Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
There are things that I love from my past that perhaps I shouldn’t. If I look at them with a critical eye, they’d fall apart.
But it’s part of my childhood or part of my life that I enjoyed and have a perhaps unreasonable fondness for. They’re the things that often bring back memories of “simpler” times or times that you don’t otherwise feel like you have many memories from.
There are comics I can open today from my past that bring me back to specific places and people in that time of my life more strongly than anything else. There are songs that recall specific moments. There are TV shows that remind me of the inspiration I took from them to be a writer. (That never panned out, but this site keeps me busy.)
I am, indeed, nostalgic for those things. And that’s OK. We all have that. There’s nothing wrong with it. We’re only human.
However, I am over the kind of nostalgia that says we always need to bring the band back together.
Some things were in the right time and place at my right age or life situation that they clicked. That’s a large number of variables to re-align to make a success today.
I’m looking for the stuff today that hits in a similar manner. I want something new to latch onto that I’ll look back wistfully on in 10 or 20 years.
Where Comics Come In
The same goes for comics. Marvel is relaunching the Ultimate universe. That was a lineup that existed in a specific time and place that worked for a little while until Marvel gave up on it. (Ahem, killing Peter Parker.)
All of the storytelling and publishing tricks that they learned from it got merged into the main Marvel Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The post-bankruptcy throw-everything-at-the-wall publishing plan worked for that time, and then Marvel became a Disney subsidiary and a lot of it didn’t seem necessary anymore.
The original Ultimate Universe was a new publishing paradigm for Marvel. Regular hardcover (oversized!) and softcover reprints, a magazine meant for newsstands, digital comics, video games, etc. Keep the prices lower, keep the quality super high, bring in strong creators and let them run wild, but in a way that new readers could follow. Give it to them in every conceivable format so there’s something for someone.
Modernize the universe, too, to include the internet and cell phones (pre-smartphones) and fashions and pop culture references, etc.
Ultimate Universe v2 is a reasonable facsimile of that. They’re going in some different directions with it and all, but I don’t care. I’ve already done that. There was a time and place that it felt right and it worked. Now, it’s just another go-around trying to reclaim past glories.
I’m not the market for it. I get that. But I just don’t think it’s going to work to attract the same kind of younger readers that the original was aimed at, either. Those readers were lost to manga twenty years ago. (We’ll get to DC’s new trade paperback format in a future essay…)
When I have a fit of nostalgia now, I can take that comic out of a longbox or download it digitally, or I can stream the show I want to watch again, or listen to that album that I probably still have on iTunes Music because I’m old and don’t stream music. (I don’t listen to much music at all, so it would be a waste of money. Buying albums infrequently still works better for me, for as long as their business model allows…)
I’ve driven around those circles once or twice already. I don’t need to go around again. Let’s create something new, instead.
The Blimp Level View of Superhero Comics For Me
This is also part of the reason I gave up on superhero comics on a week-to-week basis.
After 20 years of that, I had lived through the cycle.
Everything “new” today is an echo of something that’s already been done. How many “Crisis” titles can DC create? How many superheroes can Marvel pit against one another? How many reboots? How many events? How many “That Character Is Dead Now!” or “That Character is Not a White Male Anymore” or “That Character’s Origin Story Is a Lie” stories can we read before becoming numb to it all?
It was a good run. I enjoyed a lot of it. I moved on.
I’m not anti-superhero at all. I’m just extremely picky. I won’t read it just because they’re publishing it. I’ll pick up collections of stories I’ve heard very good things about from creators I trust and whose work I enjoy.
In the meantime, I fill up the rest of my comics time with European comics. I’m sure Asterix is nostalgic for many, but it’s still relatively new for me. I’m living in this moment and enjoying it while it lasts. Then it’ll be time to move on to the next thing. (I don’t know what that is. I’m making no plans. I plan on being here for a good long while first.)
Stop Making Sense
I’m done being excited by references to past glories. It was fun to see The Talking Heads sitting on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert stage without it devolving into a legal quagmire and all, but I’m not begging them for a new album or a new tour. I may wish they hadn’t broken up in the first place and were able to continue working together and evolved over time and continued to put out amazing music, but that was not meant to be.
The original “Frasier” series deserved every Emmy it got, but that was a collection of talent we won’t see again in any reboot.
And the Ultimate Universe meant a lot to me twenty years ago, but I’m not that person anymore.
I’ll hold on tight to everything those things gave me once upon a time. I’ll wax nostalgic about it once in a while. I may even go back and review some of it sometime, but it’ll be through a whole new lens. I’ll understand better why it worked then because it’s a different time now and analyzing those differences teaches us all a lot.
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy revisiting columns from the CBR days, just to see how much the industry has changed or how much I have changed.
At a different level, it’s much the same as “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.”
But then there’s the thing about history repeating itself versus echoes of history.
I believe in the echoes theory, and think that resonates to pop culture, as well.
Well, how much time do you have ?
Side note : once again, shame on you for pushing me down a rabbit hole in the wee hours of the morning, french time, on a Monday. No one should be allowed to post anything smart and interesting, worth discussing, so early on, when one has a ton of work to day, also known as « day job ». Can’t you confine yourself to mindless listicles instead, like everyone else on the internet ? Bad Boy you.
Anyhoo.
Basically, your cycle began when mine ended, late 80s, early 90s. At that point, I had discovered the Silver Age, the Bronze age, which felt like progress, so the arrival on the scene of the Image founders, and the way they influenced storytelling, made me tap out of American Comics and go back, revisit the Franco-Belgian treasures of my early childhood, in a new, glorious light, for a new chapter.
At the time, I just could not fathom why someone who could enjoy Wally Wood, Neal Adams or John Byrne would spend more than a glance on a Jim Lee page, since he stole most of his flashy tricks from them, without the solid base underneath. That just didn’t make sense to me.
Every time, I wanted to scream « Someone buy him and Liefeld and Valentino a set of the Hogarth anatomy books, and a set of Scott McCloud’s books on storytelling ». I saw it mostly as wasted potential, most of the early Image books were unreadable to me. I tried. I really did, to find out what the fuss was about.But no dice. And when I saw the rest of DC, Marvel and almost everyone alse ape them, but worse, I just said « Enough » and walked of the weekly/monthly grind.
For a long time, after many of those endless conversations going nowhere and often ending in a powerless shrug, the generational gap appeared to me as this : when it comes to art in general (as you say Comics, but also music, TV, movies, literature, you name it), the version of something that we will deem « the definitive one » is often (but not always) the one imprinted in our brains when we are the youngest. Someone said that the Golden Age is 12, that’s about right.
There are a few books from neuroscientists out there explaining the phenomenon at length. The brain is all but rational, or in its own way that has little to do with logic and objectivity. That’s the takeaway.
Gratuitous plug, I just read these recently that touched the subject and really opened my eyes.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Tali-Sharot/author/B004ANWOX4?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
Explains a whole lot of the world we’re living in right now, from Trump to junk food, to Romance novels.
And indeed today, technology makes permanently available all (most of) the works of the past, so everything is on the table and we have no more excuse to not realise that Haendel’s production is objectively superior to 50 Cent’s. No matter what your criteria is, One is music, the other one is garbled noise. Right ? Who would disagree with that ?
Of course, over the years, I went to relativise my position and once something like Marc Silvestri’s X-Men was published in TPB with a decent level of quality over the crappy printing of the original floppies, I came to appreciate his qualities as probably the best of the Image bunch. Still. Fathoms below a Kirby or a Ditko, or even a Heck, a Timpe or a Tuska, I thought. And still do, to some extent.
That is debatable, isn’t it ?
Also known as « getting older ». Perspective, you know.
Welcome to the Grumpy Old Men club, my friend.
Not much else to say but “Yup.”