I feel like 90% of old cartoons are about creepy rich old men cheating on their wives. Single-panel comics from pre-1970-something? I feel like Adulterous Old Creepy Fucks used to be this major genre of American cartoon humor. …What the hell was that about? Why was that shit ever funny???
When it’s an old comic, I just feel like I’ve seen that kind of joke more than any other kind of single-panel comic except maybe ones where some obnoxious shitty kid says something rotten. It’s always some old lech-y dude saying, “You have to earn that promotion by letting me insert my penis into your vagina, honey”; or two secretaries are talking and one of them says, “Any time I look over when I’m typing, Old Man Peters is staring at me and jerking himself off” or whatever. Except, it’s said in old-time-y language, so it’s all in code. It’s still sexual harassment but it’s really jaunty about it. ”I doff my hat to rubbing up against you in a subway, darling— it’s the bee’s knees. Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”
The comics are always pretty enough— people knew how to draw, back when. But … why did so many dudes find that shit funny? What’s funny about it? Was it just the guys who bought old comics, the editors, back when, that’s what they thought people could relate to? ”Phil, yer makin’ comics about how desperate young girls will fuck wrinkly old dicks for money. Joey— yer makin’ comics about how women should stay in a kitchen and make us some babies. Tommy, where are my comics about how we have to keep the minorities out of our country clubs?” Who were these assholes?
Kudos to innovators who realize they can move more branded merch than books & embrace sprawling stories about characters wearing T-shirts with logos and using products with logos and encountering plot events that introduce new logos or change existing logos. To those who don’t have the same logo obsession: become obsessed with logos (also helps to find cool ways to mythologize the lifestyle of leisure and self-identification through brand consumption that you’re trying to encourage in your audience.)
In which we see the future of everything, everywhere. Serial narrative moves product like nothing else. The single most important thing a person can invest is not money but time. Time invested becomes everything else we prize. Regularity is better than quality or quantity, in that it keeps people attached. People spending just five to fifteen minutes every day with you, is far more important than them spending a few hours, a few days or once every year. In doing so create out of whole cloth emotional associations which naturally arise in spending a lot time with something, someone, anything. The sorrow, joy, and nostalgia your narrative produces are qualities you can and will exploit.
A “jam comic” is a gimmicky but undeniably fun and awesome collaborative effort where an unscripted comic will be drawn on a page-per-week basis, with a different artist each week making up and drawing the next part of the story as they go along.
The Watchmen thing still feels like such a dirty business. It still feels like the easiest of easy calls. One of the key books that told the world, “Hey, there’s more to comics than you think. We’re not all just submental pap. There’s something valuable to this”– I don’t want to know the person who’d agree to be a part of the team that’s going to say “No, you had us right. We’re franchises and properties. We’re art made at the insistence of corporations, for the most lowly of lowest common denominators. You knew who we were all along, even when we were lying to ourselves.” I don’t know want to know anything about someone who’d participate in that. For a business so long that struggled with the very premise that comics have authors, that took decades just to understand maybe they should be crediting the creative people– to contribute to project that’s very essence is inherently to destroy the authorship of one of comic’s most well-known works (in such a profoundly different way than what Alan Moore was doing with LEOG to make those comparisons physically distressing to read)(people who read that comic but understood NONE of its themes!)
