October 15, 2013
Go, Read: Charles Hatfield On That PBS Superhero Documentary
Charles Hatfield, an award-winning writer on superhero comics familiar to many readers of this site, has a fairly succinct and strong post up
here about
Superheroes: A Never Ending Battle. I haven't watched the documentary; it doesn't look very interesting to me. Hatfield is overly nice and as far as I've been able to tell in reading him for 20 years has no particular axes to grind with treatments of that material that don't agree with his own.
I can tell you without reading the comments -- never read the comments -- that a standard response to that piece will be a) "hey, it's about superheroes," so they'll focus on Hatfield's point about the documentary not dealing with other genres in even the broadest terms as beside the point rather than key, missing and easily-included basic context that skipping leads to massively misleading-by-omission conclusions about things like the rise of the code; b) it's for the civilians, as if somehow you can't have a smart mention or two that involves more rigorous history and still have an entertaining documentary. I tend to see these things in almost every case as a part of that specific fan culture's ingrained insecurities than serious objections. That Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko get short shrift seems to me particularly dismaying at this late date considering all we know. Even if you believe the discrepancies in the Marvel creation story all favor Stan Lee 100 percent, there's very little reason to discount the massive contributions of those two artists in particular. That just seems weird now.
posted 9:42 pm PST |
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