Originally published at: You'll be wishing for a Golden Bat revival after watching this video essay | Boing Boing
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virtually every other country possesses a comic scene that offers multiple genres, and, in this arena, Japanese comics are peerless.
I am a million miles from being expert on this but I’m pretty sure that some would claim French comics to be peer.
There’s no way an American comic about pirates would ever crack number one on the Diamond sales chart. Decades of conditioning have made it impossible for American comic fans to deviate from capes and tights.
At certain points in history, that would be true. Today it would not be true. There are days I want to start jumping back into collecting/reading more comics, but for now I just dip my toe into chasing down the 10001 variant cover for Dynamite’s Shadow releases and an occasional used graphic novel. But from what I have seen, the subject matter of comics is very diverse in the modern era. Heck I would be a bit critical of Manga as being overly formulaic in general, but that isn’t fair for all of them.
ETA - The advantage nearly every other country has with comics media is it was allowed to mature with the rest of society. So there were comics for “adults” much earlier in their history than in the US, which really started to be a mainstream thing in the mid-late 80s. But I do feel the US comics industry has largely caught up.
The Italian scene too. The fumetti are funny and diverse.
Huh, this is familiar to me - and I don’t know why. The live-action movie, maybe? (Pretty sure I never saw it, except perhaps clips.) Though the cartoon form also seems familiar - at the start of the video, I had some vague memory of it being an old American comic book. (Probably I just made a connection that didn’t exist because it’s so similar to a lot of comics from the '30s and '40s, e.g. “Fantomah” - which is a bit weird, given the coincidence that Golden Bat was sometimes known as Phantoma.)
That was some pretty effective use of the cape in the live action clip. Blind one guy with the cape, hit another with the cane, then hit the blinded guy.
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