Since I grew up in the Silver Age, I remember when comics didn't have anyone to speak for them. They were the junk that only kids and naifs like Gomer Pyle would read.
A lot of that has changed, with reviews of graphic novels giving the medium more respect than it ever had before. However, one consequence of this development is that certain critics act as if the disreutable era of comics ought to be roundly ignored.
In the introduction to Douglas Wolk's book READING COMICS, Wolk pointedly distanced his type of fan from the kind who made much of, say, Julie Schwartz's GREEN LANTERN. In so doing he wasn't just stating his disinterest in GREEN LANTERN or in Silver Age books in particular. He was placing all of his critical emphasis upon the stuff from later periods because that was the stuff that had earned accolades with readers outside the hardcore audience.
Another example: a guy named Julian Darius, who's organized his own website (you can find it easily enough), came out with an essay in which he divided modern comics into "revisionist" types and "reconstructive" types. This definition is based on the developments that took place in comics of the late Bronze Age and afterward-- Miller, Moore, Morrison, et al. The trouble with this distinction is that it's so ad hoc that it means nothing when applied to earlier developments in genre comics. One might deem the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN to be "revisionist" because it was exposing absurdities in superhero stories, like superheroes never needing money. And yet Spider-Man is certainly a mainstream superhero comic despite those elements of revisionism. Is it "reconstructionist" because it still reaffirms superhero values, which is the term Darius gives to works like the Morrison JLA?
I'll probably blog about this in near future, but I wanted to sound off here first...
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I don't know if I'm catching your point. Are you unhappy with the way Silver Age comics are viewed by critics or unhappy with the amount of coverage Silver Age books are afforded? Or do you want younger critics to view the books differently?
I've read Wolk's book a couple of times and didn't get the idea that he was describing "his type of fan" or comparing such a fan to another type. His essays do focus more on specific types or styles of comics, but I think he generally makes it clear that those are just the types of comics that interest him the most. I didn't get the feeling he was writing about certain books because they earned accolades with any certain group of readers.
IIRC, the terms deconstructionist, revisionist or reconstructionist started being used to describe comics of the late 80s and into the 90s and early 2000s as newer generations of writers came on the scene and began to experiment. Most of those writers were playing with the ideas that had been laid out by Lee, Kirby, Ditko and others. I guess you could say that Stan and Jack (for example) were playing around with 50s era comics and were being revisionist to some degree, but I think most people consider early Marvel books to be a starting point in terms of modern comics. People like Miller, Moore and Morrison have made it clear that the work of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Eisner and others had a huge influence on them and they have all spent much of their careers trying to take those books apart and discover the essence of what made them great and then rebuild them into something new.
I don’t recall the introduction specifically, but I enjoyed Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics twice (back-to-back).
I guess it's "C:" "want to see younger critics view the books differently." I labelled this thread an "oldguy complaint" in an ironic manner. I know that the stuff I read as a young fan, the likes and dislikes I share to some extent with other fans of my generation, are not going to be shared by other generations. So I don't expect younger critics to rave about the Steranko NICK FURY or the Wood THUNDER AGENTS. Those were very much of their time, and people of this generation have their own priorities.
That said, I don't like the implication that comics critics can just ignore the older commercial work. I don't think that you can label Morrison's work on JUSTICE LEAGUE as "reconstructionist" as if it was *sui generis,* because it's directly based on recapturing the "sense-of-wonder" one finds in the early Gardner Fox work (and to some extent, in Kirby's NEW GODS). Elsewhere in the essay Darius uses the term "glossy escapism" for works that don't have Morrison's deeper themes. But does that make Fox's JLA some sort of escapism (presumably "unglossy")? And if it's just escapism, then why is the supposedly profound Morrison bothering to reproduce anything from it?
Ok, I see where you're coming from now. Although I think I look at the issue a little differently. I'm a "70s oldguy" and I've become painfully aware that most people who didn't grow up in the 70s don't have the same reverence that I do for a lot of the books that were published back then. But I think it's a fairly common malady to look back and view the books you read when you were 9 or 10 as being superior to everything else. I was cured of this malady when I went back and actually read those same books as an adult. Apparently I was much easier to impress in 1977 than in 2007. Despite this realization, I still have great fondness for those books, but I realize now that those feelings are rooted mostly in nostalgia. Because as an adult, I still long for that sense of wonder that only a child can experience.
Which brings me around to the reconstructionist discussion. I looked at the essay you referenced by Darius and I see what you're reacting to. However, I think he is positing that reconstructionism is an attempt to restore "sense of wonder" for an adult audience rather than the same age group that the Silver Age books were aimed at. This is an almost impossible task which is why Morrison is one of the few creators that can even come close to pulling it off. So, is Morrison's JLA, Batman or Final Crisis "sui generis?" Maybe not, because I don't think any of those projects were totally successful in pulling off "adult sense of wonder". (Though they came close at times.) And I think other creators, like Alex Ross, have also come close. But I don't think Darius' theories are totally off base.
I've certainly had the same experience you cite: you go back and reread something that held a lot of magic for you as a kid or a young teen, and as an adult you can't see it in the same light.
OTOH, I've also had the experience in which I go back to an early favorite like a Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and even though as an adult I'm aware of more flaws, I'm also aware of subtleties that the younger me missed. So I would say that while the youngster and the adult don't always see the same story, there are some important points of overlap. And those points IMO exist because youngsters and oldsters still desire a lot of the same things out of their fiction: they just desire them in different ways.
I stated it before, but let me emphasize that I don't expect younger critics to idolize earlier work. However, if they have a sincere idea to understand the roots of a genre like the superhero, IMO they need to adopt a methodology like that of the anthropologist: to understand something like THUNDER AGENTS in terms of how it tried to push "entertainment buttons" in its own time. This is hard to do without being reductive and condescending, but I think that it can be done.
Even if Grant Morrison isn't totally successful in translating a juvenile sense of wonder into adult terms-- and that lack of success itself is arguable-- to call it simply "reconstructionist" is the sort of thing that oversimplifies what's being done. The same thing applies to the use of "revisionist' as a mental shorthand for a view critical of genre conventions,. There's already a word for that: it's called "satire." The Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, however, doesn't really criticize genre conventions: it bends certain conventions in order to convince the reader that he's seeing a brand new realistic take on those conventions.
The idea of "revisionism," in other words, cannot exist without an appeal to verisimilitude. "In real life a superhero couldn't cash a check at a bank because he couldn't show his ID." "in real life a superhero would get his fancy cape stuck in a door and half kill himself." However, verisimilitude can exist quite easily without a revisionist attitude. The Silver Age GREEN LANTERN structures its hero's acquisition of powers with far greater attention to logic and motivation than one sees in the Golden Age GREEN LANTERN, where the hero just gets hold of a barely explained magic lamp and ring and then goes to town.
I can understand critics using specialized terms for periods of creativity. Maybe one could speak of a "reconstructionist" period in comics as academics speak of a "Romantic period" in poetry, even though none of the Romantic poets used such a name for themselves. But I felt Darius was taking his specialized terms too far, transporting them into the realm of abstract concepts rather than historical denotations.
I did the bulk of my comics reading in the '70s, followed by more reading in the '80s and '90s--less so in the last ten to fifteen years (but more reading of vintage comics now). I started out reading comics in the '60s, but if I counted up how many comics I actually read at that time it would be a drop in the bucket compared with those following decades.
In the '70s, i was always looking back to the previous decades, because DC did so many reprints--plus there were publications like Warren's SPIRIT magazine and the MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE.. And while some comics in the '70s stood well in comparison, I had the prevailing feeling tha the '70s were a lesser period and that the great epoch of comics had come before that and I had just arrived on the tail end of it.
Sure comics in the '30s and early '40s were raw, but these were the people developing the language and first deciding what the conventions would be. The comics of the '50s and '60s were the flowering of that language. And the '70s felt like the decline, as the great builders left the scene and some unqualified workers took their place.
So I was never pre-disposed to believe the time when I was discovering new comics was the best time, because I was discovering old comics at the exact same time.
I understand why some kids think their time is the best, if they haven't been exposed to anything else. But those are kids. You grow up. Either you give your head a shake and you start to have a deeper understanding or you go through life acting like a kid.
If you haven't developed beyond being a kid, I don't know what would make you think that you could possbily tell other people what to think. Except that you're such a kid, you think you have a right to yell and whine about every little thing. Don't those kind of self-appointed critics expose themselves pretty quickly?
I never thought that my time in comics when I was young was the best. I started in 1974 and stopped in about 1982 or 1983 because if cost, but when I rejoined in the 1990's it seemed that more than one generation had passed by. It was like I jumped from reading Frankenstein to Micky Spilane. I think at the time I expected that if there had been change it would have been more like Star Trek to Star Trek the Next Generation, this was more like Star Trek to Starship Troopers.
I think the main difference is that when I was young and read a story that promised 'everything will change' I actually believed it where now I scorn it as marketing hype.