Fortress Of Solitude
Good Jonathan Lethem essay on comic books. Especially liked ‘graphs:
“DC’s heroes are instantly comprehensible, more interesting in and of themselves than in the plots where they nominally reside. Reading a hundred issues of Superman is like watching Andy Warhol’s Empire – even as the object in the center of the frame grows in mythic force, everything else means progressively less until you want to throw yourself off a tall building. Batman, that traumatized vigilante, is a bit richer, but to read a hundred Batman books is to see the failure of his pallid, sycophantic supporting cast: why won’t anyone ever call Batman on his shit?”
“Gerber probably somewhat misunderstood the narrative-aesthetics of his form, which was never actually novelistic so much as soap-operatic. Its greatest practitioner was probably Stan Lee all along, who in Fantastic Four had grasped that he was creating a serial which, like daytime television, generations of readers would want to grow into and out of, and invested it with his big sloppy heart rather than trying to think his way out of it. Lee’s great successor, Chris Claremont, reclaimed Marvel’s angsty sincerity in X-Men, and there was no looking back. Marvel’s creative culmination was a tombstone for its old, clumsily-wielded transformative potential.”
Thanks to Ian for the heads-up.
