The Himilayas between Comics and Legitimacy

With SS2 well in hand and myself about to embark on the comic format again, my interest has been piqued by researching reference, styles etc. for drawing. It has actually forced me to read some comics, manga etc. I must conclude that Comics have arguably never been further from being a legitimate medium for art/literature.
Any headway made by Scott Douglas or Maus is firmly retracted and we are actually back to a lower point in my opinion than before the 80's. Which is rare, I mean rare that the 80's was actually the pinnacle and not the low point.
Here are the various barriers that make up the gap between here and legitimacy for comics.

Everest: Nerds.

Plain and simple, and not just any definition of nerds, my definition of nerds.
Most of everything hinges on the behaviour of nerds or the 'nerd dollar'. There must have been a few good writers before Alan Moore in the west, but none of Alan Moore's impact and profile come to mind. There were innovators, sure, like Stan Le, those guys that wrote 'Demon in a bottle' but none quite as philosophical or deconstructionist as Moore. Someone who took the essence of the comic book superhero and worked with it. Instead of writing gritty real life drama.
I don't want to write a love letter to Alan Moore, I just merely raise him because I want to point out that the vast majority of comics written before Moore arrived on the scene, and the vast majority of comics written today - weren't about anything. They were a place were people didn't explore the human condition, they explored the ability of people to blow up things with laser beams coming from their eyes. Or mechanical scorpion tales, or freeze rays, invisible planes, magic rings, people who could communicate with fish etc.
It was about the "Super" and not the "Hero" and often done poorly at that.
Nerds present an obstacle for comics legitimacy because they are the fans that like Watchmen because the comedian is 'a bad ass' and John the superman 'has cool powers' and the like.
The fact that Watchmen was about something greater than the surface storyline escapes them, or they know about it because they looked it up on wikipedia, and it became a nifty-cool-secret they thought of as evidence of their superior geek intellect, and not because Watchmen was actually crafted to speak to everyone on a fundamental human level.
Basically, think of TV, if 'Two and a Half Men' is what the majority demands as good comedy, then 'Two and a Half Men' is what all the studios are out to create, not 'Seinfeld'. In the same way, if Nerds are demanding comics about cool explosions and massive battle scenes, that is what comic companies are going to greenlight, not actual literary works that explore the human condition.
Nerds keep comics in the same literary standing as Mills & Boons novels.

K2: Movies.

This is pretty much Nerds again, the Nerd dollar. Comic book movies have an appalling record of successful adaptations to the silver screen. Theres the first two superman movies of the 80s. Then theres Batman, Batman Returns. Then nothing until Spider Man, X-men 2 was a pass, Spider Man 2 was probably reigning champion until Iron Man came out. Iron Man wins because the source material is frankly terrible. Dare Devil probably loses because the product was terrible given it has Marvels second best source material (after Spiderman).
If the above list of Movies seems pretty long, keep in mind it to my best estimate represents about 5% of comic adaptation movies made. 2/7 Batman films being worth the effort of making them since the 80's is pretty good. 2/3 Spiderman movies is also noteworthy. But then there's 0/3 Fantastic Four, 0/3 Punisher, 0/3 Blade, 1/4 X-men, 0/1 Daredevil, 2/6? Superman, 0/3 Frank Miller adaptations, 0/8? vertigo imprint adaptations (eg. Virus, anything by Neil Gaiman etc.)
Now many might argue that Batman Begins & TDK are notably absent, or that Sin City was really good etc. Well, my criteria is about 'legitimacy' and whether a movie helps or hinders a comic. For me, something like Iron Man is great to make a movie out of if you do it well, which is what happened, because Iron Man beyond the suit is a conceptual nightmare with few likeable characters and a terrible rogues gallery. A movie provides the opportunity for someone to cut out as much shit as possible and condense it down to the workable elements and actually elevate the source material. Faithfully mimicking the source material (Sin City, 300) is just a waste of time, because surely you should just read the comic. Cherry Picking the best storylines (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and actually making them worse, is even worse than the faithful adaptation.
What the success of such films (fueled by the Nerd dollar) say is that the aspiration of comics as an art form is to become a movie. You couldn't say the same about books and get away with it. Sure their may be writers that take the money and run (Dan Brown, JK Rowling) but money making is held in lower esteem than winning a Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel or Nova.
Nerds provide a 'guarunteed' audience to a studio, and comics are currently a business of selling out. And they sell out terribly with real quality control issues.
These are the two biggest obstacles facing comics.

3. The Steak not the Sizzle sells.

By this I mean, in the west particularly, most people follow Mark Millar's opinion 'if it wasn't for the artwork nobody would be reading comics' rather than Alan Moore's 'You can have the best artwork in the world and it counts for nothing if the writing isn't good' which curiously both are writers.
ALan Moore, again is like the Deniro of comic writers, he hasn't produced much worth celebrating in years, but the body of work he produced in his early career is 100 times more than most writers produce in their lifetime. I'm speaking quality not quantity also.
Mark Miller is the writer of 'Wanted' and now 'Kick Ass', the guy is a conundrum to me because he has that manner of questioning - deconstruction if you will, that leads to good ideas, then seems to fall down on the execution. Maybe his concept of hip jives with me, but he is a good illustration of what is wrong in the world of comic writing right now.
He and Grant Morrison are the most celebrated. Theres a bit of Emperor's New Clothes about them I feel. Where different is celebrated as good, regardless of how it makes us feel, and again the real problem being the vastness of the Nerd dollar reinforcing crappy writers for a Michael Bay-esque approach to plots.
It's an approach you get in most industries where I imagine editors say shit like 'Twitter seems to be all the rage now, have your character using twitter and other social netwroking tools' and this sort of shallow reflection of the 'cutting edge' comes at the expense of any real feeling or thought. But comics distinctly lack the cream to skim off the top.
In television you have 'Two and a Half Men' and 'Entourage' that reflect our own meaningless lives back at us, but you have 'The Wire', 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' etc that cater to a Niche market actually wanting more.
Alternative and independant comics too often are just auditions to be Marvel/DC comics or manga, OR the comic equivalent of Punk Rock, where the importance of self importance edges out any requirement of actual talent or effort.
Put simply, there just aren't any good writers. There are however plenty and varied good artists. Which is perplexing, because the effort of writing a good story shouldn't be too onerous, thus 1 distinct advantage western comics has over manga is that 1 good writer can be matched to many artists producing a much vaster body of quality work. Instead the reverse seems to be true, with John Romita Jr having to operate on 2 hours sleep a day working for numerous talentless writers.
Imagine how much more Takehiko Inoue could produce a week if he left the drawing up to some talented manga artist who just couldn't write for shit (which describes many manga artists). I mean sure we love Vagabond, Slam Dunk and Real for his illustration as well as his writing, my point is that he could write 8 series simultaneously instead of only 2 at a time if he had other people doing the pencils up.
The number of artists I dream of working with that are currently active would necessitate taking my shoes off, to float some names in the west you have Tim Sale, Ben Templesmith, N8 Van Dyke, Greg Cappullo, Michael Lark, John Romita Jr, Jim Lee, Riccardo Burchielli...
Yet I can barely think of two big name writers I actually admire at active at the moment.

4. Manga.

Controversially, I'm going to say, manga as an industry is crap. Bill Gates was quoted in Thomas Friedmans book 'The World is Flat' as saying 'who writes the best comics and makes the best video-games... Japan' but its a superficial view, capitalist perhaps, where dollars = quality.
If you ask about Manga and where to start discovering more about it here is what will happen - somebody will hand you either Naruto or One Piece. I would hand you Slam Dunk, Vagabond or Real. If you were interested you'd probably plough straight through Vagabond, Slam Dunk, One Piece, Naruto... here two things will happen. If your like me, you will get tired of Manga, and in particular find that Naruto turns to crap and is surely only continuing as a series because there are dollars to be made, not any love any more, and you will conclude that you'd rather take your chances with the hit and miss nature of western comics in the hope of discovering some gold than keep ploughing through consistently predictable and formulaic manga. OR you are a nerd, and being easily impressed by explosions have finally found a comic medium that can deliver what you want week after week.
A nerd will (by my definition remember) has no real capacity to comprehend that a character you thought to have power lever 1,000 actually has power level 10,000 is crappy writing, but will instead struggle with the concept of how one might illustrate a magic fireball ten times as large as the one from last issue. Probably due to a lack of training in perspective drawing.
But essentially, and I've worded it before, this is about 90% of manga. It follows a formula, and if your brain can jump to the higher level (in mathematical terms) of comprehending structure, rather than the lower level of the words and pictures on the page, you can see that you are just reading the same shit from a different arsehole.
What do I mean, manga is proscriptive, theres a formula to follow and it works. You change a few details and that is all, you take the storyline of Dragonball Z drop the character names and write in character names from Naruto and you have pretty much the same story, you do it again but scrub out the Naruto names and write in the Tenjho Tenji (or whatever) names and you are back again.
Manga has no deconstructionist. Probably the best attempt I've come across is 20th century boys, but it doesn't do for Manga what Miracle Man did to Superman or Watchmen did to Justice League of America. It just raises the questions and abandons them.
Yet Manga is incredibly popular, and more incredibly, probably the most legitimate medium of the visual arts in Japan. Yes Manga is read by all ages and both genders in Japan, is much larger than Japans domestic movie industry (and much more valuable) dominates TV adaptations and is more widely read than books.
Surely then, manga can only be good for getting comics recognised as legitimate? I don't think so. For one thing, manga has opened up not comics, but manga to young girls in the west. But since Tezuka invented Shojo (or comics targeted at a female audience) little legitimate work has been done since.
Much better way of appealing to women was the SPiderman Movie franchise, because (apart from Mary Jane being a bit of an unempowered ditz) the SPiderman movies were cleverly disguised chick flicks. Why I think this was better is because it meant it was appealling to women who arent actually nerds. Unlike Manga.
That is they don't lack the imagination, have poor social skills, and are just generally stupid. They are just an average audience.
The girls I see hitting the comics/manga sections of Boarders now are not what I would call 'a sign of progress' if anything, the newfound interest of girls into manga is a step backwards, as these girls don't need material to further isolate them from society, it provides escapism which makes things worse instead of confrontation that over time makes things easier.
Despite mangas level of integration into Japanese society, if you ask me, it produces around the same (if not less) amount of quality that the comparatively weaker western comic sphere does. Of the current 'Big Three' - One Piece, Naruto & Bleach. Only One Piece in my opinion offers really exceptional writing. Takehiko Inoue who writes Vagabond and Real is operating in a peripheral HBOesque space in manga.
Mangas real threat to the west is the influence of its proscriptive plot structures and artwork. Appreciated by nerds, not by artists.
Don't get me wrong, manga and comics are two different worlds, very distant cousins and they both have heaps to offer. But I'd rather keep both, and both at a distance than have the worlds collide. That would be a step backwards. Particularly if legitimacy is the question.

5. There is no Editor for Comics.

This is the last one, you hear about movies being noted to death. Well comics must have some shadowy chief editor figure that notes to death comics. This is particularly relevant to Marvel and DC. Because they have universes. Remember point 3 about writers writing about something. Well look at western comics 2 icons - Batman & Superman. They are the only two real Icon status characters and franchises. A very very distant third is probably Spiderman.
Batman works because the basic structure (if not the original intent and the various ages of censorship etc. it has been through) lends itself to being an examination of grudges, vendettas, revenge, arrested development and the worst in human beings. You basically have an insane man hunting down other insane people and yet the nutjob in the batsuit cant see (or accept) the irony of him protecting society from other nutjobs. Batmans the iconic apocryphal anti-hero of comics.
Superman, superman is a Rockwellian messiah, he is the world as it should be, not as it is. Black and White versions of Good & Evil. Superman has been sent to solve all our troubles. He is goodness personified, he can do no wrong.
On the thematic level they are powerful archetypes from which almost all other characters can be derived. They both offer potentially powerful commentary on the human condition, and do so when written right.
But then some shadowy editor figure says 'lets put them together!' and suddenly you have: A super-powered alien with heat vision, x-ray vision, invulnerability, super speed, flight, freezing breath and super strength paired up with Sherlock Holmes in a bat suit. It becomes in other words a conceptual nightmare.
But that's with only 2, and at least theres some kind of deconstructionist commentary in comparing the 2. SOmething that absorbed much of Jeph Loeb's energies. It's when you have conceptual nightmares on like the Avengers and the JLA that the shadowy editors start really fucking things up.
Better yet, there's no more clear cut example than the 'Hush' sage and 'Face The Face' saga. Basically Jeph Loeb wrote a 12 month series that was pretty clever called Hush, in which a convoluted conspiracy provided a neat opportunity for artist Jim Lee to showcase his drawing abilities on Batman's entire rogues gallery. In the end popular villain 'Two Face' had his face controversially repaired allowing for the possibility of an overrated but essentially dull character to explore the new avenue of attempting to rehabiliate himself physically and mentally.
Then some shadowy editor seized upon the opportunity to just immediately rehash 'Hush' exactly but with the reverse outcome, a convoluted conspiracy resulting in Harvey Dent redamaging his face and once again becoming Two-Face. I admit it pretty much had to happen. But these guys didn't even wait a week to make that decision.
They squeezed some green out of the Nerd market.
Editors in short capitulate on the big fat temptation of the Nerd dollar and thus hold comics back from legitimacy in the pursuit of profits.
They are a spanner in the works of any writer/artist team that try to elevate a comic into new territory. Each time of been on the brink of getting back into a comic book series because somebody was doing something ballsy and interesting, some editor calling the shots throws something huge and craptacular at it.
In Batman there was 'Hush Returns' which was looking really promising, good writing and shit was going on with the riddler, penguin and the Joker being used in new and clever ways, the Batman series was finding its feet. Then some editor decided that better than being clever was being sensational, there was Infinite Crisis (a super team up) the return of Jason Todd (undoing the last truly ballsy thing any editor had allowed) the return of Two-Face, 52, New Characters etc.
How bad can editors get, yes much worse than Batman's (Bruce Wayne incedently is now presumably dead, presumed soon to return from the dead, much like his return from paraplegia), check out Marvels efforts in X-Men with this excerpt from a pretty good blog post on the failings of X-men:

I know what you’re thinking Cable’s been a pretty marketable stable of the X-books since his inception. He’s got inordinately large guns and another mostly passable solo book at the moment. He’s a gruff hardass strategist type which people always like. He, um, has a codename that really has nothing to do with anything, but still sounds kind of cool.

Despite all of that there is one reason that he is atop this list: he represents everything that is bizarre, ludicrous and just plain silly in thirty plus years of X-Men continuity. To fully understand this, though, we must start at the beginning when the character was just a gleam behind a pair of ruby quartz shades. Pretty much Cable’s story begins when Mr. Sinister realized that the spawn of Cyclops and Jean Grey would be a ridiculously powerful mutant. Only problem was that Jean Grey was thought dead. Sinister does the logical thing and creates a clone, everyone’s favorite, Madelyne Pryor. Cyclops and the clone have a baby, which is Cable or Nathan Christopher Charles Summers.

But wait, there’s so much more. So, Maddy goes nuts, makes a pact with some demons and becomes incredibly powerful in the dark arts. Which leads to the Inferno cross over. The main crux of the plan is the sacrifice of the infant Cable. Good triumphs and infant Cable keeps going on. After that his telekinetic powers start manifesting in the form of a force field. Which is good because people really have it in for the baby. Like a time displaced adult-ish Franklin Richards. Which was the oft-overlooked Days of Future Present cross over.

Eventually though, baby Cable gets infected with the techno organic virus and must be taken into the distant future by the Mother Askani. The Mother Askani being Rachel Summers: the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate reality that got hurdled into the distant future. In the distant future, the newly rechristened Nathan Christopher Summers Dayspring Askani’son is raised by…Jean Grey and Scott Summers who had their minds transferred into the bodies of Slym and Redd by their time displaced daughter from an alternate reality. Cyclops and Jean raise him for twelve years, beat Apocalypse and then get transferred back into their own bodies’ moments after being shunted into the future. After that, Cable goes back in time to do some mercenary shit before leading the New Mutants.

And that is why Cable is the silliest X-Man in history. And don’t even get me started on his dealings with Nate Grey. So, yeah I don’t think I need to say anything else on the subject.

In closing there were many characters that I know you felt were unfairly left out. Changeling had a very silly hat. Moira MacTaggart is one of the world’s leading Housekeepers/ Geneticists (Go read, pre Uncanny, X-Men 96 she’s their fucking housekeeper.) X-Treme is frankly just too easy. Revanche…yeah. Strong Guy does have a silly name, but is pretty kick ass overall. But I had to pick my ten and I’m sticking to them. There you have it.

Conclusion: Okay, Nerds are not really the everest of comic legitimacy, they are the continental plate pushing into asia raising the whole mountain range. The problem is comics are for nerds, yet many of those nerds lack the very imagination necessary to create a 'by nerds for nerds' industry. Once again, it's my definition so whilst many comic book writers and artists would describe themselves as nerds and possibly even stick up for their fan base, I mean that the dollars driving and reinforcing all the shitty behaviours and structures in the comic industry are: lack of imagination (impressed by Michael Bay), Stupidity (unable to see higher level structures/addicted to World of Warcraft), and social ineptitude (drive away the types of fans that can elevate the artform with their support).
Many people could get into Manga that are just plain creeped out by the fanboys jacking off over Sailor Moon and drawing their own dirty pictures of Naruto with teenage girl characters. Many a perhaps not cool, but sensible and intelligent person might have been perusing watchmen when some Moron sidled up and 'highly recommended it' before starting to pronounce out loud all the sound effects in the comic whilst reading it over your shoulder, resulting in a future supporter of the genre thinking 'do I really want to be part of this scene'.
Many a jackass has recieved a pat on the back for their brilliant time-travel-alternate-dimension-double-cross-conspiracy-retcon-resurection-crossover storyline piece of shit because a bunch of nerds got excited at the constantly expanding cast of colourful (yet personality-less) characters and constant use of explosions and laser beams and thus made them a big clinky pile of money.
Nerds are bad fans, precicely because they are stupid, lack imagination and lack social skills.

I am of the view that when Rove watches Conan O'Brian and repackages one of his bits for an ignorant Australian audience, he is being disrespectful to his Audience (assuming they are ignorant hayseeds whom will laugh and clap at recycled and stale jokes). They very well may laugh and clap like ignorant hayseeds, but his keeping them down rather than treating them with respect and raising them up. He appeals to the worst in them, not the best in them. He does what is easy, not what is right.
And that's pretty much the whole comic book industry. Let's call a spade a spade. I'm a fan of comics and I admit, freely that if I had to describe fans of comics, I would describe them as nerds or losers. Which they may well be, and they may well clap and whistle and fork over cash for explosions, tits and ever escalating power levels, ever more time travel retconning and ever bigger crossover events. But capitulating to their demand is disrespecting their ability to appreciate good, solid, powerful and meaningful writing. Writing that is about something. Writing that is legitimate.