Last night, Fox broadcast a "live" performance of the Broadway musical, Rent. Well, it was supposed to be live but one of the cast members was injured so most of what was telecast was a recorded dress rehearsal.
I wasn't watching. I'm usually a fan of this kind of event but I saw Rent on Broadway and didn't enjoy it very much. I'd planned to TiVo it anyway but my cable TV has been cutting in and out. Last Friday evening, I couldn't get Bill Maher's show on any of the various HBO channels that broadcast it and I had to watch it online. I decided I didn't care about Rent enough to deal with it being difficult to watch.
Speaking of Bill Maher last Friday night: I see a lot of online rebuttals to him that strike me as serious overreaction to his little anti-comics rant. It's the uninformed opinion of one guy, people. It's not the second coming of Dr. Wertham.
I have been reading comic books for…well, probably a lot longer than 95% of the folks reading this. My life has been seriously intertwined with them and even when I was writing network TV shows, when someone asked me what I did for a living, I was more likely to say "I write comic books" even during some period when I was doing little if any of that. It's part of my identity and before I started writing them, reading and collecting them was part of my identity.
Since I was around twelve, I've been hearing other lovers of comics react defensively because someone somewhere said that comics were junk, comics were for idiots, there was something really wrong with you if you read them past age ten, etc. I have almost never heard someone actually say they were junk, for idiots, etc.; just a lot of comic fans getting indignant and perhaps lashing back at such reported insults.
I have probably heard more such aspersions cast on network television or whatever music "those kids today" were buying. When I hear that someone has belittled comics — I rarely hear the belittling itself — I mentally file it with all those people I did hear say that The Beatles were a passing fad and that soon, those who bought that garbage would come to their senses and switch to good music…you know, like Mantovani or Perry Como.
You know the only group I ever heard really putting down comics? Back in the late-sixties to early-seventies, it was science-fiction fans. Some of the ones I encountered at s-f conventions in and around Los Angeles were unbelievably snotty about comics…and you'd think they'd be the last ones to deride someone else for their consumption of fantasy stories. I kinda caught on that they were defensive about having their passions slandered so they were trying to draw a bold line between reading Doc Savage paperbacks and reading Superman comic books. Because one is so much more intellectual than the other.
I was invited once to a meeting of the long-running Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. This was around 1968 and I thought it might be interesting until the person doing the inviting told me, "For God's sake, don't mention comic books while you're there. They frown on that kind of thing." Well, I didn't need to go anywhere people frown or even look askance at my tastes…so I didn't go.
I did go though to a couple of s-f conventions and at one around 1970, I heard a fellow complaining that some of the vendors were selling — and this was said with a note of horror in his voice — comic books. Comic books, he insisted, were childish and infantile and beneath the dignity of science-fiction fandom. And so help me, as he said this, this person was wearing Spock ears, brandishing a plastic Star Trek phaser gun and wearing a t-shirt that said on it, "Beam me up, Scotty!"
That may have been the last time I heard that kind of putdown of comic books from a self-identified science-fiction fan. Some of those people became good friends. The sentiments expressed by that one guy are now ancient history and I think the views expressed last Friday night by Mr. Maher are going bye-bye the same way.
Okay, okay…we get it. You're so much smarter and more discerning than us. Fine. What he isn't discerning enough to know is that comics have never been more diverse in content, nor have they ever appealed to a wider audience. And judging them all by the super-hero movies is like assuming all comedians are doing pretty much the same thing as Gallagher.
Just ignore this kind of stuff, people. I've been ignoring it since I was twelve and that's worked out just fine.