Eric Henwood-Greer says:

Always a danger to make a comment before the show notes are up, but will that stop me?

This was really great–and actually far more interesting than I expected. It helps that aside from a lot of Claremont X-Men (and stuff like Swamp Thing and Sandman if they count?) Miller’s Daredevil is one of the few superhero comics I know really well and that I got obsessed with as a teen–I think through the three volume set (plus Born Again) that David mentioned? But it had been decades since I’d pulled my copies off the shelf, so it was great to give this a re-read (and yeah, as Deb mentioned, from my “now” perspective all that stuff with Karen doesn’t just feel edgy like it did as a 90s teen but… not well done at all, and I was a bit surprised you didn’t get more into that, though on the other hand I was glad you didn’t get into all the issues with Miller which luckily aren’t too relevant to his early work here.) I admit, otherwise my Daredevil knowledge is a blank, the TV series aside, though I’ve always meant to check out more of Ann Nocenti’s run (I have one collected volume) and of course the work being done by a certain mangasplainer.

So it was kinda wonderful to have Chip, who knows these works intimately in (almost 😛 ) every sense of the word. And I LOVE the discussion about colouring–I live for this kind of talk, and like Chris belong to some FB groups devoted to comparisons. (It’s interesting, when Moore’s Swamp Thing was first put out in hardcover, the first volume did have a slightly more newsprint quality that made it look great–and fans complained and IIRC after that they went to their normal paper stock… Still looks better than the shit re-colouring of the Moore run for the Absolute editions.

Again, because at this point I feel like I know and understand the manga world far better than the mainstream superhero comic world, I was fascinated to hear things like about the importance of writer/artist teams on Daredevil. I admit I feel some shame that when I do delve into this world, I pay secondary attention to who the artist is than the writer (maybe it’s because in the early 90s as a kid the main comic I read was Sandman and I just got used to thinking “ah interesting, a new artist… anyway…” ) Stupid, as for me so much of the appeal of comics and manga is the visual storytelling, and I’m good friends with a queer comic creator who has worked for Marvel but only as an artist (when self publishing he writes as well.)

I will say the more and more I delve into 1970s (and 60s!) shojo manga the more I realize how a lot of accepted manga rules don’t apply. It was VERY common, for example, for scene changes to happen mid page (it took me a while to get used to this) as Chip mentions with Daredevil but something being rare in modern manga. Also, while a lot of 70s shojo was all about the montage page layout with just bits of floating text, there also are some classic titles that are chock-a-block with text. Stuff by Year 24 members like Toshie Kihara’s Mari to Shingo, and Ryoko Yamagishi’s Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun–peak classic shojo–will have panels that are virtually all text, which makes me *really* struggle with them. I think some of that came from the fact that at the time it was still not taken for granted that manga, especially shojo manga, would ever be collected in tankoubon, and so people were expected to ONLY read the manga in large format magazine pages, not little paperbacks.

And the more I hear about superhero comics and how they’re made and the various fanbases, the more I connect with a similar fandom–American soap operas. Deb talks about how strange it feels to her to follow a story and characters when the original creator stops writing (and drawing!) them. But maybe that strikes me as less strange because I grew up obsessed with soap operas (well the interconnected Agnes Nixon created soap operas–All My Children and One Life to Live plus a few short lived failed ones like Loving, specifically.) So by the time I was 10 I became aware that the headwriter credit would sometimes change and suddenly you’d notice changes on your soap. Maybe a bunch of new characters, maybe the tone of the soap would change (AMC was a “realistic” soap but when the campiest of soaps, Days of Our Lives introduced stuff like Devil possession, suddenly networks pressured AMC to at least start to do slightly supernatural stories,) or established characters would seem to have a personality change.

Before the Internet it was pretty hard to track this, but you could find a few soap history books that paid attention to who was writing when and why a particular soap was especially good during this era (like editors with comics, often it was not only due to who was headwriter but who was executive producer and if they meshed with that headwriter.) You’d also have old school fans who, for example, would say All My Children wasn’t worth watching after Agnes Nixon stopped being headwriter of her own show and just a consultant in the 80s. Or you can ask fans like me questions like why new headwriter Megan McTavish was so good on AMC in the first five years of the 1990s, but then when she was brought back to AMC years later, none of her stories worked (hint–it was because she didn’t have as strong an exec producer and because, with soap ratings tumbling, ABC network execs were starting to interfere with the creative decisions for the first time.)

Also, like with superhero comics, I think a non soap opera watcher would basically think that all soaps are the same, or not see how different they could be from one another, or even the same soap under a different regime. But to fans, it’s as clear as day. American soaps are DOA now as far as I’m concerned (the remaining ones are truly in a horrible state, creatively and financially) so it’s all moot, but I can’t think of any N American cultural product that works so similarly as soaps and superhero comics (I guess there could be an argument that some of this is true of legacy newspaper comic strips that are still stumbling along–including serialized titles like Dick Tracy and Mary Worth that I don’t think most people are aware still exist.)

When I did my MA which was partly on the historic gay stories in Agnes Nixon’s soap operas–years before primetime American TV would have regular gay characters–I was lucky enough to get to have long interviews with a number of the headwriters during those eras. And the way they talked–about things like having to pitch ideas, be aware of their audience, be aware of their exec producer demands, be aware of the network demands, etc, etc, the closest similar situation I can think of with commercial creative writing is western comic books (OK, some of that is clearly there with manga too–but not the creative regime change.)