We need more well-written comics

As a college instructor who is fortunate to get to teach comic book writing every month, it’s extremely frustrating to me to hear so many of my students say “I didn’t understand what was going on.” As a fan and a creator of the medium, it’s disheartening.

Now, you might have the immediate reaction that some of them do: they just aren’t used to reading comics, so they don’t know “how” to read them …or maybe they’re just dumb.

No!

That’s a terrible attitude to have, but some of them actually feel that way and say so. And if you had that reaction, shame on you.

I always respond to them saying that with “if you don’t understand the comic you’ve read, it’s not because you’re dumb or don’t understand how to read comics, it’s because the writer of that comic is a terrible writer.”

There. I said it. Plain and simple, it’s the writer’s job to effectively communicate the story. When readers don’t understand, it’s not the reader’s fault, it’s the writer’s fault. Oh trust me, I know my fair share of writers who blame the readers for “not getting what they’re trying to say,” but that’s just so much bull-hooey. Write better, and they’ll understand.

Another problem, I think, and this is an incredibly mixed bag, so my own opinions are still not fully formed on this, is the wide embracing of “graphic novels” by the more literary publishing companies. Some of them have done very well, and many are embraced by the more … literary (read: snooty) community. But…are they really that good? I would argue that most of them are not, they just happen to be about topics that many who deem content to be “literarily good” find acceptable. Often, coming out stories, leaving the South because it’s racist stories, stories of “acceptance”—the kinds of stories that might not actually be good, but the content is acceptable.

If you look at the art for many of them, they’re often not very good at visually telling a story. Remove the text from most of them and you have no clue what’s going on. Comic sequential artists (and writers) are taught that the reader should be able to tell what’s going on in the story WITHOUT the words. Yeah… that’s not likely to be the case with most of the graphic novels published by non-traditional comic publishers.

The root of that, I think, is those publishers hiring editors who have no idea what a comic is and should do. They are “educated” in literary prose and so are hired to put together a line of comics. I’m sure they mean well, but they are simply not qualified (and this is not a blanket statement to suggest they are all that way).

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding as so many of my students will utter (or write) those words after having read them: I had a hard time following the story, or I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Well, that’s not their fault…it’s the writer’s fault.

So yeah, we need more better-written comics.

Not all bad tropes are bad

In my class, students read a lot of comics. A goodly portion of them are superhero comics. Super HERO comics. Of those that aren’t “superhero” comics, they often still have “heroes” though not so super. “Heroes” do heroic things. A lot of those heroic things include SAVING PEOPLE.

So I laugh to myself when I read a student write about some comic they’ve read: “oh, hero saved the damsel in distress. I hate this trope, therefore I hate this comic.”

I get it. No really, I do. You’ve been told this for years—that women don’t need to be rescued, women are tough, they don’t need a “man” to rescue them, etc., so the story is old and therefore you should hate it.

The problem (often) is, it ain’t about the person being rescued being a woman. I mean, heroes can save THE WORLD (which includes men and women) like the Avengers do in the movies…but that, too, can get old after a while. No, it’s about the hero doing something heroic, saving SOMEONE in need of saving.

If heroes are saving people, they’re either going to save a damsel in distress or a dude in distress. You’ve got a 50/50 chance of either of those. I guess you COULD make it 33/33/33 and make it a “kid” where it doesn’t really matter if they’re a boy or girl, they’re a kid.

But…I dunno, people need saving sometimes. Sometimes that person is a man, sometimes that person is a female …let heroes by heroes. Let them save people. Let them save kids. Let them save dudes. Let them save damsels! I WANT to see my heroes doing heroic things!

And PS. For the uninitiated, “heroes” can be a male or female. It’s not about their biology, it’s about what they do with the power they have.

What is a Silverline?

In the coming days I’ll be announcing a website and such for my comic imprint Silverline. Those of you who’ve been around for a long time will remember what Silverline is, but for those who haven’t and for those who are just popping by, let me ‘splain.

In 1987 I was at USM trying to finish up a degree and figure out how to earn a living as a writer. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to work in comics, but I didn’t want to move to New York. A freak chance meeting with my now long-time friend Steven Butler (long story that involves my now-wife/then-girlfriend running for homecoming court) put the pieces into play. I’d been “working” on comics since my junior high days with my good pal Barry Gregory, but neither of us really had chops to draw—we were always looking for artists with whom we could collaborate. Steven and his suitemate Mitch Byrd fit that bill. Steven was just a driven as I was and had been trying to “break in” to comics, too. The black and white boom had just started with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…so we decided to follow suit and do it ourselves.

Initially, we went with the name Top Comics. Mitch designed a nice imprint logo and off we went! We sent the solicitations around to all the distributors (there was more than just Diamond in those days) and ultimately got orders for about 4,400 copies.

It was there that we got jammed. We didn’t have the money to actually print and ship the comics. We were still in college, after all. None of the banks in Hattiesburg would give us a loan to print the comics, even with purchase orders for the 4,400 copies in our hands.

Sooooo, we had to cancel the orders and try plan B. As fate would have it, we knew someone who knew someone who had just started a small press company and was looking for content. That company was EF Graphics run by John Drury. We signed with EFG; Cat & Mouse was just the first title. It was to be followed by SilverStorm (written by Thomas Fortenberry); followed by an anthology title with stories by Barry…which would lead into a team book: The Hero Task Force.

But we’d become such a close group that we wanted an identity and we couldn’t really be Top Comics. This was before the idea of all the “studios” popped up later, but that’s kind of what we were. After some time, we settled on the name Silverline. Truthfully, I don’t know who in that group first proposed the name—if I were to guess, probably Steven. Maybe one of them remembers, but I don’t. But the idea was that since we loved the SILVER AGE of comics, we wanted to do comics that had a modern sensibility with a silver age spirit. We’d be a “line” of comics from EFG…we’d be the Silver Line. We shortened it to one word…and that, in a nutshell, is how it came to be.