How To Read Superhero Comics And Why by Geoff Klock
01/04/2003 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 

Pub: Continuum Books. 206 page enlarged paperback. Paperback: Price: £14.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-8264-1419-2. Hardback: Price: £14.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-8264-1419-2.

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This title is a bit of a misnomer. If you’re looking for a book to tell you in what order to read speech balloons when reading comicbooks then this isn’t the one.

Author Klock has written a scholarly piece regarding the effects of Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ and Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons ‘The Watchmen’ have had on the changing face of comics plus a few of the more current stars like Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison.

Up until about 9 years ago, this is really home territory for this reviewer.

I have to confess to certain misgivings about this book. It reads very much like a university thesis, which it probably was based on the mini-bio on the back cover, in that there are a lot of footnotes and quotes from various people. Typical student fare really.

Why come up your own observations when all you have to do is find well-known writers who’ve said it in the past and use it as authoritative ramblings?

Such actions tend to make me wary as such work is written with what the author feels is right rather than weighing up the evidence on both sides of the fulcrum before drawing any conclusions.

The point is this particular instance is forgetting how throughout the history of comics that the creators have always liberally borrowed from outside sources for ideas and inspiration and occasionally renovated it in the process.

Although author Klock acknowledges the influence of Japanese comics on Frank Miller, he makes a total balls-up when it comes to Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ when it’s already acknowledged in print that although they were archetypes based on Charlton characters not the JLA.

The names were changed when DC who had acquired them weren’t prepared to have the majority killed for a story. Calling the Watchmen archetypal would also match variations on Marvel’s Avengers line-up equally well.

Then again, there’s a singular lack of Marvel influence as well turning them into footnotes. This isn’t a pro-Marvel stance just an understanding of this author’s biasness or budget when he was doing his thesis.

All right, so this might appear to be a mote point but it raises odd points of favouring a particular argument without going far enough in research. This doesn’t mean that I find all things Klock wrote is wrong.

I do agree with him that the effects of both Miller and Moore’s work resulted in more violent vigilante comics when other writers and artists thought was the key ingredient that sold the material rather than the true face of vigilantism. [For the record, I did a rather popular article at the time called ‘No More Mr. Nice-Vigilante’ myself on the subject.]

It’s a pity further examination of why it was thought the violence was so important to other creators than story development and tends to undermine what their editors are after.

There is often a feeling of not examining the field in its wider aspect and the decline in comicbook sales that allowed more revolutionary comicbook writers an ‘in’ to trying some things that would be deemed different and able to find an audience.

Anyway, I’m sure if you’re into comicbooks, you’re bound to pick up a copy of this book if only to argue a contrary argument to what is written here.

GF Willmetts