Comics, as the same lazy article that keeps getting written about them every five years or so always tells us, aren't just for kids anymore.  They're for adults, and we all know what that means:  titty!  And swearing.

But wait, ho -- some comics creators at the Big Two have decided that comics not just being for kids anymore means not just showing Luke Cage fannypacking a third-string superheroine, or Green Lantern dropping the occasional f-bomb:  it means actual adult storytelling.  And that means things you have to spell with capital letters:  Relevance.  Themes.  Conflict.  Ambiguity.  Honest-to-goonies Worldviews.

In practical terms, this still tends to add up to four-letter words, slightly more graphic violence, and the suggestion that Catwoman used to be a hooker.  But from time to time, comics wroters, God bless 'em for churning out this horseshit to which I am eternally addicted no matter how awful it is 99% of the time, actually try to tackle the Big Issues. 

Now, don't get me wrong:  anyone who has known me the requisite five minutes it takes for me to start vaporing about how comics are a real live capital-A Artistic Medium with as much credibility as any other respectable aesthetic delivery vector knows that I'm all for this sort of thing in theory.  I like dark.  I like gritty.  I like noir.  I like a good sensawunda story as much as the next geek, but I'm also totally in favor of bilocating the goofballs in tights with the real world, and exploring what that would mean.  I'm fine with heroes going crazy.  I'm down with getting political chocolate in my heroic peanut butter.  I'm the first to line up when a comic is announced that will take the high stakes of its own premise seriously, that these are dangerous, incredibly powerful people in a high-stress, risky job who are likely to act the way people in that situation would really act -- which is to say, not very nicely much of the time. My favorite comics writers tend to be people who explore such ideas, like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mike Baron,  Rick Veitch, and Denny O'Neill.

But the prevailing theme among the editorial staff at DC and Marvel tends to be the same one that one often finds in television writing:  arbitrary conflict is mistaken for drama; character is overthrown for convenience; characters are put through the wringer as an excuse to move the plot along; and in a reversal of the old days when characters would never die, they are allowed to die at the drop of a hat under the mistaken assumption that killing a character for no good reason is a more sophisticated storytelling technique than preserving a character who isn't very good to begin with.  This form of narrative, this editorial sensibility, mistakes difficulty for complexity, confuses cruelty for realism, and believes that it is being sophisticated when it is merely being nasty.

This attitude is particularly visible in the two big company's premiere events.  When DC lured bestselling mystery novelist Brad Meltzer to pen its Identity Crisis series, it did so without properly assessing whether his talents as a writer of long-form fiction would transfer, the way the far more successful but far less hailed Greg Rucka's have.  They didn't; Meltzer has proven, with his tedious prolixity, that he has no appreciation for the different formal requirements of comics, and has likewise proven, with his patchy characterization, that he doesn't understand the difference between the way a character is portrayed in episodic and serial fiction.  His engineering of the rape and murder of Sue Dibny in the series -- couched as it was in a story idea with a great deal of potential, every drop of which was wasted -- stands as an all-time low in the genre, and its repercussions are still being felt.

They were felt most strongly in Infinite Crisis, a sequel to both Identity Crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earths, which managed to combine the themes of both while failing to appreciate the relevance of either.  It was written by Geoff Johns, the most powerful writer in comics today and likely the strongest editorial voice DC currently has; despite his rampant popularity, Johns is an atrocious writer, so completely immersed in his juvenile half-comprehending notions of what it means to write an 'adult' comic that he plays as a constant parody of himself.  His contributions to the largely enjoyable 52 series are so obvious as to stand out like raw, bleeding, frequently broken thumbs:  an innocent is forever tainted by taking a life.  A juvenile rejects his parents' notions of heroism.  A minor character is killed in a horrifically violent way and forgotten.  A moment of warm nostalgia is shattered by the immediate and gory intrusion of the now.  Grief and mistrust makes someone insane.  It's the writing of a rebellious 13-year-old who belongs reading this stuff, not writing it, and Johns' high salary and public profile ensure that DC's overall tone will continue in these directions as Grant Morrison plays in his sandbox and Paul Dini collects TV royalties.

Meanwhile, over at Marvel, a talent drain to the financially robust DC on the one hand and to Marvel's fatted-calf film division on the other results in a massive lack of decent writing talent, leaving gifted creators like J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Michael Bendis to burn themselves out, while the main show-runner for the entire universe is Mark Millar, whose big-screen action style is perfectly suited to action scenes, but woefully bad when he has to do the necessary business of making the characters seem consistent, relatable, or even human when they're not punching someone in the jaw.  The company's Civil War mega-event could not possibly be in worse hands:  it's intensely and inextricably political, philosophical and character-driven, and is largely being written by the blowhard fabulist Millar, whose touch with political and philosophical nuance is pure poison, and whose sense of character is as deft as granite.  The rest of the writing falls to Paul Jenkins, a talented but sporadic writer who has a Morrisonian gift for reinvention, but a Liefeldian attention span  -- he's a great idea man, but he's an awful idea executer, and his material in Frontline reads exactly like someone who wants to get on to the next clever bit he's thought up and can't be bothered to complete the thought he was in the middle of before he moves on to the next one.

Of course, all this isn't to say that comics are irredeemably awful now.  There's some amazing creators at work in mainstream superhero books these days -- not only the ones mentioned above, but people like Darwyn Cooke, Jeff Smith, Gail Simone, Ed Brubaker and Brian Azzarello.  There are a handful of truly gifted artists.  The good superhero comics, as few in number as they may be in comparison to the bad superhero comics, are as good or better as anything that's ever been done, and it's amazing to me how many books I look forward to getting every month -- more than at any time since the mid-1980s -- considering how rotten the prestige projects are.  I'm no doomsayer predicting the end of the industry; I'm just saying that the recent trend in comics has been heading, arrow-straight, in one inevitable, implacable direction, and this week, it finally arrived:

Spider-Man has killed Mary Jane Watson by giving her cancer with his radioactive sperm.

Thank you and good night.

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"War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost." (Karl Kaus)