A Bit of a Rant to Anyone Who Believes They Are Too Good for Comic Books

Have you seen the trailer to this summer's blockbuster film 300? It’s a story of Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Greek Spartans hold back a Persian invasion force of thousands. I am sure the exact numbers have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, but it’s an impressive real life story. Guess what, it’s an impressive comic book too. Frank Miller turned the story into a graphic novel (a classier word for comic book) and from what I understand, it’s a pretty darn good adaptation. Well, because Sin City (another comic book, a crime series by Frank Miller) was received so well by movie audiences, Hollywood has put its resources into making another one of Miller's comics into a movie. It looks like it will be fun. What I don't get is if you read anything in your spare time and you watch these movies (Sin City, X-Men, Spider-man, etc.) what do you have against reading a comic book?

Especially now, with media changing because of the impact of technology. The majority of movies have little content, which I believe has made a lot of people seek gaming as an alternative. And now the video game industry makes more money than Hollywood. Television got boring. Any media with in a serial format is going to get tired over time. Plots get recycled and then the only time they are interesting is when they get spun according to current events. When reality television came around, it became really popular because it was something different, which put pressure on the people writing television to come up with better stories to compete. They have, there is a lot a of good television programs out today. The comic book industry has been around since the 1930's. It has gone through a series of up periods and down periods. Right now it is in one hell of an up period. The later half of the 90’s was the last really bad period. In the early 90's collectors bought as much as they could, thinking all four variant covers of X-Men number one were going to pay for their way through college. All the industry had to do was release variant covers, holo-gram covers, foil covers, and they would make more money. When people figured out they weren’t going to be getting rich through comics they bailed. The industry went into one of those down periods until guys like Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis, and Grant Morrison started writing. Now BK Vaughn, Robert Kirkman, and Greg Ruka are writing along side those already named and comic book veterans from the past twenty years. Add to the equation guys like Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost), Bryan Singer (Superman Returns, X-Men, Apt Pupil, The Usual Suspects), and Brad Meltzer (The Book of Fate) and there are a crap load of great comic book stories being told right now. Stories with depth. There are also a lot without depth. Stories that are only clever and not that deep, like Civil War. If CW isn’t your thing, fine, it is a story designed for those who like super heroes, but if you like good story telling there are plenty of other comics, with intelligent thought provoking content, that you can read instead of super hero. Sin City and 300 are both steps in the direction of what comics can do outside of super heroes, but they are still very much action adventure stories, which are more clever than intelligent. However, I just read the first book of Maus, which tells the story of the author’s father’s experiences through the Holocaust. It anthropomorphizes nationalities to tell the story (Mice for Jews, Pigs for Poles, Cats for Germans, etc.), but so does Animal Farm and that is considered literary. My point, if you like to read, I guarantee there is some form of graphic story telling you could enjoy, if you only gave the medium the slightest of chances.