In general, Toth lamented what he saw as a lack of awareness on the part of younger artists of their predecessors, as well as a feeling that the innocent fun of comics’ past was being lost in the pursuit of pointless nihilism and “mature content.”
Toth wasn't a conscious influence on me when I was first conceptualizing Space Kid, but maybe he shoulda been**. In any event, you're right -- if he had seen my new series, I bet he would've approved.
** having said that: he was a conscious influence on part of page 9 -- which I intend to explain in the commentary when I post it.
I sometimes wonder when the trend I think he was talking about, that I would say began with projects like The Dark Knight, will finally come to an end.
How much longer can they keep feeding us dark, noire-ish projects full of blues and blacks and falling rain and painful betrayals and anti-heroes who smoke cigarettes and grimly acknowledge bleak reality?
You'd think sooner or later it would just all seem cliched... but it's been a quarter century at this point.
Well remember, we've had “people with superhuman abilities who wear spandex and fight evil and maintain a secret identity”, since 1938 and there's no sign of that letting up either. The American comics medium is peculiarly resistant to change...
Marvel's Civil War was about forcing superheroes to abandon their secret identities; since Dark Knight, evil is what the heroes often are; and spandex has been replaced many times with more noire-ish substitutions, as in the case of the all-black Spider-Man costume that turned out to be a malicious alien.
It's seeped into other genres too. BSG had a nasty, gritty look-and-feel that in my opinion was directly inspired by The Matrix, which was in turn directly inspired by dark-and-dirty comics of the late eighties and nineties.
When I find creative projects that actually use a comprehensive color palette, like Lost did, I am actually surprised.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 02:37 pm (UTC)In general, Toth lamented what he saw as a lack of awareness on the part of younger artists of their predecessors, as well as a feeling that the innocent fun of comics’ past was being lost in the pursuit of pointless nihilism and “mature content.”
Not in every case...
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 03:11 pm (UTC)Toth wasn't a conscious influence on me when I was first conceptualizing Space Kid, but maybe he shoulda been**. In any event, you're right -- if he had seen my new series, I bet he would've approved.
** having said that: he was a conscious influence on part of page 9 -- which I intend to explain in the commentary when I post it.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 03:20 pm (UTC)How much longer can they keep feeding us dark, noire-ish projects full of blues and blacks and falling rain and painful betrayals and anti-heroes who smoke cigarettes and grimly acknowledge bleak reality?
You'd think sooner or later it would just all seem cliched... but it's been a quarter century at this point.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 04:02 pm (UTC)Marvel's Civil War was about forcing superheroes to abandon their secret identities; since Dark Knight, evil is what the heroes often are; and spandex has been replaced many times with more noire-ish substitutions, as in the case of the all-black Spider-Man costume that turned out to be a malicious alien.
It's seeped into other genres too. BSG had a nasty, gritty look-and-feel that in my opinion was directly inspired by The Matrix, which was in turn directly inspired by dark-and-dirty comics of the late eighties and nineties.
When I find creative projects that actually use a comprehensive color palette, like Lost did, I am actually surprised.