Brave as a Noun

Lets play a game, the following are a series of quotes by either Gary Groth or Matt Fraction do you think you can guess who said what?

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Comics Journalist X gets exclusive interview with Creator/Editor/Executive Y, only to find every serious question is dodged for 6000 words. Yet it still runs as "news," because it's 6000 words nobody else has. "Comics news" is a setup; it's all PR and advertorial.

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The mainstream press is near exclusively PR-driven and its cycles are artificially birthed and manipulated-- I mean, how much "news" has been broken concurrent with a new issue of WIZARD that's been in the production pipeline for three months? You'll see PR hyping Marvel's 50% dominance of the direct market in January, but no analysis that, yeah, but that stunt was born of Marvel double-shipping 75% of their books that month.

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It feels phoned in as a matter of policy, it feels like it's all going by rote, repeating the same gags again and again. By and large, I mean. There are exceptions now as there were then, but mediocrity is the rule and the mainstream excels at choking off critical thought.

Jack Kirby's been dead 10 years-- And comics are exactly the same now as they were then. It doesn't feel like the mainstream's built to compete or evolve; the mainstream, the direct market, all of it seems to exist only to perpetuate itself. So yeah, man, I call bullshit. And I'm pleased to see that there are others doing the same in a way that's more profound than trolling on a message board or any of that nerdy jagoff crap.

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Yes. I'm exhausted by the Culture of Attrition that's developed around pop culture, trash culture, whatever-- that the race to diminish expectations and the resignation that things are supposed to suck is taken as an acceptable state of things. If some blip on the pop screen registers even slightly above "total shit," it's lauded and praised to high-heaven.

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If Fear Itself can be said to have a point, if that particular hurricane has an eye, it somehow is those three issues. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's sort of about legends, and myths, and the perseverance of legend and myth; and define the entirety of quote-"death"-unquote in comics to be absurd, and always have. To kind of do a story that ultimately, of all the different themes, dealt with, "what does death mean to these un-killable, un-destroyable legends?"

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I'm more fascinated by individual creators playing the spin game. When creators cross that line and become active in their own press is when it all gets embarrassingly interesting.

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(The answer is Matt Fraction on all counts)

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=14846

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=14737

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/facing-fear-fear-itself-aftermath-111208.html

Title Picture:http://www.sadkids.com/images/Mem_011.jpg