Alternative comics, ick!

This week's Chicago Reader has a 16-page pullout cartoon section; if this is what alternative comics are about these days, count me out. Self-absorbed would be putting it kindly. (At least I limit that side of my personality to a blog! Poor you.) Worse yet, they're boring. Since when were alternative comics BORING?



Let's look back to what started this whole thing: Kurtzman's MAD, Eisner's Spirit, and the first wave of underground comix (ca. 1965-75). What do all these things have in common? They entertain. They want to connect with and please a wide audience. MAD's whole reason for being was to make you laugh; The Spirit was a classic detective comic; and the undergrounds mined that most perennial of topics, sex, in a grubby, gripping way.



Then comes Maus, right? Comics as art form, right? Well, I hate to say it, but it seems that the more respectable comics become, the more boring they get. Maus succeeded because its subject matter was extreme--fascinating and horrific; a weekend spent fighting with your parents is not. (In fact, if you've ever seen one of Spiegelman's early treatments of the material that became Maus, he places it within the context of his relationship with his mother. Not nearly as successful, in my view.) Call me callous, but I don't care about three tumultuous (but not particuarly essential) days in your life; I don't have time for slight whimsy; I don't care about your facile political observations.



In my experience, artists who truly have a talent for storytelling are rare. Just as writers who have a talent for drawing are. And yet there's this bizarre auteur theory present in comics which produces reams of great, interesting art in the service of stories that make you go, "feh."



Everybody who picks up a pen--to write or draw--should ask themselves, "Do I really have anything to say? Has what I want to say been said better, before? Do I really bring anything new to our communication-choked world?"



Of course there's a powerful incentive to say "Yes!" to all of these. And God knows I've pumped out enough less-than-memorable stuff in my own short career. But God, is there no end to all the quiet, head-bound, self-absorbed, slightly depressed, trivia-obsessed comics out there? It's better to tell dirty jokes than be boring, isn't it? Are alternative comics now as bland and conventional as alternative music? If so, what a shame.