On #boing authors and their relationship with the community

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My comment was decontextualized. Here I focused on the 'how" to respond to someone else’s structural argument that Devin was “just expressing an opinion” and not arguing a particular point in a way analogous to the teacher he described.

I did engage with the content of his argument above. Your characterization of it being focused on commodification feels off-base. The core of his argument is that superheroes are not taken seriously because they no longer evoke the serious and thematic qualities Devin thinks are marks of great literature (a point where he agrees with his conservative comics-hating teacher). This argument is flawed for a few reasons. For one, comics (esp cape books) have always had experimental, playful, self-deprecating and camp qualities - he’s treating a relarively slim slice of comics history where dudes like Moore, Gaiman, and Miller and others were doing ‘elevated’ comics work as some lost golden age, when, as many are pointing out, during this supposedly ambitous heyday, Thor was spending a lot of time running around as a frog. Another weakness in the argument (that prompted my analogizing between Nealy and his teacher) is that the criteria for what is of literary merit seem to be rooted in an inherently conservative frame that devalues postmodernism, camp, satire, and other playful literary forms, which have historically been derided by the establishment, but also historically been forms where marginalized creators flourish.

I think the Marvel movies are mostly garbage, and will not defend them. But the Nolan Batman movies are also garbage, and, frankly, worse imo because they desperately try to make Batman a serious and cool character, when he is too stupid a concept to function as anything other than camp in the Adam West or Joel Schumacher vein, or as a heightened cartoon (or cartoon-like) figure like in TAS or the Burton movies.

I found Black Panther interesting, and Waititi’s last Marvel movie a fun, colorful sci Fi comedy adventure. That’s about it for me and that franchise. I’ll probably watch this new one when it comes to D+ because I enjoy Waititi’s work, am happy to support Indigenous artists, and suspect that the movie will still be engaging and funny even if I haven’t been following any of the narrative of the other movies.

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No, you specifically said in response to the original post:

Meanwhile, there is nothing in Devin’s original post to suggest that he believes that “Superheroes are only any good if they’re tonally and thematically similar to established Great Works of the Western Canon."

It seems to me that you are interpreting Devin’s claims about the movies being “too silly and too campy” as an outright rejection of silliness and camp. And yet Devin also says, “Obviously, the premise of superheroes demands that any live-action adaptation possess a decent amount of levity and suspension of disbelief. I can accept that.”

Devin is clearly talking about degrees of camp, and yet you respond as though he is drawing a dichotomy.

Devin does not bring up the Nolan Batman movies. You did. Devin is not saying, “This is how comics should be done.” You are assuming that he means that when he bemoans the excessive silliness of recent movies. The key word is excessive here. Not the very presence or absence of silliness at all.

As for the crux of the argument, the thesis statement is right there at the beginning:

“I wished for a time when superheroes would be mainstream and finally receive the respect they deserved as American mythology.” Your assumptions about what he means by “American mythology” are just that. If you want to clarify what American mythology means, be my guest. But do not respond with the assumption that it means “no levity or camp at all,” because Devin clearly states that that is not what he means in the very next paragraph.

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