“Earlier this year, my publisher informed me that my book 32 Stories was about to go out of print. “Thank god! Finally!” I replied, a wave of euphoria and relief washing over me.”
That’s Adrian Tomine talking about the last collection of his early Optic Nerve mini-comics. Now Drawn & Quarterly – the publishers holding the title for the best / worst pun in the business – have released a new version of the same work.
I don’t want to talk about the stories. I want to talk about the packaging. (I’m shallow like that.) Because now instead of a fancy book, they’ve been collected as loose facsimiles of the original photocopied comics in a brown cardboard box.
Tomine explains why in his new introduction:
“But it’s not just the content of the book that makes me cringe. It’s the book itself. The format – the very thing that tempted me in the first place – seems too professional, too aggrandizing for the material. […] Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there’s a different criteria that we apply to a little Xeroxed pamphlet versus a fancy-pants book, and in the translation from one iteration to the other, these comics of mine suffered.”
If you want to go back and read his early work, Tomine wants them read right. It could be seen as an annoying, pre-emptive apology: like a first year creative writing student standing up before the class and beginning their reading with a mumbled uh it’s not very good so uh you know.
But I think it’s genius. It illustrates the importance of context. Some films are perfectly charming and engaging, but stagger under the weight of too much acclaim. Everyone’s had a perfectly good album ruined by the expectations of oh-my-god-dude-best-album-ever hype, right?
Now let’s look at the exact opposite impulse. Marvel and DC’s determination to throw more and more of their comic book runs into giant, deluxe, slipcased hardcovers. I wrote about this over at Bookslut:
“More and more comic series are now reprinted in collections for your reading convenience. Not just paperbacks; oversized ‘collector’s editions’ with recoloured art and thicker paper between embossed hardcovers. You don’t have to be a cynic to suspect these editions are a way to let older, cashed-up fans repurchase their favourites – and to help justify their habit with handsome, not-for-kids, objets d’art.”
Some of these stories can support this new weight of greater expectation, but others seem vaguely ridiculous. It’s the contextual equivalent of seeing teenage boys forced into ill-fitting formalware.
It’s like the old equation: the more pretentious the literary quote in the front of a horror novel, the more terrible that novel will be. Many of these comics are perfectly fine – good, great even – for monthly adventures. But collected all important like this? It brings their flaws into focus.
There’s another side-effect, too. Remember in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, when Mace (Angela Basset) is trying to shake some sense into Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) about his addiction to the past? “Memories are meant to fade,” she says. “They’re designed that way for a reason.”
Comic book continuity works the same way. I’ve spoken about this before, but I admit I’m still thinking through the ramifications. Superheroes need to be able to forget, otherwise continuity stumbles under the weight of their backcatalogue. It becomes an unpleasant tangle of personal tragedies and pointless minutia – and requires an endless stream of cosmic reboots that can hurt more than help.
How do you balance this, though, with the pleasures of a shared superhero universe? That’s a big part of the fun of Marvel or DC; and an even bigger part of what makes superhero comics a unique literary artform.
For superhero writers, it’s both blessing and curse. Knowing your work will be collected, rather than disappearing off the shelf of popular memory, means you’ll try harder to create quality that’ll pass the test of time. However, it also seems to encourage some of the worst tendencies in comics – especially the urge to produce stories based on tiny details of past narratives, designed to resonate only with a rapidly aging fanbase.
As much as it pains what’s left of my collector’s heart to say it, I think that some stories work best when read, thoroughly enjoyed, and then remembered as half-forgotten background noise.