tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2328803310807154664.post663375653528165083..comments2016-05-25T13:38:07.163+01:00Comments on Night thoughts at Boing: Simon_at_Boinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04556122055291618209noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2328803310807154664.post-54209237701952730272016-05-25T13:38:07.163+01:002016-05-25T13:38:07.163+01:00ANDREW - when you see ‘Industrial Comics’ you feel...ANDREW - when you see ‘Industrial Comics’ you feel a slight that is not intended.<br /><br />The term is value-neutral as you suggest and I think it is only your old-school knowledge of the days when comics were just for kids or trash reading that makes you misread it. You see value judgements where there are none (unless you bring your own) and mistake the distinction being between narrative and abstraction – understandable, perhaps, given who I interviewed in ?sWON, but a mistake. <br /><br />Industrial Comics is a (my) term for comics made as part of a production line for the corporate owner of an Intellectual Property – as with Hollywood movies or franchise books/tv/etc, so Industrial Comics can be brilliant works of art or hollow attempts at tuning a profit.<br /><br />Independent Comics like independent cinema/author-originated books published by corporations/etc can also be brilliant works of art or hollow attempts at tuning a profit.<br /><br />Neither category determines the quality or the work or it’s popularity. Industrial Comics can throw up Watchmen, Lady Thor (is that really what it’s called?) or the most incompetent Batman cash-cow you can imagine. Independent comics can give us From Hell, Maus or an endless morass of misery memoirs. The distinction is that with one, a product or its parent product already exists waiting to be made in to a comic by hired-hands, while the other requires the comic to exist before it becomes a product.<br /><br />In modern American comics, Marvel, DC and Archie deal almost exclusively in Industrial Comics; IDW, Dark Horse and Kaboom work in both idioms; Fantagraphics, Image and the art comics crowd produce Independent Comics. Many creators work in both areas of the form. The difference is in the reason a piece is made and its ownership, not in methods of production or content... but the content of Industrial Comics must, by it’s nature, skew towards formula and homogeneity.<br /><br />I am talking to creators whose work excites me about why they do this and what they are reaching for, so there is not much scope for talking about Industrial Comics because the underlying answer has to ‘it’s a job’ whether they brought more to a project than that or not. I’m not against any other sort of comics, but there is a wealth of commentary available on those, so it’s not something I need to publish.<br /><br />There is no high/low divide any more and you are bringing outdated ideas to the conversation when you think in those terms. Comics are part of the wider cultural world in good and bad ways, the ghetto has been absorbed into the general populace so there is no need to foster an US & THEM attitude. There is space for rubbish, fun, trashy comics; rude and crude or hollow and cynical; slick and professional or hand-crafted and amateurish... or any combination of these and other terms.<br /><br />As for the style of language I’m using in ?sWON, I am not intentionally using art-speak or media-studies or the like, but neither am I interested in asking what happened next... The language with which we talk about the form has to depend on what we are looking at – you would not critique the recent Deadpool movie in the same terms you would a Kurosawa epic. <br /><br />In the end, I am simply asking questions that the works I read posed to me, which is pretty much all we can do as honest critics. Those questions are often (but not always) something other than ‘Who’s stronger - Hulk or Superman?’. But that would be ok too...<br /><br />SRSimon_at_Boinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04556122055291618209noreply@blogger.com