Does anyone even know why I write this blog!? I’m not writing to signal boost my fandom of ANYTHING. I’m not a fan first, but an artist, and I’ve been spending my whole life creating art through various media. What was consistent throughout all those years and projects was that I felt I had to say something. The whole point of it was to communicate. If you see changes in our world that signal deterioration, do you (as a creative) do everything within your power to adapt to these conditions, or do you use your powerful means of communication to expose the rot? If they lack the courage to buck trends in their art, what kinds of heroism do you think they’ll describe in their stories? Too many ‘creative’ people embrace these conditions in exchange for the material benefits of money. That is why the people that rise in this system are usually emblematic of the system’s failings.

This morning I had the good fortune of encountering this tweet by The Black Socialists In America.

How many of you artists/creatives out there have been wondering how/why it seems as though the quality of art and design with money behind it (in the mainstream) has lessened considerably over the years (saturation aside)?

Ever hear of Marx’s “base and superstructure” theory? 😏 pic.twitter.com/uOfMSFAyUV
— Black Socialists in America (@BlackSocialists) January 31, 2019

If you read through the entire thread, you’ll find a very thorough and concise description how the corporate golden umbilical cord for culture only creates stillborn ‘art’. The corporate patron is too risk-averse to allow any uncomfortable or challenging thought to enter into anything they are paying for. It’s not unusual that a patron of the arts has a say in what it is they are patronizing…in fact it’s normal. But when that patron is part of a larger corporate cultural complex that is inherently oppositioned to freedom and community building, they can limit the sorts of messaging that gets into the culture. The art coming out of this corporate system is always going to have messaging within it that actually does the opposite of what it purports.

Real art brings people together by showing that the concerns affecting them are felt by many; that we have more in common with each other than we don’t. Because corporations benefit from a divided and atomized society (better consumers, lower wages), the messaging within corporate-sponsored ‘art’ is actually delivering the message that you are above society/humanity. The best intentions of average folks towards each other get misdirected into Cancel Culture and Identity Politics that only increase the divide, and are fascistic in their dogmatic approach to people. When artists consume the culture produced from this system and draw inspiration only from it, they subtly learn the sorts of things that will exclude them from a book deal or gallery show. Those things just don’t get tackled in their ‘art’. The thing our soul craves from Art is absent. This probably explains how publishers are unable to sustain new comics series much beyond 5 issues. The people are not being given what they need.

To be an artist isn’t just to have some technical ability. If you are going to be a communicator under the umbrella of Art, you need to accept the responsibility that goes along with that. The true artist strives to be true to themself and listen to what their humanity needs in this world now. Once the artist understands the needs of their consciousness, they can then make Art to heal those needs in others unable to make art across the globe. It brings people together and makes anyone who shares this culture feel closer to their humanity and each other.

This is why I rant about Alan Moore, Frank Miller and others about their creative process: because their ‘formula’ for creating art is the only way through this. If people continue to live in a world devoid of empowering messaging, what kind of world do you think we are creating? Are you happy with the world as it is? No? Our silence and neglect of one of humanity’s greatest impulses has allowed our culture to be divorced from real human nature. What’s going to help the future understand their world? More Ghostbusters reboots? The art or comics that we are still celebrating 40 years after their creation are the product of real artists talking about their reality then. They are from a time when corporations saw commercial benefits of these stories outweigh the risk of including the messaging people needed. Now they often try to sell us on nostalgia but this time without the original context of the socio-economic conditions that inspired Ghostbusters. Meaningless ensues.

As a reader, if you find yourself dissatisfied or uninterested after 5 issues, it’s probably because whatever you are reading isn’t giving you what you bought it for; something that makes you feel less alone and less empowered to face reality. Something new that speaks to NOW. We all get so easily seduced by the promise of each new story’s novel premise but we realize it’s just trying to recreate the commercial success of something else, after we naturally lose interest. This is the deadening effect of editors and publishers unable/unwilling to take the risks needed to find something that really connects with people. Instead they prefer short-term profits and books whose shelf and mental life is no more than 2 weeks. How else are they going to keep you buying this shit?

I’ll pass on this. I’m holding out for “Action Hero”

The stagnating sales of comics is the message to corporate publishers that the stories are dead on arrival. Your hard earned dollars are worth too much to throw away on corporate comics/art that will never give you what you need.

Comic Book Confidential was a mainstay of my childhood that I watched countless times. I think growing up in Canada helped because when I saw that The Silver Snail, my local comic shop in Hamilton, Ontario was in the credits for the documentary, it made comics (and the people who made them) feel accessible. It was probably played regularly on the Canadian television airwaves to satisfy Canadian Content guidelines, but that did nothing to diminish its impact on me. Of all the many artistic adventures I’ve taken, creating comics feels closest to my heart and Comic Book Confidential was essential to cementing that association. Comics helped me explore not only to the furthest reaches of the imagination but it made me connect comics with my home and origins in Canada (talk about the sublime to the ridiculous!)

Recently my wife saw Comic Book Confidential pop up on one of our streaming services and we decided to take a trip down comic book memory lane. I already rant a lot about the roots of inspiration and the nature of art as a lost ‘alchemical formula’, so it was nice to see Frank Miller say something very similar. When talking about his inspiration for The Dark Knight, he has this to say:

What I’ve been trying to do recently, um, is to take the stuff of the old (Batman) comics and do it in a way that’s worth reading for me.
Whatever stories I write have to do with my reactions to what’s going on around me, with the world that I live in right now, with 1980s America which is a very frightening, uh, silly, um, place and it’s often silly and frightening at the same time and I hope Dark Knight is also frightening and silly at the same time.

In today’s world, we often mistake criticism as being unsupportive or even contrary to progress. It couldn’t be further from the truth and The Dark Knight is a good example of this. In the clip below, Frank Miller describes how over its 50-year history the character of Batman had been reduced to a silly, colourful costumed hero; very far from its dark and violent roots. If we are to follow the prevailing logic of today, to radically revise a character as a critique of its previous self would be unheard of. If Dark Knight is a good example, then a bad example is when costumed characters are re-imagined to try and cash in on some perceived trend in the larger culture. “Heavy Metal Batman” is a great example of this garbage, where corporate synergy tries to pass for relevance. I may be wrong, but it feels like the work of comics writers now are more about upholding the established way of doing things (because they are fans first) rather than indulging any iconoclastic impulse (and a true artist in distant second).

Why am I going on about this formula for creation? Because the best and most memorable stories came out of taking the world, transforming it through the insights of the artists, and translating them into something new. Star Wars, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings and so many more come out of this tradition because it yields the most meaningful stories that speak to people’s souls about what it is to be alive. If an artist can speak to the ways people are feeling/suffering/living and loving, then the audience will listen because they are being given something that speaks to their truest self. Making a connection between artist and audience requires that one individual experiences life and shares those experiences across vast expanses of space and time with another individual; it’s all part of a vast cultural exchange that uses our commonality as its point of departure.

When Frank Miller looked around him and thought about the world and what it meant to be alive in ‘80s America, he used Batman to illuminate and dramatize those ideas. He probably saw that the brightly coloured version in the comics didn’t reflect the difficulties people experienced in their lives. The villains in the lives of working people in the ‘80s were not garishly attired and ridiculous; they inspired fear and brought suffering felt by many. I bet a lot of people felt a deep sense of unease in the ‘80s, and many probably felt the same way as Frank Miller did; that it was all so terrifying and silly. To feel this anxiety is to be alive; to create something that dramatizes the same anxieties (in the ‘safe’ context of art) is to say we are never alone.