Go, Read: Tim Marchman On Leaping Tall Buildings

The writer Tim Marchman has penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal using recent superhero movies and the history-via-profiles book Leaping Tall Buildings as a springboard to indict the comic book industry for not being able to sell more books despite the popularity of their core genres and the accessibility/skill inherent in many of the titles down by talented creators pursuing their own work. It's an interesting piece in terms of it being a piece of comics-related rhetoric. On the one hand, Marchman is kind of mean to some specific comics people and is hostile generally to many of the approaches embraced and endorsed by modern superhero comics. On the other hand, the basic shape of his insights are shared by a significant portion of that audience -- that the superhero narratives are convoluted and trade in bizarre obscurities. Marchman is doing some back and forth with comics fans via his Twitter account.

I think it's a good piece in terms of it being an affecting, snap judgment of the comics medium from an industry-informed standpoint, and the general message that a shoddy treatment of artists will over time be reflected in shoddy, underperforming product is one that could be repeated five times a day for the rest of time as far as I'm concerned. I might quibble some with the premise. I'm not sure that comics is always best judged by how it reaches a mass audience because I think almost everything that involves reading and certainly the things that involve the kind of complex readings that comics routinely offer combine will keep comics a secondary art form in terms of how many people are going to engage with it. That said, I think a double, tripling, quintupling of the current audience is a real and even achievable possibility if that were to become a widely-accepted goal. I could be totally wrong about that, of course.

I thought I remembered the name in a comics context: Marchman suggested that the oversized Chris Ware ACME collection was 2006's book of the year in this article.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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