#meta comics

The Redemption Of Super-Boy Prime

https://youtu.be/_lJllIlAMO0

Once Upon A Time, There Was This Comic Book

It’s always been there, an unplastered crack in comics’ fourth wall.

But lately, more and more comics are peeking through back at the reader: Eternity Girl, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, Milk Wars, Multiversity, Cover, even What If? Ghost Rider. And these aren’t Deadpool-style throwaway gags, nor even the creator-as-god metaphor in Animal Man or Waid’s Fantastic Four – these are comics self-identifying as comics and then self-analyzing.

But why? What makes comics so ripe for self-awareness and self-commentary, and why has that tendency grown of late?

Perhaps it’s the unmaskable artificiality of the form. Unlike film or literature, comics lie at the intersection of art and artifice, each story visibly propped upon its scaffolding; carved out balloons for speech, boxes portioning moments, the reader able to dismantle the timeline with a glance ahead. Perhaps it was inevitable that the industry would twist this flaw into a feature.

But the format alone, largely unchanged for decades, doesn’t explain the recent increase in meta-stories. Instead, let’s consider the creative process of the ‘Big Two’, Marvel and DC, which informs the entire industry.

Superman has existed since the 30’s, Captain America the 40’s. That’s longer than any one career, but whereas in films or literature characters die with their individual creators or actors, in comics they go on, thousands of characters reworked and reshaped by thousands of fresh hands, layer upon layer. And where do those creatives come from? To some degree, they’re the creations of those comic characters, childhood fans raised by the characters they then re-create. 50’s Superman is written by a fan of 30’s Superman, 70’s by a fan of 50’s, on and on.

Let’s examine a work aware of and toying with this cycle, Kieron Gillen’s relaunch: Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. Cannon provided Alan Moore with the inspiration for Watchmen’s Ozymandias, while Gillen has described Watchmen as having a ‘fundamentally transformative’[1] effect on him before he entered the industry. The book itself is steeped in Watchmen references, from 9-panel grids, to nigh-quotes, to Peter encountering a version of himself almost identical to Ozymandias.