DON’T GET ANGRY OH WAIT TOO LATE

On Monday afternoon, Rolling Stone published a couple of articles featuring comic writer/Scottish person/Jean Luc Picard cosplayer Grant Morrison; one was a general feature where things like magic got discussed, and the other was an online Q&A where things got… hairy. How hairy, might you ask? Well, he talked about superhero comics being in a death spiral and running over Mark Millar with his car, and that was just the first half. So… people got upset.

Now, a couple of things first:

1. If you’re shocked at all that Grant “Xorn” Morrison said or did something that got people upset, then apparently you’ve never paid attention to anything he’s done before, ever. The man’s first work for North American comics was a story where Animal Man breaks the fourth wall and yells at Morrison. The first thing - literally the first thing - he did when he started writing Batman in 2006 was to give him a secret murderous ninja son and that was before he had him shoot a god and get sent back through time after fighting the devil. If there’s one thing that sums up the man’s career, it’s “upsetting people via crazy shit.”

2. I think we can all agree that talking about murdering Mark Millar was not a nice, appropriate or acceptable thing at all. Even if he was joking - and this is a very real possibility - it was the epitome of bad taste, was mean-spirited and upset a lot of people that might have otherwise agreed with him about some other things he said.

But guys? Let’s pretend for a minute that we can get past that, because the rest of what he said was pretty on-the-damn-nose at times.

01. THE SECOND WORST KIND OF SPIRAL

The first big thing not murder-related that’s grabbed a lot of attention was where Morrison and the interviewer talked about what the interviewer called the “death spiral” of superhero comics and Morrison agreed, adding, “You can always be wrong. There’s a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it’s moved on, and it’s kind of abandoned, the first-stage rocket.” Of course, he hedges everything by saying that it’s absolutely not about quality. “With comics, the quality now is better than it’s ever been, there are more people now who are really good at what they do, doing what they do.” He adds, “Everything’s available for free, I think that’s the real problem, nobody wants to buy it anymore. One comes out, you see it immediately online and you can read it. That’s the way people want to consume their information… It’s not just for comics, everyone’s going to start feeling that one.” With this story breaking within 24 hours of a major comic shop chain in Arizona closing, it’s hard not to give that bit some thought, even if it’s just a little bit.

Personally, I’m not inclined to blame comics piracy for many of the industry’s woes, though it definitely part of the overall picture. I simply think it’s a symptom of a larger problem. I’ve talked before about how, to me, two bigs parts of the problem are some of the comic shop or comics culture or impenetrably dense continuity, but what Morrison and I - and I hope you, too - can agree on is that there is a problem. Sales are down. May was the first month in quite a while that no single series sold over 100,000 copies.

But like he says, not everything is going poorly. Superhero movies are just as big as ever at the box office and next year looks to be another big one, with The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises arriving in 2012. Morrison argues that right now, movies are “where [superheroes] can be more powerful, more effective.” Whether that’s true, it’s impossible to deny that millions of people are seeing these movies in a way that they’re not reading the comics the characters come from. We can bitch all we want about how San Diego Comic Con isn’t about the comics anymore, but what if there’s a reason? The movies are connecting with audiences who aren’t connecting with comics. It’s not necessarily a pretty truth, but it’s one we all need to face.

02. NO.

That brings me to where I agree with Morrison one hundred percent: the issue of rape and misogyny in comics. Because I swear, it’s an important one. When a major company-wide storyline like Identity Crisis can hinge on the anal rape of a beloved character and a lot of people can look at that and not see anything wrong with it being in a story co-starring fucking Batman, that’s a problem.

I also agree with Morrison that “most men try to avoid misogyny, really they do.” It’s not a manner of DC or Brad Meltzer saying, “Hey, you know who sucks? Chicks.” Like he says, it’s likely related to the fact that the industry is so male-heavy; it’s simply easy for those things to slip through when so much of the creative population at a company doesn’t have to think about issues of gender inequality every day simply by virtue of being on the dominant side. They’re not bad people, they’re just not used to thinking about certain things.

“I thought this was just… why? What the fuck is this, really? It wasn’t even normal. It was outrageous. I thought something is broken here. Something has gone so wrong in this image.”

When it comes down to it, though, there is zero reason a superhero comic needs to have any kind of sexual violence or violence against children in it. It doesn’t show how “bad” a villain is. It shows a lack of imagination. It’s lazy, it’s cheap and it’s hurtful. It doesn’t better the medium in the slightest bit; it hurts it. I used to scoff a little at the “Women in Refrigerators” idea until I realized how often I had to defend the medium or come up with an excuse or an explanation. Ultimately, I had to agree with people like Morrison: something has indeed gone so very wrong in this image. Every creator should be able to say, like him, “I managed to do thirty years in comics without any rape!” The fact that so many can’t is sobering. The fact that the works of Alan Moore, a man the industry holds up as one of its best and brightest, have used rape as a plot point so often should be sobering. I’m not shitting on Moore, either. I like his work. But there is a problematic aspect to much of it.

That’s what we should be taking from Grant Morrison‘s Rolling Stone interview. Not the part about his comments about Mark Millar. That’s too easy. If we stop there, all that does is harm the industry and medium we love. Morrison‘s not perfect. He says some outlandish things. Today we saw a deeply inappropriate thing he said. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about some of the other things. Asking those tough questions is the only way the industry can ever hope to thrive.