META: Notes on a Genre I Love

Martin Phipps martinphipps2 at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 10 00:09:41 PDT 2009


On Mar 9, 12:08 am, Andrew Perron <pwer... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 06:25:13 +0000 (UTC), Martin Phipps
>
> <martinphip... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >I disagree.  Comics book villains were always dialed back: they never
> >killed anybody.
>
> Have you actually been reading comics lately?  And by "lately" I mean
> "since 1973"?

What is the significance of "since 1973"?  Are you refering to when
the Punisher came out?  Because he started off using "mercy bullets",
remember?  The bad guys were tranquilized.  That's a good example of a
character being "dialed back".  It could be the comics code authority
specifically forbode body counts in comics.  That's why when Frank
Miller came along and he had Elektra, the Punisher and the Joker
actually kill people in comics it was so shocking: I'd read comics for
a while and I'd never seen anything like that.  So the question is
"How long have you been reading comics?" because my statement was
"comic book villains were always dialed back" and not "comic book
villains are always dialed back".  I'm talking about the classic
comics and I think that's what Tom was talking about too: comics are
obviously much more serious now; they're not "comic" books in the
literal sense.

Martin



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