The End of an Era

One of my first memories of being a child was a hot summer afternoon. I was five. I held in my hand a copy of the Marvel UK 'Mighty Avengers' title - the one where Scarlet Witch, Vision and Quicksilver had been transported to a melting world - and I was hooked. I decided there and then to make a change in my life and with the permission of my mam, I walked the thirty yards from my backyard to the corner shop and proudly told Rosa (the owner) that I wanted to change my order from 'The Barnaby Comic' to the Avengers.

And ever since then I have had a slew of comics that I read every month .... until tomorrow. Tomorrow I will receive the last two issues of the 'War of the Lanterns' in Green Lantern and I will close down my order at Forbidden Planet. Thirty years of comics buying has come to an end. Some might say its about time. Others might think its ill-directed pragmatism. Personally, I just have nothing invested in it anymore.

It started, predictably, with Bendis. That the machinations of one man could have me ... ME ... abandon the Avengers is almost too much to imagine, but it happened. However, what I didn't realise at the time, was that my dropping of my beloved Earth's Mightiest Heroes would prove a watershed moment. The world didn't stop. I wasn't left bereft. It was ... inconsequential. As I have looked at the title (because I still flick through it each month, just to keep my eye in...) there has been nothing to draw me back, no reason to slap down my money.

Oh yes, money. Comics are just too damned expensive as well. £2.30 for a five minute (if that...) experience? No thank you. Of course, if there was some way that DC could reduce the cost of comics, that would work right? Maybe a ... digital revolution?

But no. Well, yes, if you want to wait a month, but not if you want them upfront. I have a lot of problems with DC's Flashpoint revolution. I don't see the DCU as it stands as an overly complex place - certainly its simpler than the pre-Crisis DCU by factors of ten - and I don't see the characters as 'tired'. I do see some titles treading water (JLA, JSA, Teen Titans etc) so I can see their point but a wholesale reboot of the franchise? Really? Nuking Detective and Action back to #1? Seriously?! Can you imagine if they did that in say, Eastenders? Oh we have decided that the backstory is too convoluted, so this week we are going to restart the show and move the characters to Wolverhampton. Same names, maybe same people, new relationships. Madness.

Its also a straight up lack of historical perspective. DC have done this before - an explosion of minor titles in the 1970s followed by the infamous 'DC Implosion' a couple of years later. Every event has been followed by the spinning off of a slew of new titles, the vast majority of which never make it through the first year of publication. Its a failed tactic. Is this supposed to a market penetration strategy, selling more of the same to the current comics buyers, or is this digital revolution supposed to represent market development - penetrating new readers with their online offer? I don't see it - this is the 'app' generation, the 'itunes' generation. Apps cost 59p and are useful forever, updated for free. A single costs 79p. A comic costs ... £2.30? Bear in mind that for the price of 2-3 comics, you can get a fully playable PC game from Steam. And these aren't your father's comics. You cannot trade them, share them, buy them second hand. You cannot trace them and learn to draw from them.... but you can read them on an iPad. Whoopee fucking do.

So what Bendis started, the Flashpoint devolution has finished. Thats me done. No more comics. Its a strange and sobering thought and quite a sad one. I may have to go and dig out that issue of the Avengers (which I have in about three different formats now!) and have some nostalgia to calm my nerves.

The Issue with Comics

Do you see what I did there?

My recent bout of apathy towards Kick-Ass and the subsequent conversations with my friends have made me think very hard about my relationship with comics.

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid was my fifth birthday, when I went by myself to the corner shop and told Rosa, the woman who ran it, that I wanted to change my order from Barnaby Bear to The Avengers. I can even remember my first issue of the Avengers - it was the reprint of Avengers #85. I was hooked.

35 years later, I am still buying comics. I have a loft filled with literally 1000s of comics. I taught my children to read using the names of characters from JLA/JSA crossover covers. When I was an impoverished student, comics came before beer in importance (pity many of those comics were early Image efforts - it was the 90s!)

In recent years, two things have impacted heavily my comics reading. The first is simple financial expediency - a period of redundancy made me re-evaluate the value-for-money I was getting from comics. They are a bloody expensive hobby to support issue-by-issue so a lot of my titles have been dropped, some changed to 'trade paperback only' purchases. The second is a little more touchy. In 2004, Marvel published the Avengers Disassembled storyline to revitalise the Avengers franchise. I've probably bored many of you with my thoughts about this turn of events, so I won't bang on about it here, but the subsequent transformation of my beloved Avengers into the Bendisverse creation it is now was not to my taste. I persevered for as long as I could, but in the end, I did the unthinkable and dropped the title-pretending-to-be-the Avengers. That took out a considerable chunk of my comics buying.

Currently, I only get two families of titles - Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps and JSA/JSA All-Stars (although the latter is under close scrutiny)

So much of comic-dom seems so dry and lifeless to me nowadays. I feel like I quite literally have seen it all before. There is, as the Bible says, nothing new under the sun.

This apparent apathy has leeched into other areas. I have baulked at the idea of running superhero games in the past, because in the end I have always felt that it just wouldn't be the experience I wanted it to be. I think the number of conflicting ideas in my head would be too much, somehow. Its a silly block really, considering the method-GMing that I undertake on most occasions, burying myself in the media of the game I am running!

It has also made me wonder what to do with my comics mountain in the loft? It needs to be sorted out (the fact that it has not been in years is a sign that they are no longer so high on my priority list!) but after that? Could I be in the position to maybe liquidate some of that collection? The horrors!

Indie? Pah!

I was chatting to my friend from school at the weekend and he commented how, even back then, I have never really been part of any 'group'. At school I was neither a trendy townie nor one of the introvert theatre group nor a sporty type or a (shudder) Venutre Scout. I sort of existed, by myself, shuttling between them all. I've always hated the concept of tribalisation and in my adult life it's been something that has annoyed me about all manner of things .... indie.

Oh how I hate the term. In every incarnation I have encountered it, it - and it's attendent antithesis - has created up the same elitist, isolationist, tribal divisions.

In the late 80s it was 'Indie Music' - the logic went like this: all chart music is crap and therefore not proper music. Therefore the only proper music was stuff that was not in the charts. The so-called 'indie music'. The more popular this music became, the less 'indie' it was until eventually the band would disappear or /shock/ they would chart - therefore instantly moving from 'indie' to 'commerical sellouts'. Oh the fun I had watching people at Uni trying to out-obscure each other. Nowadays it's like something from a surreal sketch show but it was very real then. And the looking down the nose at anyone who liked yesterdays sweetheart group or, God help them, the more serious crime of .... bandwagon jumping! Oh yes folks, worse than being a trendy chart zombie was being an indie kid who didn't know about the obscure band and then started to like them as they were getting noticed! Find your own niche group to obsess over... this one is mine. I mean, honestly, what was going on there?

After Indie Music came 'Indie Comics'. Once again, the same riff applied. If it was made by Marvel or DC, it was pretty much dead in the water, derivative, mass produced rubbish churned out for the braindead masses. What you need to be reading are 'indie comics'! Obscure, badly drawn pieces of tatt which come out less regularly than a decent Boyzone single mustering a storyline that you can barely follow. Oh but they are so good, oh but they are written by writer such-and-such and he's great and ... GAH! Thankfully, I had my mate Stephen to guide me towards 'decent' indie stuff (although I suspect he still couldn't fathom my X-Men habit) but from other fans I got the same old litany. What made it worse was that the indie snobbery was coming from the comic shop owners themselves. I distinctly remember being virutally laughed out of Nostalgia and Comics in Birmingham once because of my rather mainstream comic selections.

Of course, nothing generates quite the indie tribalism as 'Indie Wrestling'. Yes folks, none of the shine and showbiz of the WWE for the Indie Wrestling fanatic! If it isn't done in grainy film, shown in an old bingo hall or sports centre and features two or more men you have never heard of before then it simply must be bad. Now, I will admit that the difference between the punch-kick-finisher style of the WWE and the more technical/high risk style I have seen at many indie feds makes the two things almost different products, but essentially they have the same basis, require the same suspension of disbelief and aim to entertain within the same medium.

Indie Music, Indie Comics and Indie Wrestling - three things where the ability for people to create false divisions has plagued me. I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind the split? Is it because these people are seeking individualism in the arms of the obscure? Well, that would have accounted for the music at the time, but the others? Is it because of a deep seated hatred of the monolithic structures behind the big players - the EMI's, Marvels and WWEs of this world? Maybe it's because there is a degree of fairness that has been breached with regard to these properties. They are seen as equally as valid, equally as good as the more mainstream offering but the latter has far more promotion and exposure than the former and therefore is seen as superior by the un-exposed masses? That could well be it but I don't think I have ever seen the tribalism portrayed with that degree of analysis before. Snobbishness powered through a sense of social justice and anti-capitalistic zeal. Hmmmm....unlikely!

I love my (formerly) 80s (formerly) indie music and I still listen to it now. I'm also going to see Girls Aloud next month with my daughter and quite looking forward to it. I picked up my first ever Dark Horse comic last month - the company that was once the epitome of indie comics is now publishing the Season Eight comic of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I bought it alongside my Justice League and Avengers comics. I still mark out like a little girl when I watch the WWE and yet find it possible to catch Ring of Honour sometimes on the Wrestling Channel and enjoy it. Just like at school, never in one group or another. Just floating.

Which brings me to the phenomenon of 'indie roleplaying games'. Naturally my nerves are jangled by the continued use of that phrase. Coming from a city with one games shop which is very well stocked by still rather mainstream, these things come slowly into my world and I have come slowly into theirs. What I see are games made by people who clearly love their hobby, have some interesting innovative ideas and the know-how to self-publish and promote them. Hey, thats great and indeed it has inspired me to do similar things. However, what I also see are the same smoldering embers of internal division and tribalisation. Those that 'get' indie or story games and those that are happy to stay with 'traditional' games. Theres even an air of intellectual snobbery that runs through some of the conversations.

What I find comical about these things is that they seem to be the failings of all hobbies, large or small. I regularly hear football fans talking about Division Two football as 'proper football' as if they Champions League matches we have seen over the last couple of weeks were somehow all the more fake because of the lights and big-name players and lack of half-cooked pies on terraces at half-time. It also seems the smaller the hobby the more ludicrous the nature of the tribalisation. Take reading comics, for example? Hardly the biggest hobby in the world is it? A good selling comic might clear 70k copies WORLDWIDE. A comic on the brink of doom from Marvel/DC might get 20k copies. An out-of-this-world indie comic might clear 10k. Those aren't massive numbers. For RPGS, I guess you can knock a zero off those numbers!

I think thats my point as a whole. There is no one-true-musical-taste, no one-perfect-comic, no one-true-wrestling-style, no one-best-football-team and no one-godlike-roleplaying-game. They don't exist. What does exist is a wide variety of music that makes people happy, comics that allow a wide variety of people to thrill, numerous federations that scratch the wrestling itch for many and football experiences that match what the watcher wants. And a large and bountiful array of roleplaying games that we can enjoy - whether they are the product of a division of Hasbro or the maniacal brainchild of some teenagers computer in Wisconsin. If they entertain, theres really no problem.

So I say 'pah!' to 'indie' and tribalisation and 'hurrah' to fun and inclusiveness!

Neil