Well, not the absolute<\/i> most annoying, but certain high up there on my list of really annoying things…<\/p>\n
I was reading through Time<\/i> Magazine’s review<\/a> of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/i> when I came across this disclaimer at the bottom:<\/p>\n Every time I see something like this is annoys me. You see stuff like this attached to reviews for comics like Sandman<\/i> or American Splendor<\/i> and to reviews for animated features like Akira<\/i> or damn near anything else that comes out of Japan. The first article about Neon Genesis Evangelion<\/i> I ever read devoted a few whole paragraphs, paragraphs that could have been used in service of actually reviewing the material, to warn parents that Evangelion<\/i> wasn’t for small children because it was violent and people said “shit.” (And of course, that it’s blasphemous, but that wasn’t really stated explicitly. Instead the writer summed the issue up by saying the series had “mature religious themes.”)<\/p>\n The old clich\u00e9 (all too true) is that every year a major magazine or newspaper will run an article with the headline: “Bang! Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” The articles go on to carefully explain that a small group of rogue artists are daring to create a new type of comic book that explores more, and here’s that phrase again, “adult themes.” Nevermind that “adult” comics have been around for decades, it’s always “new” this new phenomenon and it’s always “a small group” of artists and it’s always a big shock that artists who create sequential art aren’t exclusively drawing inarticulate morons in tights.<\/p>\n What bothers me more, though, is when I see graphic novels with stuff like this on the back:<\/p>\n This is, obviously, from the inner flap of volume one of Spiegelman’s Maus<\/i> but I’ve seen others like it before. The Sandman<\/i> series that I read had quotes on the covers assuring\/warning readers that this was “legitimate literature,” and similar quotes can be seen on American Splendor<\/i> collections, the collected version of Watchmen<\/i>, and Ghost in the Shell<\/i>.<\/p>\n I’ve wondered for a while now if perhaps part of the reason why sequential art has had a hard time finding legitimacy as something other than a “kids’ thing” is because comic fans, artists, and publishers seem to constantly go out of their way to assure people that their adult comics are the exception and not the rule. It may seem strange, but I think that assuring readers that this comic is an “adult” comic does more harm than it does good. By extolling this single comic (say, Maus<\/i>) as special, one reinforces the notion that comics are for kids.<\/p>\n Consider a shamelessly over-the-top analogy: What idea of African-Americans is reinforced by saying that “this black guy… you know, he’s actually pretty smart.”<\/p>\n I’m not saying that the general public’s refusal to view comics as an all-ages art form is on par with the oppression of minorities but that on a smaller scale the rationale used in my–again, over-the-top–analogy is doing more to trap comics into a box than set it free. The problem of public perception is, I realise, more complex than just this single annoyance, but comic publishers, artists, and reviewers need to stop reminding people that they should view comics in any other way than as a means to an end, a medium..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, not the absolute most annoying, but certain high up there on my list of really annoying things… I was reading through Time Magazine’s review of the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when I came across this … Continue reading