More Comics Rambling With Very Little Focus

For the second time since we started making it a thing, I’m going to be missing out on a Wednesday Night Nerd Crew meal and while it’s for an exceptional reason – My Morning Jacket is playing with the Boston Pops and the lovely Linda has secured a pair of tickets for me – I’m going to miss this regular gathering that combines two favored events: New Comics Day and Dinner With Friends. This meal usually takes place at an outlet of the loathsome Pizzeria Uno chain and fairly recent changes in my diet (I’ve dropped all dairy due to a sudden manifestation of allergy and decided now was as good a time as ever to clean up the rest of my bad culinary habits, meaning I consume sushi every couple of weeks and that’s the only animal product that crosses my lips) finds me at an impasse. Yes, I’ve gone vegan, albeit badly and not for anything resembling a concern for animals; I’d still punch the shit out of a cow if it gave me the googly eye.

We’ve tried moving this meal, to little success. We’ve gone to Christopher’s in Porter Square a few times and while the majority of the crowd seemed to have a fine, fine time of it, there was always one or two people who got a bum meal – usually the British person insisting on ordering fish and chips in a location that was not The Burren or another one of the thousand places in the Boston area known for frying up the perfect piece of white fish. There was also the trip to a steak chain that shall go unnamed that I rank among the ten worst meals of my life – and I’ve spent the night in jail before. While I know the folly of eating vegetables in a joint that’s blaring shitty “new country” music and promising you a steak the size of your grandma’s ass, there was no fucking excuse for what they managed to do to green beans. They’re green beans, people – steam them, toss on a bit of sesame seed and salt and drop it in front of me. Drenching them in beef broth of the lowest quality and placing them in a dirty bowl is just cruel.

This week, the gang’s heading to The Border Cafe in Harvard Square. Border Cafe’s an odd little duck – consistently decent Cajun and Mexican fare in a mid-sized chain that stretches up from the muck of New Jersey, getting a name change from something predictably dull like South Of The Border or Food That Brown People Eat or when it hits New England, and I quite like it, but probably would be very damned limited when it came to edible menu items. But here’s the thing – for these people and their company, I’d be happy eating steamed carrots (an item I fucking despise) and drinking watered-down iced tea. Mind you, it’d be lovely to go to a place like Capital Grille or Locke-Ober, but considering that a meal at those places could, you know, buy a week’s worth of comics for me (and you just got a hint of how much I spend each week on disposable four-color doses of pop culture), so I’ll just grin and bear the limp, lifeless salad and try to avoid thinking about how much the line cooks must hate my meticulously-constructed order.

Here’s the thing – and you knew I’d get around to this – the comics business, on the whole, is dominated by companies whose business plans more resemble McDonald’s and Burger King than anything else. DC and Marvel are, for the most part, putting out fast food – disposable comics featuring licensed characters – and while they may occasionally get a fairly-clever Mark Waid revamp of the Legion of Superheroes or experiment with something like 52, these moments are few and far between. Rarely do they let a Grant Morrison show up to tear down and rebuild a franchise – why risk alienating the fans when Chris Claremont can recycle the same four plotlines again and again to the hardcore fans that will buy X-Men no matter what?

Sure, there’s more craft involved in coming up with a comics story – I know I’d never want to write Nightwing and have to worry about making sure the hardcore fans are happy while hopefully bringing in new readers – but the end result is the same 95% of the time: a predictable, empty meal that occupies the audience for five to ten minutes. The great advantage to trying something new and different in comics versus dining out is that buying a book that does something interesting usually costs very little more versus paying $50 or more for an interesting meal. Sure, Queen And Country may not feature Greg Rucka trying to turn Fire into a superspy, but you’re going to get a more interesting result because the characters belong to him, not editorial mandates.

When you look at guys like Chris Pitzer (interviewed by Ed Cunard over at Graphic Language,) you’re looking at people who aren’t content managing four locations in the Sheboygan, Wisconsin area. Pitzer, along with Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock, Fantagraphic’s Gary Groth and Chris Oliveros over at Drawn and Quarterly – they want to serve tuna tartare instead of a Filet o’ Fish to a marketplace that doesn’t acknowledge that you can, you know, try something different. This is why bookstores and libraries mean more and more to these publishers – those venues are not narrowly focused on milking the fanboy dollar and something like Persepolis is going to find its audience among the same people that bought The Red Tent.

Ah, well. I ramble, and if you’ve read this far, I’m sorry. I’ve just been thinking a lot about comics lately and haven’t had a chance to codify a lot of it.