Who's Who In The CBU Update 2010

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

They aren't MY gods...

By Barb

Grant Morrison, in an interview with i.fuse.com: “I really don't want to see any more comics about the various Golden and Silver 'ages' and how styles of the past contrast with the styles of today, I don't want to see any more comics about fictional worlds and the power of creativity, or any more comics about weird drugs and warped realities. Let's call a moratorium on stuff that was once exciting and is now dull, clichéd and repetitive. Right now, I hate all comic books except The Authority.”

I can understand why Grant Morrison only reads the Authority. I share his opinion that most of what's going on at DC lately are cannibalizations of ideas he had YEARS back. The first time I saw a hint that Crisis On Infinite Earths might be at least a tad reversible was in his Animal Man comics, for instance. The first Silver Age Marvel spoof/emulation I can point to was when Morrison parodied the Fantastic Four in Doom Patrol, using DC mature title characters. I haven’t liked where the corruption of Morrison’s ideas have taken mainstream comics, but to blame him for the overuse by others of his once-original concepts is a lot trying to blame the Beatles for the Monkees. One works hard to come up with a style all one’s own, but once a style becomes recognizable, it can be like a straightjacket to the author and a case of “monkey see, monkey do” for his/her imitators. Now that Morrison’s more recognizable stylistic twitches have been assumed by osmosis by the rest of the industry, I wonder how his style is going to change. I’m eager to read his new work for Marvel, to say the least.

Like Morrison himself, I too have gotten really tired of Silver Age re-creations. Authors that specialize in them seem to be saying that the best days of the medium are in the glorious past. “Everything that can be said or done with comics has already been done and all we can do is remake/remodel the past” is the message inherent in these comics. Alan Moore called it the ’pop will eat itself’ phenomenon. As much as I admire Mr. Moore, I don't believe comics’ best days are behind them or that nothing more can be done with them. Maybe he doesn’t read the same indie comics I do!

Unfortunately, the mainstream market’s currently flooded by those who seem to believe the same way Moore does. I am calling the current age of mainstream comics ‘the neo-Silver Age’, for lack of a better term. There’s this tendency to want to reach back to the past in a way that simply emulates instead of bringing anything new to the work. I understand how the neo-Silver Age came about. The 'dark age' of comics in the 1980’s, which is best represented for the sake of my article by Frank Miller’s work, became a cliche because after The Dark Knight Returns, people without Miller's talent mis-used the concepts inherent in the book. Instead of putting the focus on real characters and real life concerns (which is the real lesson of Miller's work, in my opinion), they put the emphasis simply on the violence and the other icky stuff.

It's not surprising that a writer such as Mark Waid came along when he did. Waid‘s work is the antithesis of Miller‘s. Waid’s work was warm and humorous, with a certain naive and childlike idealism that comic book heroes were heroes, not fucked-up vigilantes with death wishes. Now, admittedly, I like a well-written fucked-up vigilante with death wish story better than all but the best of the brighter stuff , but the ’dark stuff’ was becoming a bit old by this time. Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones thought of Waid‘s Kingdom Come as a farewell note to the Silver Age and its passing. They were wrong. Kingdom Come was a manifesto that seemed to say, "comic book characters are HEROES, not anti-social sociopaths, dammit". That seeming statement of purpose was fine as far as it went, but the return of the hero to DC comics didn‘t end with the idea that heroes should be seen as heroes. No, Waid had to drag back the Silver Age bodily to the present. He’s simply the most notable person who did this, but he’s not the only one. Kurt Busiek’s often Astro City has been all but ruined by this same sort of thing. What the neo-Silver Age writers don’t understand is that recreating the Silver Age is a bit like watching a roadshow of Beatlemania. It’s fun the first time, on a simple, “Oh my God, that’s so accurate” level, but the ultimate result is nothing that can reach the audience where they live in the here and now. While it’s somewhat interesting to see what comics the neo-Silver Agers were obsessed by as children, they are now adults and so are much of the audience. One cannot base a revolution upon nostalgia. Revolutions, whether for civil liberties or for the hearts and minds of an audience, have to be staged in the present.

As Grant Morrison’s statements at the start of this article imply, Mark Millar’s writing on The Authority offers a way out of ideas that are largely becoming trite. I read Supreme before I read Authority # 13 and the latter was a breath of fresh air in comparison. Finally, I thought, a comic that dares to play it straight. Here’s a work that isn't being filtered through 15 layers of irony and self-referral. It owes little to nothing to the Silver Age and attempts to recreate nothing from the past. It’s a comic with its eyes set towards the future, not the past. The concept of realistic characters as heroes going after real world concerns is a simple one, but its simplicity makes it brilliant. Admittedly, Millar’s idea of real heroes in the real world has some superficial resemblances to comics of the past, most notably Squadron Supreme and Elementals from the 1980’s, but the political tone of the book and the sheer revolutionary energy of the work makes it something brand new. I believe, with any luck, The Authority will be the first in a Vanguard of new superhero titles featuring well-written stories about realistic characters told in a frank, honest, and adult manner. It’s an exciting thought.