Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing trend in the comics fan community to praise comics for “awesomeness,” where the term is generally used to describe a willingness to cut-and-paste/mix-and-match various genre elements for additional thrill value. When people describe Jason Aaron’s run on Ghost Rider, for example, they’ll talk about how Ghost Rider fights a gang of evil biker nuns armed with machine guns, and how that is awesome. If you press them for details, the response will frequently be something like “because biker machine-gun nuns.” “Batman RIP” got a lot of this as well. “There’s an evil karate mime! How can you not love that?”
Of course, it’s more than that. When we describe the evil biker machine-gun nuns as awesome, it’s not just because Jason Aaron pulled the lever on the Slot Machine O’ Descriptive Elements and got a jackpot; it’s because Aaron, in his Ghost Rider issues, managed to both realize and inform the concept in a matter of pages. He didn’t just throw in the biker machine-gun nuns as a one-off joke; he made them a plot element, made them plausible without making them mundane, kept them interesting without letting them devolve into ridiculousness.
That’s extremely difficult to do. When comics fans talk about “awesomeness” these days, more often than not harkening back to the batshit insane works of people like Robert Kanigher or Bob Haney, who seemingly fueled their stories on pure imagination and a total disregard for things like logic. The problem is that precisely recreating that spirit in a modern work is near-impossible, because modern readers – even young modern readers – now expect a certain level of narrative complexity. (An issue of Marvel Adventures: Avengers, for example, is, from a narrative standpoint, far more complex than most stories produced in the Silver Age despite it being perfectly suitable for younger readers. And this is fine, because kids can actually handle a lot more complexity than most writers will give them.) The level of what-the-fuck-ness that allowed the creation of things like the Saga of the Super-Sons isn’t really there any more. The work of Bob Haney, fun as it may be, is mostly kitsch and most fans who didn’t grow up with it enjoy it mostly on that level.
From a critical standpoint, though – and I really do see this all the time – the works of the present-day are still often being evaluated on the same scale that Haney got. Partially this is because of a vocal group of fans who want comics to be “fun again” (because, what, Hitman and Astro City weren’t fun?); partly it’s because objectivity regarding the comics you read in your youth is difficult to manage and older fans are, unfortunately, often the loudest.
And partly it’s because fans tend to be generous. I call this “Grodd syndrome,” thanks to the huge number of comics fans who will enthusiastically tell you how Gorilla Grodd is a great character without being able to mention one truly great story prominently featuring Gorilla Grodd. (Maybe they’ll say the third season of Justice League Unlimited, but that’s really a Lex Luthor story, not a Grodd story.) When asked to justify why Grodd is a great character, they will simply say “psychic gorilla conqueror.” But that’s not a great character; that’s a great concept.
Which in a sense describes a lot of what “awesomeness” means to comics fans nowadays – it’s a descriptor of concept rather than execution, and an awesome concept is, simply, always a high one. “High concept” is Hollywoodese for “sellable idea that can be expressed in a single sentence.” Twins is the classic example. “Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins!” They literally built the movie out from that idea. The fact that comics have reduced “single sentence” to “single phrase” isn’t even new: Dirty Dancing originated as a title before there was ever a story attached to it (the script from a different project was attached to the title later).
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If superhero comics are going to remain relevant, they need to be evangelized, and the word-of-mouth that made Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t “it has a strong plotline and good actiony bits and it’s funny,” it was “Johnny Depp is this crazy pirate who acts like he’s Keith Richards with a sword and he fights zombies.”
Concept is the quick sell. That’s what it’s there for.
But behind concept there has to be heft. There has to be forethought into what makes the idea tick. Jason Aaron’s evil machine-gun nuns worked not just because they were evil machine-gun nuns, but because they were devoted to an angel who had gradually gone evil and brought them along for the ride (and wasn’t it a nice touch that the young nun who didn’t know anything about the cultish aspects of her convent was horrified?); they were willing to be violent machine-gun nuns because they’d long since grown settled into their beliefs that violence was justified because the angel said so and because anybody they’d be shooting at would be a sinner anyways. It didn’t take a lot of work to do this, but the work had to be there to really make the concept jump from unformed collection of nouns to living, breathing idea.
This is important because people can tell the difference between just throwing out words at random to masquerade as a plot element and a fully formed idea on the backs of those seemingly random words. (He said, unabashedly discarding one idea he knew was crap and endorsing another he knew was solid.) The first one might entice readers temporarily but people aren’t stupid and they know when they’re being spun literary candyfloss in place of word-meat. The second is what keeps readers around.
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I am glad more people are realizing the awesomeness that is Jason Aaron. Anything he has touched, so far, is pretty much comic gold.
I always loved Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan because he managed to insert this kind of ridiculousness so well.
It really is what makes or breaks a comic from the… err… comic sense?
Well said.
There just isn’t any single narrative element that you can point to that automatically makes a story good, or cool, or “awesome”. There are bad ninja stories, bad pirate stories, bad zombie stories. There was an episode of Torchwood that featured a cyberwoman fighting a pterodactyl, and while that one scene was undoubtedly pretty cool, the episode was shit on numerous different levels.
The thing is, if you automatically like all stories that feature, say, space gorillas, that doesn’t make those stories good. That’s a fact about you, not about the stories. In the fanfic-oriented parts of the net, we call it a “kink”: not necessarily a sexual thing, just something that you really like to read; something that will allow you to enjoy a story that is otherwise not particularly good. I know I’ve waded through acres of godawful writing (and hours of godawful TV, and godawful movies, and godawful games) just to get to that one bit that was tailored to stimulate the pleasure centres of my brain. But the hit that I get from them doesn’t magically eliminate all the bits that are crap.
Well put. I was just thinking about this myself the other day with regard to Jeff Parker, who I like, but is a bit guilty of playing “The Awesomeness Slot Machine” card.
On the other hand, Nextwave is full of this kind of thing, it is given zero depth, and it worked rather well.
…because Ellis was playing it for laughs.
You know, oddly, I’ve been thinking about this lately, partly because I saw someone comment somewhere that “awesomeness” isn’t a word.
I think, though, it’s a word of linguistic requirement. I think we invented it because the other words we had didn’t fit the way we meant them. Because obviously, “awesomeness” is related to “awe” and “awesome,” but awesome ultimately stopped meaning what we meant it to because it started being applied too easily. Eddie Izzard commented on it in one of his bits; “awe” is a word with a meaning like one is so absolutely astounded and struck by inspiration as to be dumb. It is a degree of feeling transcendental in nature; when Siddhartha and Jesus achieved enlightenment, those moments came with awe. Nirvana is awesome in that way.
Biker nuns and Grodd? Not so much. They’re neat and fun and funny and make you smile, certainly, but they’re not “awesome” in the sense of being so insanely awe-inspiring as to strike one dumb.
But, like, Sandman? I’d call that awesome. In terms of the sheer scope, range, execution, and accomplishment of the series? I was going to say that it’s kind of like “awesomeness” is a postmodern version of awesome, but then I started to wonder if maybe awesome is to awesomeness as art is to entertainment.
I don’t know, but now I’m blathering.
…
I like alien space Nazis.
Sure, dino-riders might be better, but… alien space nazis!
Sounds like “awesomeness” is code for snobbery.
I bet you will HATE Chaos the Cute Little Cloud:
http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/handmade-gifts-for-the-win-chaos-the-cute-little-cloud/
To each his own, happy holidays!
This concept is what the entirety of The Adventures of Doctor McNinja is built on.
http://www.drmcninja.com/index.html
“Awesomeness” is more a code for a semi-ironic reveling in absurd high concept. It’s like typing “teh” for “the” — it brings emphasis and a slight bit of mockery to a description. I always thought there was a certain assumption of “yeah, it’s silly crap, but I love silly fun crap” embedded in the word.
It is annoying when a work figures its success as entertainment purely on slamming together enough “awesome” elements without regard for how. When such works are decried as empty crap, the defense of “fun” and “how can you not respect the awesome” rise up. Gack.
I’d saw Swarm is another “awesome” character who doesn’t have a single decent story written about him (maybe a marvle adventures spider-man issue or something). But he’s a Nazi made out of radioactive bees, how is that not amazing?
What about the glory that is Tyrannosaurus Reich? I agree, though. It’s also the differeince between Aquaman and Starman: Aquaman’s a good concept, but Starman’s got the meat (IMHO).
Illogical awesomeness is just another way for going multimedial. We all know THE END IS NIGH and our lives are so short and blahblahblah, so we want it all, Queen-style, just mix it and drink it.
We’ve worshipped gods and we’ve worshipped science, and nothing has really changed. We’re fucking doomed and need this colorful distractions ’cause ridiculous, non-sense stories are better than a completely senseless world. We’ve had enough and said fuck this, we don’t wanna think.
Maybe the world was ending in Haney and Kanigher’s time too? How much of this specific kind of awesomeness was in 80s and 90s comics?
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, sorry. I’m just a little sick of these supereclectic comics and books and films. Some of them are really good (Umbrella Academy, Ygdrasil, Dr. 13: Architecture and Mortality, Dogma) but I find more and more people just using that slot machine and I fear…
I fear the overexposition could make zombie nazi gorillas boring.
You omitted one major element here: the quality extent to which the ‘awesomeness’ of a story/character/concept ties into the series as whole.
Gun toting biker nuns is a spectacular ‘bad guy’ concept for a series about a flaming demonic skeleton stunt biker.
It fits the series and would in all likelihood have been far, far less effective/enjoyable in another series, like X-Force or Justice League. The ‘Drive-In Movie’ flavor of Ghost Rider in general fits having other bikers as enemies, it fits having religious antagonists, it fits having over the top levels ‘crazy’ by having those militant nuns show up in the same story where he has to fight cannibals and ghosts (of cannibals).
A lot of the ‘awesomeness’ of Morrison’s Batman, overall, was poorly fitting the character. Particularly early stuff like having him fight (and defeat easily) an army of ninja man-bats. While that is a neat high concept, it fell apart because for all the superpowered people Batman’s fought, he’s still just one normal guy who has traditionally struggled against one man-bat made out of a pencil necked-geek.
I thought the Ninja Manbats beat Batman and captured him? I could be wrong, it’s been a while since I read the issue.
(Maybe they’ll say the third season of Justice League Unlimited, but that’s really a Lex Luthor story, not a Grodd story.)
Huh. I guess you don’t think the two Grodd themed two parters in the first two seasons of the Justice League cartoon (Brave and the Bold and Secret Society) aren’t good Grodd stories.
He also has a good appearance in the new Brave and the Bold cartoon. Granted, since that cartoon seems devoted to using B-list villains, that may not say much about him.
The Annotated Mantooth by Matt Fraction is a perfect example of this… actually just about anything by him. He even managed to turn a long unpopular character (Iron fist) into a popular one by using the idea of catching them with an interesting concept (kung-fu billionaire) and creating a great story around it to keep them coming.
I preferred the Ghost Rider when it wasn’t based in Christian mythology. I fucking hate Garth Ennis.
Sellyourselfshort: Fraction for me is like flipping a coin, half the time I like it and want more (Thor) and the other half I can’t believe I spent money on it (Punisher: War Journal). So, I would believe that it was actually Brubaker who was the real talent on that book. Plus, it fits in with Brubaker’s style (as I see it): take a movie genre and make it a comic. Cap: political thriller, Fist: kung-fu, Daredevil: noir, X-Men: sci-fi.
Zenrage: Ennis was just taking the GR story back to it’s roots. It wasn’t till later that Mephisto became the Rider’s cheif antagonist. Shit, there’s a GR story in the 70’s where Satan, fucking Satan!, tries to steal Blaze’s soul AND JESUS SHOWS UP TO SAVE HIM! Personally, I think the best “reason” for the Ghost Rider’s existence is actually the movie’s explination that he’s the Devil’s bounty hunter.
MGK: All alien Nazi’s need is a reason for them existing. It’s a simple montra: everything’s better when you can kill Nazis.
I’m not trying to belittle Brubaker in any way, Captain America has been my favourite comic since it started. And I’m definitely not trying to say Fraction is the only reason Ironfist is great. I’m just trying to say that he is great example of taking concepts that would be deemed “awesome” (like the commie bear in a jet pack from the order) and crafting intriguing and excellent stories around them. I used Ironfist as an example because “Kung-fu billionaire” is a direct quote from him when describing the book. Also I agree that punisher war journal is crappy and I think that it may be because with a book like punisher he can’t use any of the “awesome” concepts that would work in other books. It also occurs to me that many people probably haven’t read “the annotated Mantooth” so let me describe it in one “awesome” sentence. Kung-fu secret agent gorilla fights; robots, Hitler, zombies and Oprah Winfrey.
Sage, if you want to masturbate to the further adventures of Ghost Preacher, you go right ahead. The Road to Damnation was a shit story that focused more on the Angels and Demons that Ennis let fall out of his ass than it was about Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider had as much to do with that series as Blade did in his television series.
The movie was shit and the 70’s version of the Ghost Rider wasn’t much better. The Ghost Rider has always been at its best when it is unexplained; An unstoppable force of nature. This is why the first four years of the 90’s version was the best Ghost Rider.
Also, they never had a defining moment for the character, because like any other force of nature it arrives unexpectedly, causes massive damage, and then leaves the survivors knowing that it could have been worse. In which case, the only thing that can or should be defined is how the survivors cope with the damage.
MGK defines this as a concept. I say its a concept with a purpose: to test those around it and those that would confront it.
The Ghost Rider mythos will never be better than it was with Mephisto, Blackheart, Zarathos (as a separate entity), Lilith, Blackout, Scarecrow and especially MADCAP (why Marvel didn’t push that villain in the series, I’ll never figure out) than it ever can be with the christian bullshit because inevitably that crap will end in one of two ways – The Ghost Rider will either be turned into an angel or it’ll go down the same mindless path that Spawn overdid.
Isn’t “awesomeness” a lot like Colbert’s “truthiness” in that it explicitly acknowledges the bullshit inherent in the concept?
Or is it more like the elusive “cult” designation in cinema? It’s almost impossible to set out to create a true cult film, say something like Blue Velvet, Rocky Horror, Buckaroo Banzai or Donnie Darko, but they almost always have a lot of the same “high concept” and genre-blending elements. When someone tries to make a cult film you wind up with something like Pootie Tang, which fails at just about ever level. (Of course, someone will just say “Pootie is teh Awesome!” and render my argument meaningless). Then there are kitch movies with a cult following, like the Dolomite movies, which have the same trash appeal of those Haney comics and not coincidentally a lot of the same fan base.
The Ghost Rider mythos will never be better than it was with Mephisto, Blackheart, Zarathos (as a separate entity), Lilith, Blackout, Scarecrow and especially MADCAP (why Marvel didn’t push that villain in the series, I’ll never figure out)
Wow. You must have been reading some entirely different Midnight Sons imprint books in the 90s…
The Ghost Rider will either be turned into an angel or it’ll go down the same mindless path that Spawn overdid.
Heh, Daniel Way already did the angel thing, actually.
Oh, and regarding the Iron Fist creative split, Brubaker has said that Fraction did most of the work on that.
“Isn’t “awesomeness” a lot like Colbert’s “truthiness” in that it explicitly acknowledges the bullshit inherent in the concept?”
I like this idea a lot. Not sure I totally agree, but I think there’s something to it, definitely.
The first two parts of the “Run Riot” storyarc were good Grodd stories. Not GREAT ones, to be sure, because the plot was simple:
Flash: “If Grodd escapes, he’s going to be really angry and beat the crap out of me. Grodd MUST NOT GET OUT.”
The ensuing struggle was built around the Flash trying to stop Grodd’s escape, failing, and then getting wrecked.
I think the issue could’ve been a GREAT Grodd story if it had lasted one more issue–there needed to be some sort of bridge in there, something more than just “Grodd messes up the Flash, then the Flash messes up Grodd.”
“Heh, Daniel Way already did the angel thing, actually.”
If you would please excuse me for a moment. I want to go introduce Garth Ennis to my good friend Mr Tire Iron.
At high velocity. Repeatedly.
and the word-of-mouth that made Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t “it has a strong plotline and good actiony bits and it’s funny,” it was “Johnny Depp is this crazy pirate who acts like he’s Keith Richards with a sword and he fights zombies.”
Slight correction – the *actual* WOM at the time went like this:
JohnnyDepp!OrlandoBloom!KateWinslet!ZombiePirates!!eleven! ARRRR! SQUEE!SQUARRR!
Otherwise – dead-on rant, old chap.
“Awesomeness” is the stuff that xkcd-reading, ninja vs. pirate nerds use because they think themselves above Halo-playing, Chuck Norris joke-cracking frat boys and ironic hipster kids who like Power Rangers and Pokemon.
Snakes On A Plane, anyone?
Oh, and I liked Grodd in that Phil Foglio Angel And The Ape miniseries, funny, but he still snapped Dumb Bunny’s spine.
I mean… you’re completely correct and very eloquent about it.
On the other hand, way to dissect awesomeness until its guts hang like streamers from its distended belly and its heart lies on the floor, still beating sadly.
Thinking about Grodd I’d mention his post-coital interruption of Snapper Carr in Final Crisis Submit. Then there’s Grodd eating his way through Superbia in JLA Classified 1-3….
[…] hiding in their chests. The concept scores high in that ineffable quality geeks call “awesomeness” and would have been magic in the hands of, say, Dave Stone. It’s a tribute to […]