easier done than said

Spend enough time on the comics internet and you're bound to run across one: a burst of message board bile or an angsty long form blogpost about how some recent event in the comics scene has raped the author's childhood, kicked her dog, or fractured some part of their anatomy, and so now they must holler a pointed "Adieu to comics" from their soapbox. Then, after a hiatus of minutes or even hours, they return to piss and moan about how Jean Grey is depicted in the latest issue of X-Cessive Franchise X-Pansion. Net-based bluster and net-based drama are cheap.

The sad truth is that the habits of ingrained fandom are harder to excise than pancreatic cancer. The attachment to the characters and titles and the serialized nature of the medium make it too easy to stick around for a while and hope things will sort themselves out, especially when a large percentage of the fanbase is caught up in the obsessive collector's mindset and will keep throwing money down a hole for the sake of completeness.

Which is why I was a bit startled to realize that my own sense of fandom has apparently scabbed up and fallen off after three decades. It's not a political statement or an empty gesture of protest...or a gesture of protest of any kind. Nor is it a blanket repudiation of my affection for the medium. I have no plans to unload my collection or quit buying reprint editions or back issues that interest me. I have simply quit caring about the current crop of offerings in the superhero genre and the marketing psychodrama that goes with them.

It was a small epiphany at the end of long, drawn out process, and it happened while I was reading the latest issue of DC's current big event title, Final Crisis. The series and comic itself weren't half bad. It's competently written and illustrated, contains the expected lashings of bombast and melodrama, and is more intelligently constructed than one would expect from an editorially-mandated tentpole title.

As well-crafted as Final Crisis is, it still comes off as an exercise in creative decadence, mired in the poorly focused sense of deja vu that typifies the present-day Marvel and DC Universes. The superhero genre has always been predicated upon finding new routes for the trip to the same old well, but these days it feels different somehow, with familiarity stressed as much as cosmetic differences used to be.

There are exceptions, but for the most part it feels that no one even tries to achieve escape velocity anymore. Instead they settle for a predicable (yet decaying) orbit around childhood nostalgia and creative hero worship that mimics superficial forms but not the underlying substance. The results are essentially licensed fan-fiction, a downward spiral clogged with hobby-horses and trivial obsessions passing for actual storytelling, and kept moving with clumsy grafts taken from the popcult zeitgeist. Why settle for adequate (at best) knock-offs that shamelessly ape the source material when you can just read the original stories?

I fully concede the point that "it's new to you, maybe, but not to a lot of fans," though that same logic, when applied to Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho over the original film or Oasis's discography over that of The Beatles, comes off as pretty laughable. I've been collecting superhero comics for over three decades now. There have been creative high points and plenty of low ones, and through it all I've managed to stay engaged with the material, with some sense of eager anticipation. Now, at age thirty-six, I feel like I've outgrown the scene.

It's not fan entitlement that moves me, just plain vanilla apathy for current offerings, for the online mind-games between producers and vociferous aggrieved consumers (which is just sort of pathetic), and for the utter foolishness of it all.

Me, curse the darkness? Nah. Better, I think, to curl up on the couch with a tall glass of ice tea and the OMAC omnibus edition and quit pretending I care about Skrulls, demonic annulments, display cases, or other nonsense.

Belle & Sebastian - I'm Waking Up To Us (from a 2001 single, collected on Push Barman to Open Old Wounds, 2005) - It's not you, baby, it's me and you...but mostly you, though.