MEG 321 - American Reaper , sexy ostriches?

[TordelBack]

Product based on a work of art.

[Gonk]

So being a creative, imaginative individual, you could turn that product based on a work of art back into a unique work of art. How? Drawing a picture of it yourself or incorporating it into your own story or imagination in some way. 

[A.Cow]

My friend, it's a comic strip, a form of cheap popular entertainment, not Picasso or Ezra Pound.

You explain that to Pat Mills.  He appears to take this stuff far more seriously in interviews.

[Gonk]

I would never deny that the artists who make the stories for 2000ad are not very skilled craftsmen.
Comic strips are associated with low popular culture, like the newspapers that originally spawned them.

Because something belongs to low popular culture does not make it of any less value than something belonging to high popular culture, such as Pound's Cantos. Heck! I can enjoy a Shakespeare play as much as I can enjoy watching a wrestling match.

I enjoyed AR, a few on here are evaluating a bit harshly for a comic strip. That was my original contention. As far as comics go I think 2000ad is of the highest standard, and I do not bother reading any others because I do not think they are as good as 2000ad.

[TordelBack]

I can enjoy a Shakespeare play...

Themselves 'low popular culture', by your definition:  one penny for a groundling in the Globe, 2000 at a time, doesn't get much cheaper that that, even in the early 17th century.  Shakespeare wasn't just writing immortal drama for the connoisseur of classical allusion, he was writing bawdy jokes, pratfalls, historical inaccuracies, ridiculously overblown melodrama and superstitious nonsense for the common person with a copper to spend on entertainment.  Does that automatically make his plays cheap and undeserving of serious criticism?

Don't mean to be unduly argumentative with you Fonky, I accept that you are not running down 2000AD or comics creators in general, but I think your underlying assumption of a division between 'high' and 'low' art and culture is just plain wrong:  there's just art you like and art you don't, everything else is just that opinion in cultural aggregate and over time.  I quite agree with you that a strip can be enjoyed even if it's just pitched as throwaway fun, but even so it doesn't mean that it should automatically be excused its perceived flaws on the basis that the medium its in is somehow cheap and mainly meant to appeal to the LCD. 

(Incidentally I haven't seen anything of American Reaper beyond review excerpts, so I'm talking in the abstract here and not about the strip itself).

[Spaceghost]

I enjoyed AR, a few on here are evaluating a bit harshly for a comic strip. That was my original contention.

No. You see, this is where you are very, very wrong. Saying, as you are, that "It's ok  because comics are a trashy, low brow medium", is not only condescending to the creators, it's also patronising to the readers.

Comics can be just as life affirming, affecting, and important as any art house film or prize winning novel. They can also be as broad in scope and scale as a blockbuster film due to the fact that there is, in effect, an unlimited budget as far as location and SFX goes.

To suggest that the creators went out of their way to create a strip which is supposed to be enjoyed as vacuous fluff is insulting to say the least.

I may not like American Reaper but I would never suggest that it's good if only enjoyed on the level of throwaway trash because comics are supposed to be low art, disposable entertainment.

[TordelBack]

Anecdote time:  I once worked with a lady who was an enormous Opera buff, spent her salary traveling the world attending festivals from New York to Vienna, had librettos and boxsets and handwritten correspondence from Domingo, the whole thing.  On her return from a once-in-lifetime trip to a full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth, and casting around for a topic of conversation I (being a colossal nerd, but one who absolutely hates opera and knows nothing about it) asked her something or other about Siegfried and Hagen and the Ring (probably gleaned from a commentary of Lord of the Rings): she hadn't a clue what I was talking about.  She'd just spent several days enjoying the music and the spectacle, she had only the sketchiest idea about the story or its origins.  So, was she enjoying high art, because it's a Wagner opera cycle, or low art, because it was just singing and gilt sets?  And did that matter at all?

[John Caliber]

Opinions regarding AMERICAN REAPER aside for a moment. Re: its return in the Autumn, I would have thought that, with the release of DREDD 3D, the Megazine should have been wall-to-wall Dredd for 3-4 months to capitalise? More so than 2000AD since the Megazine covers prominently feature Dredd's name.

[radiator]

That's a good point. I'd quite like a new series of The Lost Cases, but get Al Ewing, Si Spurrier, Rob Williams and Gordon Rennie to pitch in stories as well as Alan Grant. That way we'd at least get two Dredds a month.

[Proudhuff]

Got to agree with John and Rad excelent ideas!!

[John Caliber]

I wonder if a serialised adaptation of the movie is in the works for the latter-year Megs?

[Proudhuff]

not according to Mol-R

[Gonk]

I enjoyed AR, a few on here are evaluating a bit harshly for a comic strip. That was my original contention.

No. You see, this is where you are very, very wrong. Saying, as you are, that "It's ok  because comics are a trashy, low brow medium", is not only condescending to the creators, it's also patronising to the readers.

Comics can be just as life affirming, affecting, and important as any art house film or prize winning novel. They can also be as broad in scope and scale as a blockbuster film due to the fact that there is, in effect, an unlimited budget as far as location and SFX goes.

To suggest that the creators went out of their way to create a strip which is supposed to be enjoyed as vacuous fluff is insulting to say the least.

I may not like American Reaper but I would never suggest that it's good if only enjoyed on the level of throwaway trash because comics are supposed to be low art, disposable entertainment.

No Lee Bates, I'm saying AR reflects the trashy low brow elements of comics. I think this strip has jokingly been referred to as resembling something from Mandy or Bunty, I don't know which, and I think that's part of the AR strip, to call into question the trashy throw away elements of comics. My view is AR is a ambitious undertaking by it's creators.

Comics can be a very subversive element in the cultural life of a society. I do not thnik it's vacuous fluff in the least. At the end of the day it's down to the reader to decide how they want to interpret the comic.

Comics as a whole are products for a commodity market. It is people like us, who collect and nuture them, that recuperate them from this status as plain commodity into something more significant.

I see your point Tordel. But even the most open minded and liberal of us must at some point decide that Wagner's music is of more consequnce than something by Jedward.

I'd like wall to wall Dredd for a few months.

[James Stacey]

I think this strip has jokingly been referred to as resembling something from Mandy or Bunty, I don't know which, and I think that's part of the AR strip, to call into question the trashy throw away elements of comics. My view is AR is a ambitious undertaking by it's creators.

No I think you are missing the reason. The same comments can be levelled to Slaine or ABC, it's just more evident in AR. Langleys photoshopping of photos is how he creates strips now so can't really be said to be an intentional conceit of AR.

[TordelBack]

I see your point Tordel. But even the most open minded and liberal of us must at some point decide that Wagner's music is of more consequnce than something by Jedward.

Two points on a spectrum defined by the aggregate appreciation of their work, not inhabitants of discrete universes of 'high' and 'low' culture (although arguably hailing from two different species entirely).  Do you automatically give Jedward a free pass to be utterly shite because they're just miming along to synthetic jingles in a medium that is basically shite anyway?  Or do you say that you don't like them because you find their output empty, grating and devoid of any musical merit?  As a man who obviously loves music, I'm guessing the latter.

As to Wagner, he wasn't always belle of the cultural ball.  Wagner's first opera wasn't produced until after his death.  His second closed after the second performance.  He abandoned his job as director of the Opera in Riga due to massive debts.  Nothing he wrote had any kind of positive reception until he was 39*. This suggests that his early audiences may have thought him the Jedward of the opera house scene. 

I'd suggest there are real distinctions between the two, and they lie in complexity and craft and long-term widespread appeal.  But it's not because one is opera and one is reality-TV manufactured pap.



*Thank you Wikipedia.  As noted above, I know nothing about opera.