Somebody Else's Bad Mood

While hunting all over for that Alan Moore quote, I came across an old interview from (hey!) The Onion which is well worth checking out. I was struck by this bit, which gives voice to something that's been rattling around in my head for a few months:

"I think that what a lot of people saw when they read Watchmen was a high degree of violence, a bleaker and more pessimistic political perspective, perhaps a bit more sex, more swearing. And to some degree there has been, in the 15 years since Watchmen, an awful lot of the comics field devoted to these very grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don't have a lot to recommend them. And some of them are very pretentious, where they'll try and grab some sort of intellectual gloss for what they're doing by referring to a few song titles, or the odd book. They'll name-drop William Burroughs here or there. Just like MAD comics, which was a unique standalone thing, it's almost become a genre. The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago."

Don Federico, of the great, great new blog The Pop Ark (linked at left, and which I visit each day praying for a new post (yeah, like I'm one to talk)) nails it even more precisely (and I suppose I ought to spell out here that I don't just have comics on my mind...) (I've corrected some of his more egregious typos and format sloppiness):

"I think this dark age era of Batman ushered in by Dark Knight Returns and finally killed off in Identity Crisis will be seen in the long run as a temporary aberration, not the real Batman. As I mentioned that aberrant vision of Batman does have it's fans, typically maladjusted young men with serious social malaise....These young men of course have no historical context or understanding of what Batman really is, all they know is the garbage DC pumped out in the 90's; that's what they think is good. As such I really sincerely feel sorry for them, they were conditioned to accept a substandard and largely negative vision of an iconic figure in modern mythology, until such time as they get over trying to act 'cool' on the internet then they are going to miss out on great stuff. There the kind of wankers who go to discos and stand around looking ridiculous, expecting people to come and fall all over them, then go home bitter and angry when no one talks to them and they are too insecure to actually go and introduce themselves to anyone. The internet caters to this kind of wounded narcissist, suddenly he imagines he has an audience, and so he has a place to present his ego-centric world view...believing his opinion to be absolute and unique and utterly correct. Of course they can't communicate in complete sentences, or anything more then one paragraph, when pressed they have nothing to tell, when asked to elucidate or expand their opinion, to back it up with any kind of historical context or objective criteria of any kind, they become very quiet or launch into personal attacks. They are nothing more then whimpering hollow men. Their sexual repression and social ineptitude pour through in every word they write, in what they deem laughable, in what they deem erotic, in the fascist power fantasies they find so appealing, and in the art that celebrates and dignifies humanity that the find so repulsive.

"I'm not seeking to put down comics fans or internet fans in general, the average comic book fan is a good guy, and picking on the stereotypical nerd is something that I find to be the worst kind of bullying. That's not what I'm trying to do here at all. My basic point is that if you don't like the new...Batman then you are probably a sad bitter socially inept sexually repressed little compulsive masturbator."

Couldn't have put it better myself.