BLACKEST NIGHT: The Great Darkness Saga, Pt. 3

• Part 1
• Part 2
• related

In the previous installment, I glanced at some major changes in mainstream superhero comics art between the Great Darkness Saga from 1982 and Blackest Night, the latest crossover event now in 2009. There have been a lot of changes on the writing side, too, and if anything, they're even more dramatic.

As I mentioned in Pt. 1, Sean Collins's review of GDS makes a good point of departure for examining some of those changes. Although he enjoyed it, he still pointed out how dated it seemed to him. I'd like to start with his knock on the dialogue, when he says,

Now, is this a great comic book? No. It's too rooted in house-style artistic aesthetics, expository dialogue, self-referential continuity, corny jokes, and everything else you'd expect from a basic superhero comic of the early '80s. As in so many comics of the period I have to wonder if the creators ever listened to human speech.

Dialogue from that period wasn't just bad in a vacuum. It was actually quite good at serving the purposes for which it developed. Here's a little context:

When I was young, I got hooked on comics because they were pervasively available and, with their eye-catching covers, irresistible. When I say "pervasively available," I mean damn near every place where you could buy a candy bar probably had a spinner or stand. They were just out there, part of the environment, and if you were a kid like me, to see them was to want them. I begged for them in supermarket checkout lines. They were something to pick up along with medicine at the drugstore when I was sick. On long car trips, we'd restock at every Stuckey's or gas station or sometimes even restaurant or hotel lobby. Visiting grownups would sometimes bring them as treats. I'd wager something like that is how almost all comics fans of my generation came to love them.

Mainstream superhero comics creators from that period had to assume a younger audience than creators do now that all pamphlets are exclusively Direct Market--at least in the same sense that television programmers have to assume a younger audience at 8 p.m. than they do at 10 p.m. What creators couldn't assume was much reader familiarity. One of the demands they had to juggle was the fact that any given issue might be some kid's point of entry to that story arc, that title, or comics, period. All the features of dialogue that Sean criticizes from that time are actually solutions to the problem of how to establish situations, personalities, and relationships briskly and efficiently for a relatively young readership.

The Avengers was the first comic I actually followed. I picked it up back in '79, and it was always just stuffed with this kind of banter. When I read Sean's complaint about dialogue, in fact, this two-page spread from my first Avengers issue (#185) sprang immediately to mind:


It sprang to mind not only because it's a great example of what Sean's talking about (if I'm reading him correctly), but because it's such a vivid memory for me. And it's such a vivid memory for me because it gave me a jolt of instant emotional connection with these characters.

As "instant" implies, there's something cheap and easy about that. This isn't really depth; it's just one flat surface "subimposed" beneath another. But this goes to the question of emotional accessibility I raised with regard to Blackest Night back when I was addressing new-reader friendliness:

There is a sense in which this isn't so "new reader friendly," however. While it doesn't presuppose much knowledge of prior continuity, it does sort of presuppose a history of emotional attachment to these characters. The climax of BN #1 is a gruesome murder of two characters by reanimated zombie versions of two other characters. From what I can tell, having read a ton of reviews, this scene was a disturbing gut-punch for many longtime fans, in a way that it simply wasn't for me and probably couldn't be for any new reader. It's not that I didn't grasp what was going on--I didn't need a wikipedia article to help me sort out backstory or anything. And really, I don't even think it would help much if I ran out and bought a relevant graphic novel or two. Much of the emotional whammy in this scene, the horror and tragedy, depends on viewing these characters as old friends.

To which Sean replied:

Second, he articulates a problem with serialized superhero comics that not even Jim Shooter-style "new-reader friendliness" can overcome, namely that even if a superhero comic uses exposition to provide you with all the information you need to make sense it, it still "presuppose[s] a history of emotional attachment to these characters" to connect with it. And frankly there's no more of a way around that than there would be to make latecomers to The Sopranos instantly connect with the plight of Christopher Moltisanti. It's just the nature of long-form serialized storytelling.

Well, it's a tradeoff, either way. You can make an emotional connection immediately accessible to new audiences at the price of keeping it perpetually superficial, or you can reward long-term loyalty by going deeper in ways that make the material increasingly emotionally opaque to outsiders/latecomers.

This is another of the industry-wide sea-changes between GDS and BN--those tradeoffs have been renegotiated. Back in the early '80s, without having read a single prior issue ever of Legion of Super-Heroes, I could jump right in to the Great Darkness Saga and enjoy pretty close to the full range of emotional experience it aimed to evoke. That was possible, in large part, precisely because of the kind of dialogue packed so densely into the two-page spread below, and the kind of emotional connection it made possible with such little precondition:


Now that superhero floppies are off the supermarket spinner racks and sold exclusively in specialty Direct Market shops, they can aim at older readers, and assume long-term familiarity, not only narratively, but emotionally as well. I honestly hadn't noticed, but I wouldn't be surprised if dialogue has shifted to some extent toward the more realistic end of the spectrum in response to these changed conditions. What I do know is that, so far, I've read twice as many Blackest Night-related issues as comprise the entire Great Darkness Saga, and I'm nowhere near up to speed in my emotional engagement with the characters, situations, or events.

(more to come . . .)