

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The sky's the limit for superheroes in Hollywood these days - the four top-grossing 2018 films to date each feature costumed crusaders - but in the publishing world they face a historic challenge: Can they keep the American comic book from going into the ground?

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Why are villains fascinating to us? One answer to this can be shadow confrontation. Some psychologists believe that humans need to confront and understand our hidden natures in order to grow in a healthy way. Another answer to this question could be wish fulfillment. This means that human nature is antisocial and inherently bad. This point of view believes that the only reason we hold back these urges is to conform to society. Through reading about villains people are able to get their darkest wishes fulfilled without straying from society. Another explanation of our love of supervillains could be that they give us a taste of what absolute freedom could look like. Villains don't have many restrictions placed on them, and when they do they break these restrictions. This sense of being able to do whatever you want can create a liberating feeling in readers that they cant experience on their own. This could relate to the desire for power. People could envy the power that some villains possess, making the villain intriguing. On a lighter note, people could be fascinated by supervillains because more evil villains could mean there's an even greater superhero.

Daniele Melina

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Why are we fascinated by supervillains? Posing the question is much like asking why evil itself intrigues us, but there's much more to our continued interest in supervillains than meets the eye.
* Don't Blame The Dark Knight Rises for Theater Massacre
* A Voice of Reason on the Dark Knight Rises Tragedy in Aurora

* Why Batman Believes in Gun Control

Not only do Lex Luthor, Dracula and the Red Skull run unconstrained by conventional morality, they exist outside the limits of reality itself. Their evil, even at its most realistic, retains a touch of the unreal.

But is our fascination with fantastic fiends healthy? It's a question that's bubbled beneath the surface of the public consciousness ever since a masked gunman - who reportedly identified himself as Batman's nemesis the Joker after police apprehended him - went on a shooting spree at a Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises last week.

From a psychological perspective, views vary on what drives our enduring interest in superhuman bad guys.

Shadow confrontation: Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed we need to confront and understand our own hidden nature to grow as human beings. Healthy confrontation with our shadow selves can unearth new strengths (e.g., Bruce Wayne creating his Dark Knight persona to fight crime), whereas unhealthy attempts at confrontation may involve dwelling on or unleashing the worst parts of ourselves (as the Joker tries to get Batman and Harvey Dent to do in The Dark Knight).

Wish fulfillment: Sigmund Freud viewed human nature as inherently antisocial, biologically driven by the undisciplined id's pleasure principle to get what we want when we want it - born to be bad but held back by society. Even if the psyche fully develops its ego (source of self-control) and superego (conscience), Freudians say the id still dwells underneath, and it wishes for many selfish things - so it would love to be supervillainous.

Hierarchy of needs: Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow held that people who haven't met their most basic needs will have difficulty maturing. If starved for food, you're unlikely to feel secure. If starved for love and companionship, you'll have trouble building self-esteem. People who dwell on their deficits may envy and resent others who have more than they do. Some people who are unable to overcome social shortcomings fantasize about obtaining any means, good or bad, to satisfy every need and greed.

Conditioning: Ivan Pavlov would say we can learn to associate supervillains with other things we value - like entertainment, strength, freedom or the heroes themselves. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner would likely argue that we can find it reinforcing to watch or read about supervillains, but without knowing what's reinforcing about them, that's a bit like saying it's rewarding because it's rewarding.

Our Motivations for Seeking Out Supervillains ---------------

Throughout history, humans have been captivated by stories of heroes facing off against superhuman foes. But what specific rewards, needs, wishes and dark dreams do supervillains satisfy?

Freedom: Superpowered characters enjoy freedoms the rest of us don't. Nobody can arrest Superman unless he lets them (at least not without kryptonite handcuffs). Even while sitting in prison, Will Smith's superhuman protagonist in the movie is as free as he chooses to be. As much time as supervillains spend locked up, they seem to escape as often as they please, to run unconstrained by rules and regulations. Cosplayers who dress like Wonder Woman and Captain America can't do any crazy thing that crosses their minds without seeming to mock and insult our heroes, whereas those dressed as villains get to go wild. Supervillainy feels liberating.

Power: Maybe you envy the power these evil characters wield. While that's also a reason to adore superheroes, good guys don't ache to dominate. Stories like and Kingdom Come show how heroes become menaces when they try to take over. So when dreaming of superpowers, maybe you relate to characters who dream of power as well, from the Scarecrow (who controls individuals' fears) to Doctor Doom (who's perpetually out to dominate the world).

Payback: Batman not only protects the innocent, he inflicts pain upon the wicked and instills in them the fear they'd create in others. A child who feels bullied wants protection and might want the bullies to suffer in kind. Batman only goes so far. But the Punisher - driven more by revenge than justice, and more interested in killing mobsters than in saving victims - seems less heroic. The part of a person that wants payback might appreciate villains' frequent schemes for revenge.

Blaming victims: Psychologist Melvin Lerner observed the just-world phenomenon, a common tendency to assume victims must deserve to be victims rather than believe bad things happen to good people. The worse the tragedy is, the worse we tend to think the victim must be, so when Hannibal Lecter mutilates and eats not only a person who offended him but also his victim's spouse, human nature motivates us to think the worst of that relative as well.

Better villain than victim: Physiologically, anger activates us and feels better than anxiety or fear. One who feels victimized and cannot figure out constructive ways to stand up, be strong or become heroic might twist the need for self-assertion into destruction. Alternately, a healthy person simply might focus on how all characters assert themselves in any given story.

Better villain equals better hero: A hero only appears as heroic as the challenge he or she must overcome. Great heroes require great villains: Without criminals, Batman has nobody to hit and Superman's a flying rescue worker searching for people to save from wrecks and natural disasters. Without supercriminals, the world's finest heroes seem like overpowered brutes nabbing thugs unworthy of them. Through myths, legends and lore across time, we have needed heroes who rise to the occasion, overcome great odds and take down giants.

Facing our fears: Instead of dreading the darkness, you might reduce that dread by shining a light and seeing what's out there. Fiction can help us feel empowered and enlightened without literally traipsing into mob hangouts and poorly lit alleyways. Watching a gangster point a gun at Bruce Wayne's head in Batman Begins is as close as most of us want to get.

Exploring the unknown: Our need to challenge the unknown has driven the human race to cover the globe. This powerful curiosity makes us wonder about everything that baffles us, including the world's worst fiends. Knowledge is power, or at least feels like it. Learning more about Ted Bundy and the Unabomber helps us feel less vulnerable to others who'd commit similar deeds. When gritty details repulse us, exploring evil through the filter of fiction can help us contemplate humanity's worst without turning away or dwelling almost voyeuristically on real human tragedy. Even when the fiction is about improbable people doing impossible things, the story's fantastic nature reassures us that this cannot happen - and therefore we don't have to turn away.

Supervillains' Ultimate Purpose -----------

In the end, our interest in supervillains can be healthy or unhealthy. Even the more maladaptive reasons for such fascination tend to arise from motivations that were originally healthy and natural - frustrated drives that went the wrong way.

Remember, though, that superheroic fiction ultimately begins and ends with the heroes. Comic book writers and artists create supervillains, who move in and out as guest stars and supporting cast, first and foremost to reveal how heroic the comics' stars can be.

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Why Do Supervillains Fascinate Us? A Psychological Perspective

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Why are we fascinated by supervillains? Posing the question is much like asking why evil itself intrigues us, but there's much more to our continued interest in supervillains than meets the eye.

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Memoirs through the medium of comics can be extremely effective as it tells a story using dialogue and imagery. The use of images makes it easier for readers to establish an emotional connection and see exactly what the author is trying to convey. Through memoir comics, authors are also able to distance themselves from the emotional connection. For instance, in the memoir comic Maus, Art Spiegelman uses Cats to represent the Nazi Germans and uses mice to represent the jewish prisoners in concentration camps. The use of animals distances the readers from the characters (Gerstein 2012). In this article, Julie Gerstein states, "For graphic novel memoirists like Bechdel, Spiegelman, and Satrapi, the form serves a critical storytelling function -- to highlight and enhance the emotionally fraught images with words, and vice versa" (2012). This quote does a great job of summing up how graphic novel memoirs are so effective in connecting readers with their emotions. It is different reading a book memoir vs a comic memoir because readers are able to physically see what the author wants them to, instead of interpreting it on their own. It raises the question if movies made from memoirs are more emotion provoking or if graphic novel memoirs are?

Daniele Melina

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The graphic novel-memoir is a small but growing field populated by skilled artists who choose to use both words and images to tell their stories. In graphic memoirs such as Art Spiegelman's " Maus," Marjane Satrapi's " Persepolis," and most recently, Alison Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?," the graphic novel form deftly conveys painful instances of sadness, suffering and loss -- and those moments are at once enhanced and muted via the medium. The images in these memoirs can act to both reinforce and contradict the powerful emotional messages held forth in their pages.

Perhaps no graphic novel is more well-known or highly lauded than Art Spiegelman's 1986 Holocaust memoir "Maus," which recounts his father's harrowing experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Rather than explicitly illustrate his father's tale, Spiegelman turns the story into an Orwellian nightmare, where Polish Jews are mice, being summarily tortured by Nazi cats. The onlookers are played by pigs. Spiegelman's choice -- to tell the story in both graphic novel form, but then to further distance readers from the characters by symbolically turning them into animals, serves to make the story palatable.

But Spiegelman's visual metaphor also works to gather space between reader and subject. Readers can choose identification with his animal characters -- or choose to disconnect. Similarly, Marjane Satrapi, author of "Persepolis," notes in an interview with Robert Root in the journal Fourth Genre, "there are so many things that you can say through images that you cannot say with the writing. The comics is the only media in the whole world that you can use the image plus the writing and plus the imagination and plus be active while reading it." Similarly, notes Satrapi, the graphic novel form is limited by the fact that the artist is unable to truly, fully render a living, breathing, moving story. "Because on each page you have to find a way of [telling the story], because you cannot draw it the same way the whole time, because you have to worry about how to keep the reader through 150 pages and give them a surprise of discovering a new way of drawing and the layout, etc., so that they wouldn't be bored."

Graphic artist Alison Bechdel, best known for her serial comic, "Dykes To Watch Out For," has produced two highly personal, intensely moving memoirs. Her first, "Fun Home," charts her fraught relationship with her late father, who harbored a deep sexual secret. For Bechdel's latest, "Are You My Mother?," she again returns to her childhood home, weaving together a narrative about her strained relationships with her mother and her therapist and the way those two have so often stood in for one another in her life. But "Mother"is not so much a straight narrative as a meta-commentary on the genre, sparing nothing in exposing the complicated and heartbreaking toll writing about one's life can take on one's personal relationships.

Bechdel punctuates and relates her delicate, rickety maternal relationship with quotations and references to the psychologist Donald Winnicott, who pioneered the field of object-relations theory. Winnicott's object-relations theory, explains Bechdel, centers on the construct of the "good enough mother" -- the mother whose love offers us enough grounding to construct our own identities and develop our own psyches. And this analysis -- as to whether Bechdel's mother was good enough in her own version, and in Bechdel's -- lies at the core of the memoir. To get closer to her own truth, Bechdel attempts to fully understand who and what her mother is, reading her through Winnicott, psychoanalyst Alice Miller and author Virginia Woolf.

For all the heady subject matter, Bechdel punctuates the story with images that belie a sometimes separate truth. One that helps the reader swallow down a story rife with family trauma, grief, multi-level psychoanalytic dramas and painful breakups -- romantic and otherwise. As Judith Thurman says in the The New Yorker, "The voice that narrates the traumas and the conflicts of her younger self both yearns for and mistrusts closeness, strives for detachment yet suffers from too much of it, and is offhandedly confessional but wary of its own sincerity."

For graphic novel memoirists like Bechdel, Spiegelman, and Satrapi, the form serves a critical storytelling function -- to highlight and enhance the emotionally fraught images with words, and vice versa.

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The Power and Range of the Graphic Novel-Memoir

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The graphic novel-memoir is a small but growing field populated by skilled artists who choose to use both words and images to tell their stories. In graphic memoirs such as Art Spiegelman's " Maus," Marjane Satrapi's " Persepolis," and most recently, Alison Bechdel's "Are You My Mother?," the graphic novel form deftly conveys painful instances of sadness, suffering and loss -- and those moments are at once enhanced and muted via the medium.

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In this article Jamahl Johnson describes how the style and format of panels in comics has changed throughout the years. In the Golden Age of comics (1938-1950) panels were basic and put in square grids (Johnson 2016). Panels were often filled with dialogue instead of focusing on the imagery. The Silver Age of comics took art movements like surrealism and used them in comics. Comics deviated from the "cheesy" side and used art to show the main characters state of mind (Johnson 2016). The Bronze Age of comics used more realistic images instead of surrealism in the panels. It is also noted that the alter-ego side of characters was showed more in panels than before because they wanted to emphasize how these heroes were also everyday people. The style during the Bronze Age is more cinematic, creating more connections between the reader and the comic (Johnson 2016). After the Bronze Ages is the Dark Ages. Comics made in the Dark Ages had many panels that took place in the night, allowing authors to play with lighting and shadows in panels. These comics had a feeling of uneasiness to them with unnatural angles, silhouettes and darker images. It poses the question if this period of time influenced darker comics or if that was the way that comics naturally evolved? Presently, we are in the Noage Age of comics which entails realistic comics that border movie effects. this article shows how comics evolve and how the panels style changes with them.

Daniele Melina

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

The history of comic book styles is one as dynamic as the stories they contain, shaped not only by the hands of countless writers and artists but by millions of readers across nearly a century. While there might not be any mutants or doomsday weapons in the actual history of comics, its panels are every bit as unpredictable.

The Golden Age (1938-1950)
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The Golden Age was truly an idyllic time. There was a clear stylistic distinction between good and evil, and superheroes were nothing more than happy-go-lucky do-gooders that battled and always defeated villains motivated by money or world domination. And that's exactly why the comics of this age caught like wildfire. They fulfilled every kid's dream of gaining larger-than-life powers, effortlessly overcoming their bullies and leaping out of their colorless neighborhoods into adventure.

Dropping literally out of the sky to kick off the Golden Age, Superman represents the comic book origin story. Newspaper comic strips (where the term 'comic' book comes from, incidentally) already existed along with radio shows featuring masked vigilantes like the Shadow. But Superman was the first super-powered musclehead to don a cape and skin-tight spandex to fight crime. Readers couldn't take their eyes off of him. Superman set the tone for every superhero to come after, even becoming the first to earn his own exclusive comic book dedicated to his adventures in a time when characters were typically restricted to one-shot stories in variety publications.

Art styles of the Golden Age of comics

Though printed in booklet form, comics did not deviate far from their newspaper ancestors, telling a straightforward story through basic sequential images.

Cartooning was simple as publishers were not yet at the level of investing in or attracting serious artists.

Panels were laid out in basic square grids, often full of more dialogue than imagery.

The Silver Age (1950-1971)
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Not unlike the youth of its readers, the Golden Age was a time of whimsy and innocence that couldn't last forever. Fans were growing up-some of them returning home from a horrific World War-and the idea of an invincible, caped avenger casually overcoming the world's great evils became less and less convincing. These factors led to a decline in superhero stories and a rise in comic titles that would appeal to more adult sensibilities-the Silver Age of Comic Books.

Publishers explored racier genres, and by far the most successful was horror. These gruesome tales single-handedly rescued the industry from its fate as a half-remembered fad, and their influence stretched beyond comics to likes of acclaimed film director John Carpenter. The visual styles mimed these darker themes, mixing in surrealistic and sometimes disturbing imagery.

These comic books were so effectively grisly that morality groups-already raging against comics as "junk food for the young mind"-now regarded them as the indisputable tools of the devil, despite the fact that majority of its readership was adults.

After a number Senate hearings, publishers created the Comics Code Authority (CCA), whose strict censorship forbade even the words "horror," "terror" or "crime" in any titles. The result was a growing pains era of artistic experimentation, fast and loose writing and political suppression all rolled into one.

Art styles of the Silver Age of comics

Comics took their inspiration from art movements of the past, most notably surrealism, to illustrate the strange worlds in which their heroes lived.

With comics now established as a lucrative medium, cover images relied less on cheap, attention-grabbing tactics and instead became an artistic representation of the issue's themes or a protagonist's state of mind.

Comic books found true artistic expression for the first time in the Pop Art movement, which appropriated commercial objects such as product labels, magazine ads and comics for the purpose of fine art.

The Bronze Age (1971-1980)
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As suggested by its name, the Bronze Age wasn't as lustrous as the carefree Golden Age or the experimental Silver Age. Having exhausted just about every dastardly scheme a supervillain could hatch, comics gave its heroes even tougher enemies to confront.

It all began with a story in Spider-man in which the hero's best friend suffers a drug overdose. Spider-man is helpless, and his alter ego, Peter Parker, has no choice but to take the stage, relying solely on his gifts of persuasion and empathy to save the day. The CCA opposed the inclusion of drug topics, whatever the message, but Marvel published the issue anyway with reader support. This caused the public to lose respect for the CCA and led to the end of censorship, paving the way for darker stories (more on that later).

Around this time, writer Chris Claremont revived a cancelled Silver Age series about a ragtag group of mutants called the X-men (heard of it?). Adding racially diverse, international characters to its cast, Claremont's second wave of mutants still had godly powers, but now they were reviled by the public for that very reason. Echoing the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, prejudice against the X-men's genetic traits became the comic's most enduring theme.

While the Golden Age portrayed social topics like World War in typical Golden Age fashion-unfailing virtue and easy justice-Bronze Age comics dealt with the gritty realities of urban life in ways that had no real answer. Maybe Captain America could smack Hitler in the face, but how does a superhero attack the intangible foes of bigotry and addiction?

As the stories became more focused around gritty, realistic stories, the style of the imagery morphed to match.

Art styles of the Bronze Age of comic books

Comics traded in surrealism and experimentation for photorealistic depictions of the urban landscape.

The alter-ego side of the superhero's life is given more panel time, and sensational costumes took a backseat to depictions of everyday people.

Depth of focus and lighting gave comics a cinematic style, heightening the reader's emotional connection.

The Dark Age (1980-1993)

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Unlike the actual Dark Ages, this era was where comic books achieved enlightenment. Until then, the Golden Age's uncomplicated right and wrong still echoed (if just subtly updated to suit the times). Here, writers threw all of it out the window and showed us that a comic book hero's world was just as gritty as the enemies he faced.

Stories like "The Dark Knight Returns" and "V for Vendetta" warned of an ominous future no amount of heroism could prevent. Writers crafted characters who were psychologically complex, often dangerously so. Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" introduced us to a Joker who was more than a giggling jester but a frighteningly psychotic serial killer. "Watchmen" gave us heroes that were pushed to questionable actions by the very nature of the world they were trying to defend. During this age, the line between hero and villain wasn't just blurry; writers revealed that it never existed at all.

But it wasn't all dark, even when it was. Independent publisher Image Comics was born, and their flagship hero, Spawn, received unprecedented popularity, enough to spawn (sorry!) a movie adaptation only a few years after its inception. This and several other popular titles such as "Prophet" and "The Savage Dragon" also spawned (last one, promise) more interest in creator-owned comics as a whole.

Ironically, as the imagery in these comics was becoming darker and more stylized-playing with lighting and deep, dark, contrasting colors-the genre was thrust out of the shadows of pulp and into the light of literary awareness. The idea of a sustained comic as a single work of literature led to the publication of several graphic novels, culminating in Art Spiegelman's "Maus," the first comic series to win a Pulitzer Prize. Comic books were finally regarded as a legitimate art form, as malleable and open to creative expression as any medium.

Art styles of the Dark Age of comics

Night was the prominent setting for virtually all stories of this age, leading to an art style that favored strategic lighting and long shadows.

Similarly, artists took their inspiration from hard-boiled noir films of the 40s and 50s, creating gloomy, dubious worlds of smoke, rain, alleyways and silhouettes.

Silver Age horror comics influenced the Dark Age in a more psychological sense, with disturbing portraits and unnatural angles that created a perpetual sense of unease.

The Ageless Age (1993-Present Day)
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We've now reached the point in our journey across many colorful panels at which there is no definitive way to categorize the present "age." Comics have expanded into something without shape or borders-a nebulous mass of nerd wonder.

Advanced technology in film, television and video games has created an unstoppable juggernaut of adaptations, leading to an upsurge in comic book readers from all walks of life. Plus, the impact of Image Comics is still being felt, as readers continue their interest in indie books fueled by the industry's rampant commercialization. No longer restricted to publishing giants Marvel and D.C., writers are free to explore specialty publishers and niche markets, even foregoing traditional distribution channels by publishing their content on the internet.

One thing can be said about our current comic book age: it's a time when the superhero doesn't have to be heroic or dark or even present at all. Comic books can be as pulpy or as serious or as just plain weird as you want them to be. Like the invincible Superman of the optimistic Golden Age, now is a time when anything is possible.

Art styles of the Ageless Age of comics

Advanced technology has led to creative illustrative techniques-everything from digital painting to 3D modeling.

The line between film and comic is now so thin that some series are adapted into motion comics, adding voice actors and animation to the panels with no change to the art itself.

The ubiquity of publishers has led to a wide variety of art styles. Design now varies drastically, depending on the nature of the comic and the choices of the creator (rather than the uniform "in-house" styles of the past).

Got a favorite comic book style?

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Comic books have had a long and vibrant history-far too long to represent in one modest article. The references here represent but a handful of pivotal moments as well as some of my personal favorites. Maybe I missed yours.

Before you start sharpening your adamantium claws, how about sharing your thoughts in the comments?

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The AMAZING history of comic books & their art

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

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This is written by Melissa Beattie-Moss and she poses the question, "why are so many movies based on comic books?" Comic book movies have become very popular among all age groups. For comic book fans, the very characters we love and look up to are coming to life on the big screens. The movie industry are making so much money from all the people who wouldn't miss a chance to see their favorite superheroes or villains. The article mentions how comic book films are among the top earning film each year. And this is because they know who their widest audience are and what they are looking for. Even those who aren't comic fans have come to love comic book movies. For three years in a row, it was a comic book film that was the top earner at the U.S box office. And thats not surprising considering how full movie theaters tend to be when these movies are released.

-Marystella Larmore

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Comic book geeks, unite! The era of modern crime-fighting superheroes that began in 1938 with Action Comics #1 and the first appearance of Superman has made the leap into the 21st century and onto the big screen like no other art form. Evolving from ten cents a copy to billion-dollar box-office brands, comic book superheroes -- and their legions of fans and superfans -- have earned their spot at the top of American pop culture.

What explains the immense success of movies based on comic books?

"In most of the history of film, movies based on comic-book characters were usually 'B-movies' -- B for budget, or second-tier," says Matthew McAllister, professor of media studies in Penn State's College of Communications. "Some of the earliest film adaptations of comic books were movie serials, where moviegoers would watch one chapter of an unfolding story every week in a theater. These included The Adventures of Captain Marvel in 1941, Batman in '43, and Superman in '48."

There were virtually no mainstream releases of superhero comic book theatrical films from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he says. "Blockbusters or 'A-movies' tended to be targeted for older audiences and were focused on more serious topics" such as biblical epics -- think Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments -- or historical dramas like Doctor Zhivago.

All of that changed when Superman hit the silver screen in 1978. "The release of Superman set a precedent for movies based on comic books to play a significant role in developing and defining the modern blockbuster," says McAllister. "For the first time, in a genre previously considered only for child audiences and produced on shoestring budgets, a superhero movie was a big-budget release with both global distribution strategies and big-name stars, including Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman."

The release of Batman in 1989 proved that superhero movies could generate merchandising revenue beyond the theatrical box-office returns, adds McAllister. "Warner Brothers' exploitation of licensing, such as the soundtrack and book adaptation, also solidified the value of comic book franchises as multi-media money makers." Superhero flicks are 'high-concept' films, he points out, "meaning the premise can be succinctly summarized and the formula is easy to repeat in sequels. What's more, the distinctive and colorful look of superheroes creates easily identifiable merchandise such as action figures and themed games."

Advances in digital effects have also played a role in the surge in superhero movie popularity, McAllister says. "Special effects really enhance the look of super powers and spectacular feats. When combined with significant action and clear archetypes of heroes and villains, these movies appeal to global audiences."

Just as superheroes have on-screen rivals, the two leading American comic book companies have been competing for decades. Batman and Superman are characters from the DC Comics universe, which dominated the mainstream comic-book film audience for much of the 1980s, notes McAllister. "This began to change in the early 2000s with the success of the Spider-Man and X-Men movie franchises, which illustrated the viability of movies based on Marvel Comics characters."

Exactly how successful has this genre been? "Four of the top films in U.S. box office history are based on comic books: Marvel's The Avengers, The Dark Knight, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and The Dark Knight Rises," says McAllister. Comic-book films are among the top-earning films each year, he adds. In 2015, Avengers: Age of Ultron is currently ranked #3 with $1.4 billion in global box-office revenues. For three straight years, between 2012 and 2014, the top earner at the U.S. box office was a comic-book film. They also receive among the largest production and marketing budgets, some costing upward of $250 million to make.

While the comic-book industry has humble roots, times have changed, says McAllister. "Many comic-book companies and their characters are now also owned by large entertainment conglomerates, as is the case with Disney's ownership of Marvel, and Time Warner's ownership of DC." Since these conglomerates also own movie production and distribution companies, the interplay between films and comic books becomes economically efficient, he adds. "They also serve as publicity for other versions of the characters produced by the conglomerates, especially in television or online."

Comic-book films now can be said to be a key genre for modern filmmaking, concludes McAllister. "They attract top directors and actors, have budgets in the hundreds of millions, and, when they're a hit, they generate revenue in the billions." There may be a downside to that success, though. "As such a dominant genre, these superhero movies demand a lot of the resources and attention of Hollywood, so the distribution of resources to other genres may be affected," says McAllister. "What kinds of more nuanced and sophisticated movies are not being made, for example, when a movie about an ant-sized superhero costs $170 million to make?"

If that thought tempts you to swear off superhero blockbusters in favor of art-house indie films, you might want to wait until after March 25, 2016, jokes McAllister. That's the release date of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the first time the two iconic superheroes will battle it out in live action on the big screen.

Matthew McAllister is professor of media studies and chair of graduate programs in the College of Communications. He can be reached at mpm15@psu.edu

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Probing Question: Why are so many movies based on comic books? | Penn State University

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Comic book geeks, unite! The era of modern crime-fighting superheroes that began in 1938 with Action Comics #1 and the first appearance of Superman has made the leap into the 21st century and onto the big screen like no other art form.

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The article from the Guardian, written by Steve Rose, discusses how superheroes have become almost a villain themselves because of a number of reasons. While I don't necessarily agree with everything in the article, I do think it is an interesting stance on how one can look at superheroes. There have been several story lines in superhero movies and tv shows that deal with how citizens look at the heroes, and whether they should stop being a hero because it causes more harm to people than it does good. It will also be interesting to see if there is a rise in anti-heroes because of a need to change up the formula of the typical superhero movie one would see today. Superhero movies seem more willing to take risks because of their previous popularity, and the future of comic book movies after this initial wave will be interesting to witness and observe how they have changed from the last decade. Superhero movies don’t seem to be losing the movie going public’s interest, and with the release of more unique, somewhat unknown character movies, it seems like superhero movies will just appeal to more and more people because studios seem more willing to add heroes that can appeal to a wide number of audiences due to the increased popularity in those movies. -Dillon Eldridge

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What if superheroes aren't really the good guys?

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We've always thought of them as flawed, noble and on our side - but perhaps they're just dangerous rightwing vigilantes

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Comic book Movies and their Impact on Society

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Comic book Movies and their Impact on Society

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Comic book movies in today's generation has been steadily increasing into a huge trend in today's society; to kids and adults alike. Unlike in the previous decades, today's technology allows us to make film adaptations of comic books previously thought impossible back in the golden age of comics. The widespread use of recreating comics into live film adaptations brings a new perspective on various subjective matters such as heroism and morality and how it can impact an audience in our society. The implentation of widespread film viewing throughout countries vastly increases the views and influences for milions of people when watching a certain movie so bringing the comic book genre does nothing less but spread the values and ideals of what it means to be a hero and how it can greatly impact a person. The same was proved effective but not as efficient since comic books back then were plenty but werent widely accepted with all age groups. Comic book movies however try to drag in people of all ages by combining various adult humor and action and just a light-hearted sense that would attract any person to view said film, Disney for example is doing a great job of this when it comes to their marvel movie franchise. Marvel has made leaps and bounds when it comes to influence and popularity with their wonderfully written and produced movies, all along with a great cast of actors and actresses, it seems their streak isn't ending anytime soon in my opinion. All in all however ever since the film industry has obtained a good footing into the comic book genre it seems like there is no end to the impact and success it'll make in today's society.

-Shane Plaskett

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Though this article is not strictly-speaking about comic book movies, I feel it would be remiss not to mention the wonderful Stan Lee who died today at age 95. This IGN video and accompanying article provides a very warm remembrance of a man who may be the biggest name in comics history. This class would probably not even be taking place were it not for his contribution. Even DC has sent out their own message of condolence and sadness at the news of his death, reflecting how huge of an impact he had on the comics industry and its pop-culture status. Even for those who have not read the Marvel comics he loomed large, making a cameo appearance in as many Marvel films as he could, including Deadpool (though I sincerely hope they do digitally add him in to future films as they did for Carrie Fischer and Peter Cushing in Rogue One). I hope that everyone can take a moment to appreciate the importance of this great man, and look back on his contribution fondly.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/11/12/the-true-legacy-of-stan-lee-at-marvel-comics?abthid=5be9f9a59514518679000781

-Bryce Taylor

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Its not an article directly commenting on comic book movies, but I was just reading Stan Lee’s obituary, and as he is probably the most influential person in this area, it seems fitting to bring up this article.  In terms of movies, I thought it was interesting that it took a long time for Stan Lee to find success in film and television adaptations.  The obituary discussed how Lee struggled to get Marvel to be profitable in terms of live action adaptations in the 1980’s.  I thought this was interesting as comic book movies, as we have discussed, have become such a prevalent genre since the 1990’s.  While ultimately finding incredible success, I just wonder why there were so many issues in bringing these stories to the big screen, and to make them successful.  It may be a factor that the improvement of special effects made these live action adaptations more enjoyable to watch.  I really don’t know, but it seems strange that arguably the best written modern takes on the classic hero narrative were unable to find success.  Obviously that has changed, but its something that I just thought was interesting in regards to Stan Lee’s life and our topic of comic book movies.

Jay Ostrom

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transcript

The Last Word: Stan Lee

Stan Lee, one of the most influential writers and publishers in the comic book industry, sat down with The New York Times in 2015 to talk about his life and career.

"Oh, I always wished I could do something better than comics, but there didn't seem to be anything. My mother used to say that when I was having lunch or dinner at home, if I didn't have a book to read I'd be reading the label on the ketchup bottle. And, in fact, one of the gifts that I got one Christmas, my mother bought me a little metal stand that you could put a book on, so while you're eating you could be reading the book. There were the Hardy Boys, Don Sturdy and Tom Swift. One was an adventurer, one was an inventor. I loved Émile Zola. I loved Charles Dickens. Whenever I got an extra 50 cents, I'd buy one of those books. In those days, grown-ups hated comics, didn't want their children to read them particularly. So, I figured I'm not going to use my real name, which I'm saving for posterity, for these silly comic books. So, I cut my first name into two and called myself Stan Lee. And it was a living, and I was doing the best I could to make the stories a little bit better. But the kind of stories my publisher wants me to do are banal. They're juvenile. They're nothing. I said to my wife, 'You know, there's got to be something better than this.' So, Joanie said to me, 'Why don't you write one book the way you'd like to do it?' So, at that time my publisher, Martin Goodman, said, 'Give me a new superhero book. I think superheroes may sell.'" "Superman!" "But I didn't want to do superheroes just like Superman or Batman, I wanted something a little more original, and where I played up the personality of the characters more, and where there were surprises. And I came up with the Fantastic Four. And I called Jack Kirby, who was the best artist we had, and I asked him if he would draw it. It sold very well. We had never gotten fan mail before, but we started getting fan mail, and that started it. So, I dreamed up Spider-Man and the Hulk and the X-Men and all the others. What I tried to do was take these characters, who are obviously bigger than life and fictitious, and make them seem real. They've got these powers. They do wonderful things. But what are the things that worry them? What are the things that frustrate them? I tried to write a well-rounded character with every character I did, rather than just somebody who is extra strong and can beat up the bad guys. If you're writing about people, you have to make the people come to life. I know I always loved reading Sherlock Holmes, and I loved the way Sherlock Holmes spoke, and the way Dr. Watson spoke, and you could tell one from the other. They didn't speak the same way. And the same with any good books. You didn't have to read, 'Joe said' or 'Sam said,' you knew who said it by the way the words were written. In the beginning, I wrote all the scripts myself. I typed them out, wrote them. After a while I was writing almost every book, and we had a lot of books, and there wasn't time to do it. Kirby would be waiting for a script, and I couldn't keep him with nothing to do. So, I would say, 'Look Jack, I don't have time to write your script, but here's the story I want to tell, and here's how we'll end it.' I gave him whatever I wanted this story to be. And I said, 'You draw it any way you want, I'll put in the dialogue and the captions later.' So, he would work just from an outline - a verbal outline that I gave him. He'd put in a lot of details that I hadn't even thought of and that was great. And I did the same with all the other artists. One reason that our stories were so successful was I had these great artists illustrating them. Kirby was good, Ditko was good, John Romita was good, John Buscema, Gene Colan - and I tried to get the best people I could. Even though we couldn't pay more than anyone else - and we very often paid less - I tried to make the job as interesting as I could. Even though they were comic strips, it would be great if we could make them readable and enjoyable and having something to say." Singing: "Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can." Interviewer: "What would you like people to be left with from your career?" "He wrote some good stories. I don't think about that much. You know, when I'm gone, I really don't care. It doesn't do you any good when you're gone."

Stan Lee, one of the most influential writers and publishers in the comic book industry, sat down with The New York Times in 2015 to talk about his life and career.

Jonathan Kandell and

If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp - maybe bigger - on the even wider pop culture landscape of today.

Think of "Spider-Man," the blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle. Think of "Iron Man," another Hollywood gold-mine series personified by its star, Robert Downey Jr. Think of "Black Panther," the box-office superhero smash that shattered big screen racial barriers in the process.

And that is to say nothing of the Hulk, the X-Men, Thor and other film and television juggernauts that have stirred the popular imagination and made many people very rich.

If all that entertainment product can be traced to one person, it would be Stan Lee, who died in Los Angeles on Monday at 95. From a cluttered office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the 1960s, he helped conjure a lineup of pulp-fiction heroes that has come to define much of popular culture in the early 21st century.

Mr. Lee was a central player in the creation of those characters and more, all properties of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he was for many the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general, overseeing the company's emergence as an international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium's silver age.

Many believe that Marvel, under his leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel's chief competitor at the time, National Periodical Publications, now known as DC - the home of Superman and Batman, among other characters - augured this period, with its 1956 update of its superhero the Flash, but did not define it.)

Under Mr. Lee, Marvel transformed the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes and, often, a sense of humor.

In humanizing his heroes, giving them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths, Mr. Lee tried "to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality," he told The Washington Post in 1992.

"That's what any story should have, but comics didn't have until that point," he said. "They were all cardboard figures."

Energetic, gregarious, optimistic and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Mr. Lee was an effective salesman, employing a Barnumesque syntax in print ("Face front, true believer!" "Make mine Marvel!") to market Marvel's products to a rabid following.

He charmed readers with jokey, conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, "I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn't aware of."

Though Mr. Lee was often criticized for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators , his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel's best-known characters is indisputable.

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.

Stanley began reading Shakespeare at 10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.

He graduated at 17 from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and aspired to be a writer of serious literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when, after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a company owned by Martin Goodman, a relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics field.

Mr. Lee was initially paid $8 a week as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the superhero genre.

At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing partner, Joe Simon, had created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a vital role in Mr. Lee's career. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, Timely's hottest stars, were lured away by a rival company, Mr. Lee was appointed chief editor.

As a writer, Mr. Lee could be startlingly prolific. "Almost everything I've ever written I could finish at one sitting," he once said. "I'm a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest."

Mr. Lee used several pseudonyms to give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed Lieber to Lee.)

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Mr. Lee at his office in Manhattan in 1980. As chief writer and editor of Marvel Comics, Mr. Lee was, for many, the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general. Credit... William E. Sauro/The New York Times

During World War II, Mr. Lee wrote training manuals stateside in the Army Signal Corps while moonlighting as a comics writer. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a former model who had moved to New York from her native England.

His daughter Joan Celia Lee, who is known as J. C., was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after birth in 1953. Mr. Lee's wife died in 2017.

A lawyer for Ms. Lee, Kirk Schenck, confirmed Mr. Lee's death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the "Amazing Spider-Man" syndicated newspaper strip for years.

In the mid-1940s, the peak of the golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted immorality and juvenile delinquency.

Feeding the senator's crusade was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham 's 1954 anti-comics jeremiad, "Seduction of the Innocent." Among other claims, the book contended that DC's "Batman stories" - featuring the team of Batman and Robin - were "psychologically homosexual."

Choosing to police itself rather than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code Authority to ensure wholesome content. Gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences and attention to social issues. Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.

Many found the sanitized comics boring, and - with the new medium of television providing competition - readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined by almost three-quarters within a few years.

With the dimming of superhero comics' golden age, Mr. Lee tired of grinding out generic humor, romance, western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern) at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.

Mr. Lee took Mr. Goodman up on his suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.

In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby - whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel - produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles and, in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

Mr. Lee in 2012 at New York Comic Con. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium's silver age. Credit... Marion Curtis/STARPIX, via Associated Press

Other Marvel titles - like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster - offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks - a key to the character's lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

Mr. Lee's dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, like Spider-Man's patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor's; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing's. It could also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by the Silver Surfer, a space alien:

"And yet - in their uncontrollable insanity - in their unforgivable blindness - they seek to destroy this shining jewel - this softly spinning gem - this tiny blessed sphere - which men call Earth!"

Mr. Lee practiced what he called the Marvel method: Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions of character ownership.

Mr. Lee was often faulted for not adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Mr. Kirby. Spider-Man became Marvel's best-known property, but Mr. Ditko, its co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Mr. Kirby, who visually designed countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Mr. Lee for a Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.

Many comic fans believe that Mr. Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime, and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Mr. Kirby and Mr. Lee had created together. Mr. Kirby's heirs were long rebuffed in court on the grounds that he had done "work for hire" - in other words, that he had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.

In September 2014, Marvel and the Kirby estate reached a settlement. Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby now both receive credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.

Mr. Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action television and movies were disappointing. (The series "The Incredible Hulk," seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)

Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the company's Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated "X-Men" series on Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the live-action big-screen "X-Men" franchise, which has flourished since its first installment, in 2000.)

In the late 1990s, Mr. Lee was named chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Mr. Lee was never charged.)

Chadwick Boseman, left, as T'Challa/Black Panther and Michael B. Jordan in "Black Panther." It was the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starred an almost all-black cast. Credit... Matt Kennedy/Marvel, Disney

In 2001, Mr. Lee started POW! Entertainment (the initials stand for "purveyors of wonder"), but he received almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to increase its stake in POW!

In Mr. Lee's final years, after the death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in the news media. In 2018, Mr. Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Mr. Lee's daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter claimed "elder abuse."

In February 2018, Mr. Lee signed a notarized document declaring that three men - a lawyer, a caretaker of Mr. Lee's and a dealer in memorabilia - had "insinuated themselves into relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose," to "gain control over my assets, property and money." He later withdrew his claim, but longtime aides of his - an assistant, an accountant and a housekeeper - were either dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.

In a profile in The New York Times in April, a cheerful Mr. Lee said, "I'm the luckiest guy in the world," adding that "my daughter has been a great help to me" and that "life is pretty good" - although he admitted in that same interview, "I've been very careless with money."

Marvel movies, however, have proved a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Mr. Lee. With the blockbuster "Spider-Man" in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies (including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion worldwide as of April.

"Black Panther," the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over the four-day Presidents' Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of all time.

Many other film properties are in development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Mr. Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have never had before.

Mr. Lee wrote a slim memoir, "Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee," with George Mair, published in 2002. His 2015 book, "Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir" (written with Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.

Recent Marvel films and TV shows have also often credited Mr. Lee's former collaborators; Mr. Lee himself has almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a tradition. (Even "Teen Titans Go! to the Movies," an animated feature in 2018 about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name or presence have included the reality series "Stan Lee's Superhumans" and the competition show "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?"

Mr. Lee's unwavering energy suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter account, @TheRealStanlee.) And the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.

"I want to do more movies, I want to do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I want to do more of everything I'm doing," he said in " With Great Power ...: The Stan Lee Story," a 2010 television documentary. "The only problem is time. I just wish there were more time."

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Stan Lee Is Dead at 95; Superhero of Marvel Comics (Published 2018)

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Jonathan Kandell and If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp - maybe bigger - on the even wider pop culture landscape of today. Think of "Spider-Man," the blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle.

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With the new season of Daredevil that just came out on Netflix, is the series going to keep going or will it be cancelled like Iron Fist and Luke Cage? The Daredevil series has now had 3 seasons and has been one of the best comic book shows of all time. The show just recently lost 50% of viewers after the first week. I would think that it would be due to people binge watching it. Me personally, I love the series and I don't want it to be cancelled like the other two were. Luke Cage and Iron Fist were critically acclaimed as high as Daredevil was. Both shows didn't get the love because they were poorly written and aren't A list characters like Daredevil. Daredevil has been getting great reviews for season 3 and should be getting the praise it deserves because it is that good. I highly recommend it if you have not even seen the first season of Daredevil. It is the best comic book show out there even trumping the DC shows on the CW network. The show needs to keep getting more viewers or it will not keep getting made! I would give season 3 a 10/10!

-Daniel Rivera

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Marvel’s Daredevil: Season 3 | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

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It's not secret that the biggest franchises in the movies come from the two reigning comic book companies: DC and Marvel. These two are dominating box offices and creating films that have made up to billions of dollars such as Infinity War released last summer. But comic books are changing. Does that mean the movies will change as well? According to this article, comic books were written with the intention to evolve over time. Characters and plot lines change as well as the artistry behind the comics. With our advancement of special effects in mind, it is not surprising that comic book writers are modernizing their comics and pushing them forward with amazing plot lines. The ability to bring these unrealistic stories to life with effects is now a reality. It's important for any fan base that the film adaptions of comics and characters it possesses remain true to the literature. But the old comics that are adapted to film today are much different because the special effects allow for endless possibilities on-screen. But not comic books are changing to "catch up" to the new world of cinema and when the stories begin the change, so will the comic book movies.
- Laura Vacek

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Comic book movies and TV shows are the biggest trend in entertainment right now, with any series or film released under the umbrella of the "big two" superhero franchises (DC and Marvel) guaranteed to pull in a substantial audience. One of the biggest talking points surrounding the release of any comic book movie or TV series is no doubt the question of how closely (or not) the project is sticking to the comic book canon that inspired it.

A lot of people believe (pretty strongly) that comic book movies should stick to the canon, and that the only way to convey the core values of a character or story is by delivering a cinematic experience that fans are familiar with. Other fans are open to interpretation and new creative visions of the characters they know and love - even if that experimentation alters core values of the character.

But if you step back for a second and really look at comic books and their very nature, this shouldn't even be a debate: Comic book movies and TV shows can - and should - alter canon, mythos, characters - really anything they want about a comic book property. And here's why:
Comic Books Are About Change
From a literary standpoint, comic books are unique. It's not just the format of having a story told in a combination of words and pictures measured out in boxes on a page; it's also the fact that comic books, by their nature and tradition, are "butterfly novels - i.e., literary works meant to evolve over time by way of changing creative input.

Every comic book fan has a definitive version of the characters they love and read about, created by a specific creative team working in a specific era. Dan Jurgens' Superman; Chris Claremont's X-Men; Frank Miller's Batman - each of these now well-known creator/character pairings marked a significant new direction for the character(s), pushing them into new eras and paradigms of storytelling and characterization. And the list of similar cases pretty much extends through the history of comic books.

If comic books can, by nature, change with the times and offer new creative interpretations of characters, what's the rule that says comic book movies and TV shows can't do the same? How can people like Suicide Squad director David Ayer or Batman v Superman director Zack Snyder by accused of "ruining" characters and canon, when they are simply the next to put their creative stamp on both?

If we're playing by the rules of the comic book medium, then a film like Man of Steel, or Bryan Singer's alternate version of X-Men mythos, are not just allowed but encouraged to exist, in the comic book tradition of new interpretation.
Change Does Not Equal Disaster
There's this specious notion some fans have that when filmmakers or TV showrunners divert from comic book canon - or change any defining beat of a famous storyline or character - then it equals automatic disaster for the character and/or project. But of course, both the MCU and DCEU - and many other comic book shows in between - are littered with examples to the contrary.

The X-Men movies (even the ones you love) are all far departures from comic book canon; the DCEU films are clearly their own interpretation, but even the MCU has made many, many, changes, tweaks and updates to just about everyone of its characters - to the point of retroactively influencing the comics (read a great breakdown of that . Other successful comic book films - like Mark Millar and Matthew Vaughn's collaborations on Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Sercet Service - have similarly come with major overhauls to what was printed on the comic book page.

On the TV side, The Walking Dead still reigns as king, despite offering fans a very different path of events than the comics did. We just got done writing about why Gotham has struck such a successful chord as a mainstream comic book show, despite being a very distinct departure from Batman canon. Marvel's network and Netflix shows have all made big changes to characters or lore - often with the enthusiastic approval of fans.

So clearly, not all change is bad. As recent history has shown, it's often the changes fans don't like that get marked as blasphemous, often at the expense of the creative minds behind said changes.
Changes Are Not Evidence of Ignorance
While we're on the topic, let's just put it out there: the filmmakers, actors, and TV showrunners get it (for the most part). There's this insistent notion that any unpopular creative changes a comic book movie or TV show made must be the result of creators and executives who don't "get" the core values of the character or the property.

However, in the modern (read: geek chic) age of comic book TV/movies, that's a pretty hard argument to sustain. These days, it's almost an official part of the PR process to to have directors, showrunners, actors, all taking to social media with pictures of the comics they're reading as "research."

Even actors who choose not to read the source material must navigate a continuous barrage of reporter and fan questions about the character's source material, and characterization. In other words: knowing your sh*t about these comic book characters, their history, and the source material, is part of the job. Not just for performance sake onscreen, but also for the sake of marketing and promoting the movie (the important part).

Giving $200 million to those uneducated or ignorant about the characters and properties isn't really a thing anymore. Not when there are entire universes to build.
All Opinions Fair & True
At the end of the day, it really boils down to preference: some interpretations of a comic book character or storyline will interest and delight you; others will definitely not. When comic book publishers make unfavorable changes to canon or characters, then fans may complain; they may ultimately stop reading for that creative run; but they rarely dismiss the character entirely, or boycott the idea of a new creative team trying to put their stamp on things.

For some reason, when it's a single, big-budget movie that fans' hopes are riding on, the rules change. Maybe it's that fans look to the comic book page fore exploration and the movie or TV screen for validation that the characters and stories they know and love will be just as enjoyable to wider audience. But while that's a nice sentiment, it's not exactly a fair one.

TV showrunners, and movie directors, and all the actors and filmmaking teams that surround them, are creative people looking to put their creative stamp on comic book characters and stories that have been reinvented and re-told so many times, their histories turn Wiki pages into novels. Those working in the cinematic medium have just as much right as those on the page to try (succeed or fail) to inject new things into the characters and mythos, and possibly (hopefully) open up new doors of enjoyment for fans.

If not for those attempts, we wouldn't have a Dark Knight Trilogy, or Guardians of the Galaxy, or Kick-Ass, Kingsman - or so many of the other comic book movies that the fanbase now holds in high regard.

So we should probably extend the same creative license to comic book movie and TV creators that we have always extended to comic book publishers and creative teams: let them try.
It won't always work out

...Nothing to really explain here. We've all seen the failures ( X-Men: Origins, Green Lantern); sometimes, going off book goes horribly, horribly, wrong.

But it doesn't matter: some comic book creative runs are horrible (many, if we're being honest); we have to allow new attempts at interpretation, regardless. Just the nature of the business.

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Why Comic Book Movies & TV Shows Can Alter Canon (and Should)

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Comic book movies and TV shows are the biggest trend in entertainment right now, with any series or film released under the umbrella of the 'big two' superhero franchises (DC and Marvel) guaranteed to pull in a substantial audience. One of the biggest talking points surrounding the release of any [...]

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Comic Book Movies: Why Are They So Popular? 

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Comic Book Movies: Why Are They So Popular? 

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In 2017 alone, seven major films adapting comic book characters to the big screen were released, and Marvel has a que of comic book films that stretches well into the 2020s all ready to go. So what is it about these comic book movies that has made them take over Hollywood?

This article gives yet another perspective on why popular culture is so enamored with the superhero, and why they will continue to be for years to come. One of the main reasons cited is the never ending nature of comic books. Since so many of our favorite comic series are serial, meaning they can continuously grow and reboot when the company is in need. These storylines are basically immortal. The only issue? Actors are not, and often fans become as attached to the actors that bring them to life as the characters themselves. To combat this, films are able to keep introducing new characters, keeping the life cycle going in a continuous loop.

The article continues to describe the beginning of the modern comic book movie with Superman in 1978. The film was a critical and commercial success and set the stage for the genre it is today with a new age of audiences obsessed with sci-fi and fantastical special effects. It proved that not just comic book fans, but mainstream culture cared about men in tights. The 2000s marked a significant boom in the comic book movie, due to major developments in special effects and the release of several very successful adaptations, including Spiderman, X-Men, and Iron Man.

Although comic book movies are beloved by nearly all, they are no easy feat to bring to life. Adapting the sheer volume of comics associated with our favorite heroes can be overwhelming, and having too many voices involved in the making of the film can hold up production and lose the essence of the main character all together.

The article concludes with the ongoing cycle of superhero success being fueled by new generations of fans being brought in by every successive comic book movie, and as these fans grow up, news ones come, obsessed with the heroes of generations. Superman, the hero that brought the comic book movie to the big screen, is still one of the biggest names today. New movies, such as Black Panther and Wonder Woman, also continue to bring new demographics to the screen, creating an even larger and more diverse fan base of the genre.

- Rachel Leadholm

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In the last ten to fifteen years, comic book movies have been dominating the big screen. Seven major films adapting comic book characters debuted in theaters in 2017. Numerous television shows returned for another season or aired their first pilot.

Marvel has a film slate that goes well into the 2020s and is now in the process of realizing a film duology ten years in the making. WONDER WOMAN finally got her own amazing solo movie. Comic book fans everywhere are Superhero movie fatigue, who? But what is it about comic book adaptations that have them taking over the world?

Never Ending Potential

Here's the obvious reason: comic books are serial. The principle here is the same one that drives film adaptations of popular book series if they hit the sweet spot of three or more installments. A serial property can grow forever and reboot whenever it suits a production company's needs - the SPIDER-MAN films, anyone?

The Best Comic Book Films of 2017

The only true issue that crops up here is that actors aren't immortal, no matter how much I wish Robert Downey, Jr. could play Tony Stark forever. When it comes to live-action films, this presents the opportunity to essentially keep introducing new characters.

The current MCU appears to be working on this as the original AVENGERS cast contracts start running out. In addition to comic book movies, the potential for live-action and animated television series are overwhelming. Marvel has their budding Netflix franchise and the occasional endeavor popping up on Hulu and Freeform. The Arrowverse is large and sprawling and successful, creating their own cross-over events.

SUPERMAN: The Start of Everything

In 1978, SUPERMAN arrived on the scene as the first big-budget comic book movie. At the time, the film's budget of 55 million dollars was unparalleled. Christopher Reeve brought Clark Kent to life with an endearing timidness and his Superman alter-ego with a quiet humor and swelling confidence. Anyone remember the scene when Clark was about to tell Lois he was Superman?

SUPERMAN was a critical and commercial success, setting the stage for more superhero and comic book movies in a new age obsessed with sci-fi and fantastical elements. It proved people cared about admittedly goofy-looking characters dressed up in glorified underwear. After all, STAR WARS came to the big screen just before SUPERMAN.

However, the late '80s and most of the '90s would produce only moderately successful films that were pretty universally panned by critics. Marvel's first true venture in the genre began with HOWARD THE DUCK in 1986 and nearly ended there. The film failed miserably. The immense success of BLADE in 1998 became part of the shift in the late '90s heralding darker, more serious comic book movies and reviving the dead superhero genre.

It was especially good timing for Marvel, who spent most of this era frantically selling the rights to their properties in order to avoid bankruptcy. DC and Warner Brothers, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in any hero that wasn't the 1986 BATMAN. The catastrophic failure of SUPERMAN IV: QUEST FOR PEACE had sufficiently scared production companies from trying out the superhero genre.

This Is Everything You Need to Know About 2018 Comic Book Movies and TV Shows Coming Out

The 2000s and the Recent Boom

There are more than a few reasons why the 2000s marked a crazy boom in comic book movies. The first, of course, is the new technology for special effects. Of the major sci-fi and superhero films we got in the '70s and '80s, few can overcome being dated by a modern audience's expectation of technology.

SPIDER-MAN and the X-MEN movies were at the beginning of the 2000s comic book movie boom. SPIDER-MAN, in particular, had an effects budget of 100 million dollars - many of the web-slinging antics had to be carefully choreographed and then computer-generated. As the recent years have progressed, technology has only improved.

X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN got the ball rolling and reinvigorated the movie industry. In 2005, Christopher Nolan debuted a new dark and gritty BATMAN BEGINS. The trilogy's second installment, BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, won the late Heath Ledger an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the Joker.

Beyond being great adaptations, these were great movies. The success of these franchises motivated Paramount pictures to distribute Marvel's self-financed film IRON MAN in 2008. The release of IRON MAN effectively changed the superhero movie game forever.

How Hard Is It to Make Comic Book Movies?

Short answer: pretty hard.

Adapting a comic book into a live-action movie is more than just recreating the individual panels. Characters most likely to get a film are usually the staple juggernauts like Superman, Batman, or Spider-man. However, the sheer volume of stories those characters are in can be overwhelming. The key to a great comic book film is to tell a story where the titular hero is true to their core values no matter the adventure.

Often times, the issue with a bad comic book movie is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Films spend in development hell before seeing the light of day. In 1992, Wesley Snipes pitched a BLACK PANTHER movie, but the project stalled again and again until the 2018 theatrical release. The DCEU's film slate lists dozens of possible adaptations, half of which will never be made.

The god-awful 2011 GREEN LANTERN movie lost the true essence of Hal Jordan's loveable asshole space cop due to far-removed executives chopping everything away. When it finally hit theaters, it was . Now that we've seen Ryan Reynolds as DEADPOOL, it's almost criminal how unfunny GREEN LANTERN was.

How R-Rated Movies Can Keep The Superhero Genre Fresh

The creation of the cinematic universe has the added safety net of, eventually, becoming established. The reason Marvel was able to take risks with GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (who thought that movie would do as well as it did?) and ANT-MAN is that they've hammered out a relatively foolproof formula for a comic book movie adaptation.

Realism in Comics Movies and TV: When Being Real is a Problem

Fostering a New Generation

Hundreds of fans spring into existence with the release of every new comic book movie. The original SUPERMAN movie's beloved by a generation of fans who grew up with Christopher Reeve. The MCU has been around long enough to see children grow into teenagers and young adults - much like the current iteration of Peter Parker. The SPIDER-MAN movies are a defining part of my childhood, as are the JUSTICE LEAGUE and TEEN TITANS animated cartoons.

BLACK PANTHER experienced a crazy amount of success because an entire demographic saw themselves on screen in ways they hadn't before. WONDER WOMAN gave us a story fueled by hope and love to contrast the grimdark atmosphere of superpowered crime-fighting. Comic book movies are being cranked out like no tomorrow because people want them.

Plus, they're a total cash cow.

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Comic Book Movies: Why Are They So Popular? - ComicsVerse

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In the last ten to fifteen years, comic book movies have been dominating the big screen. Seven major films adapting comic book characters debuted in theaters in 2017. Numerous television shows returned for another season or aired their first pilot.

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This article discusses the question about whether audiences have grown tired of the current landscape of moody comic book movies. Nathan Braudrick writes about the failures of popular movies like Justice League and elaborates on why the dark tones in the narrative failed to resonate. He does a great job of explaining some of the reasons why people didn’t flock to more recent DC films by pointing to the fact that the films are largely mishandling the personalities of certain characters. Considering the target demographic involving a large group of those who grew up with the characters, who then most likely introduced them to their families and friends, it makes sense that many avoid the films when the characters are not true to their nature. Superman is a prime example of someone who used to be a standard to look for happiness and an optimism but became dark and brooding like Batman. Film and television that has incorrectly established their characters has largely driven audiences away, yet properly handled characters have continued to see an uptick in popularity, regardless of tone. The article mentions shows like Daredevil and Legion, where audiences are loving the dark tone and atmosphere because it aligns so well with the darkness of the characters that are represented.

- Christopher Perez

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Do we fans really want dark comic book movies and television shows? The quick and easy answer is "Yes"... conditionally.

Now, I know and understand that this may seem like a bit of a cop-out, but frankly, it's the only answer that makes any real sense. If you look at the superhero landscape when it comes to film and television, you can plainly see that the entertainment industry's track record is hit-and-miss, and that's being generous. One of the greatest factors in why many comic book movies and TV shows fail can be identified easily by taking a look at the tone in which the character's movie or show is representative of. We comic book fans are an excitable, but extremely (some may say OVERLY) critical lot. We hold deep reverence for our comic book heroes and we often will not stand for even a modicum of revision when it comes to how they are represented on the screen. Whether I agree with the level of perceived ownership is completely besides the point; the fact is that comic book fans want to see the version they hold most dear on display and many of them tend to get very upset if that isn't the case. This has lead to what I see as a bit of confusion in people's minds regarding what kind of comic book entertainment we fans want to see.

The DC Extended Universe

The latest example of the disconnect between what we want and what entertainment studio's think we want is the fallout from the early attempts from DC to establish their DCEU (or whatever they've decided to call it). Now, I understand that this is VERY low hanging fruit, but it stands as the prime example for our generation. It's not the only one, but it is the most obvious and it has had the most repercussions. Of all the characters DC has established in this universe, their most famous (or 2nd most famous depending on who you ask) is the one they have gotten the most wrong. Superman has been portrayed as a dark, brooding, depressing presence on the screen thus far and it has not resonated well with most of us. Man of Steel has its fans, but even early on there were fans of the character bemoaning the dark mood of Superman's first entry into the DCEU. The movie made enough money to be profitable, however, so this version of Supes made his way into the poster child for getting the tone wrong: the divisive Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Here's where things, in my opinion, took the worst turn. But before that, let's just admit that of all BvS got wrong, it got Batman himself pretty much correct. He was dark, brutal (maybe too brutal) and driven, which is everything the Dark Knight is supposed to be. The problem with the movie, though, is that everything and everyone else was just as dark. What has always made the relationship between Batman and Superman so compelling is the dichotomy between dark and light. Superman is ever the bright optimist and Batman the brooding creature of the night. When you make both of them dark and brooding, there's no interplay between the two and all sense of their relationship is stripped away. BvS gave us darkness in spades and those fans that put up with it in Man of Steel weren't as forgiving this time around.

The movie opened huge, to exactly NO ONE'S surprise, but audiences weren't loving it and it took an enormous 69% drop in its second week which puts it at 114th all time in second week drop-offs. 114th place may seem as if it's not that big a deal, but when you consider how many movies have been released theatrically since these stats have been tracked (since the 1920's!) and the history of the characters included, coupled with the star power behind the whole thing, a 69% drop off and 114th place all time is shocking, to say the least. Warner Bros. took note of the historic drop off and ran themselves ragged to change course. To make a long story short and get to the point, the follow up to Batman vs Superman was Justice League, and we all know how THAT turned out.

Justice League

Justice League was DC and WB's answer to the tepid critical reception of BvS. They lightened up the tone across the board and after pushing Zack Snyder out the door, brought in the quip master Joss Whedon to finish directing the film. What resulted was a lighthearted, but soulless exercise in over-correction. There were jokes flying like mosquitoes at a Louisiana cookout, even from Batman, which is so wrong for reasons I shouldn't have to explain. Now, I'm not in love with Batman v Superman; I find it mildly entertaining at best, but Justice League was so far below the level of quality of its predecessor that it's hard to believe they even exist in the same cinematic universe. The film was a disappointment and although it got better critical reviews than most of the other DCEU films, it also has the lowly distinction of being the lowest grossing film in the entirety of the DCEU, failing to crack even $650 million. For a movie about the flipping Justice League, that's unbelievable.

So, that's a look at the surprising difference between what fans want and what movie studios think we want. Instead of looking at BvS and realizing that there were certain aspects that needed to be tweaked, namely Superman, they scrapped Snyder's entire vision and made a film that tried SO hard to copy the Marvel formula that it ended up becoming the worst thing a film can become: immediately forgettable.

However, DC or Warner Bros. are not the real loser in all of this. WE are. Most of us still want dark and mature comic book movies, we just want it when appropriate. WB's knee-jerk reaction painted a picture of fans who simply didn't want that kind of film when in reality, we wanted Batman to be dark and Superman to be light, but WB and DC took an all-or-nothing approach to the tone of their burgeoning universe and in the end, threw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Dark Knight Trilogy

If anyone would need proof that audiences still want dark, moody adaptations, one need look no further than WB and DC's own crown jewel in the comic book movie genre, Christopher Nolan's exemplary Dark Knight trilogy. Of the three movies in this trilogy, one, The Dark Knight Rises, is in the top 25 highest grossing movies of all time and another, The Dark Knight, in the top 35. The trilogy itself has eclipsed $1 Billion at the box office and is widely loved by fans and critics alike. The second film, The Dark Knight, is probably the most highly regarded and it is, SURPRISE, easily the darkest of the three. Heath Ledger's legendary performance of The Joker was cinematic brilliance, but he was a dark, DARK character. The film dealt with heavy, weighty issues and was loaded with plot points and exposition on top of the mayhem, horror, and murder. Even with the prevalent darkness draped throughout the entire trilogy, audiences ate it up and asked for seconds. So... do we want dark comic book movies? Well, apparently we do. Conditionally.

Unfortunately, what most of us comic book fans need to come to grips with is that we are, surprisingly, not the target audience for these big screen films. Comic book movies cost studios an awful lot of money to make, and as such, they need to appeal to the widest audience. To do that, the movies often need to offer a broader appeal that darker elements would, at least in part, negate. It's why Marvel has had such unprecedented success with their cinematic universe. They make wildly entertaining films that appeal to all age demographics. Those films make for amazing cinematic experiences, but what they most certainly are not, is dark. Even their darkest film yet, the amazing Avengers: Infinity War, had plenty of levity and jokes aplenty. That is the formula that puts butts in the seat and for better or worse, that's the tone that most comic book films will ultimately attempt to hit.

Darker films will always appeal to a more niche audience. Horror films can make a huge box office splash and hit the number one box office spot, but those kinds of movies are typically much cheaper to produce and will never have the broad appeal that the comic book movies require. The investment from the studios is far too high and they also need to sell a metric butt-load of toys and collectibles to recoup the astounding marketing costs. Darker movies don't have this requirement because they have much, MUCH lower overhead. There's no necessity from the smaller studios to flood Target and Walmart shelves with action figures from The Conjuring or The Grudge. Although, if there were, I would definitely buy them!

Marvel Television

However, for those of us who like the darker elements in our comic book entertainment, television and streaming services have given us the avenue through which to prove our existence! Shows like FX's Legion exists in the X-Men universe and it is, as of this writing, prepping for its 3rd season. It is a largely dark show with heavy, weighty themes and it has resonated extremely well with audiences. It even sits at an impressive 8.4 in audience rating on IMDb. Another example would be Netflix'sDaredevil series. Daredevil carries an even more impressive 8.7 on IMDb and anyone who has watched that spectacular show can attest to its dark, even occasionally oppressive atmosphere. Daredevil would easily net an "R" rating (and a hard one at that) as a film, and it is absolutely adored by most of the audience. The success of Daredevil has even spawned several other dark Netflix Marvel shows such as Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Punisher. Coincidentally, the most light-hearted of these shows, Iron Fist, is also the least revered by fans and critics alike.

Television and streaming services have given us an avenue to enjoy our heroes on the screen and allowed them to keep their darker elements intact. Even shows that didn't last, like Constantine, endeared itself to fans and star Matt Ryan has been inexorably linked to the character in fans' minds. This has allowed him to appear as the character on other live action comic book shows and even voice him in DC's direct-to-disc animated movies. This and more proves that we do, in fact, want dark comic book entertainment; we just want it appropriately dispersed.

Luckily, I believe that we are beginning to find an acceptable balance in terms of desired tone. Although we aren't likely to always get the exact incarnation of every character embodied on the large and small screen, studios seem to be getting on the right track. Marvel seems to be staying the course with their cinematic universe without much deviation, but the difference in tone we're getting from their small screen counterparts is refreshing and entertaining. WB and DC also seem to be righting the ship with some of their upcoming offerings such as the appropriately goofy Shazam as well as the intriguing Joaquin Phoenix Joker film. Everything we've been hearing from Matt Reeve's upcoming Batman film is also highly promising. It looks like DC's decision to create films outside of their cinematic universe could pay off for them as well as us. As much as I despised Justice League, its lingering stench may well be responsible for us getting the kinds of films we want in the tones that we want.

Are Audiences Rejecting Dark Comic Book Movies and TV?

So when it's all said and done, yes, we do want darkness in our comic book entertainment. Conditionally. We want Batman to be dark, we want Punisher to be a ruthless killing machine, we want Daredevil to break bones and spit out his own blood after a fight. Conversely, we want Steve Rogers to be optimistic, we want Shazam to walk around with a goofy grin on his face and we want Superman to be just as concerned with helping an old lady across the street as he is with stopping a terrorist attack. What we DON'T want is anyone on one side spending too much time on the other side. We need the darkness as well as the light. As much as we need the day, also we need the night. We want our comic book heroes to be what they were created to be and the consistency of their individual tones will, ultimately, dictate our level of entertainment.

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Are Audiences Rejecting Dark Comic Book Movies?

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Do we fans really want dark comic book movies and television shows? The quick and easy answer is "Yes"... conditionally. Now, I know and understand that this may seem like a bit of a cop-out, but frankly, it's the only answer that makes any real sense.

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Recently Disney has bought 21st Century Fox and now they have acquired the X-MEN and The Fantastic 4 rights which people have been wanting for a long time. Fox hasn't been doing good with those titles recently. Fans have been wanting Marvel Studios to get the rights for years and they finally got it. Now Marvel Studios gets the right to the heroes on January 1, 2019. That being said, most of the X-Men movies haven't been good at all with some of them actually being good like Logan, Deadpool, Days of Future Past and a few more. Does Dark Phoenix still need to release in theaters if the merger has already happened? Marvel Studios is just going to reboot X-MEN from the ground up again. The movie just got delayed again until June 2019. I would say don't release it in theaters because no one will care anymore now. There's a lot of things wrong with the X-MEN franchise and we are tired of seeing these story lines butchered by poor film making. The reboot is happening so it is confusing as to why this movie is still releasing in theaters when it's not going to matter anymore. They have a good cast for the X-MEN right now but it is soon to be over for them and the franchise as a whole.

-Daniel Rivera

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Dark Phoenix | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

The history of comic book styles is one as dynamic as the stories they contain, shaped not only by the hands of countless writers and artists but by millions of readers across nearly a century. While there might not be any mutants or doomsday weapons in the actual history of comics, its panels are every bit as unpredictable.

The Golden Age (1938-1950)
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The Golden Age was truly an idyllic time. There was a clear stylistic distinction between good and evil, and superheroes were nothing more than happy-go-lucky do-gooders that battled and always defeated villains motivated by money or world domination. And that's exactly why the comics of this age caught like wildfire. They fulfilled every kid's dream of gaining larger-than-life powers, effortlessly overcoming their bullies and leaping out of their colorless neighborhoods into adventure.

Dropping literally out of the sky to kick off the Golden Age, Superman represents the comic book origin story. Newspaper comic strips (where the term 'comic' book comes from, incidentally) already existed along with radio shows featuring masked vigilantes like the Shadow. But Superman was the first super-powered musclehead to don a cape and skin-tight spandex to fight crime. Readers couldn't take their eyes off of him. Superman set the tone for every superhero to come after, even becoming the first to earn his own exclusive comic book dedicated to his adventures in a time when characters were typically restricted to one-shot stories in variety publications.

Art styles of the Golden Age of comics

Though printed in booklet form, comics did not deviate far from their newspaper ancestors, telling a straightforward story through basic sequential images.

Cartooning was simple as publishers were not yet at the level of investing in or attracting serious artists.

Panels were laid out in basic square grids, often full of more dialogue than imagery.

The Silver Age (1950-1971)
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Not unlike the youth of its readers, the Golden Age was a time of whimsy and innocence that couldn't last forever. Fans were growing up-some of them returning home from a horrific World War-and the idea of an invincible, caped avenger casually overcoming the world's great evils became less and less convincing. These factors led to a decline in superhero stories and a rise in comic titles that would appeal to more adult sensibilities-the Silver Age of Comic Books.

Publishers explored racier genres, and by far the most successful was horror. These gruesome tales single-handedly rescued the industry from its fate as a half-remembered fad, and their influence stretched beyond comics to likes of acclaimed film director John Carpenter. The visual styles mimed these darker themes, mixing in surrealistic and sometimes disturbing imagery.

These comic books were so effectively grisly that morality groups-already raging against comics as "junk food for the young mind"-now regarded them as the indisputable tools of the devil, despite the fact that majority of its readership was adults.

After a number Senate hearings, publishers created the Comics Code Authority (CCA), whose strict censorship forbade even the words "horror," "terror" or "crime" in any titles. The result was a growing pains era of artistic experimentation, fast and loose writing and political suppression all rolled into one.

Art styles of the Silver Age of comics

Comics took their inspiration from art movements of the past, most notably surrealism, to illustrate the strange worlds in which their heroes lived.

With comics now established as a lucrative medium, cover images relied less on cheap, attention-grabbing tactics and instead became an artistic representation of the issue's themes or a protagonist's state of mind.

Comic books found true artistic expression for the first time in the Pop Art movement, which appropriated commercial objects such as product labels, magazine ads and comics for the purpose of fine art.

The Bronze Age (1971-1980)
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As suggested by its name, the Bronze Age wasn't as lustrous as the carefree Golden Age or the experimental Silver Age. Having exhausted just about every dastardly scheme a supervillain could hatch, comics gave its heroes even tougher enemies to confront.

It all began with a story in Spider-man in which the hero's best friend suffers a drug overdose. Spider-man is helpless, and his alter ego, Peter Parker, has no choice but to take the stage, relying solely on his gifts of persuasion and empathy to save the day. The CCA opposed the inclusion of drug topics, whatever the message, but Marvel published the issue anyway with reader support. This caused the public to lose respect for the CCA and led to the end of censorship, paving the way for darker stories (more on that later).

Around this time, writer Chris Claremont revived a cancelled Silver Age series about a ragtag group of mutants called the X-men (heard of it?). Adding racially diverse, international characters to its cast, Claremont's second wave of mutants still had godly powers, but now they were reviled by the public for that very reason. Echoing the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, prejudice against the X-men's genetic traits became the comic's most enduring theme.

While the Golden Age portrayed social topics like World War in typical Golden Age fashion-unfailing virtue and easy justice-Bronze Age comics dealt with the gritty realities of urban life in ways that had no real answer. Maybe Captain America could smack Hitler in the face, but how does a superhero attack the intangible foes of bigotry and addiction?

As the stories became more focused around gritty, realistic stories, the style of the imagery morphed to match.

Art styles of the Bronze Age of comic books

Comics traded in surrealism and experimentation for photorealistic depictions of the urban landscape.

The alter-ego side of the superhero's life is given more panel time, and sensational costumes took a backseat to depictions of everyday people.

Depth of focus and lighting gave comics a cinematic style, heightening the reader's emotional connection.

The Dark Age (1980-1993)

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Unlike the actual Dark Ages, this era was where comic books achieved enlightenment. Until then, the Golden Age's uncomplicated right and wrong still echoed (if just subtly updated to suit the times). Here, writers threw all of it out the window and showed us that a comic book hero's world was just as gritty as the enemies he faced.

Stories like "The Dark Knight Returns" and "V for Vendetta" warned of an ominous future no amount of heroism could prevent. Writers crafted characters who were psychologically complex, often dangerously so. Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" introduced us to a Joker who was more than a giggling jester but a frighteningly psychotic serial killer. "Watchmen" gave us heroes that were pushed to questionable actions by the very nature of the world they were trying to defend. During this age, the line between hero and villain wasn't just blurry; writers revealed that it never existed at all.

But it wasn't all dark, even when it was. Independent publisher Image Comics was born, and their flagship hero, Spawn, received unprecedented popularity, enough to spawn (sorry!) a movie adaptation only a few years after its inception. This and several other popular titles such as "Prophet" and "The Savage Dragon" also spawned (last one, promise) more interest in creator-owned comics as a whole.

Ironically, as the imagery in these comics was becoming darker and more stylized-playing with lighting and deep, dark, contrasting colors-the genre was thrust out of the shadows of pulp and into the light of literary awareness. The idea of a sustained comic as a single work of literature led to the publication of several graphic novels, culminating in Art Spiegelman's "Maus," the first comic series to win a Pulitzer Prize. Comic books were finally regarded as a legitimate art form, as malleable and open to creative expression as any medium.

Art styles of the Dark Age of comics

Night was the prominent setting for virtually all stories of this age, leading to an art style that favored strategic lighting and long shadows.

Similarly, artists took their inspiration from hard-boiled noir films of the 40s and 50s, creating gloomy, dubious worlds of smoke, rain, alleyways and silhouettes.

Silver Age horror comics influenced the Dark Age in a more psychological sense, with disturbing portraits and unnatural angles that created a perpetual sense of unease.

The Ageless Age (1993-Present Day)
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We've now reached the point in our journey across many colorful panels at which there is no definitive way to categorize the present "age." Comics have expanded into something without shape or borders-a nebulous mass of nerd wonder.

Advanced technology in film, television and video games has created an unstoppable juggernaut of adaptations, leading to an upsurge in comic book readers from all walks of life. Plus, the impact of Image Comics is still being felt, as readers continue their interest in indie books fueled by the industry's rampant commercialization. No longer restricted to publishing giants Marvel and D.C., writers are free to explore specialty publishers and niche markets, even foregoing traditional distribution channels by publishing their content on the internet.

One thing can be said about our current comic book age: it's a time when the superhero doesn't have to be heroic or dark or even present at all. Comic books can be as pulpy or as serious or as just plain weird as you want them to be. Like the invincible Superman of the optimistic Golden Age, now is a time when anything is possible.

Art styles of the Ageless Age of comics

Advanced technology has led to creative illustrative techniques-everything from digital painting to 3D modeling.

The line between film and comic is now so thin that some series are adapted into motion comics, adding voice actors and animation to the panels with no change to the art itself.

The ubiquity of publishers has led to a wide variety of art styles. Design now varies drastically, depending on the nature of the comic and the choices of the creator (rather than the uniform "in-house" styles of the past).

Got a favorite comic book style?

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Comic books have had a long and vibrant history-far too long to represent in one modest article. The references here represent but a handful of pivotal moments as well as some of my personal favorites. Maybe I missed yours.

Before you start sharpening your adamantium claws, how about sharing your thoughts in the comments?

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The AMAZING history of comic books & their art

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

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One of the things that has always fascinated me about superhero stories is their origin, and how the hero got the power in the first place. In my opinion, one of the most entertaining aspects of comic books are the origins and how characters deal with their powers the first couple of weeks that they have them. In an article published by Smithsonian Mag, the author discusses what is so special about a superhero's origin story and how obtaining those powers emphasizes certain positive aspects of the character’s personality I also think that some of the best themes and messages come out of stories or comic issues that are focusing on the origin story of  certain character, and how that character will come to be known as the hero they eventually become. Even villain origin stories have an important message or impact on the character that later will affect them in life, so I think that origin stories are very important for the most part, and while there may be exceptions, I think that almost all superhero characters need a fleshed out backstory on how they got their powers, and how that first moment of obtaining their powers affected them as they evolved into  villains or heroes. 

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One of the things that has always fascinated me about superhero stories is their origin, and how the hero got the power in the first place. In my opinion, one of the most entertaining aspects of comic books are the origins and how characters deal with their powers the first couple of weeks that they have them. In an article published by Smithsonian Mag, the author discusses what is so special about a superhero's origin story and how obtaining those powers emphasizes certain positive aspects of the character’s personality I also think that some of the best themes and messages come out of stories or comic issues that are focusing on the origin story of  certain character, and how that character will come to be known as the hero they eventually become. Even villain origin stories have an important message or impact on the character that later will affect them in life, so I think that origin stories are very important for the most part, and while there may be exceptions, I think that almost all superhero characters need a fleshed out backstory on how they got their powers, and how that first moment of obtaining their powers affected them as they evolved into  villains or heroes. 

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-Dillon Eldridge

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It is important to never underestimate the importance of a superhero origin. There's no coincidence that the majority of superhero films are, in effect, film adaptations of the character's origins. Heck, in a lot of cases, you will see the character's origin told all over again every time the franchise has been rebooted, no matter how familiar said origin story is to the world. The origin often shows just why readers should care about your character and what motivates your character (plus, of course, if your character has powers, how they got them).

RELATED: Ranking The Best "Suicide Squad" Stories DC's New 52 Began

Some origins are revealed as soon as a character is introduced, while others saw their origin filled in after the fact. It is interesting to note that there doesn't really seem to be much of a difference in quality between the two approaches, so there's clearly no "right" time to introduce a superhero's origin.

Here, then, are the 15 greatest superhero origins of all-time.

Dave Stevens' origin for Cliff Secord, the man known as the Rocketeer, was a striking example of just how simple but effective an origin can be. Debuting as a back-up in 1982's "Starslayer" #2, Cliff Secord was a stunt pilot in 1938 who came to see his plane when he saw a police disturbance. As it turned out, some bad guys had stolen an experimental rocket pack and hidden it in his hangar when they were arrested by the police. Discovering the hidden rocket, Secord began to put together an outfit he could wear while testing the pack out. While he was planning how to do so, he blew off his next flying gig and a drunk pilot filled in.

When Secord realized that the drunk was going to die, he had to make an instant choice: risk his life by trying to use the rocket pack to save the drunk or play it safe and do nothing? It is in moments like these that a hero is truly born. Again, it's a simple origin, but it is so universally appealing that it really works well (the above image is a recap of the origin from "Starslayer" #3).

14. Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes)

The origin for Robbie Reyes, the new Ghost Rider, in 2014's "All-New Ghost Rider" #1 (by Felipe Smith, Tradd Moore and Val Staples) was a stunningly modern take on a classic Silver Age style origin. Robbie Reyes is a young man who works as a mechanic and takes care of his younger brother, who is in a wheelchair. Robbie doesn't make a lot of money, so he makes extra cash by drag racing in a 1969 Dodge Charger that he borrows from the auto shop. Like in all great Silver Age heroes, Robbie made a selfish mistake (for a good reason) that came back to haunt him, but also like in all great Silver Age heroes, Robbie pulled out of it and became a hero.

There's an epic moment where Robbie thinks he is being pulled over by the cops that his whole life flashes before his eyes and the disappointment that this good kid sees is striking. However, they're not the cops and they open fire and seemingly kill Robbie, as there's something that they wanted in the trunk of the Charger. Instead of dying, though, Robbie is transformed into the new Ghost Rider and the car is transformed into his Hell Charger!

In the first issue of "Luke Cage: Hero for Hire" in 1972, Roy Thomas, Arhie Goodwin, George Tuska and Billy Graham gave us such a cinematic origin for Luke Cage that it is not surprising that the "Luke Cage" TV series practically adapted it scene by scene. The concept is that Luke Cage is in prison for a crime he did not commit. Constantly tortured by a corrupt prison guard, Cage eventually agrees to become a test subject for a medical process designed by a kindly scientist.

With a new warden breathing down his neck and fearful of what Cage (then using his real name of "Carl Lucas") would say about him, the guard sabotages the experiment. But in the resulting explosion, instead of dying, Lucas gains impenetrable skin and super-strength. He soon uses his new powers to escape, fearing that he will be blamed for the explosion. After a name change and a costume purchase (designed by John Romita), Cage becomes a hero for hire. It's a powerful origin story.

As mentioned before, one of the trademarks of a great Marvel Silver Age origin is that the protagonists do something selfish and/or stupid before they learn from their experience and become heroes. It's a wonderful hook that resulted in multi-faceted superheroes. In 1961's "Fantastic Four" #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Reed Richards is so angry with the government for scrubbing his mission to space that he decides to prove the utility of the rocket by stealing it, along with his pilot best friend, Ben Grimm. Reed even allows his fiancee and her teenaged brother to come along for the extremely illegal mission.

When it turns out that the rocket wasn't safe and they are all bombarded with cosmic rays, transforming them and giving them strange new powers, they still are inspired to make lemonade out of their cosmic lemons and use their new powers to become superheroes. The first comic of the "Marvel Age" laid out a blueprint that many Marvel characters would follow in the years since.

In 1962's "Incredible Hulk" #1, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman took a slight deviation from the "hero's flaws cause problem" approach, as here, the hero's flaws were the end result of the character! Dr. Bruce Banner is working on a powerful new gamma bomb. However, right before testing was set to begin, a teenager drove onto the test site to prove to his friends that he wasn't a chicken. Banner told his assistant to stop the detonation while he saved the teen. Unluckily for Banner, this was 1962, so every third person in a comic book was a Communist spy. As a result, the evil Igor let the bomb go off.

Instead of killing Banner (how amazing is the sequence where he gets caught in the explosion?) it instead unlocked the rage within Banner and at night, it came out in the form of the Hulk, as Banner transformed into the monster. The teenager who Banner saved, Rick Jones, tried to help the Hulk out as a way to make it up to Banner, while the father of Banner's girlfriend, General Thunderbolt Ross, vows to take the Hulk down. In one simple story, Kirby and Lee came up with an awesome character and a great set-up that would continue for a number of years (Hulk being hunted down by the father of his girlfriend in his human form).

Thor is one of the few Marvel Silver Age heroes whose origin was not really revealed in the first issue of his ongoing feature. 1962's "Journey Into Mystery" #83 by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby, and Joe Sinnott, tells a good chunk of Thor's origin, but not the heart of it. In the story, Dr. Donald Blake is on vacation in Norway when he stumbles upon an alien invasion (don't you just hate how that always happens when you're on vacation?). He hides in a cave and tries to find a weapon. He discovers a walking stick. When he picks it up, he is transformed into the Mighty Thor, God of Thunder. The hammer reveals that whoever holds the hammer, if they are worthy, will gain the powers of Thor.

The trick is that, in the first story, all we know is that Blake got the powers of Thor. It wasn't until later that we got the full origin, which is that Odin banished the real Thor into the form of Don Blake to teach him to learn some humility, so when he found the hammer, he simply regained the ability to become himself again. That's a great hook, especially for a Silver Age comic considering a guy finding a magical artifact by accident is pretty much every other Golden Age hero's origin (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, just not as interesting as this origin).

1964's "Daredevil" #1 by Stan Lee and Bill Everett (with a lot of help from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) introduced us to the world of Matt Murdock. A quiet boy, he grew up with a boxer for a father. One day, Matt was walking home from school when he saw a blind man about to be hit by a truck. Matt knew his father's wishes, but his inner hero couldn't let a person get killed when he could stop it. Matt saved the man, but in the process, was doused with radioactive chemicals which blinded him.

However, because radiation is your friend when you're a superhero, the chemicals gave the now-blind Matt extraordinary senses. He could now do acrobatics that regular people could not pull off, but Matt knew his father's wishes, so he kept his talents to himself and just continued to study. Jack Murdock, though, was killed after betraying a mobster who fixed fights (Jack won a fight he wasn't supposed to). With his father now dead, Matt decided to embrace the "Daredevil" nickname and use his abilities to bring the Fixer to justice. Once that finished, he decided to continue to fight crime while also pursuing a law practice with his law school roommate, Foggy Nelson. What a great set-up for a series (Wallace Wood would add the last touch a few issues later by giving Daredevil his classic all-red costume).

In her debut appearance in 1941's "All-Star Comics" #8 (by William Marston and H.G. Peter), we were quickly caught up on the background of the Amazons who lived apart from "Man's World" on Paradise Island. We also saw how things changed forever when a wounded man, Steve Trevor, washed up on the island. It was decided that someone should go back to Man's World with Trevor and represent the Amazons to the rest of the world.

The only fair way was to do a tournament among all the Amazons. All but Princess Diana, that is, who was forbidden from entering by her mother. One by one, Amazons were eliminated until it came down to two finalists, one who wore a mysterious mask. They played the ultimate Amazon game - "Bullets and Bracelets" - where they would take turns shooting a gun at each other, each trying to block the bullets with her bracelet when on the receiving end of the gunfire. The masked warrior was the winner and the Queen was shocked to learn that it was Princess Diana in disguise! Sadly (while still also with a sense of pride, of course), the Queen gave Diana her new costume as Wonder Woman, Amazon Representative to the world!

7. Captain Marvel/Shazam

In 1941's "Whiz Comics" #2, Bill Parker and C.C. Beck introduced the world to the stunningly bizarre world of Shazam. The opening of the story is this fantastic set piece where a young homeless newsboy, Billy Batson, finds himself following a stranger through a magical subway station. The graphics that Beck used for this journey were psychodelic decades before psychodelic was even a thing! Finally, Billy meets the wizard Shazam, who explains the meaning of the acronym S.H.A.Z.A.M. and why it is such a powerful magic word - the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury!

Billy agrees to become Shazam's champion and says the magical word and is transformed into Captain Marvel (decades later, his name would be retconned to Shazam), Earth's Mightiest Mortal! This was all done in literally five pages, by the way. Captain Marvel then stops a bad guy and in the end, Billy gets a job as a junior radio news reporter. The off-kilter style of Parker and Beck made Captain Marvel really stand out at the time, which is why he soon became one of the most popular characters in all of comics.

1940's "Captain America Comics" #1 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby gave us an iconic heroic journey. Young Steve Rogers is far too scrawny to be accepted into the military, but he wants to serve mankind because he is such a great guy. He is given the opportunity to do just that when he is approached to be part of a government experiment where a Super Soldier Serum will be used on him. He goes through with it, even though it's a risk to his life, and in the end, he is transformed into a perfect mental and physical specimen. Tragically, the secrets of the Super Soldier Serum died with its inventor, as a German spy kills the scientist after Steve's experiment finishes. There will only be one Super Soldier.

However, that doesn't keep Steve from becoming the spy-smashing hero known as Captain America. At the end of his origin, while in his secret identity as a hapless Army soldier, he is discovered changing into his costume by a teenager who hung out at the camp. Young Bucky Barnes soon became Captain America's partner-in-crime, Bucky! This was all in just the first story in the first issue and all this was also a year before the United States even actually entered World War II! Simon and Kirby were ahead of their time in many ways, including coming up with awesome origin stories.

In 1963's "Tales of Suspense" #39 (by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber and Don Heck, with additional work by Jack Kirby), Marvel debuted another one of their flawed heroes. Tony Stark is the world's most famous weapons maker. However, while touring overseas to see how his weapons were doing, he was caught in an explosion and captured by an enemy army (this being the early 1960s, the Asian bad guys are all drawn as pretty racist-looking caricatures). As it turned out, he had shrapnel in his heart and the only thing keeping him alive was a metal contraption that another captured scientist had developed.

They decided to trick their captor by promising to deliver him a weapon he could use, but instead secretly came up with a suit of armor that Tony could wear in order to break them out of the prison (while also powering his heart). Sadly, the armor was not ready when the villains returned, so the other scientist sacrificed himself to buy Tony enough time to finish the armor. Now fixed, Tony wiped the floor with the bad guys and returned to the United States, now a hero but a hero who needs a machine to keep his heart ticking. An Iron Man in name and in spirit.

The origin of Superman was first briefly revealed on the first page of 1938's "Action Comics" #1 before being expanded upon in 1939's "Superman" #1 (both by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) and it is instantly the stuff that modern myths are based upon. On a distant planet known as Krypton, a husband and wife decided that they were going to make sure that their son lived, so they rocketed him away just before their planet was destroyed. The baby landed on Earth where it gained superpowers due to Earth's sun.

A kindly couple adopted the young baby and hid its abilities, but as the baby grew older, it realized that it needed to use its powers for good, so the young baby became Superman, defender of Truth, Justice and the American Way! It really is like the type of story that you would read in a myth. It is such a great hook that it basically launched the era of superheroes in comic books. And originally the origin was literally just a single page (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely later paid homage to this by telling Superman's origin in a single page in "All-Star Superman").

Steve Ditko was really the master of coming up with superheroes who you would kind of not want to be friends with if you met them before they became heroes. The perfect example of that "jerk who reformed and became a hero" was Doctor Strange, whose origin appeared in "Strange Tales" #115 in 1963 (by Ditko and Stan Lee). Doctor Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon who only cared about fame and fortune. After a car accident badly damaged his hands, he devoted his life to finding a way to cure his ailment. He eventually ended up in a mystical city where a mystic known as the Ancient One agreed to help him. Strange didn't believe in magic, but he would do anything to fix his hands, so he began working for the Ancient One doing odd jobs.

During one of those jobs, he learns that the Ancient One's top apprentice, Baron Mordo, is trying to kill the Ancient One! Mordo uses magic to shut Strange up to keep him from warning the Ancient One. Thus, the only way to stop Mordo was for Strange to learn magic, so he put aside his own desires to learn magic in order to save the Ancient One. He did so and thus became the Ancient One's new prized pupil and soon a master of the mystic arts! That's such a tight origin, it is great that the "Doctor Strange" film followed it closely.

The story of Spider-Man is similar to Doctor Strange, but it has an even better hook. 1962's "Amazing Fantasy" #15 (by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko) sees young Peter Parker living a boring, nerdy life with his uncle and his aunt, who adore him. Things change when a radioactive spider bites him and gives him superpowers. He decides to use these powers not for the good of the world, but for the good of his wallet, and becomes an entertainer (one of the ways that this origin is a step-up from Strange is that Spider-Man continued to screw up even when he had the power to do otherwise). One day, he doesn't try to stop a burglar who is running from the cops. "Not my problem," he thinks.

Well, it turned out to be his problem after all, as the burglar went to Queens and ended up murdering Peter's beloved Uncle Ben! Peter uses his wrestling costume to take down the crook, but is shocked when he discovers that it is the man he let get away (note that the original panels had Spider-Man's eyes visible, reprints changed that - we figured that we should show you the original one here, on top of the reprint image for the article's banner). This teaches Spider-Man a lesson that will drive his superhero career for years to come: with great power comes great responsibility. Brilliant work.

When Batman debuted in 1939's "Detective Comics" #27, it was unclear what drove him to becoming a hero. During the Golden Age, no one really cared about the motivation behind heroes, which is why you'll see a ton of half-hearted origin stories during the 1940s (or heroes without any origins at all). In "Detective Comics" #33, however, (by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and either Bill Finger or Gardner Fox - we lean towards Finger for the writing of the origin), a two-page origin was revealed before the main story began (the main story was by Fox, which is why people think he wrote the origin, as well. Finger was Batman's co-creator, which is the main reason people think he likely also came up with Batman's origin).

In it, young Bruce Wayne watched his mother and father get murdered in front of him. And at that moment, this little boy decided that he was going to declare war on crime by becoming a perfect crimefighter, so he did just that. He didn't get bitten by a spider or learn magic from an Ancient One, he just made a goal for himself and achieved it. When you throw in the excellent sequence where a bat crashing through his window inspires him to dress as Batman to scare cowardly and superstitious criminals, the origin of Batman has it all and is our #1 pick!
What do you think is the best superhero origin of all-time? Let us know in the comments section!

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The Greatest Superhero Origins of All Time

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It is important to never underestimate the importance of a superhero origin. There's no coincidence that the majority of superhero films are, in effect, film adaptations of the character's origins. Heck, in a lot of cases, you will see the character's origin told all over again every time the franchise has been rebooted, no matter how familiar said origin story is to the world.

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So far we've talked a lot about the fundamentals of what it means to be a super hero, villain, or anti-hero. But I thought it would be interesting to delve a little bit deeper into something every Super hero has, even the villains, and anti-heroes get them too. Something very important to building blocks of every character. An origin story. They setup arcs, plot points, motive, essentially everything that led to these people dawning the cape or putting on the mask. So why do we like origin stories so much? Check out this article that will tell you why.

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"Why is every superhero movie an origin story?" complained Entertainment Weekly film critic Adam Markovitz after seeing a trailer for this summer's Man of Steel -yet another version of the 75-year-old Superman saga. Perhaps we love origin stories, Markovitz suggested, because they "show the exact moment when a normal guy goes from being Just Like Us to being somehow better, faster, stronger."

I'm inclined to disagree. As a clinical psychologist who has written books about the psychology of superheroes, I think origin stories show us not how to become super but how to be heroes, choosing altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power. I've learned this through hundreds of conversations at comic book conventions, where fans have been remarkably candid about their lives and the inspiration they draw from superhero stories.

In one form or another the superhero origin story has been around for millennia: A hero battles "supernatural" forces and returns home "from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man," as the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote.

In my surveys of the genre, I've found that superheroes undergo three types of life-altering experiences that we can relate to.

The first is trauma, which lies at the heart of Batman's origin story, in which Bruce Wayne dedicates himself to fighting crime after seeing his parents murdered. In real life, many people experience "stress-induced growth" after a trauma and resolve to help others, even becoming social activists.

The second life-altering force is destiny. Consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about a normal teenager who discovers she's the "Chosen One"-endowed with supernatural powers to fight demons. Buffy is reluctant to accept her destiny, yet she throws herself into her new job. Many of us identify with Buffy's challenge (minus the vampires) of assuming a great responsibility that compels her to grow up sooner than she wants to.

Lastly, there's sheer chance, which transformed a young Spider-Man, who was using his power for selfish purposes until his beloved uncle was murdered by a street thug. Spider-Man's heroism is an example of how random adverse events cause many of us to take stock of our lives and choose a different path.

At their best, superhero origin stories inspire us and provide models of coping with adversity, finding meaning in loss and trauma, discovering our strengths and using them for good purpose. (Wearing a cape or tights is optional.)

Comic book writers could have chosen not to endow their characters with origin stories. (In fact, Batman's back story wasn't published until the comic's seventh installment.) But those writers were keen observers of human nature. And they were able to translate those observations into captivating stories reflecting aspects of psychology that were confirmed by researchers decades later. In doing so, they tap into our capacity for empathy, one of the greatest powers of all.

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The Psychology Behind Superhero Origin Stories

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How does following the adventures of Spider-Man and Batman inspire us to cope with adversity?

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I feel like there is almost an inside joke amongst superhero fans about how overdone some heroes' origin stories have become (the Spiderman and Batman franchises are particularly guilty). Interestingly, I feel as though this is not begrudged about as much in conjunction to villain origin stories. Heroes backstories are formulaic (Batman is always going to become the Batman because his parents died), whereas villain’s backstories have more room for creative liberties. So, if people have fatigue with these familiar hero stories, why are they still so prevalent?

In their article, psychologist Rosenberg categorizes what they believe to be the three most popular origin story types—trauma, destiny, and chance. Ultimately, Rosenberg believes these three categories are so popular because they are relatable to the viewer. We enjoy seeing somebody at their lowest, as we have been, and turning that pain into something extraordinary. Rosenberg emphasizes that extraordinary aspect of heroism does not come from strength and power, but the pursuit of altruism above all else in the face of adversity. However, I do wonder if the popularity, or even relatability, of origin stories is strictly derivative of altruism. As some of the other articles my classmates have posted point out, nowadays antiheroes as well as villains (whose motives are not always of the altruistic variety) are becoming even more popular than regular heroes.
-Rachel Levine

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"Why is every superhero movie an origin story?" complained Entertainment Weekly film critic Adam Markovitz after seeing a trailer for this summer's Man of Steel -yet another version of the 75-year-old Superman saga. Perhaps we love origin stories, Markovitz suggested, because they "show the exact moment when a normal guy goes from being Just Like Us to being somehow better, faster, stronger."

I'm inclined to disagree. As a clinical psychologist who has written books about the psychology of superheroes, I think origin stories show us not how to become super but how to be heroes, choosing altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power. I've learned this through hundreds of conversations at comic book conventions, where fans have been remarkably candid about their lives and the inspiration they draw from superhero stories.

In one form or another the superhero origin story has been around for millennia: A hero battles "supernatural" forces and returns home "from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man," as the mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote.

In my surveys of the genre, I've found that superheroes undergo three types of life-altering experiences that we can relate to.

The first is trauma, which lies at the heart of Batman's origin story, in which Bruce Wayne dedicates himself to fighting crime after seeing his parents murdered. In real life, many people experience "stress-induced growth" after a trauma and resolve to help others, even becoming social activists.

The second life-altering force is destiny. Consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about a normal teenager who discovers she's the "Chosen One"-endowed with supernatural powers to fight demons. Buffy is reluctant to accept her destiny, yet she throws herself into her new job. Many of us identify with Buffy's challenge (minus the vampires) of assuming a great responsibility that compels her to grow up sooner than she wants to.

Lastly, there's sheer chance, which transformed a young Spider-Man, who was using his power for selfish purposes until his beloved uncle was murdered by a street thug. Spider-Man's heroism is an example of how random adverse events cause many of us to take stock of our lives and choose a different path.

At their best, superhero origin stories inspire us and provide models of coping with adversity, finding meaning in loss and trauma, discovering our strengths and using them for good purpose. (Wearing a cape or tights is optional.)

Comic book writers could have chosen not to endow their characters with origin stories. (In fact, Batman's back story wasn't published until the comic's seventh installment.) But those writers were keen observers of human nature. And they were able to translate those observations into captivating stories reflecting aspects of psychology that were confirmed by researchers decades later. In doing so, they tap into our capacity for empathy, one of the greatest powers of all.

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The Psychology Behind Superhero Origin Stories

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How does following the adventures of Spider-Man and Batman inspire us to cope with adversity?

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MF DOOM is one of my favorite rappers/producers alive right now. I was captivated not only by his impressive lyricism, but I was intrigued by the persona he has taken up. His real name is Daniel Dumile, but most fans don't even know that due to his lack of interaction with the hip-hop community. MF DOOM wears an iconic metal mask that resembles the mask of Fantastic Four villain Dr. Doom. He hides his true identity behind the mask which allows MF DOOM to live a "normal" life outside of his music career. Even though we know little about MF DOOM he has managed to inspire a whole generation of artists who take up personas and put on a facade.

MF DOOM owns his villainous persona by incorporating samples from Dr. Doom into his music, by successfully hiding his true identity from the general hip hop community, and by actively maintaining his villainous persona wherever he goes. The article that I choose talked about how MF DOOM sent a fake DOOM out to perform in one of his shows. There has been a lot of cases of MF DOOM sending out fake DOOMs to perform, and although I personally would be annoyed if the experience happened to me, I understand and respect the reasoning behind MF DOOM's actions. "Everything we do is villain style" is what MF DOOM told the media with regards to the fake DOOMs. The reason why I respect this is because it takes a lot of energy to consistently fill this persona. MF DOOM, unlike most popular artists, is not concerned with commercial success, so he does everything he can so he can enjoy his personal life. I understand the anger and frustration that the people at the show felt when they saw a fake DOOM come on stage, but at the end of the day Daniel Dumile is a villain, and that is what a villain is going to do.

Like most villains, MF DOOM's villainous style was influenced a lot by the way society was treating MF DOOM. Soon after the death of his brother, his original group KMD (MF DOOM, his brother, and some other guy) was dropped from their label for having controversial artwork. The artwork was not something that was offensive, but it was more for a political and social statement that correlated with the name of their album Black Bastards. After being dropped from a label, MF DOOM proceeded to avoid the commercial success that labels provided and decided to release his music through indie/underground labels. This frustration and anger towards commercial rap music is often displayed in his raps, one in particular called "Beef Raps" where he highly criticizes the state of popular rap music in America.
_Ignacio Sedano

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This past weekend, British DJ collective Livin' Proof hosted a party called "Livin' DOOM", which was meant to feature a DJ set by DOOM himself. As reports, that allegedly didn't quite happen. According to a Facebook post from the promoters, the rapper sent what seems to be a masked imposter to the show. (Check out a picture of the alleged imposter, who indeed does not look like Daniel Dumile, here).According to the statement from Livin' Proof, there were a number of complications leading up to the appearance. Read the full statement below.

When contacted by Pitchfork, a representative for DOOM offered no comment.

DOOM has been accused of sending imposters to shows before. The rapper addressed the issue in a rare interview with Rolling Stone in 2009:

"Everything that we do is villain style. Everybody has the right to get it or not get it. Once I throw it out, it's there for interpretation. It might've seemed like it didn't go well, but how do we know that wasn't just pre-orchestrated so that we're talking about it now? I tell you one thing: People are asking more now for live shows and I'm charging more, so it must've worked somewhere...I tell you one thing: when you come to a Doom show, come expecting to hear music, don't come expecting to see."

In other, less controversial news, DOOM's collab album with Jneiro Jarel as JJ DOOM, Key to the Kuffs, is out now via Lex Records. Watch a video for a song from that LP, "Guv'nor", below.

Livin' Proof statement:

To everyone who came down to our Livin' DOOM event on Saturday and are questioning whether that was the real DOOM - we are in the same position as you. We had a legitimate contracted gig from his official booking agent and were in contact throughout the booking process with his US management, and label. We were even talking and working with the promoters of DOOM's forthcoming London live shows in October and November.
As far as we were concerned, the real DOOM was going to appear... we received news from DOOM's management on the morning of the gig that DOOM wanted more money or he would not show up. This show was done and intended as a very special and intimate show which was not about making money but putting on an incredible party in a very small capacity venue. As we wanted the show to go ahead and was left to ransom to this extortionate request, we agreed this even though this was a breach of our agreed contract. In hindsight, we should have cancelled the show then and there...

At 9.30pm after we had open the doors, we were told by management that he would appear but would not DJ and was just going to sign autographs. We said this was unacceptable as we had agreed and paid for a DJ set... 10 minutes later we received a call saying that he would DJ... Or that's what we were led to believe.

As many of the people in the venue noticed, there is a very strong possibility the person that was finally sent down was not DOOM himself.

Doing this show has taught us a lot about how some artists operate and how they feel they can treat others and, most importantly, their fans. As fans of DOOM ourselves, this has left a very sour taste in our mouth.

Anyone who has been to Livin' Proof parties always know that we do our utmost to provide the best quality show and we are so sorry for anyone who came down and were disappointed by the DJ set from the artist supposedly meant to be DOOM.

We will do our utmost to make this up to anyone who purchased a ticket for this event. We paid the fee upfront to Daniel Dumile's bank account and have the receipts to prove this. We will be seeking legal advice and are doing our best to get his show fee refunded from DOOM and his management and will then take suitable steps after this action.
All the best,
Livin' Proof Crew.

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DOOM Allegedly Sends Imposter to DJ Set in London

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This past weekend, British DJ collective Livin' Proof hosted a party called "Livin' DOOM", which was meant to feature a DJ set by DOOM himself. As reports, that allegedly didn't quite happen. According to a Facebook post from the promoters, the rapper sent what seems to be a masked imposter to the show.

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For decades, we as viewers have watched epic series consisting of a protagonist and an antagonist that go head to head in a world ending situation. We find it captivating and exciting; that being said, it's never been hard to distinguish a super hero versus a villain. The hero and the villain share some characteristics as far as their pasts and upbringings but Masson states that despite that, "They're of course at opposite ends of the spectrum." Also noted that for the plot to work in a movie or comic, the interaction between the two is key and that they must share somethings in order to understand their opponent. They are also both considered leaders (one good, one bad). The reason I chose this article is because while we focus on the idea that the two are complete opposites of each other, we fail to realize that their chemistry is based off of the personal things they have in common. Masson goes on to discuss how we may be presented with "relaxed" hero/villain versus a brave and impulsive one. While not mentioned in the article, a great example is the new movie Venom that recently hit theaters. Instead of having two separate characters, they are combined into one and demonstrate this idea of sharing more things in common than we originally believe.

-Laura Vacek

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Heroes and villains-they're of course at opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of characters, but they share more than might be obvious at first glance, and if you're in the business of writing fiction and creating such characters, it can be useful to think about those things.

Of course, the principal element that heroes and villains have in common is their function in terms of the story: it is their interaction which determines the main action of the plot. At its most basic, it is either that the hero is being specifically targeted by the villain, or the villain has general nefarious plots which the hero sets out to foil.

But a common function in the plot isn't the only thing these two extreme types of characters share. They are leaders, not followers, and they also share high doses of intelligence, imagination and determination, all of which are neutral qualities to be used for either good or bad. (I'm talking here about major, central heroic or villainous figures, not the minor characters, good and bad, who line up behind them). And I also think of heroes and villains as blowing hot or cold. What I mean by that is that I think major heroes and villains can be each basically divided into two broad sub-categories, Type Hot and Type Cold. Of course these are only very broad generalisations; traits will often bleed into each other. But basically:

*Type Hot Hero: impulsive, brave, sometimes foolhardy, generous, often impatient, gregarious or solitary, prone to wild temper, pride and defiance but also with a basic sweetness to them: a good character who struggles to be good, it doesn't come easily. They are often immediately or soon attractive to other good characters, as they have a certain charisma. Can be momentarily tempted out of a hero's trajectory by a clever villain of either type, playing on their impulsiveness;

*Type Cold, or more attractively, Cool, Hero: reserved, thoughtful, often solitary, self-controlled, ironic, stoical, brave, but without the impulsiveness of the 'hot' type. Or else, much less commonly, they can be sweet, dependable, kind, apparently accepting but inwardly resisting. This type of hero often emerges unexpectedly and has less outward charisma than the 'hot' type. A 'cool' type hero is a good character whose inner integrity really grounds them, they are less easily tempted, but the results when they are tend to be worse than for the 'hot' type.

*Type Hot Villain: impulsive, reckless, ruthless, violent, arrogant (the extreme end of pride), physically intimidatory, often bullying, yet calculating. A fearsome opponent, but out in the open: the wolf in wolf's clothing, if you like. This sort of villain is not to be thought of as stupid: real villains are always intelligent, in books, unless they are minor villains of the henchman type. They often attract hordes of followers as they have a certain violent, dark charisma. Usually defeated by clever heroes of the 'cool' type, or less often, the 'hot' sort who have learned self-control.

*Type Cold Villain: self-controlled, calculating, deceitful, manipulative, ironic, cruel, ruthless. This is the wolf in sheep's clothing: for my money, the most frightening enemy. They are highly intelligent and imaginative and often emerge unexpectedly, and though they often have fanatically devoted followers, they generally do not have obvious charisma. But a villain of the 'cold' type can sometimes masquerade behind the mask of an apparently warm and charismatic heroic type-and this can be one of the worst of all!

So, there's quite a bit in common in terms of those hot and cold qualities, for a different emphasis on say, anger or pride, can lead to very different results depending on whether the character is hero or villain. But of course there's two very big differences: and that is self-centredness and the will to power. Both of these things are the absolute essence of true major villains, but are absent from true, major heroes. It does not mean that heroes don't sometimes act selfishly or foolishly, or that villains aren't capable of being brave or even merciful (when it suits them!). It doesn't mean either that heroes don't know how to exercise power or that villains are always obviously powerful. What it means is, simply, that villains seek power for its own sake and to exercise it over others and their actions are motivated by their own interests. Contrary-wise, as Lewis Carroll would say, heroes do not seek power for themselves, but for the good of others(and often walk away from it or reject at the end, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, for instance). And their actions are motivated not only in the cause of defending themselves, but also, and crucially, defending others, often at the risk of their lives.

That's why I think it's so difficult to write a really good and satisfying novel based on the villain's point of view, though of course it has been done, and successfully too, by a few people. The main problem with seeing it from a villain's point of view is that fundamentally a real villain is not interested in other people except as pawns or obstacles, even when they are observant and understand of others' motives. If the villain is perceptive and has a sense of humour, it can work, but the villain's point of view runs the risk of being chillingly detached and thus not engaging to readers. Mind you, I think the too-good hero is also a turn-off to readers and that sort rarely features as a point of view narrator; much more engaging is the kind who you feel could be tempted, and who struggles with their calling. The flawed, reluctant hero may be common in literature, but that's because he or she resonates strongly with readers, expressing deep human longings and hopes.

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Heroes and villains-they're of course at opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of characters, but they share more than might be obvious at first glance, and if you're in the business of writing fiction and creating such characters, it can be useful to think about those things.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/11/20/jon-bernthal-is-perfect-as-frank-castle-in-the-punisher-and-a-new-mcu-a-lister/#71dea06748f9
This link is to a review of the Netflix series The Punisher, starring Jon Bernthal in the lead role. The reviewer offers a pretty fair assessment of the show, with a focus on Bernthal's performance. Though, the review is really more of a jumping-off point to get people interested in watching it, there are mentions of how Bernthal's performance and the overall pace of the show help to flesh out the Punisher as more than just a revenge-driven killing machine. I have seen the show, and I really enjoyed it, especially because it does not shy away or gloss over the issues with the character of Frank Castle. Antiheroes are by their very nature controversial, but when done well, be it in comics or on film, they can act as a meta-criticism or deconstruction of the superhero character. That is part of what makes antiheroes appeal to me, but also they seem more human than most superheroes. Just like the hard-boiled, hard-drinking detectives in gritty noir fiction, antiheroes have to struggle with very real questions about identity, morality, violence, and purpose. I think that recent superhero fiction has gotten better at humanizing the superheroes, but to me antiheroes will always be a better vehicle for tackling those issues both within and outside the genre. Of course, the storyteller still has to give the character room to have the depth and development necessary to create the internal conflict. Netflix's Punisher is  a good example of how that can be done.

-Bryce Taylor

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This article looks at the changes that the movie industry is facing in terms of superhero movies.  Specifically, there is a fear that audiences are getting weary of super hero films, and that Hollywood will have to adapt in order to keep these narratives profitable.  The article looks at the recent trends of anti-heroes, as they appear to be more and more prevalent in mainstream media.  For example, Deadpool has been extremely popular and profitable, and the recent premier of Venom received unexpectedly large box office returns.  These movies rely on more flawed protagonists whose motives are not as clean cut as someone like Captain America.  This article argues that the more realistic, gritty heroes are what audiences are starting prefer.  That is why everyone loved the recent Batman films.  Anti-heroes are very effective in filling this desire for audiences, as their actions are typically rooted in their own self-interest and their own struggles.  While they may not want to save the day, it something that they may have no choice but to do.  This is more relatable for audiences as everyone faces tasks in their life that they may not have a choice to do, but it is necessary for their future/well being.

Jay Ostrom

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The looming prospect of "superhero fatigue" has been hovering off the coast of Hollywood at least since the last time Tom Hardy starred in a blockbuster comic-crusader movie. That commercial fear has yet to materialize, yet last weekend may have brought studio suits some comfort.

Hardy, of course, played the Batman villain Bane to great acclaim in 2012's "The Dark Knight Rises." At that point, even such superhero-cinema directors as Matthew Vaughn had already said audiences were growing weary at caped adaptations.

Box-office receipts, as we know, haven't borne that out.

Since 2012, for instance, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has offered 15 movies that have each grossed more than a half-billion dollars worldwide - and six of those have grossed more than a billion dollars. Add films such as Warner Bros./DC's "Wonder Woman" ($822 million worldwide), as well as the "Deadpool" franchise ($1.52 billion total) and "Logan" ($619 million) for Fox, and big-screen superheroes are doing just fine, thank you, long after their exaggerated death notices.

What has helped buoy the box office in recent years is the growing diversity of the title superheroes, and next spring's "Captain Marvel" will be a fresh test of increased marquee representation.

Yet what will Hollywood do if cracks begin to appear in the commercial ceiling - some day after the fourth "Avengers" team-up has concluded a Marvel Studios phase? (Chris Evans has already wrapped his Cap role with a social media bow.) Surely at some point, superhero movies - like the comic-book industry they spring from - will need to dramatically adapt. But which way to go?

If Sony's new hit "Venom" is any indication, perhaps that pivot will involve asking: Whose story takes the center spotlight? It's often said the difference between a good and great superhero movie sits with its villains.

Once we're fatigued by superheroes as our stars, then, will comic-book villains and antiheroes represent the freshest title stories to tell?

Deadpool's roots as villain and antihero - successfully adapted as cinematic crime-fighter - appear to have already pointed one way forward.

Now, Sony has scored with another popular Marvel villain/vigilante born in the Reagan/Bush years.

Despite the critical drubbing, Ruben Fleischer's "Venom" soared above projections over the weekend, grossing $80 million domestically - and a whopping $205 million worldwide in its debut.

That audience embrace is reflected, too, in the film's CinemaScore of B-plus.

How encouraging must it be at Hollywood studios packing comic-book franchises that even such a far-from-great movie - if slotted into a typically soft time such as October - can score big?

A half-century ago, amid the turbulence of the Vietnam era, the Hollywood antihero enjoyed a popular '60s pinnacle with classic films such as Stuart Rosenberg's "Cool Hand Luke" (starring an impossibly charismatic Paul Newman) and Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" (starring the heat between Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway), all riding the rise of Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy that made Clint Eastwood a global star. (Of course, they would set the stage for a wealth of '70s antiheroes and vigilantes, to boot.)

Could Hardy, as a symbiote-hosting journalist in "Venom," be signaling to the Spandexed pretty boys that gritty life outside the law is the way to go?

If so, Todd Phillips' quirky Joker project, starring Joaquin Phoenix, could end up being less off the beaten trail than some anticipate.

Sony has the opening-weekend receipts from "Venom" to justify building out its Spider-Man universe.

Now the larger question could prove to be: Will Hollywood soon embrace star comic-book vigilantes the way Hardy embraces a mouthy parasite?

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Will antiheroes like Venom become savior for eventual superhero fatigue?

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The looming prospect of "superhero fatigue" has been hovering off the coast of Hollywood at least since the last time Tom Hardy starred in a blockbuster comic-crusader movie. That commercial fear has yet to materialize, yet last weekend may have brought studio suits some comfort.Hardy, of course, played the Batman villain Bane to great acclaim in 2012's "The Dark Knight Rises."

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Why are we obsessed with the anti hero? Jill Ingebritsen

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Why are we obsessed with the anti hero? Jill Ingebritsen

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We like them because they are an honest human portrayal of all that is bad in humanity. When we see it played out on screen it can be cathartic to see that one character break all of the laws and harm people selfishly to attain their goal. There is something brave about the character, that although they may fear repercussions for what they are doing, they still will do anything to attain their goal. There is something inspiring about it, Looking at the main character in breaking bad, people root for him throughout the entire series, although he becomes more and more corrupt, you are never rooting for the people trying to catch him. I think this feeds into the human mentality that if they feel a certain way, or do horrible things, they are physically manifested in character onscreen and therefore never have to act on that horrible feeling. Seeing the reality of what happens when you make illegal life altering choices played out, I think calms a lot of people down. Also the whole idea of counter culture being appealing has always been a fad. Do the new, cool, dangerous thing, it'll be fun and no one else has done it before. This is a mentality that fascinates a lot of people, especially young ones. There will always be someone rooting for the bad guys because they inherently disagree with a justice system and the engrained inequalities in the world. We want someone to fight back against a broken system, because we are scared to.

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Think about your favorite television shows. Think about your favorite character. Is he a power-hungry politician? Is he maybe a motorcycle gang member, or is he a narcissistic philanderer in ad sales? Do you root for the man cooking the meth or the DEA agent trying to stop him? Do you root for the savior or the criminal?

Our generation has entered into a new era, which many are deeming "The Golden Age" or "The Dawn" of television. And with this Golden Age comes a new type of character -- a new leading role -- that's been the staple piece of almost every Emmy- nominated program. It's the man who lies and cheats. It's the woman who trades sex for favors, deals weed in gated communities and sleeps with married men. It is the anti-hero.

The anti-hero is the protagonist who does not have the traditional qualities of the admirable leading man or woman. He or she lacks courage, kindness and nobility, but most notably, moral goodness. It's a character wrought with flaws and demons, disregarding the normal societal processes for his or her own agenda. It's become a compelling phenomenon based on the concept that we are rooting for someone who is violating everything we've ever known as right.

The best example of the anti-hero archetype is " Breaking Bad."The AMC series was the first national celebration of the anti-hero since " The Sopranos." An entire nation was found rooting for a meth lord who turned to murder and betrayal to keep his empire functioning. We watch the dissolution of his marriage, friendships and career in an attempt to gain power and wealth.

We watched him turn from an acquiescent chemistry teacher to a power-hungry drug dealer and still never faltered in our allegiance and devotion to him. It's a strange thing when you step away from the man you've been idolizing and look at him as who he really is: a criminal, a madman and villain.

As a whole, we have come to celebrate the reign of the flawed men and women who stand in the spotlight. From " Breaking Bad," " American Horror Story," " The Sopranos," " Girls," " Boardwalk Empire," almost every show we love is led by a flawed character -- a man or woman with questionable actions and motives -- always self-serving and determined to succeed at any cost.

We follow these characters throughout their journeys: their quests for redemption, fame, fortune and love -- the same common goals we find ourselves longing after. And like ourselves, we see the selfishness that comes with attaining goals and dreams. We watch other people commit betrayal and wrongdoing that comes with human nature.

Unlike the shows of our parents' generation, when the main characters were examples of the ideal American citizen, housewife, husband or child, these main characters are the undesirables, the flawed and the evil that encompasses the true American culture, not just projections of what we want it to be.

But why do we love them? Why do we find ourselves rooting for the ones who steal, lie and cheat? Why do we support the ones who sell meth and murder innocents? The ones who betray their lovers, alienate their friends and get even at any cost. What does this say about us?

It says we're realistic; we understand the true fabric of what makes this country great, the flaws of the people and their selfish motives. We live in an age of divorce, corruption and celebrity meltdowns, realizing at a young age that no one is perfect and watching someone perfect isn't what we want to see. We want to see the people like us, the people with flaws and mixed morals. We want to watch the people who don't know how to behave correctly all the time and don't always make the morally correct decision.

We love them because it's cathartic to love them. They make us feel better about those lies we told and those acts of betrayal. We don't feel so bad about our own mistakes and flaws when we see others doing the same.

Here's why the anti-hero is the most relateable character on TV today:

They're Flawed Like We Are

One of the main things that attracts us so much to the anti-hero is the relatability. Since there is no such thing as a perfect person, why would we want to watch one on screen? Empathy is one of the strongest emotions we have and being able to understand a character, even when he is murdering innocents and betraying loved ones, has a very profound effect.

They're Complex

Life isn't simple and neither are we. We are all racked with insecurities, demons and regrets. We like to watch people with emotions and hardships like ours. We expect the characters that we've invested so much time in to have the same complex emotions as ourselves. A housewife who is always chipper and happy isn't realistic; we can't relate to her.

They're Strong

Like the hero, the anti-hero is also strong, even if he doesn't have the same moral grounding. He is determined, not letting anything get in his way, which usually is what leads him to take the immoral path. We respect the anti-hero because he demands respect. He is a force to be reckoned with.

Their Intentions Are Admirable

While their actions may be questionable, their motives are always pure. In the case of Walter White, the chemistry teacher only took to meth dealing to provide for his family in a time of need. Though his actions were corrupt, his motives were pure. As Machiavelli pointed out, the ends justify the means, right?
Photo credit: Batman

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Villains Do It Better: Why This Generation Is Obsessed With The Anti-Hero

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Think about your favorite television shows. Think about your favorite character. Is he a power-hungry politician? Is he maybe a motorcycle gang member, or is he a narcissistic philanderer in ad sales? Do you root for the man cooking the meth or the D...

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Who will you be, Superhero or Supervillain? 

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Who will you be, Superhero or Supervillain? 

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Marystella Larmore

This article points outs some interesting questions. If humans were to be given superpowers, what would we use them for? will we use them as a superhero would or as a supervillain? I think this is something that many people have thought of, myself included because why wouldn't we want superpowers? according to the article, this would depend on an individual's moral compass and I agree for the most part because it is often what dictates our actions in the situations we find ourselves in. And our values and beliefs are a huge part of this. As people we have our own moral code that we live by and that guides us in the decisions that we make. Spiderman and Dr Octopus are used as an example here, where Peter was just a shy, quiet kid before but when he did get his powers he did use them for good. He had a responsibility to his family and to the citizens. Dr Octopus on the other hand became violent and vengeful. Even though he was a good person before, a well respected scientist, he became a supervillain. Although we have to take into account a person's upbringing and the kind of environment they grew up in, because it can determine whether we put our powers towards good or evil, this is not always the case. Some may see these super abilities as a responsibility like Peter Parker but others would just turn to the other side. For me, personally, I would like to think that I'd use my superpowers for good if I had any but I honestly don't know.

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Illustration by Charlie Powell.

From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes-or supervillains?

You might think the answer would depend on each individual's moral compass. Batman uses human-enhancement technologies to fight crime because he loathes injustice, while the Joker uses them to wreak mayhem because he's a psychopath. In reality, though, most people possess the capacity for both good and evil. Which one wins out at any given time depends not only on our genes and our upbringing, but the circumstances in which we find ourselves. For Peter Parker, a shy and neurotic kid, the transformation into Spider-Man brings out a deep sense of social responsibility. For Otto Octavius, once a respected scientist, becoming Dr. Octopus means becoming a vengeful megalomaniac. Comic books typically provide pop-psychological back stories to explain the choices each character makes in response to the pressure of being extraordinary. But what if it also turns out that some types of powers inherently lend themselves to altruism, while others make us more likely to lie, cheat, steal, or kill?

Last year, Stanford researchers recruited 60 volunteers for an experiment on how virtual superpowers could influence moral decisions. In an immersive virtual-reality simulation, 30 of the subjects were granted the power of flight, like Superman, while the other 30 rode as passengers in a helicopter. Each volunteer had the same mission-to cruise over a city following an earthquake in search of a stranded child. The experiment was rigged so that everyone would find the boy in the same amount of time and save his life.

After the simulation, an experimenter sat down to debrief each subject. As they talked, the experimenter "accidentally" knocked over a canister full of pens, then waited five seconds before beginning to pick them up. The volunteers in the helicopter group took an average of six seconds to start helping clean up the spill, and some didn't pitch in at all. But those in the Superman group jumped right in, with most coming to the experimenter's aid even before she started gathering the pens herself.

The findings suggest that acquiring a superpower can spark benevolent tendencies. Give someone Superman's abilities, and she'll start to behave a little more like Superman. Clinical psychologist Robin Rosenberg, who helped design the experiment, said its outcome supported her hypothesis that people might treat an extraordinary ability as a sort of gift that brings with it a responsibility to help others. That's an encouraging finding, particularly in light of Lord Acton's maxim that power corrupts.

But wait-what if the researchers had given their subjects a different superpower? Rosenberg's co-author, Stanford communications professor Jeremy Bailenson, explained that they chose the power of flight partly because it seemed like a classic "do-gooder" sort of ability. "We thought about giving them X-ray vision, but that would have been a little creepy," he noted.

It would be nice to think that morality emanates from the sheer goodness of people's souls, but research has consistently shown that people behave far better when they think they're being watched. In a 2010 study, Newcastle University researchers found that just hanging posters of a pair of staring eyes on the walls of a cafeteria was enough to cut littering in half. That's why Rosenberg, who has written a book on the psychology of superheroes, draws a distinction between visible powers and stealth powers. Soaring above the masses is a highly conspicuous activity, so it would behoove the flyer to be on his best behavior. X-ray vision is stealthier-you could use it for nefarious purposes without making a scene.

The ultimate stealth power, of course, is invisibility. Its promise is that of impunity-the ability to do things that would otherwise get you in trouble. In Plato's , Glaucon recounts the story of an otherwise decent shepherd who came into possession of an invisibility ring. Unable to resist temptation, he used it to seduce the queen, kill the king, and claim the crown for himself.* H.G Wells' invisible man went on a similar spree. And in a classic episode of This American Life, John Hodgman went around asking people which superpower they'd prefer: flight or invisibility. Those who pondered invisibility couldn't resist premeditating a slew of illicit deeds. One fellow was so spooked by his own impulses that he ended up changing his answer to "flight" because the mere thought of invisibility "leads me down a dark path."

Powers that inherently violate other people's autonomy, like mind control, would also seem to lend themselves to abuse. A utilitarian might be able to dream up some applications that redound to the public welfare, but the German philosopher Immanuel Kant would argue that mind control is immoral no matter how it's used. Mind-reading would be similarly invasive. A form of telepathy that required both parties' active participation, on the other hand, might be stealthy, but it would be fundamentally social and consensual. That ups the odds that it would be used for virtuous ends. Other powers, like supreme intelligence, time travel, and indestructibility, are morality-agnostic and could be employed equally for good or ill. Likewise incredible strength, which Bruce Banner's Hulk uses mostly for good but which also bedevils him by amplifying the consequences of his rage.

That example suggests another way of looking at the risks and benefits of human-enhancement technologies. By definition, they enable people to transcend their natural limitations. That can obviously be a good thing, but it also carries heightened risks, because civil society and human morality have evolved against a background in which those constraints are taken for granted. That's why emerging technologies like drones and 3-D printing scare so many people-they enable behaviors that our laws and norms have not evolved to regulate. Imagine the panic that would ensue if hypothetical superpowers like mind-reading suddenly became widely available.

It's probably fortunate, then, that we're nowhere near as close to the technological singularity as Ray Kurzweil would have us believe. We have jet packs, but they're grossly impractical. Headlines about real-life invisibility cloaks tend to be exaggerated. Muscle suits so far are clunky enough that they're only really useful for people with disabilities. Brain-computer interfaces let you move things with your mind, but only if you're willing to undergo brain surgery and practice for months just to feed yourself a bite of chocolate. Promises of super-longevity or immortality are premature.

That said, each of these human-enhancement technologies, and several more that Slate will explore in the coming weeks, are progressing at various rates along a path that could someday lead to real-world viability. Before they do, it might be wise to take a little time to think about whether each one is likely to make people better-or just more potent.

Correction, May 3, 2013: This article originally misstated that the shepherd seduced the king and killed the queen in Glaucon's story from Plato's Republic. He seduced the queen and killed the king. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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If Science Gives Us Superpowers, Will We Use Them for Good or Evil?

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From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes-or supervillains? You might think the answer would depend on each individual's moral compass.

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Adding onto our readings from unit 3, this short article posted on Bustle talks about not only why we love superheroes, but just how early we discover this love. According to research by the Kyoto University in Japan, humans are drawn to heroes at very early stages of development. Before we can even talk, we can pick our favorite superhero. In an experiment conducted by the university, preverbal six-month old infants were shown animations where one figure chased and bumped into a second while a third figure watched. In one version, the third figure steps in and intervenes, in the other, it runs away. After watching, infants were shown replicas of the intervening and non-intervening figures, and they consistently preferred the intervening hero. Even though they're too young to talk, the infants were able to recognize heroism. The article goes on to offer yet another reason superheroes are so appealing to people of all ages, from infants to adults. Clinical psychologist Robin Rosenburg wrote that origin stories, such as those of superheroes, help us cope with adversity, allowing us to find "meaning in loss and trauma, discovering our strengths and using them for good purpose." Superheroes possess these fantastic abilities, but also imperfections, therefore we relate to them and their struggles, despite their epic proportions.

- Rachel Leadholm

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If you've ever attended a midnight screening of the newest movie about mutants, billionaire vigilantes, science experiments gone awry, or any combination thereof, you've probably wondered why we love superheroes so much. We dress up like them, proudly carry lunchboxes emblazoned with their faces, and spend hours debating who would win if pitted against each other in a fight. (The annual Superman vs. Thor debate is a time-honored Thanksgiving tradition in my family.) Even people who otherwise prefer to abstain from pop culture have a favorite superhero. The appeal of watching scantily-clad men and women dole out justice is universal, and despite what you might think, that's not an exaggeration.

According to recent research from Kyoto University in Japan, humans are drawn to heroes from early stages of development - before we can even talk. In a series of experiments, preverbal infants as young as six months were shown short animations in which one figure chased and bumped into a second. Meanwhile, a third figure watched from afar. In one version, the third figure steps in and prevents the collision, and in the other, it runs away without intervening.

After watching the clips, the infants were presented with replicas of the intervening and non-intervening third figures, and they consistently preferred the one who saved the day.

Although the babies were too young to speak, the study's results indicate they were capable of understanding the situation at hand - the intervening figure stepping in to protect the first - and recognizing heroism

That being said, there were still some nuances they didn't grasp. In some animations, the third figure helped out by virtue of being in the right place at the right time, rather than doing it on purpose, but six-month-old babies didn't show a preference for intentional help over accidental help. However, 10-month-old infants did notice the difference, suggesting that our ideas of justice develop quickly.

"These findings shed light upon the developmental trajectory of perceiving, understanding and performing [heroism], suggesting that our admiration for and emphasis upon such acts - so prevalent in thousands of stories across human cultures - is rooted within the preverbal infant's mind," researchers concluded in Nature Human Behavior.

Much has been written about the appeal of superheroes in regards to children and adults. In Smithsonian, clinical psychologist Robin Rosenberg wrote that origin stories help us cope with adversity in our own lives, allowing us to find " finding meaning in loss and trauma, discovering our strengths and using them for good purpose." Some have compared superheroes to modern, secular Greek deities - possessed of fantastical abilities, but still imperfect (except for Superman, who remains #flawless to this day) and relatable. There's something comforting about seeing characters with extraordinary powers struggle with ordinary problems - not to mention the knowledge that no matter how "flawed" they might be, they'll do the right thing in the end. Most of the time.

But if the Kyoto University research is anything to go by, maybe our enduring love affair with superheroes is rooted in our sense of justice, which develops far earlier than you might think. Wonder Woman would be proud.

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The Psychology Of Why You Love Superheroes

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If you've ever attended a midnight screening of the newest movie about mutants, billionaire vigilantes, science experiments gone awry, or any combination thereof, you've probably wondered why we love superheroes so much. We dress up like them, proudly carry lunchboxes emblazoned with their faces, and spend hours debating who would win if pitted against each other in a fight.

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- Christopher Perez

This article by Franziska Barisic details the curious balancing act that writers must make when defining the role a character will play in their narrative. Drawing parallels between the nature of Batman and Two-Face, Barisic does a great job of explaining to the reader the small differences that can make a character take a dark turn toward villainy. He spends time elaborating on the origins of the two characters and how strong differences in their upbringing helped develop their modus operandi for dispensing justice. While Two-Face dispenses his twisted version of justice through the equal chance of coin-flipping, he serves justice selfishly. He spends his time focused on how the justice system has failed and believes he must take matters into his own hands, but the coin always remains as the final deciding factor on whether a character lives or dies. Batman, on the other hand, seeks justice not for himself, but for his parents. He doesn’t act for himself. He acts for others, and in doing so, still navigates through heroism by saving the final punishment for those with power to mete out justice. The way Batman moves towards that point effectively brands him an anti-hero, as he still spends his time above the law in order to capture his suspects.

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I think this article does a good job of what a memoir does in its text and how it tells the story. It also mentions some of the books as essentials in the memoir genre, like Fun Home or Maus. I think its important to se this list and maybe give some of these memoirs a shot to really dive into how effective the story tellings can be in these types of comics.

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Definition
Graphic memoirs are comics or sequential art that tell an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical story. Because they are a sub-genre of graphic novels and comics in general they may sometimes be referred to more generally as "nonfiction graphic novels."
Characteristics
Most graphic memoirs do not cover the same wide scope a print memoir would. Typically what they lack in breath, the make up for in depth. Since graphic memoirs are instead more focused, they often afford the author the opportunity to focus on one particular event, span of years, or relationship with someone or something and their feelings surrounding it. A key advantage of using the comics medium is the ability to show rather than merely tell. Everything from the font used for a particular character's speech, to the size and position of each panel helps to tell the story. In memoir, this can help the author to communicate a feeling or situation from their past more immediately and, and perhaps more effectively, than if they were relying on text alone.
Appeal
Graphic memoirs appeal to traditional memoir readers and traditional comics readers. They can serve as a great entry point into comics and graphic novels because they tend to be stand alone works. Readers looking to get into the comics genre may often feel intimidated by "where to start" especially when considering superhero comics or manga. Furthermore, readers of nonfiction or realistic fiction may not think comics are for them, as they perceive comics to be centered on superheroes, science fiction and fantasy. Graphic memoirs are, by nature, realistic and may be more accessible. Similarly, they can serve as a great entry point into memoirs, as they are typically less of a time commitment than print memoirs.
Titles to Know
Following the death of her father Bechdel looks back on their relationship. Both highly intellectual, but also sentimental, this memoir focuses on Bechdel's coping with the possibility that her father's death may have been suicide, and examining his life as a closeted homosexual, just as she begins to accept her own sexuality and comes out to her family. Bechdel's memoir is the first graphic novel I read and what made me to a comics reader. It is not a young adult title, but could be a meaningful read for older, mature teens.

Spiegelman uses the comics medium to tell his father's story of survival through the Holocaust. By drawing his characters as mice and cats, he can use art as well as text to depict racial profiling. Recently, at my library we have moved Maus to the "school readers" section (where we put books that are often required reading in local high schools) as many teachers have realized that comics may be a more engaging choice for reluctant readers who want a change of pace.

Satrapi chronicles her coming of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Originally published in four volumes and later compiled into two volumes and translated into English, her memoirs begin with Persepolis, The Story of a Childhood, but I recommend checking out The Complete Persepolis to get the whole story of Satrapi's childhood in Iran and return to Iran following high school in Vienna. Satrapi's memoirs were also adapted into the animated film Persepolis. 2009 Fabulous Films for Young Adults

Bell's memoir focuses on her hearing loss following meningitis at age four. She learns to lip read, and uses a phonic ear at school that gives her the power to hear her teacher wherever she is throughout the school. Though Bell imagines herself as the amazing superhero, "El Deafo", she still has trouble dealing with various new friends' reactions to her deafness. Bell uses the comics medium to portray herself and her family and friends as rabbits. This helps her to emphasize her ears and the self-consciousness she felt about her hearing aids. Though Bell's memoir El Deafo swings toward middle grade rather than young adult in terms of the protagonist's age, this memoir is a worthwhile read for all who can related to the trials and tribulations of making new friends, and all who want to learn more about "various ways to be deaf" as Bell says in her author's note. El Deafo recently a Newbery Honor Award for 2015, a huge victory for graphic novels!

Congressman John Lewis tells his story of growing up in segregated Alabama, his relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his work through nonviolent protest in the Civil Rights Movement. Book One is framed as a flashback, as Congressman Lewis recounts his activism to two young boys whose mother takes them to meet him, hoping he can convey to them the continued importance of the Civil Rights Movement. March is a trilogy with Book Two having just been released on January 27th.

These are just a small sample of all the great graphic memoirs out there! Tell me your favorites in the comments!

-Emily Childress-Campbell, Currently reading Laughing at my Nightmare by Shane Burcaw

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Definition Graphic memoirs are comics or sequential art that tell an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical story. Because they are a sub-genre of graphic novels and comics in general they may sometimes be referred to more generally as "nonfiction graphic novels." Characteristics Most graphic memoirs do not cover the same wide scope a print memoir would.

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The Joker is one of the most popular super villains in the world. In the movies, he has been portrayed by different actors such as Heath Ledger, Jared Leto, Jack Nicolson and a few others. Each portraying the iconic villain in their own ways. Can Joaquin Phoenix's Joker be one of the best?
Joaquin is one of the most talented actors in Hollywood right now. He takes his roles seriously which I believe he'll do a great job portraying the iconic character. What's interesting about his Joker so far is that the make up is different compared to the other jokers. In the test footage below, we see his make up is like an actual clown and not so much the joker. I think it looks great already. But is his make up his final look for the film or is there another where he looks like the actual Joker? Something to think about too.
We have only heard a few things about his solo movie so far. Batman isn't in it and it takes place when Bruce's parents are still alive. Bruce Wayne's dad I believe is running for Mayor or something similar to it.
Overall I think this movie will surprise a lot of people. Joaquin will nail the role of the Joker!

-Daniel Rivera

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JOKER Make-Up Teaser Trailer (2019) Joaquin Phoenix DC Movie

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Since I knew very little about memoirs, I wanted to research and see how they were thought of in the first place and how they evolved to their current status in the literary world. I also wanted to know how they were originally received, what is what about memoirs people found so attractive and the overall effect they had overall on the literary world. In an article from The New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn, he goes into detail about the history of memoirs and how they gained so much popularity in a short amount of time. The article describes how memoirs were criticized by some people when they were first created, only to eventually be given a respectable place in the literary world. This article interested me because I thought it did a great job at explaining why memoirs are so appealing to people, and what aspects of the memoir have been modernized to attract the current members of society. I also think it will be interesting to see how memoirs continue to evolve in the future, and if they will continue to rise in popularity, or be a niche literary practice will become less popular as time goes on.

-Dillon Eldridge

Mendelsohn, Daniel. But Enough About Me. The New Yorker, 25 Jan. 2010, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enough-about-me-2.

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In August of 1929, Sigmund Freud scoffed at the notion that he would do anything as crass as write an autobiography. "That is of course quite an impossible suggestion," he wrote to his nephew, who had conveyed an American publisher's suggestion that the great man write his life story. "Outwardly," Freud went on, perhaps a trifle disingenuously, "my life has passed calmly and uneventfully and can be covered by a few dates." Inwardly-and who knew better?-things were a bit more complicated:

A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.

Freud ended by suggesting that the five-thousand-dollar advance that had been offered was a hundredth of the sum necessary to tempt him into such a foolhardy venture.

Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)-spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends-motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention. Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism-when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author's masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the "new sort of glory" the eminent philosophe was getting "from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents." (The complaint sounds eerily familiar today.) When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical "sketch," she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror-the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication.

As it happens, Woolf, the tentative memoirist, met Freud, who wouldn't dream of writing a memoir, when both were nearing the end of their lives; Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell reported that the psychoanalyst presented the novelist with a narcissus. Whatever Freud may have meant by the gesture, it nicely symbolizes the troubling association between creativity and narcissism, an association that is nowhere as intense as when the creation in question is memoir, a literary form that exposes the author's life without the protective masks afforded by fiction.

Such self-involvement, as Ben Yagoda's fact-packed if not terribly searching book "Memoir: A History" (Riverhead; $25.95) reminds you, is just one of the charges that have been levelled against memoirs and their authors over the centuries, the others being the ones that Freud was so leery of: indiscretion, betrayal, and outright fraud. But it's the ostensible narcissism that has irritated critics the most. A decade and a half ago, the distinguished critic William Gass fulminated against the whole genre in a scathing Harper's essay, in which he asked, rhetorically, whether there were "any motives for the enterprise that aren't tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner's head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?" The outburst came at a moment when a swelling stream of autobiographical writing that had begun in the late eighties was becoming what Yagoda calls a "flood." By the end of the nineties, a New York Observer review of one writer's first book, a memoir, could open with an uncontroversial reference to "this confessional age, in which memoirs and personal revelations tumble out in unprecedented abundance." (The memoirist in question was me; more on that later.)

By now, the flood feels like a tsunami. Things have got to the point where the best a reviewer can say about a personal narrative is-well, that it's not like a memoir. "This is not a woe-is-me memoir of the sort so much in fashion these days," the book critic of the Washington Post wrote recently in an admiring review of Kati Marton's "Enemies of the People," an account of how the journalist's family suffered under Communist rule in Hungary. But, as Yagoda makes clear, confessional memoirs have been irresistible to both writers and readers for a very long time, and, pretty much from the beginning, people have been complaining about the shallowness, the opportunism, the lying, the betrayals, the narcissism. This raises the question of just why the current spate of autobiography feels somehow different, somehow "worse" than ever before-more narcissistic and more disturbing in its implications. And it may well be that the answer lies not with the genre-which has, in fact, remained fairly consistent in its aims and its structure for the past millennium and a half or so-but with something that has shifted, profoundly, in the way we think about our selves and our relation to the world around us.

It all started late one night in 371 A.D., in a dusty North African town miles from anywhere worth going, when a rowdy sixteen-year-old-the offspring of an interfaith marriage, with a history of bad behavior-stole some pears off a neighbor's tree. To all appearances, it was a pointless misdemeanor. The thief, as he ruefully recalled some thirty years later, was neither poor nor hungry, and the pears weren't all that appealing, anyway. He stole them, he realized, simply to be bad. "It was foul, and I loved it," he wrote. "I loved my own undoing."

However trivial the crime and perverse its motivations, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teen-ager's future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore. For although the boy eventually straightened himself out, converted to Christianity, and even became a bishop, the man he became was tortured by the thought of this youthful peccadillo. His desire to seek a larger meaning in his troubled past ultimately moved him to write a starkly honest account of his dissolute early years (he is disarmingly frank about his prolific sex life) and his stumbling progress toward spiritual transcendence-to the climactic moment when, by looking inward with what he calls his "soul's eye," he "saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind." The man's name was Aurelius Augustinus; we know him as St. Augustine. His book was called "Confessions."

As Augustine, a teacher of rhetoric, well knew, there had long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men-Plutarch's Lives, say, written at the end of the first century A.D.-and of autobiographical accounts of daring military escapades and the like. (Xenophon's Anabasis, for instance, written in the fourth century B.C., recounts how he and his troops managed to make their way back to safety after getting trapped behind enemy lines deep in what is now Iraq.)* But Augustine was the first Western author to make the accomplishment an invisible, internal one, and the journey to salvation a spiritual one. The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to-and readers have been insatiable for-ever since. Augustine of Hippo bequeathed to Augusten Burroughs more than just a name.

To be sure, the autobiography as an entertaining record of hair-raising or merely risqué scrapes has also proved resilient, from Benvenuto Cellini's ribald "Autobiography" to Errol Flynn's outrageous "My Wicked, Wicked Ways." ("I played regularly-or irregularly-with a little girl next door named Nerida," the actor reminisced about his childhood in Australia.) But the memoir's essentially religious DNA, the Augustinian preoccupation with bearing written witness to remarkable inner transformations, remained dominant during the sixteen centuries from the "Confessions" to Burroughs's "Running with Scissors." Among the earliest vernacular memoirs in the post-Classical tradition were so-called "spiritual autobiographies": St. Teresa of Ávila composed one in Spanish, as did St. Ignatius Loyola. A fifteenth-century woman named Margery Kempe, whose autobiographical journey included some rather less exalted matter (not least, how she negotiated a sexless marriage with her avid husband), gave us what is considered to be the first memoir in English.

After the Reformation, the Protestants took up the form, partly in response to the Puritan call for "a narrow examination of thy selfe and the course of thy life," as the sixteenth-century divine William Perkins put it. The memoir as a negative examination of the self, a form in which to showcase our reasons to be, in John Calvin's words, "displeased with ourselves," indelibly marked the Anglophone autobiographical tradition thereafter-as did a resultant vaingloriousness about the extent of one's waywardness. The title of John Bunyan's "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners" (1666), a masterpiece of the conversion narrative, is an allusion to an epistle of Paul: "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." Bunyan's book spawned a line of unholier-than-thou first-person narratives that has culminated in the memoirs of abjection with which we are surrounded today: James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," with its Day-Glo depictions of addiction and recovery; Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss," a reminiscence of father-daughter incest; Toni Bentley's "Surrender," about the author's penchant for anal sex. The list, as we know, goes on.The crucial moment in the evolution of the suffering-and-redemption memoir from its religious origins to its profane zenith (or nadir) today occurred as the Age of Faith yielded to the Age of Reason. Yagoda rightly emphasizes the importance of Rousseau's "Confessions"-published in 1782, four years after the philosopher's death-for the secular transformation of the genre. (The "Confessions" came at the beginning of a boom in memoir-writing that some found deplorable. By 1827, John Lockhart, the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, could rail against "the mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences.") Rousseau's work is striking now less for its frankness, which left little of the memoirist's life to the imagination, than for the way it anticipates the present in its representation of memoir-writing as a kind of therapeutic purge. One of the most interesting passages in the "Confessions" mirrors Augustine's "Confessions" in recounting an ostensibly minor youthful infraction. In Rousseau's case, it was the theft of a bit of ribbon in the house of the family he worked for. Rousseau's crime had more serious immediate repercussions than Augustine's: when the theft was discovered, he blamed a young woman who worked as a cook in the same household. Forty years later, the only way he could ease his guilt was to write about it:

This burden, then, has lain unalleviated on my conscience until this very day; and I can safely say that the desire to be in some measure relieved of it has greatly contributed to the decision I have taken to write my confessions.

For better or worse, Rousseau gave impetus to the transformation of "confession" into a secular, public, and purely literary gesture. He understood that this secularization was a step "without precedent," as he writes at the beginning of the "Confessions." In the hands of a great thinker the form could yield great insights; but few of us are Rousseau. Once the memoir stopped being about God and started being about Man, once "confession" came to mean nothing more than getting a shameful secret off your chest-and, maybe worse, once "redemption" came to mean nothing more than the cozy acceptance offered by other people, many of whom might well share the same secret-it was but a short step to what the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani recently characterized as the motivating force behind certain other products of the recent "memoir craze": "the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art."

Virtually at the time that Rousseau was writing, redemption was being redefined on this side of the Atlantic, too. From the start, there had been a strong taste in the Colonies for tales of rescues and escapes-local incarnations of those old adventure memoirs. The seventeenth century saw a number of best-selling accounts by settlers who had been captured by "savages" and later escaped. (These, Yagoda suggests, provided the blueprint for the subcategory of contemporary American memoir that includes Patti Hearst's 1982 account of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army.) But a hundred years later another, new kind of escape memoir began to emerge, one that combined previous strains-the memoir as a record of dangers overcome and as a road map of spiritual renewal-while giving them a powerful new political resonance: the slave narrative. Running the gamut from the several reminiscences of Frederick Douglass, which the author revised and republished a number of times between 1845 and 1892, to the 1849 life story of one Henry (Box) Brown, who escaped to freedom by mailing himself by parcel post from Virginia to Philadelphia, these autobiographies by slaves and former slaves are remarkable for being among the first memoirs that were meant to serve as politically meaningful testimony to systemic crimes against an entire people. As such, they anticipate both in form and in function the numerous memoirs written by survivors of the Holocaust and other government-sponsored genocides of the twentieth century. (The earliest of the slave narratives were, in fact, contemporaneous with a vast body of political escape narratives that Yagoda, with his nearly exclusive focus on the Anglophone tradition, nowhere mentions: the memoirs written by those who fled the French Revolution and often landed on distant and improbable shores-one acquaintance of Marie Antoinette's milked cows near Albany-before returning, eventually, to France. In these autobiographies, elements of both witness literature and survival epic are combined.)

What the slave narratives, the émigré accounts, and the Holocaust and genocide memoirs have in common is that, in them, the stakes of redemption are much higher than ever before. Now the "soul's eye" that Augustine spoke of was turned outward as well as inward, documenting the suffering self but also, necessarily, recording the tormenting other. The implicit and conditional universality in Augustine's suffering-and-redemption narrative-"This happened to me, and could happen to you, if you did what I did"-became indicative and explicit in the memoir of political suffering: "What happened to me happened to many others." Each of these witness memoirs had to bear an awful burden, standing in for the thousands of memoirs that would never be written. As the "I" became "we," the personal journey that had begun in the fourth century was transformed, by the end of the eighteenth, into a highly political one. The conversation between one's self and God had become a conversation with, and about, the whole world.

As the implications of the memoir have grown in importance, so has the seriousness, and the consequences, of another complaint made about it: what Freud called "mendacity." The need for certain kinds of memoir to be true goes back to Augustine's "Confessions": if the anguish and the suffering aren't real, there's nothing to redeem, and the whole exercise becomes pointless. It is precisely the redemption memoir's status as a witness to real life that makes the outrage so loud when a memoir is falsified. (By contrast, if Errol Flynn bedded ten more or ten fewer starlets than he claims, you don't feel cheated.) This outrage tends to be exacerbated when the book in question claims to bear witness to social and political injustice. Yagoda, who is at his energetic best when indicting phony memoirs, gleefully recounts how a book called "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams"-one of three memoirs by a Native American writer called Nasdijj, in which the author rehearses the catalogue of sufferings (fetal alcohol syndrome, migrant life, homelessness, H.I.V. infection) that fuelled his resentful rejection of Western ways-turned out to have been written by a twice-married white Midwesterner whose other literary output includes gay S. & M. erotica.

The 1999 Esquire essay on which "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams" was based was nominated for a National Magazine Award; the book itself was ecstatically reviewed in the Native American literary press. ("Raw, poignant, poetic, and painful.") The effusiveness of the reception explains, to some extent, the violence of the reactions when such memoirs are revealed as phonies: beneath it lies, all too clearly, a kind of shame-shame at the ease with which we have been seduced, and at how naked our desire is for certain kinds of narrative, however improbable or tendentious or convenient, to be true.

Indeed, the reactions to phony memoirs often tell us more about the tangled issues of veracity, mendacity, history, and politics than the books themselves do. This was already true of the nineteenth-century slave narrative and the way it was sometimes exploited. One of the most interestingly convoluted cases concerns the publication, in 1836, of a book called "The Slave, or Memoirs of Archy Moore"-a startling account of maltreatment, incest, and revenge told by a light-skinned African-American slave. The fact that it soon became clear that the book was a novel-by a Harvard graduate named Richard Hildreth, a New Englander who, during a stay in the South, had been deeply shocked by the treatment of black slaves-didn't bother some abolitionist reviewers; for them, what mattered was the "terrible truths" from which Moore's fiction had been constructed. In a letter to the Boston Liberator, the abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child went as far as to claim that Hildreth's novel was more powerful than an authentic narrative written by a slave called Charles Ball. "The extracts I have seen from Charles Ball are certainly highly interesting," she wrote, "and they have a peculiar interest, because an actual living man tells us what he has seen and experienced; while Archy Moore is a skillful grouping of incidents which, we all know, are constantly happening in the lives of slaves. But it cannot be equal to Archy Moore!"

The story of "Archy Moore" anticipates the contemporary willingness to accept as works of social or political witness stories that turn out to be works of fiction. In the preface that Frey was obliged to add after the extent of his fictionalization in "A Million Little Pieces" created an outcry, he writes, "I hope these revelations will not alter [readers'] faith in the book's central message-that drug addiction and alcoholism can be overcome, and there is always a path to redemption if you fight to find one." After the publication, in 1983, of Rigoberta Menchú's memoir describing government atrocities against indigenous Guatemalans, investigations by a Middlebury College professor and by a reporter for the Times revealed that some of the incidents in the book hadn't happened the way she described. (Among other things, a brother who Menchú said had died of starvation didn't exist.) Menchú, who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, retorted that her book expressed a "larger truth" about the sufferings of her people. Yagoda reports that one sympathetic Wellesley College professor of Spanish-a modern-day Lydia Maria Child-declared, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Whether her book is true or not, I don't care."

One of the most interesting defenses of memoirs that turn out to be "enhanced" or downright invented is that they accurately reflect a reality present not in the world itself, as in the case of "Archy Moore" and Rigoberta Menchú, but in the author's mind. This line of argument raises a question that goes to the heart of our assumptions about literature, about the difference between fictions and nonfiction, and about truth, fiction, and reality itself.

At the beginning of 2008, critical and public irritation with memoirs reached a new peak, during a bewildering onslaught of phony-memoir revelations that were made within weeks of one another. There was "Love and Consequences," a memoir of inner-city gang life by a mixed-race girl living with black gang members, which had been written by a white woman who had gone to a fancy prep school. And there was "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years," by Misha Defonseca, a Belgian woman who wrote about having survived the Holocaust by wandering around Europe with a pack of friendly wolves, but who turned out (a) not to have left Belgium and (b) not to be Jewish. In a statement published after the scandal broke, Defonseca declared, "The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality-it was my reality, my way of surviving." (She added, "The truth is that I have always felt Jewish.")

This justification of a literary fraud on the ground that it is true to the writer's interior world-a world that helps the author "cope" or "survive"-strikingly echoes the self-defense offered by Frey. "People cope with adversity in many different ways," he wrote, adding that his mistake had been "writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience." Behind such tortured psychological self-justification lies an aesthetic consideration familiar to anyone who has ever gone fishing: the experience he actually went through wasn't nearly as compelling as the one he wrote down. "I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require," Frey explained.

Such claims add up to a quite valid defense of a certain literary genre, but the genre in question isn't memoir-it's the novel. The novelist, after all, is a writer who has a vivid internal reality that wants expressing; who invents stories with dramatic arcs and tensions that point the reader toward a message; and who imagines himself or herself into the experiences of others in order to populate those stories with psychologically real characters.

The seemingly pervasive inability on the part of both authors and readers to distinguish their truth from the objective truth is nothing new in the history of modern literature; it goes right back to issues that were simmering away as both the memoir and the novel were emerging in their contemporary forms, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yagoda points out the curious fact that Daniel Defoe, the earliest major novelist in the English-language tradition, cast many of his novels as memoirs, thereby complicating a relationship that has remained vexed right up until the present. In 1719, a well-known author called Charles Gildon published a tract demonstrating that a popular book that claimed to be "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures" of an English mariner, and which came complete with an editor's note ("neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it"), was a pack of lies. The mariner in question was Robinson Crusoe, and Gildon was, of course, right; like all novels, it was, in one sense, a pack of lies. And yet like all great novels it expresses something we know to be true.But the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent "a truth" about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent "the truth" about specific things that have happened. A generation after Defoe and a generation before Rousseau, the philosopher David Hume was pondering the difference between memoir and fiction-a difference that, ultimately, may have as much to do with readers as it does with writers. Yagoda cites a passage from "A Treatise of Human Nature" (1740) in which Hume compared the experience of a reader of what he called "romance" to that of a reader of "true history":

The latter has a more lively conception of all the incidents. He enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: represents to himself their actions, and characters, and friendships, and enmities: he even goes so far as to form a notion of their features, and air, and person. While the former, who gives no credit to the testimony of the author, has a more faint and languid conception of all these particulars; and except on account of the style and ingenuity of the composition, can receive little entertainment from it. By "entertainment," Hume meant intellectual stimulation and illumination-what we have been seeking from memoirs, in one way or another, since St. Augustine. It's a genre in which truth value is necessarily of greater importance than are aesthetic values. Two and a half centuries later, in a reaction to the revelation that Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments," the 1995 account of the author's experiences as a Latvian Jewish child experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust, was a fiction (the author was a Swiss Gentile whose real name was Bruno Grosjean), a Holocaust survivor named Ruth Klüger suggested that a fraudulent memoir-particularly a fraudulent account of extreme trauma-could, precisely because it lacks truth value, never amount to much more than a kind of perverse aesthetic experience, a trashy entertainment (in the more familiar sense of that word):
When it is revealed as a lie, as a presentation of invented suffering, it deteriorates to kitsch. . . . However valid it may be that much of this may have happened to other children, with the falling away of the authentic autobiographical aspect and without the guarantee of a living first-person narrator identical with the author, it merely becomes a dramatization that offers no illumination.

When readers defended Frey on the ground that his book, however falsified its "memories" were, had nonetheless (as he had hoped) provided them with the genuine uplift they were looking for, they were really defending fiction: an uplifting entertainment that can tell truths but cannot tell the truth.

A question that Yagoda never really explores is why, now in particular, there seems to be so much blurring between reality and fiction. (He doesn't mention, for instance, the scandals involving fraudulent journalism-Stephen Glass, at The New Republic, and Jayson Blair, at the Times -that erupted in the very period when similar scandals were staining the reputations of memoirists.) The answer to this question suggests why it's hard not to feel that there is, in fact, something distinctive about the current cycle of memoir proliferation and anti-memoir backlash.

Reality itself is a term that is rapidly being devalued. Take reality TV: on these shows, "real" people (that is, people who aren't professional actors) are placed in artificial situations-they go on elaborately arranged dates, are abandoned on desert islands, have their ugly apartments redecorated, or are dumped into tanks of worms or scorpions-in order to provoke the "real" emotions that the audience tunes in to witness (disappointment, desire, joy, gratitude, terror). This craving on the part of audiences for real-life displays of increasingly extreme emotion (over, say, the carefully rehearsed emotions that are provided to us when we go to the theatre or to the movies) surely stems from the rise, in the seventies, of talk shows whose hosts put ordinary people and their problems in the spotlight: first, Phil Donahue and, later, Sally Jessy Raphael and Montel Williams. These TV shows helped create and promulgate the wider culture of self-discussion and self-exposure without which the recent flurry of memoir-writing and reading would be unthinkable. More important for the history of the memoir, they created a context for the huge popularity of Oprah Winfrey, who has used her show as a platform for people to tell-or, in the case of authors, to sell-their remarkable life stories; and who has, not coincidentally, fallen prey to more than one fraud. (In addition to Frey, Winfrey promoted what may be the strangest phony-memoir case of all: that of Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor who embellished his true story of survival in the camps with an invented, sentimental twist-his "angel," a little girl who, he claimed, threw apples to him over the camp's fence.) Winfrey's susceptibility suggests how an immoderate yearning for stories that end satisfyingly-what William Dean Howells once described to Edith Wharton as the American taste for "a tragedy with a happy ending"-makes us vulnerable to frauds and con men peddling pat uplift. As Frey's preface reminds us, the grander the dramatic arc, the likelier the tale is to be a tall one.

But Winfrey's-and, by extension, her audiences'-hunger for good stories at any price also suggests that the trauma-and-redemption memoir, with its strong narrative trajectory and straightforward themes, may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture. Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary? More significant, the premium placed by these shows on the spontaneous expression of genuine and extreme emotions has justified setups that are all too obviously unreal-in a word, fictional. In a way, not only the spate of memoir hoaxes but the recent proliferation of what Yagoda calls "stuntlike" memoirs-narratives that result from highly improbable stimuli ("One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States")-arise from a deeper confusion about where reality ends and where make-believe begins.

This awkward blurring of the real and the artificial both parallels and feeds off another dramatic confusion: that between private and public life. The advent of cell phones has forced millions of people sitting in restaurants, reading on commuter trains, idling in waiting rooms, and attending the theatre to become party to the most intimate details of other people's lives-their breakups, the health of their portfolios, their psychotherapeutic progress, their arguments with their bosses or boyfriends or parents. This experience of being constantly exposed to other people's life stories is matched only by the inexhaustible eagerness of people to tell their life stories-and not just on the phone. The Internet bears crucial witness to a factor that Yagoda discusses in the context of the explosion of memoirs in the seventeenth century (when changes in printing technology and paper production made publication possible on a greater scale than before): the way that advances in media and means of distribution can affect the evolution of the personal narrative. The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.

So if we're feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives, it's because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn't to be found in bookstores. If anything, it's hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers-the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.

Yagoda's relentless focus on the genre's opportunistic low points obscures the fact that there are some very great memoirs. He devotes little space to masterpieces like "The Education of Henry Adams," a choice he wants to justify on the ground that his approach is "historical" rather than "aesthetic." This odd tactic-a general study of the novel that failed to celebrate the great ones would give us very little sense of why we read novels-betrays how suspicious he is of the idea that intimate revelations can have motivations other than exhibitionism or "commercial enterprise."

And yet sometimes memoir may be the only way to cover a subject effectively. Fifteen years ago, I found myself unable to complete a study of contemporary gay culture that I'd contracted to write. The book was meant be a more or less straightforward examination of the way in which the books, movies, and art that gay people were producing, and the way they partied, shopped, travelled, and dined, reflected gay identity. But the deeper I got into the subject, the harder I found it to isolate just what "gay identity" might be-not least because I and most of the other gay men I knew seemed to be torn between the ostensibly straight identities and values they'd been brought up with (domesticity, stability, commitment, mortgages) and the "queer" habits and behaviors made possible in enclaves that were exclusively gay. Because I didn't want to suggest that I somehow stood outside those tensions and instabilities, I felt I had to write, in some part, about myself. This was the book that the reviewer introduced by alluding to "this confessional age."

As for Freud's charge that memoirs are flawed by mendacity, it may be that the culprit here is not really the memoir genre but simply memory itself. The most stimulating section of Yagoda's book is one in which he considers, albeit superficially, the vast scientific literature about memory and how it works. The gist is that a seemingly inborn desire on the part of Homo sapiens for coherent narratives, for meaning, often warps the way we remember things. The psychologist F. C. Bartlett, whom Yagoda quotes without discussing his work, once conducted an experiment in which people were told fables into which illogical or non-sequitur elements had been introduced; when asked to repeat the tales, they omitted or smoothed over the anomalous bits. More recently, graduate students who were asked to recall what their anxiety level had been before an important examination consistently exaggerated that anxiety. As Yagoda puts it, "That little tale-'I was really worried, but I passed'-would be memoir-worthy. The 'truth'-'I wasn't that worried, and I passed'-would not." In other words, we always manage to turn our memories into good stories-even if those stories aren't quite true.

Anyone who writes a memoir doesn't need psychology experiments to tell him that memories can be partial, or self-serving, or faulty. A few years ago, I was on a plane coming home from Australia, where I'd been interviewing Holocaust survivors for a rather different kind of personal narrative: an account of my search to find out exactly what happened to my mother's uncle and his family, who were Polish Jews, during the Second World War. As I interviewed survivors from the same small town where my great-uncle had not survived, I asked not only about my relatives and what might have happened to them but about the tiniest details of life before, during, and after the war: what they ate for breakfast, who their middle-school teachers were, how and where they spent their school holidays.

Both the mad ambition and the poignant inadequacy of those interviews-and perhaps of the whole project of reconstituting the past, anyone's past, from memory-came home to me on the long flight home. I was sitting next to my brother Matt, a photographer, who was shooting portraits of the survivors we were interviewing, and about halfway through the flight some kids toward the back of the plane-a high-school choir, I think it was-began singing a seventies pop song in unison. Matt turned to me with an amused expression. "Remember we sang that in choir?" he asked.

I looked at him in astonishment. "Choir? You weren't even in the choir," I said to him. I'd been the president of choir, and I knew what I was talking about.

Now it was his turn to be astonished. "Daniel," he said. "I stood next to you on the risers during concerts!"

Matt was talking about a shared history from 1978-a comparatively recent past. The people we'd just spent ten days with, struggling to find the keys that would spring the locks of their rusted recollections, had been talking about things that had happened sixty, seventy, even eighty years before. I thought about this, and burst out laughing. Then I went home and wrote the book. ♦

* Correction, February 11, 2010: Xenophon's Anabasis was written in the fourth century, not the early third, as originally stated.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of the memoir " An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic." He teaches at Bard College.
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In August of 1929, Sigmund Freud scoffed at the notion that he would do anything as crass as write an autobiography. "That is of course quite an impossible suggestion," he wrote to his nephew, who had conveyed an American publisher's suggestion that the great man write his life story.

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Photography and the Layering perspective 

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Photography and the Layering perspective 

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In the article “Photography and the Layering Perspective in Graphic Memoir” the author Nancy Pedri uses various examples of graphic memoirs to show how stylized reproduction of photographic images gives meaning to oneself  and it’s personal experience. One example she uses is the graphic memoir “Mendel’s Daughter” written by Martin Lemelman. Although Lemelman reproduces photographs and other memorabilia similar to Alison Bechdel in “Fun Home” he goes further on this goal to authenticity by uses many portraits of his family throughout this novel. What differentiates this method of using signifiers of truthfulness is his attempt to label each portrait with the age and a statement to go along with the portrait. These portraits also include the relationship of the people pictured to the narrator. These portraits of people that are close to Gusta are always held by a hand drawn in a cartoon style to remind the reader how important these people photographed in the portrait are to the narrator. I feel this a good article to read on graphic memoirs because it gives various examples of how authors use different methods of layering images along with text to express a certain emotion.

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Photography and the Layering of Perspective in Graphic Memoir

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Among the many different types of images reproduced in comics, photography stands out for the frequency with which it is used, especially in autobiographical, documentary, and other non-fiction comics.

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In this short interview with ABC Arts, Art Spiegelman talks about growing up with comic books, Maus, his writing process, and new projects he had been working on at the time of the interview.
One of the things that struck me the most in the interview was Spiegelman saying he had never intended for Maus to become a means for teaching history. He recognizes that a lot of schools use his book as an introduction into the history of the holocaust, as well as Auschwitz. However, he claims this was never his intention with writing it, and he is not sure that is the approach that should be taken when reading Maus. Spiegelman had always thought of his story as a son trying to understand his father's experiences being a holocaust survivor, and the idea of memory in conjunction to that. There is a prevalent pressure to remember what the holocaust survivors remember, and Spiegelman believes the burden of that can be great. It reminded me a lot of what we have been talking about with the reliability and authenticity of memoirs, since it is so strongly based in memory and personal experiences.
-Rachel Levine

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Life after Maus with Art Spiegelman [HD] Late Night Live, ABC RN

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Graphic Memoirs as a Way to Introduce Heavy Topics to Children

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Graphic Memoirs as a Way to Introduce Heavy Topics to Children

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This was an interesting paper written by a Virginia Tech PhD candidate, Margaret Robbins.  It discusses the importance of using graphic memoirs as a way to address difficult topics for younger students, specifically in secondary school.  Robbins discusses how the visual hierarchy that can be implemented in a graphic novel can make these tough social topics easier to grasp.  For example, she discusses Maus as an example, citing the cat and mouse imagery as a way to easily indicate the rights and wrongs of the situation, in this case the holocaust.  Robbins goes on to discuss the importance of introducing these topics to kids at a young age, as they are in a period of seeking acceptance and have a desire to fit in.  By understanding struggles that other kinds of people have to fit in to society while going through it them self, they are more likely to become more accepting of all kinds of people.  This is the foundation of why Robbins argues for the use of graphic memoirs, as they are easily understood by young students, but can still address heavy topics that may have not been introduced otherwise, as typical literature may be to heavy.

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ALAN v42n3 - T35 Using Graphic Memoirs to Discuss Social Justice Issues in the Secondary Classroom

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Traditionally, comics and graphic novels have been perceived as "kids' stuff" appropriate only for pleasure reading. However, I believe this perception is outdated. Over time, graphic narratives that pertain to war and other historically significant issues have made their way into classroom settings.

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When I began this course, I did not know that graphic memoirs could be so well written much less be this impactful. After reading Fun Home, I recognize how descriptive this story is of Bechdel's events in her life and how she walks the audience through her feelings. More importantly, the presence of trauma plays a monumental role in this memoir. The paper I found discusses trauma in memoirs and how we step into the lives of other people that possess experiences unknown to ourselves. Trauma occurs in many graphic memoirs and convinces us to share the trauma as a collective with the author. From an outside perspective, this seems to help the author feel less alone and like he/she can share the weight of her trauma with their readers. The author of this paper also discusses the Maus comic we read in the last unit and how Maus projects the trauma experienced onto the characters in the comic that are separate from herself.
- Laura Vacek

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<iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/7519542/7519545" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player">

<iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/432622572/434329393" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player">

These are two separate interviews from NPR's Fresh Air. The first is with Ishmael Beah, the author of the memoir A Long Way Gone, and the second is with Alison Bechdel and the songwriters for the musical adaptation of Fun Home. Though A Long Way Gone and Fun Home are very different both in style and subject matter (the former being a prose memoir about Ishmael's experiences as a child soldier, and the latter being a graphic memoir dealing with Bechdel's relationship to her father), I think there is important insight to be gained from both interviews about the actual people behind the memoirs. The interviews do not address the books necessarily, but focus more on the authors' description of the events, so we do not here about the process of writing the memoirs, but we do get to hear more details about the events in them from the authors. Also, the interview with Alison Bechdel and the two women who wrote the music for the musical is fascinating because Terri Gross asks them about the process of adaptation and how difficult it can be with a memoir, especially when you are trying to accurately capture the feelings in a moment with a musical number. I also appreciated being able to hear the authors' voices; something about that lends further authenticity to their memoirs. Authenticity may actually be the wrong word, perhaps appreciation is better, but either way, both interviews are worth listening to.

-Bryce Taylor

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Why memoirs should be taught in classrooms 

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Why memoirs should be taught in classrooms 

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Jill Ingebritsen
In this video a women, I assume and librarian or a teacher, highlights some of her favorite graphic novel memoirs and why people would enjoy reading them. She highlight two books we've read already, Fun House and Maus. The speaker talks about how she loves the psychoanalysis in Fun House and how though many may argue Maus is fiction, she believes it is memoir because Art is interviewing his father. As she goes through each novel she gives insight into why one should read and get into memoirs, giving examples of how amazing each book is as she goes. I believe that graphic novels are a more immersive experience for children, a melding of both reading and watching images and interpreting them together. I feel blending these two learning styles cements more of the information into a young persons head. It forces people to be more involved in the story when multiple senses are being used to interpret information. Because of this i think it would be highly beneficial to integrate graphic novels and memoirs about important issues, like the civil rights movement, at younger ages in schools. I believe we learn about important materials too late in life and I think comics could help younger people relate and understand more. The speaker in this video is simply advocating for reading them, but I think we should read them younger.

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Before reading Fun Home, I did not consider myself a fan of the comic book/ graphic novel genre. It's not that I didn't enjoy them, I just viewed them as more childish and felt as though reading one comic book did the whole genre justice. I assumed all comics and graphic novels followed the stereotypical superhero plot line, the good vs. evil struggle, but after reading Maus and Fun Home, my opinion changed. The memoir style of comic allows for the genre to explore far past the stereotypical super hero subjects to include complex stories with adult themes told in a truly unique artistic style. I think telling these stories in the comic format actually added to their value and authenticity for the reader. While reading fun home, I found the comic format allowed the author to separate her Narrating I voice and her Experiencing I voice in a clear and compelling way that would have bee difficult to achieve in the novel format. The article attached is a piece done by the Huffington Post includes a list of "10 Compelling Graphic Memoirs that Will Make You a Devoted Fan of the Genre". Fun Home and Maus are both included on the list, and I'm excited to explore the other books mentioned.

- Rachel Leadholm

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By Caitlin Kleinschmidt | Off the Shelf

For years and years, I labored under the assumption that comic books were only read by nerdy guys with a childish penchant for superheroes. But after seeing Marjane Satrapi's harrowing and exuberant film, Persepolis, I was shocked to find that it was adapted from a graphic memoir. I had to read it -- and I've been hooked on the genre ever since. Heart wrenching and intimate, vivacious and funny, these graphic memoirs will turn anyone into a true believer.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast
In her first memoir, beloved New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast addresses what it's like being the only child of aging parents--and coping the best she can. Filled with her signature wit, this National Book Award Winner showcases the full range of Chast's talent as a cartoonist and storyteller.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
Inspired by her blog of the same name, this touching, absurd, and darkly comic graphic memoir showcases Allie Brosh's unique voice, leaping wit, and ability to explore complex emotions with simple illustrations. She takes on everything from dogs to depression, as only Brosh can.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman
The story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor and his son--a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father's story and history itself-- Maus has been hailed as "the first masterpiece in comic book history" by The New Yorker. It was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize and established the genre as a force to be reckoned with.

More Recommendations from Off the Shelf:
13 Lena Dunham-Approved Books You Need to Read Right Now

11 Exceptional Audiobooks for Your Every Mood
Get Off the Shelf Delivered Daily to Your Inbox

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10 Compelling Graphic Memoirs that Will Make You a Devoted Fan of the Genre

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By Caitlin Kleinschmidt | Off the Shelf For years and years, I labored under the assumption that comic books were only read by nerdy guys with a childish penchant for superheroes. But after seeing Marjane Satrapi's harrowing and exuberant film, Persepolis, I was shocked to find that it was adapted from a graphic memoir.

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This article by Nathan Chazan discusses the lack of graphic memoirs available to the mainstream audience in comparison to its boom from the mid-00s. He also discusses at length the idea of why they’ve disappeared from the public eye. He goes on to explain that the scarcity arrived due to the early craze of the genre oversaturating the market with “middle-of-the-road,” average material that was not particularly memorable. For every critical breakthrough like Fun Home and Maus, there were many others varying levels of average work that drowned out the genre. I think this is true for a variety of material regarding comic books and helps explain why the format hasn’t expanded as largely as film or other comparable formats. There is just so much available content that it’s always difficult to pin down what to read next or what to even start with. Although book stores tend to have the most popular copies of graphic novels and memoirs, it’s harder to find lesser known novelists due to the shrinking size of the genre in easily accessible locations. This is something that Chazan also mentions in the article. He believes some of the best comics a reader may ever find are hidden away in memoirs and mourns the loss of availability to the wider public.

- Christopher Perez

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A few weeks back now, I was perusing the pages of the print edition of this very paper, when I happened upon a surprising sight. Among the crossword puzzles and the regular newspaper comic reprints was a cartoon I had not seen in the paper before, or any paper for that matter. The contents of the cartoon were unremarkable - apparently kids say the darndest things - but I was surprised to see that the artist was none other than Jeffrey Brown. Woah, I thought to myself, that's a blast from the past. See, back in the mid-'00s, Brown used to be a high profile figure in the then-bustling genre of graphic memoir. He was like the Lena Dunham of comics - a mid-profile artist whose work was raised up by both superlative praise and ire, often at the expense of his peers. Just before the turn of the decade the memoir game dried up, as many things do, and since then Brown's resurfaced in the gift book genre, the "invisible mainstream" of comics, more widely read than any of the supposed blockbusters or critical darlings combined but completely overlooked in any discussion as there's simply just not that much to say. Thus, Jeffrey Brown's Darth Vader and Son or Kids are Weird may have been given to you on Christmas by an acquaintance, yet for me it is graphic novels like Clumsy and Unlikely that lurch out of the bowels of memory when I come upon that name.

The days of Unlikely feel like an alternate reality, but it wasn't really that long ago. People call it the book store boom, but really the majority of comics sold in bookstores were shojo manga, so the phrase is misleading - it would be more accurate to call it the book publisher deal flood. See, what happened is this: Maus had won a Pulitzer, and copies of Fun Home and Persepolis were selling like hot cakes. Graphic novels had become a phrase that people other than Will Eisner said, and all the publishers wanted a piece of the action. "Literary comics" suddenly went from being mindfully crafted works by struggling artists quietly released by prestige publishers such as Drawn and Quarterly to a whole aisle at Borders. Loads of artists were suddenly on board for a new level of attention, some poached from small press standbys (Chris Ware, for instance), while others shuffled in from nowhere, young or at least inexperienced cartoonists or graphic novelists or whatever placed under contract to craft 300 page opuses. Big books. Real literature.

If there's a connecting thread for the majority of comics produced during this boom, it is mediocrity. These works are mired in maddeningly poor draftsmanship and plodding, flavorless writing. These were memoirs by people without a great deal of life experience or insight, the tell-all ferocity of the prior generation replaced by vaguely Woody Allen-ish adaptions of diary entries. Genuinely good cartoonists are among this group, but their work was and is drowned out by the dross of their competition and the arbitrariness of page counts. Jeffrey Brown is a perfect example of the flaws that plagued this era of autobio. The majority of Brown's comics from this time were hastily illustrated navel-gazing chronicles of failed relationships, aggressively consumable in their self-deprecating humor yet leaving much to be desired in substance. And yet it was these books, now buried under successful coffee table trinkets, that were lauded by many at the time as some of the best of a generation.

The graphic memoir never really went away, and neither did the bookstore comic, but their presence today seems greatly reduced. Shockingly, it turns out that most readers don't want warmed over straight male versions of Fun Home, and the literary crowd prefers work with literary merit. Indeed, that wave of graphic novels seems to have done more harm than good for the reputation of comics, creating a perception that the medium is simply inferior writing marred by those pesky pictures. Today, where artists at indie publishers might have hoped to catch the eye of a major publisher, masses of self-published artists now hope for a decent deal with an indie publisher. The current crop of major cartoonists - brilliant folks like Brandon Graham, Katie Skelly and Michael Deforge - have generally rejected the memoir format in favor of decompressed takes on genre standards, finding their artistry and impact without reliance on verity.

I for one don't miss the days of a Jeffrey Brown-dominant comics scene, but I worry about some of the changes that have come in its wake. With the greater difficulty of an artist reaching big publishers comes greater difficulty in comics reaching a wider audience, not to mention the difficulty inherent in making a living drawing comics.
Moreover, the increasing loss of respectability around the autobiographical genre really is a shame. Some of the greatest comics you'll ever read are memoirs - My New York Diary, by Julie Doucet, I Never Liked You by Chester Brown (no relation to Jeffrey), David B's Epileptic, to name just a few. Some recent graphic memoirs have also been outstanding: Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, Ulli Lust's extensive portrait of her experiences as a young woman in the seedy underbelly of Europe's punk scene in the '80s, is one of the more powerful stories you'll read in any medium, and Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer, while not exactly a masterpiece, has stuck with me since I read it as an important work of non-fiction. The pictographic format of comics has a way of mimicking the sensation of a visceral memory - we don't remember entire events in sequence, but rather key moments, images and phrases, much in the way panels in comics depict a scene. This makes comics a really wonderful form for memoir, capturing the strength and subjectivity of recollection in a way that film and literature tend to smooth over. However, since the worst in graphic memoir eschews this potentially powerful effect in favor of lazy writing and shoddy artistry, we tend to forget it. So keep that in mind.

Nathan Chazan is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Next Panel will appear online at www.cornellsun.com Wednesdays this semester. He can be reached at ndc39@cornell.edu.

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CHAZAN | What Ever Happened to the Graphic Memoir?

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A few weeks back now, I was perusing the pages of the print edition of this very paper, when I happened upon a surprising sight. Among the crossword puzzles and the regular newspaper comic reprints was a cartoon I had not seen in the paper before, or any paper for that matter.

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This article goes over the style and qualities that define most Seinen manga while also pointing out the differences between other forms of manga. One of the key qualities that differentiate Seinen manga from the others is the narrative. Seinen manga uses a more mature and complex narrative compared to say Shônen which is geared more towards a younger audience. Most people often mistake this mature narrative to include plenty of violence but it is based more on philosophical narratives with less idealism. Another ideal quality for this style of manga is Character development. While Shônen manga lead character is usually the ideal hero Seinen manga offers a more realistic take on the lead character. The reader is able to notice this realism by through the character’s flawed personality traits such as selfishness. The villain’s motives are usually varied and sometimes just in Seinen manga whereas the style of creating villains in Shonen is usually always the same; a villain being evil just to be evil with very little thought in their motives. 

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This article goes over the style and qualities that define most Seinen manga while also pointing out the differences between other forms of manga. One of the key qualities that differentiate Seinen manga from the others is the narrative. Seinen manga uses a more mature and complex narrative compared to say Shônen which is geared more towards a younger audience. Most people often mistake this mature narrative to include plenty of violence but it is based more on philosophical narratives with less idealism. Another ideal quality for this style of manga is Character development. While Shônen manga lead character is usually the ideal hero Seinen manga offers a more realistic take on the lead character. The reader is able to notice this realism by through the character’s flawed personality traits such as selfishness. The villain’s motives are usually varied and sometimes just in Seinen manga whereas the style of creating villains in Shonen is usually always the same; a villain being evil just to be evil with very little thought in their motives. 

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-Chris Young

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Seinen is a genre/demographic that is aimed primarily at the male, college-aged/young adult demographic. Seinen anime and manga tend to be a little bit more mature than it's counterpart, Shounen, which is aimed at younger boys. This can be in Manga where a trademark of Seinen material is the use of Kanji in the writing.

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In this article I linked by Geoff Boucher, he discusses how comic book films are affecting the sales of comic books, and the article further explores reason for why that is. The article also mentions why comic book writers are not so eager to have popular comic book movies come out.
The article goes over some of the history of comics, and how they have changed so much since their original rise in popularity. I thought that this was an interesting article to link because one would tend to think with the current boom of superhero movies, comic books sales would be plenty, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Even though digital mediums have probably brought a huge decrease in sales for physical copies, there should still be a boost in comic book sales and talk. Another thing that surprised about the lack of interest in comics is that comics and their characters seem to be much more mainstream now compared to the past, so again, one would think the sales of comic books would be on the rise with the current popularity of the Marvel films. It will be interesting to see how comic books and their popularity fare in the future.

Dillon Eldridge

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There is no hotter commodity in pop culture than Marvel Comics superheroes. They're the powerhouse behind four hit films this year (including the top two in global box office, Disney's $3.6 billion tandem of "Black Panther" and "Avengers: Infinity War") and on television they're featured in 10 live-action series spread across ABC, Fox, Netflix, FX, Hulu and Freeform as well as five more animated franchises.

Don't expect a break during the commercials, either, where Marvel creations are the costumed pitchmen for Ford, Geico, Infiniti and Rocket Mortgage.

There is one sector, however, where Marvel heroes are not soaring to new heights, one in which they struggle to find new fans - and in a wry twist, it's in their original medium, in the pages of Marvel Comics.

Marvel comic books, which introduced the world to such characters as the Avengers, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Deadpool and Venom, is still the brand to beat in its sector - over the past decade, Marvel has locked down the No. 1 spot in its annual market share competition with rivals including DC Comics, Image and Dark Horse.

But the picture is less rosy when Marvel competes with its own past. Today's comics sell one-tenth the numbers Marvel expected in the 1960s and 1970s glory days when comic books were cheaper than candy bars and just as easy to find at the nation's newsstands, corner markets and drugstores.

Now, a new comic book costs $4-$6 and the only shelves they reach are at the 2,500 comic book specialty shops doing business in the U.S. and Canada - and even that number is in decline as stores (among them Meltdown Comics, the Sunset Boulevard landmark of 25 years) lose their leases or downsize to online merchants.

There's an even steeper challenge: For young consumers, could any comic book ever stack up against video games, smartphones and Pixar films?

All monthly comics by Marvel, DC and other leading publishers reach readers through Maryland-based Diamond Comics Distributors, which reported that in 2017 single-issue sales were down more than 10%, while graphic novels (which reprint the most popular multiple-issue storylines into the "trade paperback" format sold at bookstores) were down more than 9%.

Next week, the New York-based Marvel Comics will bring its top creative talent to Comic-Con International in San Diego, the largest pop culture convention in the world. Fans will hear about major new publishing directions for Captain America and the Fantastic Four as well as plans for the company's 80th anniversary celebration in 2019.

Marvel will be thrilled by any celebration after a bumpy 2017 in which it endured a minor retailer revolt (due to ordering policies on high-demand releases) and then sparked a cultural debate (when an executive blamed diversity efforts for sales setbacks).

The year ended on a happier note with respected industry veteran C.B. Cebulski taking the reins as editor in chief, a move hailed widely as a good step toward energizing a brand that, in recent years, has been vague in its editorial vision amid notable talent defections.

The panel presentations will put Marvel editors face to face with impassioned longtime fans (many of them dressed in tights) who, like "Star Wars" followers, veer between fawning or furious but are never apathetic.

The diehard Marvel readership were nicknamed "True Believers" back in the 1960s when the publisher promoted itself as "the House of Ideas" and boasted a legendary staff bullpen (led by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and John Buscema). They introduced a level of melodrama, humor and trippy cosmic mythology that instantly reinvented the staid superhero template that had been set in the FDR era by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman over at archrival DC Comics.

Like today's Marvel films, the energy of those 1960s comics issues won over a wider and older audience than previous superhero fare; in a 1965 poll of college campuses by Esquire, both Spider-Man and the Hulk joined Che Guevara and Bob Dylan in a ranking of favorite counter-culture icons. Marvel in the 1960s energized the entire comics industry by winning over an audience that was more grown-up but now (with a fan base of collectors in their 30s), the publisher's readership is growing old.

The monthly comics are written to appeal to longtime fans, which means they often have very little in common with the current storylines of films such as Disney's just-released "Ant-Man and the Wasp" or television shows such as "Legion," "Daredevil," "Punisher" or "Jessica Jones."

The movies aren't rescuing the comics; they're replacing them.

Curious fans of the screen heroes that manage to find a comic book store might not recognize the heroes they find in their namesake comics. (In the case of Netflix's "Luke Cage," the same character that merits his own television series wasn't popular enough to hold to his own monthly comic book.) At Comic-Con, the Marvel television shows will be packing fans in to panel presentations with stars, but they will be separate and unconnected to the panels for comics readers. (The cinematic Marvel stars and filmmakers will not attend this year's expo in San Diego at all, a testament to their secured spot as a commercial dynamo that no longer needs the promotional opportunities of Comic-Con.)

It adds up to a frustrating disconnect, according to Heidi MacDonald, editor in chief of the Beat, a comics industry blog.

"With Marvel Comics, they're definitely down from where they were five years ago even as the movies have gotten huge," MacDonald said. "But over that time, they have also been No. 1 in the direct market for something like 99% of the time. So their point of view is, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

"The movies and, to a lesser extent, the television shows have made Marvel a household brand name and when you have a film that is tied closely to a specific storyline - like [the Fox film] 'Logan,' which was based on the graphic novel 'Old Man Logan' - there is definitely interest in that title. But when you see the brand power outside of comics the question people ask is 'Are they doing as much as they could with that?'"

Few people in Hollywood have more history with comic books adaptations than Michael Uslan, who began writing comic books in the 1970s and used that expertise as an executive producer on Tim Burton's "Batman," the 1989 hit that launched a new generation of superhero movies. Uslan recalled recently that top Marvel Comics executives treated him to a lavish Manhattan meal after the movie stirred fan interest in all comics and gave Marvel a hefty spike in sales.

"That was the case for years, big superhero movies brought new fans to comics, but it's not the case now," Uslan said. "The biggest comic book movies now have little or zero impact on the comics sales. The movies aren't rescuing the comics; they're replacing them. So now I really worry about comics. Any entertainment medium that can't connect with new generations, doesn't it have one foot in the grave?"

Uslan and most longtime observers agree that on paper, at least, the future of Marvel appears far smaller than its past but that's not a world view shared by Dan Buckley, the president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment and an industry veteran who responds to the chorus of doomsayers with a survivor's chuckle.

"I've been managing over the demise of the print comic book business since 1991," Buckley said. "That's all anyone has talked about - how this is going to end. I find it fascinating that there's a certain cynicism built into the beast. I've been fighting against it for a really long time."

The truth, he says, is that, "it's a pretty fabulous business to be in."

Buckley cites history and experience to back up that opinion. Marvel is a company that has endured bankruptcy, a disastrous debut effort in Hollywood (remember "Howard the Duck" in the 1980s?) and certain death back in the Reagan era when "funny books" lost their best chance to reach youngsters across America. When glossy magazines and retailer priorities pushed comics out of mainstream stores in the 1980s, the industry was saved by devoting itself to the "hobby market," as Buckley calls it, adding that "the hobby business is a wonderful business to be in too, one we're thankful for."

The superhero comic book is (like jazz, baseball and hip-hop) a uniquely American creation, but it's a foreign object to most youngsters today.

There are few places where kids might even bump into one by accident - Marvel's monthly issues aren't sold at Target, Barnes & Noble or even 7-11, where, in recent weeks, you could have found Marvel's fan-favorite character Deadpool on every Slurpee machine in America but nowhere on the magazine rack. At movie theaters Fox's "Deadpool 2" is the biggest R-rated film of 2018 - but would his comics sell like popcorn if they were available in the lobby?

Privately, some comics creators say they view themselves as the R&D departments for Disney (which bought Marvel for $9 billion in 2009) and Warner Bros (which owns DC Comics) and judge their content's value as intellectual property, not as a publishing venture.

DC Comics is challenging the status quo with a just-announced Wal-Mart partnership. The retail giant will sell four different 100-page monthly anthologies of comics stories (mixing reprints with some new and exclusive content) that will not be sold to comics shop. The move was met with complaints from the comics shop community and curious interest by rival publishers, making it a topic of high interest next week in San Diego.

Technology has helped somewhat in the form of digital comics, but after a decade on the scene, the screen versions of comics have been a middling success at best and even there, again, the in-demand product is primarily tailored to the sensibilities of longtime collectors, not newbies.

When Marvel got into the digital game back in 2007, a reporter for The Times asked Buckley about the key challenge facing his company. "We don't have a natural lifestyle interaction point for kids anymore," he said. Reminded of the quote by the same reporter, Buckley admitted that not much has changed over the past decade. "I was right when I said that and, you know, I'd be right if I said it again."

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Superheroes are thriving in movies and on TV - but comic books lag behind

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The sky's the limit for superheroes in Hollywood these days - the four top-grossing 2018 films to date each feature costumed crusaders - but in the publishing world they face a historic challenge: Can they keep the American comic book from going into the ground?

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Marystella Larmore

This article is about how important it is that we have superheroes. It shows that comic books and the evolution of superheroes have solved some of our societal problems as well as reflecting historical trends. Why is it that we see this as integral to our society? the idea of a superhero? it also talks of the effects of reading comic books as children, how it helps with the development of their emotions, reading ability and morals. I agree with this, as children it is easier to alter our thinking and emotions. I also liked how the article compared idolizing comic book super heroes like we do celebrities and it used Tony Stark as an example, he had a fondness for alcohol, he suffered with anxiety, panic attacks and other bouts of paranoia. We do see these things happen with celebrities yet we still idolize them. The villains and superheroes impact our lives in many ways, our behavior, the negative and positive attitude we have in situations can be attributed to our views of the characters in comic books. I agree with this part only pertaining to those who are fans of the comic universe. The article points out great illustrations of children and their imagination with comic book characters, the influence it has had on their lives and how they view the world around them.

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In 1977 Albert Bandura developed the theory of social learning, proposing the idea that learning occurs within a social context through observation and direct instruction. Developmental psychologists have argued that social learning theory has applications for the way in which children develop an understanding of morals. Most famously, Bandura tested his theory using the Bobo Doll experiment, in which adults modelled violent behaviour towards a doll and were then punished, rewarded or provided no consequence. Children were then observed to determine if they would replicate this behaviour.

It is quite common for superheroes to be presented with the option of whether to fight or not to fight - to use their moral compass, so to speak, before making big decisions. Importantly, these moral dilemmas occur so frequently within comics they give children the opportunity to observe how their favourite role model problem-solves through ethically sticky situations.

Past research indicates that adolescence is the stage in which social comparisons are most common, often based on moral values and feedback from others. Teenagers use villains as avoidance role models, in that they shape their attitudes, values and behaviours in ways they consider to be different from their personal villains. Comic villains such as the Joker and Lex Luthor are perhaps most appreciated among fans because they are creative, complex and arguably have better motivations than their heroic nemeses. Batman is at times even considered insensitive to the mental health of his "rogues gallery". This may also explain the rise in popularity of anti-heroes, which are argued to be flawed, complex and strong, with admirable intentions.

Superheroes display prosocial behaviour, leadership and a variety of positive attitudes - all of which have an impact on readers. Leadership is transactional - that is, "leaders do something for the group and the group in return does something for the leader" and "followers look to their leaders to mould, transform and express who they are". This dynamic is best shown by superheroes and their sidekicks (think of Batman and Robin) or between superheroes and the cities they protect (like Superman and Metropolis).

Comics and superhero stories also address several areas of study within prosocial behaviour, such as a superhero's unwillingness to be a bystander. Comics strongly display the empathetic and personal costs of not helping, and as discussed above, social learning theory argues that human social behaviour is learned from appropriate models - it is possible that learning to help others occurs through the models of superheroes.

There is a strong relationship between comic books and superheroes, and the field of psychology. The former have a long history of reflecting societal change: they are often progressive and this challenges both children's and adults' moral development, while the characters are so exaggerated that they give people the opportunity to compare and contrast individual traits. They are based on us, and we feed off their images, integrating their characteristics into our personalities, ethics and morals.

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The psychology of comic books: Why we worship superheroes

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In 1977 Albert Bandura developed the theory of social learning, proposing the idea that learning occurs within a social context through observation and direct instruction. Developmental psychologists have argued that social learning theory has applications for the way in which children develop an understanding of morals.

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Difference Between Comic Books and Graphic Novels

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Difference Between Comic Books and Graphic Novels

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The article describes something that I've always had a hard time coming to an understanding off. It explained some of the differences and similarities between comic books and graphic novels. The main source of confusion is that both graphic novels and comic books contain many illustrations, panels, text boxes, and transition text. The author explained that one main difference between a comic book and a graphic novel is that a comic book uses "traditional saddle stitching" which means that the binding for the book is done with a traditional stitch. The graphic novels we see are typically harcovers or paperback, but they aren't compiled the same way. Most comic books are released periodically where as graphic novels are typically one or two books with meaning and a message behind it, such as The Arrival. Comic book authors have more room to experiment with charecter development as well as plot development because of their periodic releases. Knowing the similarities and differences is cruicial for being able to identify what genre a book falls under. It is also important to know the differences when creating either a graphic novel or a comic book.
- Ignacio Sedano

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When wandering through a bookstore, it is routine for me to stop by the graphic novel section and flip through some of my favorite classics, "Sin City" and "Watchmen," before skimming the new items. After telling people I read graphic novels, a common response is, "I didn't know you were into comic books."

It's difficult to describe how frustrating it is to answer to that response. Although I do enjoy a good comic now and again, I am quick to respond with a, "No, no, not comics, graphic novels," elongating the g-r-a-p-h-i-c n-o-v-e-l-s in hopes that the listener will understand the difference - alas, they rarely do.

Yet reading one or the other is a great way to escape the heavy reading of textbooks or classic novels. It can be a fun way for studying students to escape into a world less concerned with finals and essays.

So, it is time to give you my opinion on what separates two very wonderful forms of literature. And yes, they are literature.

"Maus," a graphic novel created by Art Spiegelman, was the first comic/graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Additionally, comics have been inspiring, read, cherished and used for marketing and propaganda in America since the 1930s. This, I believe, qualifies both as true-blue literature.

They have a few things in common that make it easy to mix the two. They are both works of fiction and have panel-style illustrations that do a large part of the storytelling. They are often tied to superheroes and villains, although many modern comics and graphic novels are experimenting with different story lines. But what sets them apart?

Many enthusiasts use binding as the determining factor in whether something is classified as a graphic novel or comic book. Comics, as many of you are familiar with, use traditional saddle stitching - meaning they are held together with staples in the spine. Graphic novels are bound either in hardback or tradepaper (soft cover) like a book, with a thick spine glued to hold the pages together.

Although this simple explanation is satisfactory and points to a clear physical difference, it is not sufficient. What do we do with a series of "Spider-Man" comics that are bound in a single book? This is where I make a distinction between comic books and graphic novels, and why I tend to read one and not the other.

Comic books are periodicals. They are produced monthly and usually have a good amount of action that progresses the story line forward to the next issue. Graphic novels are read like a book. They delve deeper into the story lines of characters and history, not just action, and they complete the full arch of a narrative by the end of the novel.

This dive into the story and history of characters and events is what sets graphic novels apart. Intricate story lines are, of course, told in comic books, but it can take months before a certain history is explained from a past issue, and it's easier to introduce and remove characters without much consequence to the overall story line.

Graphic novels have to focus on character development and consistent details, giving me, as a reader, a more satisfying experience.

Absolutely, both forms have their merit, and many readers sway from one to the other occasionally. But for those interested in entering the world of comics and graphic novels, it's important to recognize the differences and pick the right form.

Is there a key component to graphic novels or comics that make them what they are that is missing here? Comment online and share your opinion.
s.turk@ustudentmedia.com

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Graphic Novels vs. Comic Books: What's the Difference? - Daily Utah Chronicle

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When wandering through a bookstore, it is routine for me to stop by the graphic novel section and flip through some of my favorite classics, "Sin City" and "Watchmen," before skimming the new items. After telling people I read graphic novels, a common response is, "I didn't know you were into comic books."

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This is the first part of a series by John Berger that first appeared on television in the 1970s. As part of my film curriculum, we read his text of the same title and were encouraged to watch the complete series as well (which I urge everyone here to do also). Though Berger does not specifically address comics or comic books in this video, he makes excellent points about how we as humans perceive imagery of many forms (in this video he focuses on paintings). I feel that his discussion here can really help us analyze any form of visual art of communication, comics and films included. Especially because he makes us realize that perspective has a lot to do with how we understand form and style. As we have seen from the discussion on the definition of comics, everyone approaches the world with their own way of seeing it, and it is important to understand this before we continue to analyze style and form in greater depth. Also, I realize that Berger's discussion focuses more on cinema's impact on our perception of things, but I encourage everyone to bear with this because comics are inherently cinematic (and cinema is inherently comic-like). Both mediums rely heavily, indeed completely, on imagery to form their narratives or communicate to us. Film and comics would not be either if they were not using graphic representations and imagery to communicate with us, the reader-viewer. Furthermore, Berger provides several perspectives that we may not have considered before, and I hope that everyone thinks about what he has to say and how it can apply to comics carefully. Enjoy!

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In this video explaining DC's best movies, DC has its fair share of good movies here and there compared to Marvel. These are some of the best DC movies to ever come out. Batman has the most movies in the video because he is the most popular super hero in DC. Batman and Superman are the only superheroes to have movies in the top 10 considering they have other famous super heroes. Why are they in the top 10 so much? They are that good. Watchmojo can be biased in the video here and there, but the video was made in 2014. If a new list was made, Wonder Woman would definitely be in the top 5.
Batman and Superman are very popular with there movies today making them juggernauts. They both rake in over millions and millions of dollars at the box office.
I will be bias here, but The Dark Knight is the best super hero movie ever made. It triumphs all DC and Marvel movies even to this day. Superman and Batman both have some of the best comics to date. That's why it translates well into the movies. Check out these movies if you have not! They are some of the best comic movies out there!

-Daniel Rivera

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While mostly discussing superhero movies (the Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC movies), the spirit of the superhero is all the same. This article begins by talking about how “troubled times demand heroes.” Of course, not all heroes wear capes, but sometimes the most accessible heroes are caped and are a 10-minute drive to your local theatre.

But why exactly are the movies so successive in the first place? “Filmmakers = Fan-boys.” They say that if you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life. The article points out that super-movie directors such as James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), Kevin Feige (Age of Ultron), or Zack Snyder (Marvel’s president of production) are “unashamed comic book nuts.”

The rest of the article goes into risk-taking (how Marvel isn’t just “chasing the dollar,” and try to make movies of variety), amazing special effects (Groot, Spider-Man, literally everyone in X-Men), and fame and balance.
While Hollywood’s studios obviously try to gather the widest market they can manage, pleasing the “hardcore fans” is just as important. “They’re the ones who talk on the internet,” producer Ralph Winter said. “They set the tone and the buzz for everything else.”

-Thorn Lin

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With this week's Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice and TV's Daredevil, Arrow, Supergirl, Gotham, and The Flash, superheroes are everywhere. But why are they so popular now, and will this pop cultural domination last?

HEROES R US

Cinematically, it is the age of the superhero. The against-the-grain and idiosyncratic Deadpool has been a surprise smash; Marvel Studios' Avengers: Age Of Ultron executed a box office raid of stunning enormity; the trailer for Captain America: Civil War was one of the most downloaded ever; the mutants are back in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse; and DC's just-about-to-release Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (with Suicide Squad to follow soon) has the potential to be one of the biggest superhero flicks yet. And it's not just on the big screen either. On TV, The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been expanded into the company's small screen series, Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D, Agent Carter, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the upcoming Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and The Defenders. DC's properties are being equally well served, with Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, Supergirl, and Legends Of Tomorrow. These movies and TV series are hugely popular, and their appeal is bleeding out exponentially from the rusted-on fan-boys-and-girls and young kids that have always been the obvious demographic. Superheroes have always been an essential thread in the rich pop cultural tapestry, but now they're forming an even bigger part of the picture. Off the fringes, and into the mainstream, the superhero is front and centre, and the reasons behind this current campaign of pop cultural hegemony are just as multifold as the number of caped-and-cowled crusaders on our movie and TV screens.

TROUBLED TIMES DEMAND HEROES

"It's a very delicate time right now on Earth, and there's a lot going on that is pretty frightening," Michael Shannon - who played the villainous General Zod in Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel - told FilmInk just prior to the film's release. "It would be nice to believe or think that there was somebody that could protect us from that. Man Of Steel is a very relevant movie." Whether it's random terrorist attacks, over-population, rising crime rates, the threat of financial collapse, the mental hangover of the Global Financial Crisis, prejudice, ignorance, infectious killer viruses, or just traffic congestion, our world is on a constant knife edge. And in troubled times, people enjoy escapism, and perhaps secretly wish that there were superheroes around to hose down all of the horrors of the world. "Good economic times usually signal the death of superheroes, and bad economic times see a surge in their popularity," Mark Millar - an acclaimed comic book writer who has worked on a number of titles at Marvel, and was signed by movie studio, Twentieth Century Fox, to oversee and function as a consultant on all of their comic book properties, which include X-Men and the disastrous Fantastic Four - told FilmInk in 2013. "Superheroes were huge in the thirties during The Great Depression. The worldwide recession will probably last until the end of the decade. You've gotta entertain everyone through it!"

FILMMAKERS = FAN-BOYS

"It actually started with Uncle Scrooge, The Beagle Boys, and Disney comics," Guardians Of The Galaxy director, James Gunn, told FilmInk in 2014. "I really liked those. Every time that I went to the grocery store with my mother, she would buy me one. I then started getting into Spider-Man and Thor and Captain America. I remember one called Scamp, which was Lady & The Tramp's puppy. That was my favourite comic. I learned to read by memorising that comic book. I would just read it over and over again. My mother believed that I could read at the age of three, but I was actually just memorising the comic book that she had read to me." By mere dint of their age, the right people are now making superhero movies. Like James Gunn, many of the filmmakers who have worked, or are currently working, in the genre - like Zack Snyder; Marvel's president of production, Kevin Feige; Avengers: Age Of Ultron director (and now much publicised Marvel Studios drop-out), Joss Whedon, and more - are unashamed comic book nuts, and grew up obsessed with superhero stories. They know and understand superhero folklore and mythology, and believe that maintaining a semblance of connection to the source material is vital to a superhero movie's success.

Superhero movies are now being conceived with intelligence and sensitivity. "I don't know if you realise how hard it must have been to make X-Men," legendary Marvel Comics writer, Stan Lee, told FilmInk in 2004. "Here are a few characters, each one with a super power, and they're all so much bigger than life. How do you get an adult audience to accept this? And yet the director, Bryan Singer - I'm a big fan of his, as I am of Sam Raimi, who did Spider-Man - did it in such a way that even people who weren't comic book fans were able to enjoy the movie. He made it intelligent, and it could have been silly in the wrong hands. I was very impressed."

Gone are the days of low rent production companies like the infamous Cannon Films buying up the rights to superhero characters on the cheap. Not aware of the rich history of Spider-Man - which they bought off Marvel - the company had ridiculously envisioned the character as a half-man, half-tarantula mutant more akin to something out of David Cronenberg's The Fly. Meanwhile, the idiotic script changes that producer, Jon Peters, asked of screenwriter, director, and fan-boy extraordinaire, Kevin Smith ( Clerks, Mallrats), during the pre-production of a failed Superman movie in the nineties are now legendary. "I don't want to see him in that suit...it's too faggy," Peters allegedly told Smith. "There'll be no flying, and he has to fight a giant spider in the third act." Peters also thought that Sean Penn would be perfect to play Superman because he had the eyes of "a caged animal, a fucking killer!" Mmmm, right...

Superhero movies used to be made - or were attempted to be made - by people who had little to no idea of what they were working with. Yes, there were flukes. 1979's Superman: The Movie was a much loved smash despite being principally scripted by Mario Puzo ( The Godfather), who has never been described as a comic book geek, and Tim Burton's 1989 hit, Batman, rode high on the dark vision of its director and the marketing might of Warner Bros. Today's superhero movies are being made by talented, committed directors who are connected to the material. "Great screenwriters and great directors," Mark Millar told FilmInk when asked to offer an opinion on why superhero-themed films have been so popular of late. "It cannot be underestimated. It's something that comic book movies have actually been very lucky with. Having people like Christopher Nolan [the Batman movies], Sam Raimi, and Bryan Singer doing comic book movies has been great. Up until 2000, you could count on one hand the number of good directors doing comic book movies. And since 2000, it's been incredible. It really is the upper A list, and you can never underestimate that. It's shown in the films."

These directors also know that there's a lot more to superhero movies than explosions and action set pieces. "I really enjoy character," Guardians Of The Galaxy director, James Gunn, told FilmInk in 2014. "I love directing big action sequences and putting those together. I love the mechanics and the puzzles of that. But there needs to be character and emotion. That's the stuff that I really care about the most in a movie. And if the other stuff works, it's because I care so much about that part. That's what I bring more of, and that's why they hired me." The fact that comic book publishing house, Marvel, reinvented itself as a movie studio - and subscribes to the same story-and-character-first ethos as someone like James Gunn - is also a huge part of today's superhero movie success, with the company getting all the details right.

And despite the fact that these superhero movies are all being produced by competing studios, their success actually helps - rather than hinders - each other. If all of the superhero movies are good, then ironically, everybody wins, and more of them get made. "I'm always rooting for DC and Warner Bros," Marvel boss, Kevin Feige, told FilmInk, "because not everybody makes the distinction between a Marvel and a DC movie. I hope that people are now starting to see that Marvel Studios logo, and that they know what cinematic universe they're in and what we're doing. But frankly, I get asked all the time, 'Aquaman? Who's that?' So I root for all of them, because if they're all good, people keep staying interested."

ROLLING THE DICE

Another big part of Marvel's success is their willingness to take risks, despite what their box office surety might suggest. If the company was just chasing the dollar, they could much more easily churn out more movies featuring Iron Man. Instead, they're constantly looking through their extensive catalogue for properties that offer variation and a point of difference. "We started talking about Guardians Of The Galaxy as a movie six years ago," the film's producer, Jeremy Latcham, told FilmInk. "At the time, Marvel had this one plan, which was to connect all the films that we were making. It was a crazy experiment in cinema, but it worked. But now we needed another plan, and to do something different, and Guardians Of The Galaxy was on the top of that list. We went ahead with this project because it's so different, and it's so out there." It's also what pushed Marvel to team up with streaming service, Netflix, on the series, Daredevil, which is much grittier and violent than anything the studio has previously produced. "Marvel wanted to try something a little more adult, a little darker, and a little more morally complex," showrunner, Steven S. DeKnight, told FilmInk. "Not to take away from the other shows or the movies - because I enjoy all of them - but Marvel has enough content out there that they felt comfortable with trying something different, and out of the box." To grow, you have to change, and Marvel has been doing that in spades, and inspiring other producers of superhero content in the process.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS HERE

"Studios are looking for comic book characters because they're now able to do them properly thanks to the advances in special effects and computer generated imagery," Stan Lee told FilmInk in 2004. "When you see the special effects in Spider-Man or X-Men, you can't believe it. They couldn't have done this years ago." While Tim Burton could effectively make Batman in 1989, there's no way that he could have pulled off a much more fantastical property like, say, Guardians Of The Galaxy, with equal panache. But with extraordinary advances in movie technology, filmmakers can now create almost anything that is in their head, and that has largely made the influx of superhero movies possible. "It's everything combined," director, Zack Snyder, said at a pre-screening Sydney Q&A for his 2013 foundation-laying epic, Man Of Steel. "It's the modern mythology, it's visual effects technology at its height, and it's also, if done right, about compelling characters, especially now that we have so many A-list actors on board. It's a Hollywood wet dream in that way, and then everything comes together in box office madness."

And the younger, tech-savvy directors of today know (usually) exactly how to employ these special effects. "Zack Snyder is a visionary guy," said the director's Man Of Steel co-star, Kevin Costner, who is, of course, an Oscar winning director in his own right. "I see stuff like that and go, 'Fuck! I couldn't direct like that!' I like to direct cowboy movies with fires and horses! I wouldn't know how to budget the stuff that Zack does," he laughed to FilmInk. "I wouldn't know if anybody would allow me to do a movie like that! I wouldn't know how to do it. So that's when I'm very content to work with another director - you go, 'Wow, you just blew up a whole town! How did you do that?' That's my whole budget right there - that town! That's the whole budget for my western."

THE TENTPOLE MOVIE: INSTANT RECOGNITION

It's now an inarguable fact: movies are being made, distributed, and watched differently. Because of the now varied means through which viewers can access movies - both legally and illegally - when it comes to the big screen, Hollywood's studios now have to look at a much wider market. They have to make big films that everyone around the world will have an interest in, and superhero movies fit perfectly into that financial reality. "It's a very corporate environment," veteran producer, Tony Bill - who worked on seventies classics like The Sting and Hearts Of The West - told FilmInk in 2013. "Movies get made because they have foreign appeal. They generally don't get made with one source of financing unless it's a studio. And studio films are definitely not what they used to be. There are a lot of wonderful films getting made that are more than a product or commodity, but 70% of our income comes from outside the US now. Filmmakers now have to make that an important consideration. We're making movies for export. It's not just, 'Let's make a movie because it's going to be good.' There's no longer an ample enough motivation for somebody to invest in a movie that they don't think is going to turn out well. Now people want to invest in a movie because it's got a big star in it, or because it's based on previously successful material, or because there are tie-ins with McDonalds. You've got huge foreign appeal because you've got explosions, or vampires, or superheroes. It's much more calculated now."

When studios pump millions of dollars into a film, it obviously salves their concerns when it's one that will register with audiences immediately, whether it's Mad Max: Fury Road or Pitch Perfect 2. And there's nothing more instantly recognisable than superheroes. For Hollywood studios, it's an easy sell. Whether it's China, Japan, Australia, or England, everyone knows who Superman and Batman are. "You're dealing with a worldwide brand," Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice producer, Charles Roven, told FilmInk. "There's built-in pressure when you're dealing with something so iconic. It's amazing to think how many people have grown up admiring someone like Superman for over 75 years." As long as superhero movies are easy to sell, studios will keep making them.

THE BALANCING ACT

One of the most difficult challenges that any superhero movie has to undertake is pleasing the hardcore fans, while also appealing to the audience at large. The best films in the genre have successfully walked that tightrope, and have appealed to both elements of the audience, leading to continued popularity. "It's always a concern of the filmmakers," producer, Ralph Winter - who worked on the initial X-Men films - told FilmInk on the set of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. "The people financing the movie want to be sure that it gets to the widest audience; they can't just spend this kind of money on a narrow audience. But critically, you've got to pay attention to that narrow audience, and know that they're repeat customers. They're the ones who talk on the internet, and they set the tone and the buzz for everything else. We're watching the internet. We've got our own geeks on board who are watching what people are saying online, and we've got our own internal set of controls on that. Achieving that balance is important to us. But you defy that when you know that you're doing the right thing for the story. In the comics, Hugh Jackman's not the same height as a character like Logan, but Hugh Jackman's the right guy for the role." Says Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice producer, Charles Roven: "The internet is both your friend, and also a frustrating companion barking in your ear. Sometimes you want to say, 'Just shut the fuck up for a minute!' [Laughs] But it doesn't."

A LITTLE ALCHEMY

"There are no rules," Stan Lee told FilmInk in 2004. "A film has to be a good film, whether it's from a comic or not. If you're doing a screen version of a bestselling novel, the most important thing to think of is, 'What made it a bestselling book? What was the element that the public liked?' Then you make sure that you keep that element in the movie. So many times I feel that they miss that. A perfect example is when they did a live action Spider-Man series for television in the seventies. I didn't think it was good because they omitted everything that made Spider-Man popular. They omitted the humour, and the personality. He was just a guy walking down the street. He'd see a crime being committed and go, 'Oh, I'd better become Spider-Man!' Then he went and caught the crook. There was no dimension. A superhero movie has to be a good movie by itself. It needs to have characters that you believe in and that you care about, and situations that you understand and that you want to know what's going to happen. Those rules apply whether it's based on a comic book or whether you're writing a movie. There's no difference." In short, a superhero movie - like any movie - has to have a certain intangible quality that just, well, makes it work...and the best ones do, and the best ones are what keep audiences wanting more. "You need the storyteller," Captain America himself, Chris Evans, told FilmInk. "You need someone who has the ability to tell a story, and someone who just knows what's good. You need someone who can watch a scene and say that it's not working. It's intangible. I don't know how to describe it. Let's call it magic."

TO BE CONTINUED, OR 'NUFF SAID?

"I sometimes enjoy them because they are basic and simple and go well with popcorn," Oscar winning The Revenant director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, told Deadline of the current swarm of superhero movies. "The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, and based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing. I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be. I hate that, and I don't respond to those characters. They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn't say anything about the experience of being human."

Though they're hugely popular, superhero movies are not popular with everyone. Whether it's Nightcrawler director, Dan Gilroy ("Independent films are holdouts against a tsunami of superhero movies. We have survived, and that's true spirit"); Aussie Infini filmmaker, Shane Abbess ("I love the superhero films, but the origin formula, I mean, Christ, I get it, you have to be relatable, and you have to overcome adversity. Fuck, I get it"), or Kiwi actor, Martin Henderson ("The superhero stuff is something that I'm personally not a huge fan of...it doesn't appeal to me as an actor"), the public detractors are certainly out there, and they're more than happy to have a swing at something so popular. Have superhero movies reached saturation point? "Oh sure, we're worried about that," X-Men Origins: Wolverine producer, Ralph Winter, told FilmInk way back in 2009. "I mean, is there a saturation point on talking animated animal movies? I'm amazed that they keep making them! It's about whether we can continue to deliver good stories. People always want to see a good story about a hero."

Marvel boss, Kevin Feige (who has movies planned out until 2019), has been asking himself this very question for many years now. "I've worried about that since I first started at Marvel fourteen years ago," he laughed to FilmInk. "After X-Men 2, I started being asked, 'How long can this last?' I always thought: I think that it's going to last a long time, as long as they're all different, and as long as they're all unique. If every movie had just been a kid in his bedroom putting on a mask and fighting crime, we wouldn't be making many more of them. Thankfully, the Marvel characters are all so unique, and we have thousands and thousands of characters to draw from. Could they all be movies? Probably not. But as long as they're interesting, we can keep doing them for a long time."

With Marvel Studios in full swing, the relatively nascent production house will now have a true rival with The DC Extended Universe set to crank into overdrive with Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice just the first shot ( Man Of Steel was more like the loading of the ammo) in what will be a sustained cinematic salvo, with Suicide Squad set for release, Wonder Woman currently in production, and films featuring Aquaman, The Flash, Cyborg, Green Lantern, and more all slated for future release. Warner and DC will then unleash its version of a nuclear strike with two Zack Snyder-directed Justice League movies (in 2017 and 2019), which will bring together all of the aforementioned characters. "We've been talking a lot about where we're going to go with Justice League...we kind of knew what Justice League was going to be pretty early on, which allowed us to lay the groundwork in a lot of ways," says Zack Snyder. "When you see the movie, you'll really get a sense that there's a second layer coming, and filtering down through the film, as far as what's possible. We slowly introduce the other characters and how they play and what is their purpose and where they are in the world. Justice League is about turning the whole thing up to eleven as much as you can, with all these guys trying to work together, if that's possible. That's a lot of fun for me."

It would appear that the age of the superhero is far, far from over...

Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is released in cinemas on March 24. Captain America: Civil War is released in cinemas on April 28.

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The Age Of Heroes: Why Are Superhero Movies So Popular?

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With this week's Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice and TV's Daredevil, Arrow, Supergirl, Gotham, and The Flash, superheroes are everywhere. But why are they so popular now, and will this pop cultural domination last? HEROES R US Cinematically, it is the age of the superhero.

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10 most powerful comic book panels of all time

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10 most powerful comic book panels of all time

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This video talks about panels and full page spreads that have made history with how they impact the book on a whole and the reader. The speaker takes time to point out how each artist makes specific choices to show unique view points. I'm really fascinated by the countless ways that comic book creators can alter the perspective a panel and effectively change the mood of the entire page. The most fascinating thing about all the the panels and spreads that the speakers points out, is that they are all melancholy or dark. Maybe it's just their bias shining through, but it seems the most memorable panels tend to be ones that can convey extreme darkness or twisted themes. Also the speaker points out that readers tend to buy the comics where they kill off major characters, a seemingly infallible, incredibly popular character dying is apparently very good for your comic book sales. Which I would have never expected. Why would someone want o see their favorite hero/character die? I found that really interesting, people just seem to want drama.
-Jill Ingebritsen

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10 Most Powerful Comic Book Panels Of All Time

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This article discussed “house” styles that are used among comic brands, specifically Marvel and DC.  Having never read comics before, I had no idea that it was typical for there to be a common style used among these authors.  However, this article explained that it is something of importance.  Specifically, DC has recently changed their aesthetic, and all their comics have a similar art design.  On the other hand, Marvel has dropped the common style, and has been allowing many different artists to pursue their own visions.  The article discusses how this is likely in order to try and find popular new comics by creating as much diversified content as the can and hoping that something sticks.  The article didn’t explain the purpose of a “house” style, but I would imagine it is important as there tends to be crossovers in these comics, and it is more natural if they share the same art style.  If that is not why it is significant, then I’m not sure why they would bother to have the same style, as it seems more profitable to take DC’s approach, allowing readers to choose what they enjoy the most and moving forward with that.
-Jay Ostrom

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The Meaning And Impact Of Marvel and DC's 'House Styles'

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Matt Wilson looks at DC Comics' current adherence to a certain aesthetic across its New 52 line, and whether or not it's a good idea.

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In the particularly riveting piece of YouTube clickbait I found, WhatCulture counts down the “10 Disturbing Scenes Cut From Comic Book Movies”. In the video, the narrator introduces the precarious duplicity of the superhero movie franchise face in regard to violence. There is an unspoken expectation films based on superhero comics will portray some degree of violence, however, as the genre also attracts a young demographic the violence has to have its limits. The video brings up the interesting point, “[a] superhero can punch people in the face all he likes, as long as nobody loses any teeth or spits blood”.

Superhero movies are violent, but the violence which they portray deviates from reality, or at least shies away from the full extent of it. It really makes you question why some forms of violence are “okay” to watch, whereas other forms cross the line. The Dark Knight (2008)—one of the movies on the Top 10 list—is objectively very dark in terms of its content, especially in conjunction to the subject of morality. There is even one scene in the film in which the Joker makes a pencil “disappear” by lodging it into a man’s eye. This scene was kept in the movie, however, a later of a man getting burned alive was cut for being too violent. Where is the line?

Although I have not read many superhero comics, watching this video made me wonder if this is a similar morality battle the illustrators face in regards to how violent is too violent, or maybe even not violent enough.

-Rachel Levine

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10 Disturbing Scenes Cut From Comic Book Movies

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Something I find very interesting about Comics in the real world is something they have done for society.  With the advent of superheroes, millions of young people grew up believing that they too could fight crime.  That you dont need super powers to be a super hero.  But some of these young readers took it to the next step.

As they got older, they began to actually take steps to become real life superheroes.  While they arent swinging from building to building, driving the Batmobile, or flying the Quinjet, they are on the streets making the world a better place.

Some actually fight crime like Phoenix Jones, and some just are do gooders in costumes, like Thanatos, delivering food and supplies to the poor.  But they all strive to make the world a better and safer place.

Comics have rapidly taken a place of precedence in our modern times.  They have inspired others to do good, even if they have no powers.  Since so many people have related intimately with comics, its no wonder that comics have come to life.

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Christopher Perez

This article discusses many of the points in our posts regarding comic book form and styles. Like Scott McCloud, the author talks about sequential art, the origins of “comic book,” and the differences between comic book and graphic novel. He also speaks to the misconception of comics being a genre format and not their own medium, which I found to be very interesting and completely agreed on.

I liked Tim Martin’s perspective about comic books because it paralleled my own opinions on the format. As he mentions, the comic book medium is still young and developing alongside the evolving views from public perception. Because it is so young, it has an opportunity to grow with the mainstream audience and attract more to the medium. We see this now as more and more film and novels receive comic book adaptations. A recent example of this growing trend that I saw prior to reading the article were the Game of Thrones graphic novel adaptations that seemed to be easier entry points into the world in contrast to the 500-page novels that are written by George R. R. Martin.

He makes a valid point that those who grew up with comics are now in a position of power to help it grow as well. What was once taboo or considered something for children has developed into something that can be enjoyed by people of all ages and groups.

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The central misconception around comics is the idea that they're a genre, not a medium. The roots of 20th-century popular comics may well be in genre fiction: we're all familiar with the zap-pow-whoppery of early superhero comics, whose campy cadences were deftly caught in the old Adam West television adaptations of Batman, and with the use of "comic-book" as an adjective synonymous with primary-coloured morality and cartoon violence. But although superhero stories are still as active a part of the comics medium as its other ancestor, the "funny papers" strip cartoon, many creators and artists have devoted years of energy and talent to guiding the medium out of its generic constraints.

What Scott McCloud, the critic and cartoonist, attempted to categorise in Understanding Comics - perhaps the medium's best work of literary criticism, and itself a comic - as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response", now comprehends a rainbow of genres: history, criticism, biography, crime, sci-fi, romance, memoir, the classics, literary fiction, blogging, pornography and more. All in words and pictures.

Let's start with biography. In the run-up to the recent American presidential election, much ink was spilt over the publication of two biographies, of Obama and McCain, in comics form. It appears that the concept isn't as up-to-the-minute as it might appear, however. Google swiftly throws up a comic-strip biography of John F Kennedy, published in 1961 for circulation to US embassies abroad and thoughtfully scanned for posterity.

Spain Rodriguez's recent graphic biography of Che Guevara, in words and pictures that are hectoring and feverishly antic by turns, gives a better picture of the magnesium blaze of Guevara's life than either of Stephen Soderbergh's jumbled and laden biopics. The flourishing tradition of autobiography in comics can only be hinted at here: the places to start are Satrapi's Persepolis, about her childhood in Iran, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, an extremely funny and sensitive story about her upbringing in a funeral home and her self-discovery as a lesbian.

Reportage, too, is a rising genre in comics, helped by the fact that a sketch book may be tolerated in places and under conditions where a camera would be smashed. The American journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco's furious collections of dispatches and colour pieces from Palestine and Bosnia, published as Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer, have won their author an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the comics world's most reputable prize, the Eisner Award. Meanwhile, the peerless Canadian cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle has published three collections, from China, North Korea and, most recently, Burma, that give a personal, peculiar and hilarious picture of life as a Westerner under the most repressive of regimes.

Like many relatively young disciplines, the format is still developing its own critical vocabulary. How do you talk about the strange splitting-up of time, the possibilities for representing simultaneity or implying progression, that a panelled grid of related images suggests to a viewer? Understanding Comics is an invaluable primer to the medium, as well as a brilliantly argued piece of criticism.

Just as literary adaptation provided an important stage in the commercialisation of film, so a growing number of prose classics are being adapted into the medium of comics. Self Made Hero is a London-based publisher currently making strides in the field with a collection of titles based on the great works of Western literature. Its list includes a series of Shakespeare adaptations, aimed at attracting younger readers with the vivid stylings of Japanese manga - there's a memorable Othello set in an alternate-world Venice, with Roderigo as an anthropomorphised wolf and the Duke as a three-eyed oracle - as well as several aimed at an intellectual adult market. Chantal Montellier's pen-and-ink take on Kafka's The Trial takes place in a baroque world of candlelight and rain as dancing skeletons caper in the margins, while the Polish-British illustrator Andrzej Klimowski, who counted among his fans the late Harold Pinter, turns in a dark and teasing adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Literary fiction is alive and well in comics, providing some of its most exciting work. The terse, short fictions of Adrian Tomine, which represent Californian alienation and New York anomie in clean-cut, perfectly contrasted black and white, have the deft ear for dialogue and situation of a Raymond Carver story. Meanwhile, Rutu Modan, an Israeli author, writes and illustrates barbed fictions that perfectly capture the sheer weirdness of contemporary Israel, from the bombs to the bourgeoisie. In Britain, Posy Simmonds's dry and perfectly observed Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe (the former based on Flaubert, the latter on Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd) skewer middle-class infidelity and literary preoccupations with a stiletto wit belied by her charming watercolour illustrations.

The rise of public interest in comics is being reflected by increasingly adventurous decisions from mainstream publishers. Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape, balances a list that includes big sellers such as Satrapi and commissions for newer writers such as Hannah Berry, whose noir-tinged debut Britten and Brülightly was signed to Cape the year after she graduated from Brighton Art College. And stalwarts of British comics such as Brian Talbot and Raymond Briggs are preparing new work: Briggs's Ethel and Ernest, based on the story of his parents, has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies for Cape and is being considered for film adaptation, while Talbot's marvellous and recherché Alice in Sunderland, a book in which local history meets the cabinet of curiosities, has only whetted the appetite for a sequel. "I'm a literary publisher," says Franklin. "I don't publish anything that doesn't satisfy the criteria I'd be looking for in a novel."

Perhaps the last word should go to Ed Brubaker, the American comics writer behind series such as Criminal, who sought recently in an interview to explain the success of his work in Hollywood. "The reason is if you look at the generation now in power in the entertainment industry, they grew up with comics as serious stuff," he said. "The geeks have won."

The Top Ten Comic Books

Understanding Comics: the

Invisible Art

by Scott McCloud

(HarperCollins, £14.99)

Peerless comic-about-comics, the medium's first serious example of literary criticism and a valuable and often very funny work of popular aesthetic philosophy.

Exit Wounds

by Rutu Modan

(Jonathan Cape, £14.99)

This tremendous work of fiction perfectly captures the gloss and grime of Israel in peace and war. It has a dark wit and a distinctive look.

Burma Chronicles

by Guy Delisle

(Jonathan Cape, £14.99)

A personal chronicle of Delisle's time under the Burmese dictatorship with his wife (an aid worker) and young son.

Persepolis

by Marjane Satrapi

(Vintage, £7.99)

A mordantly funny chronicle of the author's childhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran.

Promethea

by Alan Moore

(Titan Books, various volumes)

A beginner's guide to the history of occultism in the form of a feminist superhero epic, incorporating some of the most adventurous narrative and didactic techniques in contemporary comics.

Sleepwalk

by Adrian Tomine

(Faber & Faber, £9.99)

Ice-cool vignettes of disenchanted urban life, some with memorable stings in the tail, by one of comics' most exciting young creators.

Achewood

by Chris Onstad

(www.achewood.com)

Hands down the funniest web comic, an extravagant tale of oversexed cats, retarded otters, robots and the like, with dialogue that rarely ventures far from comic genius. Updated twice weekly, and free to read online, it has people cackling and rolling in their office chairs.

The Invisibles

by Grant Morrison

(Titan Books, £17.99)

A full-time mental series about a band of time-travelling British anarchists seeking to avert the annihilation of world consciousness. Incredibly clever, totally barking.

Krazy and Ignatz

by George Herriman

(Fantagraphics, various volumes, £13.99 each)

The inimitable ancestor of contemporary alternative comics: the perennial love quadrilateral between a cat, a mouse, a dog and a brick. One of the most good-hearted and amusing works of mortal man.

Alice in Sunderland

by Bryan Talbot

(Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

Centuries of local history, John Lennon, Alice in Wonderland, George Formby and the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. Glorious, panoptic and precise; one of the oddest and cleverest comics there is.

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How Comic Books became part of the literary establishment

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The central misconception around comics is the idea that they're a genre, not a medium. The roots of 20th-century popular comics may well be in genre fiction: we're all familiar with the zap-pow-whoppery of early superhero comics, whose campy cadences were deftly caught in the old Adam West television adaptations of Batman, and with the use of "comic-book" as an adjective synonymous with primary-coloured morality and cartoon violence.

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This article discusses the popularity of comic book movies and why we are not exhausted by the typical heroes portrayed in each movie.

First off, comics are serial, which provides the entertainment business a chance to build a franchise off of several comics. What I found captivating about this article is the difference in style between comic books and movies. One significant point the author makes is the mortality of comic book characters. In the comics, the heroes are portrayed as immortal whereas in movies, actors are not immortal thereby providing the chance to continuously introduce new characters from the comics into the franchise.

Another component I found interesting is the advances in technology and how that aided the development of these comic book franchises. With all of the special effects that are now added to these movies, they are able to bare a close resemblance to some of the panels in the comic books. For example, the spiderman franchise did extremely well due to the effects of the character flying through he air by web much like in the comics. This article is subjective but develops strong arguments towards success of comic book movies.
- Laura Vacek

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In the last ten to fifteen years, comic book movies have been dominating the big screen. Seven major films adapting comic book characters debuted in theaters in 2017. Numerous television shows returned for another season or aired their first pilot.

Marvel has a film slate that goes well into the 2020s and is now in the process of realizing a film duology ten years in the making. WONDER WOMAN finally got her own amazing solo movie. Comic book fans everywhere are Superhero movie fatigue, who? But what is it about comic book adaptations that have them taking over the world?

Never Ending Potential

Here's the obvious reason: comic books are serial. The principle here is the same one that drives film adaptations of popular book series if they hit the sweet spot of three or more installments. A serial property can grow forever and reboot whenever it suits a production company's needs - the SPIDER-MAN films, anyone?

The Best Comic Book Films of 2017

The only true issue that crops up here is that actors aren't immortal, no matter how much I wish Robert Downey, Jr. could play Tony Stark forever. When it comes to live-action films, this presents the opportunity to essentially keep introducing new characters.

The current MCU appears to be working on this as the original AVENGERS cast contracts start running out. In addition to comic book movies, the potential for live-action and animated television series are overwhelming. Marvel has their budding Netflix franchise and the occasional endeavor popping up on Hulu and Freeform. The Arrowverse is large and sprawling and successful, creating their own cross-over events.

SUPERMAN: The Start of Everything

In 1978, SUPERMAN arrived on the scene as the first big-budget comic book movie. At the time, the film's budget of 55 million dollars was unparalleled. Christopher Reeve brought Clark Kent to life with an endearing timidness and his Superman alter-ego with a quiet humor and swelling confidence. Anyone remember the scene when Clark was about to tell Lois he was Superman?

SUPERMAN was a critical and commercial success, setting the stage for more superhero and comic book movies in a new age obsessed with sci-fi and fantastical elements. It proved people cared about admittedly goofy-looking characters dressed up in glorified underwear. After all, STAR WARS came to the big screen just before SUPERMAN.

However, the late '80s and most of the '90s would produce only moderately successful films that were pretty universally panned by critics. Marvel's first true venture in the genre began with HOWARD THE DUCK in 1986 and nearly ended there. The film failed miserably. The immense success of BLADE in 1998 became part of the shift in the late '90s heralding darker, more serious comic book movies and reviving the dead superhero genre.

It was especially good timing for Marvel, who spent most of this era frantically selling the rights to their properties in order to avoid bankruptcy. DC and Warner Brothers, on the other hand, seemed uninterested in any hero that wasn't the 1986 BATMAN. The catastrophic failure of SUPERMAN IV: QUEST FOR PEACE had sufficiently scared production companies from trying out the superhero genre.

This Is Everything You Need to Know About 2018 Comic Book Movies and TV Shows Coming Out

The 2000s and the Recent Boom

There are more than a few reasons why the 2000s marked a crazy boom in comic book movies. The first, of course, is the new technology for special effects. Of the major sci-fi and superhero films we got in the '70s and '80s, few can overcome being dated by a modern audience's expectation of technology.

SPIDER-MAN and the X-MEN movies were at the beginning of the 2000s comic book movie boom. SPIDER-MAN, in particular, had an effects budget of 100 million dollars - many of the web-slinging antics had to be carefully choreographed and then computer-generated. As the recent years have progressed, technology has only improved.

X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN got the ball rolling and reinvigorated the movie industry. In 2005, Christopher Nolan debuted a new dark and gritty BATMAN BEGINS. The trilogy's second installment, BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, won the late Heath Ledger an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the Joker.

Beyond being great adaptations, these were great movies. The success of these franchises motivated Paramount pictures to distribute Marvel's self-financed film IRON MAN in 2008. The release of IRON MAN effectively changed the superhero movie game forever.

How Hard Is It to Make Comic Book Movies?

Short answer: pretty hard.

Adapting a comic book into a live-action movie is more than just recreating the individual panels. Characters most likely to get a film are usually the staple juggernauts like Superman, Batman, or Spider-man. However, the sheer volume of stories those characters are in can be overwhelming. The key to a great comic book film is to tell a story where the titular hero is true to their core values no matter the adventure.

Often times, the issue with a bad comic book movie is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Films spend in development hell before seeing the light of day. In 1992, Wesley Snipes pitched a BLACK PANTHER movie, but the project stalled again and again until the 2018 theatrical release. The DCEU's film slate lists dozens of possible adaptations, half of which will never be made.

The god-awful 2011 GREEN LANTERN movie lost the true essence of Hal Jordan's loveable asshole space cop due to far-removed executives chopping everything away. When it finally hit theaters, it was . Now that we've seen Ryan Reynolds as DEADPOOL, it's almost criminal how unfunny GREEN LANTERN was.

How R-Rated Movies Can Keep The Superhero Genre Fresh

The creation of the cinematic universe has the added safety net of, eventually, becoming established. The reason Marvel was able to take risks with GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (who thought that movie would do as well as it did?) and ANT-MAN is that they've hammered out a relatively foolproof formula for a comic book movie adaptation.

Realism in Comics Movies and TV: When Being Real is a Problem

Fostering a New Generation

Hundreds of fans spring into existence with the release of every new comic book movie. The original SUPERMAN movie's beloved by a generation of fans who grew up with Christopher Reeve. The MCU has been around long enough to see children grow into teenagers and young adults - much like the current iteration of Peter Parker. The SPIDER-MAN movies are a defining part of my childhood, as are the JUSTICE LEAGUE and TEEN TITANS animated cartoons.

BLACK PANTHER experienced a crazy amount of success because an entire demographic saw themselves on screen in ways they hadn't before. WONDER WOMAN gave us a story fueled by hope and love to contrast the grimdark atmosphere of superpowered crime-fighting. Comic book movies are being cranked out like no tomorrow because people want them.

Plus, they're a total cash cow.

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Comic Book Movies: Why Are They So Popular? - ComicsVerse

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In the last ten to fifteen years, comic book movies have been dominating the big screen. Seven major films adapting comic book characters debuted in theaters in 2017. Numerous television shows returned for another season or aired their first pilot.

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This blog post takes a look at the dominant artistic styles and content of comics throughout the ages, from their first entry into mainstream popularity to the present day.

What I found most interesting was that throughout time, the style of the comics artistically and in regards to the content deeply reflect the issues of the time period. This comes as no surprise, but it is interesting to see the style and content directly reflect current issues. For example, the blog talks about the "silver age" of comic books, or the years 1950-1971, as a transition from the whimsy, innocent style of the previous "golden age" comics, to darker, racier themes as young fans grew up, many of them freshly returned from World War II.

Another point worth noting was how, when defining present day comics, the author addresses the nebulous nature of comics, calling it the "ageless age". With so many new technologies, comics have expanded to include more mediums and content than ever before. With the ease of online publication, creation has also been opened up to anyone, creating the opportunity for niche markets and taking the comic book genre out of the hands of only giants such as Marvel and DC. This blog is an opinion piece, but the author makes many interesting points about the evolution of the artistic style and content of comic books throughout their history.

- Rachel Leadholm

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

The history of comic book styles is one as dynamic as the stories they contain, shaped not only by the hands of countless writers and artists but by millions of readers across nearly a century. While there might not be any mutants or doomsday weapons in the actual history of comics, its panels are every bit as unpredictable.

The Golden Age (1938-1950)
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The Golden Age was truly an idyllic time. There was a clear stylistic distinction between good and evil, and superheroes were nothing more than happy-go-lucky do-gooders that battled and always defeated villains motivated by money or world domination. And that's exactly why the comics of this age caught like wildfire. They fulfilled every kid's dream of gaining larger-than-life powers, effortlessly overcoming their bullies and leaping out of their colorless neighborhoods into adventure.

Dropping literally out of the sky to kick off the Golden Age, Superman represents the comic book origin story. Newspaper comic strips (where the term 'comic' book comes from, incidentally) already existed along with radio shows featuring masked vigilantes like the Shadow. But Superman was the first super-powered musclehead to don a cape and skin-tight spandex to fight crime. Readers couldn't take their eyes off of him. Superman set the tone for every superhero to come after, even becoming the first to earn his own exclusive comic book dedicated to his adventures in a time when characters were typically restricted to one-shot stories in variety publications.

Art styles of the Golden Age of comics

Though printed in booklet form, comics did not deviate far from their newspaper ancestors, telling a straightforward story through basic sequential images.

Cartooning was simple as publishers were not yet at the level of investing in or attracting serious artists.

Panels were laid out in basic square grids, often full of more dialogue than imagery.

The Silver Age (1950-1971)
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Not unlike the youth of its readers, the Golden Age was a time of whimsy and innocence that couldn't last forever. Fans were growing up-some of them returning home from a horrific World War-and the idea of an invincible, caped avenger casually overcoming the world's great evils became less and less convincing. These factors led to a decline in superhero stories and a rise in comic titles that would appeal to more adult sensibilities-the Silver Age of Comic Books.

Publishers explored racier genres, and by far the most successful was horror. These gruesome tales single-handedly rescued the industry from its fate as a half-remembered fad, and their influence stretched beyond comics to likes of acclaimed film director John Carpenter. The visual styles mimed these darker themes, mixing in surrealistic and sometimes disturbing imagery.

These comic books were so effectively grisly that morality groups-already raging against comics as "junk food for the young mind"-now regarded them as the indisputable tools of the devil, despite the fact that majority of its readership was adults.

After a number Senate hearings, publishers created the Comics Code Authority (CCA), whose strict censorship forbade even the words "horror," "terror" or "crime" in any titles. The result was a growing pains era of artistic experimentation, fast and loose writing and political suppression all rolled into one.

Art styles of the Silver Age of comics

Comics took their inspiration from art movements of the past, most notably surrealism, to illustrate the strange worlds in which their heroes lived.

With comics now established as a lucrative medium, cover images relied less on cheap, attention-grabbing tactics and instead became an artistic representation of the issue's themes or a protagonist's state of mind.

Comic books found true artistic expression for the first time in the Pop Art movement, which appropriated commercial objects such as product labels, magazine ads and comics for the purpose of fine art.

The Bronze Age (1971-1980)
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As suggested by its name, the Bronze Age wasn't as lustrous as the carefree Golden Age or the experimental Silver Age. Having exhausted just about every dastardly scheme a supervillain could hatch, comics gave its heroes even tougher enemies to confront.

It all began with a story in Spider-man in which the hero's best friend suffers a drug overdose. Spider-man is helpless, and his alter ego, Peter Parker, has no choice but to take the stage, relying solely on his gifts of persuasion and empathy to save the day. The CCA opposed the inclusion of drug topics, whatever the message, but Marvel published the issue anyway with reader support. This caused the public to lose respect for the CCA and led to the end of censorship, paving the way for darker stories (more on that later).

Around this time, writer Chris Claremont revived a cancelled Silver Age series about a ragtag group of mutants called the X-men (heard of it?). Adding racially diverse, international characters to its cast, Claremont's second wave of mutants still had godly powers, but now they were reviled by the public for that very reason. Echoing the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, prejudice against the X-men's genetic traits became the comic's most enduring theme.

While the Golden Age portrayed social topics like World War in typical Golden Age fashion-unfailing virtue and easy justice-Bronze Age comics dealt with the gritty realities of urban life in ways that had no real answer. Maybe Captain America could smack Hitler in the face, but how does a superhero attack the intangible foes of bigotry and addiction?

As the stories became more focused around gritty, realistic stories, the style of the imagery morphed to match.

Art styles of the Bronze Age of comic books

Comics traded in surrealism and experimentation for photorealistic depictions of the urban landscape.

The alter-ego side of the superhero's life is given more panel time, and sensational costumes took a backseat to depictions of everyday people.

Depth of focus and lighting gave comics a cinematic style, heightening the reader's emotional connection.

The Dark Age (1980-1993)

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Unlike the actual Dark Ages, this era was where comic books achieved enlightenment. Until then, the Golden Age's uncomplicated right and wrong still echoed (if just subtly updated to suit the times). Here, writers threw all of it out the window and showed us that a comic book hero's world was just as gritty as the enemies he faced.

Stories like "The Dark Knight Returns" and "V for Vendetta" warned of an ominous future no amount of heroism could prevent. Writers crafted characters who were psychologically complex, often dangerously so. Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" introduced us to a Joker who was more than a giggling jester but a frighteningly psychotic serial killer. "Watchmen" gave us heroes that were pushed to questionable actions by the very nature of the world they were trying to defend. During this age, the line between hero and villain wasn't just blurry; writers revealed that it never existed at all.

But it wasn't all dark, even when it was. Independent publisher Image Comics was born, and their flagship hero, Spawn, received unprecedented popularity, enough to spawn (sorry!) a movie adaptation only a few years after its inception. This and several other popular titles such as "Prophet" and "The Savage Dragon" also spawned (last one, promise) more interest in creator-owned comics as a whole.

Ironically, as the imagery in these comics was becoming darker and more stylized-playing with lighting and deep, dark, contrasting colors-the genre was thrust out of the shadows of pulp and into the light of literary awareness. The idea of a sustained comic as a single work of literature led to the publication of several graphic novels, culminating in Art Spiegelman's "Maus," the first comic series to win a Pulitzer Prize. Comic books were finally regarded as a legitimate art form, as malleable and open to creative expression as any medium.

Art styles of the Dark Age of comics

Night was the prominent setting for virtually all stories of this age, leading to an art style that favored strategic lighting and long shadows.

Similarly, artists took their inspiration from hard-boiled noir films of the 40s and 50s, creating gloomy, dubious worlds of smoke, rain, alleyways and silhouettes.

Silver Age horror comics influenced the Dark Age in a more psychological sense, with disturbing portraits and unnatural angles that created a perpetual sense of unease.

The Ageless Age (1993-Present Day)
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We've now reached the point in our journey across many colorful panels at which there is no definitive way to categorize the present "age." Comics have expanded into something without shape or borders-a nebulous mass of nerd wonder.

Advanced technology in film, television and video games has created an unstoppable juggernaut of adaptations, leading to an upsurge in comic book readers from all walks of life. Plus, the impact of Image Comics is still being felt, as readers continue their interest in indie books fueled by the industry's rampant commercialization. No longer restricted to publishing giants Marvel and D.C., writers are free to explore specialty publishers and niche markets, even foregoing traditional distribution channels by publishing their content on the internet.

One thing can be said about our current comic book age: it's a time when the superhero doesn't have to be heroic or dark or even present at all. Comic books can be as pulpy or as serious or as just plain weird as you want them to be. Like the invincible Superman of the optimistic Golden Age, now is a time when anything is possible.

Art styles of the Ageless Age of comics

Advanced technology has led to creative illustrative techniques-everything from digital painting to 3D modeling.

The line between film and comic is now so thin that some series are adapted into motion comics, adding voice actors and animation to the panels with no change to the art itself.

The ubiquity of publishers has led to a wide variety of art styles. Design now varies drastically, depending on the nature of the comic and the choices of the creator (rather than the uniform "in-house" styles of the past).

Got a favorite comic book style?

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Comic books have had a long and vibrant history-far too long to represent in one modest article. The references here represent but a handful of pivotal moments as well as some of my personal favorites. Maybe I missed yours.

Before you start sharpening your adamantium claws, how about sharing your thoughts in the comments?

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The AMAZING history of comic books & their art

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In a time when audiences were racing in droves to catch the latest talkie and hand-drawn animation was just finding its legs, a new medium brought kids (and adults, let's be honest) back to reading. Comic books began as a dime-store novelty, and since then, they have gone through countless transformations, artistic explorations, public excises, declines and revivals.

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Former Student

This article is about the over-saturation of comic book movies and franchise movies currently occurring in the film industry. Not only does a certain "fatigue" set in for viewers, the films themselves suffer. The article notes that "Avengers: Infinity War" was basically a slew of climactic action scenes strung together. I don't think this is unique to comic book movies or superhero movies, but it certainly occurs in them as well. There is no lag time between superhero movies — it seems there's a new one every week — and this takes away from the anticipation and time for speculation that makes movie franchises so much fun for fans. Fans are getting too much of what they love, and it's ruining the movies.

I somewhat agree, but I really like the discussion in this article by Alan Shepherd. He says that comic book movies are becoming more like comic books through serialization and by death, resurrection, and replacement of characters. I like that this change has occurred because it brings the movie and its source material into closer conversation. It makes them really feel like adaptations and not separate stories.

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But I cannot see where Marvel will go next. I can imagine all sorts of resurrections and plot machinations, but structurally it was a totally maxed-out film. From the first scene to the last, Avengers: Infinity War felt like 2 hours and 40 minutes of climactic scenes, sutured together. There's no respite. I thought I'd fall asleep in the screening because it was so long, but instead I left feeling like my brain had been cranked up to high alert and then left running.

There is a plot, but a very simple one, and its only real function is to let the movie pivot, then pivot again, between fights in Edinburgh; Wakanda; New York; space. The Edinburgh setting might have been my favorite, if only because Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) delivers a sombre line underneath a shop window sign that reads "We will deep fry your kebab."

You're right, Alex, that it felt like an All-Star Game. But how do you restart a franchise once its audience is used to the ice cream-for-breakfast feel of a movie like this? Marvel has deep-fried its kebab with this film, and I cannot imagine an effective next move, in filmmaking terms.

Heer: I think what both of you are getting at is the post-narrative nature of the Marvel movies (and many of the other franchises). In a one-and-done movie, you can have a traditional beginning-middle-end plot. Or shift the narrative around, Pulp Fiction-style. But still, you have a contained story. A franchise is much more like a roman-fleuve or a soap opera, with characters showing up, dying, coming back to life, endlessly.

Stan Lee, the huckster/maestro who co-created the Marvel Universe with Jack Kirby, likes to say that what Marvel sold was "the illusion of change." That's to say, the comic books offered serialized stories where it looked like the characters were going through life-changing crises every month but somehow always reverted to the same spot. I've always been dissatisfied with "the illusion of change" because it robbed the stories of the finality of traditional narratives: the finality that comes with making irrevocable changes that lead to love or death.

In fact, the Marvel movies have now gone beyond soap opera into another post-narrative form that is even more resistant to finality of life: video games. "INFINITY WAR was structured like a video game with differently themed boss battles to defeat," Arthur Chu noted on Twitter. "Thanos is the player character who accumulates new powers as he progresses, and has to send his party members on the missions he can't do himself."

I don't want to sound like an old stodgy codger (even though I am an old stodgy codger) but it seems to me that this lack of narrative finality really hampers the genre. Like video games they can be stimulating and exciting, but only at the expense of denying the emotional engagement other forms of art offer. (The post-narrative video-game aspect of these movies might be why critics like Scott and Richard Brody are cool to them. Which in turns feeds into the status anxiety of superhero movie fans who aren't content by the fact that their genre dominates global cinema; they also want The New York Times and The New Yorker to bend the knee).

Livingstone: Are you signaling, Jeet, the beginning of a structurally postmodern turn in comic books movies? Video games are certainly one reading for the new Marvel world. But your word "post-narrative" gives me some hope. This is something the novel went through many decades ago. And I'm glad it did ...

Heer: I do think that these franchise movies (and the superhero comics they often draw from) are merging with video games. And that's not a wholly bad thing: There are exciting experimental possibilities in a post-narrative world. If the end result is we get big-tent movies that play with storytelling in the manner of Robert Coover or Lydia Davis, so much the better. But that possibility is still hypothetical. What we have in most Marvel movies is not just a video game but a bad video game: one that is overstuffed and chaotic.

Shephard: The video game analogy is a good one, but it doesn't go nearly far enough for me. They're merging with video games and television and toys and theme park rides and branded content-I'm naive, but I was still surprised to see the Lexus from the Black Panther Lexus commercials show up in Black Panther-to form a knotty meta-narrative that ultimately signifies nothing (except maybe corporate profits). But, even with the shock ending of Infinity War, the tone of these movies has always been broad and good-natured, in contrast, for instance, to the sheer oppressiveness of DC's botched attempts at cinematic universes. They're the ideal vehicles to just keep layering on other profitable narratives.

Jeet's point about "emotional engagement" is a really good one, though. To me, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are the only ones that really have that (though that may be because I am weirdly primed to cry at yacht rock). I always leave Avengers movies scratching my head about stakes. Big-budget movies usually are all about them-an asteroid hurtling to earth, a group of velociraptors that could wipe out humanity, fathers and sons, etc. But I never felt any real sense of urgency in Infinity War. Or much else, for that matter.

Livingstone: I had the same questions about what I was meant to feel, Alex. But in the end I think I felt what the movie wanted me to: overwhelmed. The action of Infinity War keeps it all at such a high pitch that the movie obliterates its own emotional stakes. I think it was intended to engender one long sharp intake of breath.

We are three different movie-goers, and we each seem to have come away with a similar feeling of bewilderment from this film. Perhaps it's the shock of witnessing something like an ending to this long, long franchise. As Alex said, it's not an ending for the market: layers will keep layering, toys will keep being sold. But for the one-and-done Marvel paradigm-which we just saw done to total perfection in Black Panther-something was killed off in Infinity War.

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But I cannot see where Marvel will go next. I can imagine all sorts of resurrections and plot machinations, but structurally it was a totally maxed-out film. From the first scene to the last, Avengers: Infinity War felt like 2 hours and 40 minutes of climactic scenes, sutured together.