B&N Week 196: What Are You Doing To Bring Fun & Games To Comics?

[Steven Forbes]

We’ve got another Tuesday upon us! The sun is shining once again in Tucson, and the heat won’t hit in the triple digits anymore. [You’re all going to be envious of me in a couple of months, when I’m still talking about 80 degree weather…]

We’ve got a short discussion this week. This week’s question: are you bringing fun and games to comics?

There’s one thing that I know: it’s difficult to be amusing, if not downright funny, on paper. I don’t know how some writers do it, and I’m trying to learn.

But just because you aren’t “funny” doesn’t mean that you can’t be fun, right? A lot of today’s comics are very serious. No, not grim and gritty, but serious. Look at the state of both Marvel and DC, and the stories being told there. Marvel is going from one event to another, and the stakes keep growing. DC rebooted their entire universe a couple of years ago, and they’re still trying to establish a feel for it. But it’s very serious stuff.

There’s only one character that instills a sense of fun in his adventures, and that’s Wade Wilson, the merc with a mouth: Deadpool.

Click here to read more.

[Morganza]

I can't remember the last time I had fun reading a comic, probably back in the 80's. Comics are a lot more violent now, darker, serious, and yet contain no entertainment value IMO.

If I were to go this route, I would make a comic about kids using their imaginations. When I was a kid, my brother and I wanted to build a boat out for scrap junk and sail it from a nearby river to a lake, we would get other kids in the neighborhood to help us too. The most fun we had was planning the whole thing and searching for parts to use, imagining the journey kept us going.

If I could make that a comic, I think it would be fun to read, maybe just for me but who cares.

[TonyKidd]

Humor, just like individual tastes in comics is a very subjective thing. Funny is tough because there isn’t any standard for universal acceptance. You can narrow it down by knowing what issues might be humorous to certain demographics, typically age groups or subcultures.

One of my favorite comics right now is Rat Queens, which I consider to be very funny. Not only does it appeal to my crass sense of humor, but it also includes insider jokes aimed at nerdy fantasy gamers (my kinda peeps). The comic is entertaining on a variety of levels.

“Next Issue: Shut the fuck up, Gary! +5 on attack rolls against dudes named Gary.”

Even in a serious title you can inject bit of humor by creating that one jokester character, who will often play off irritating the character representing the skeptic or the stoic person in your story. The back and forth between these two types can almost write its own comedic scenes.

[crognus]

Interesting article, but I don't think it's really fair to generalize all comics as getting too serious. I think that generalization applies when you only look at our mainstream Marvel/DC superhero comics. Writers for DC or Marvel are very restricted with what they can do with characters that don't belong to them. Many of these characters already have five plus decades of straightforward smaller, "fun” adventures. There’s just so many of them that have been written. When contemporary writers try to do something "original" with them they get stuck with either: reboots, making it darker, writing an alternate universe version, or doing something silly (like Dinosaur Island.)

Also, the storylines for big power guys like Thor and Superman may be getting too serious and high stake, but you can’t really go back and give them smaller issues without feeling cheated. Now that Superman has saved the world hundreds times, if you try and have him take on some small-time mob bosses (like he used to) he just seems to be shirking his responsibilities. If we have the whole Justice League take on a plan to rob a bank it seems a little silly.

But DC did try to address that by giving readers two versions of Superman with the reboot: The Action Comics line and the Superman line. By setting one of these in an earlier timeline, we can still have a younger Superman struggle with Metropolis only issues, but retain the big, bad Superman from a later timeline to do all that crazy, high stakes stuff.

Then again, I probably don’t read enough of the new 52 weigh in too heavily. But really, there’s a lot of other fun stuff out there especially if you step outside DC and Marvel, you have your Scott Pilgrim, Pop, etc. Not to mention there’s a whole world of Eastern comics, which for the most part, has retained those classic, less “serious” storylines.