You know what you can do well in comics? Scale.

Not to say that they do it expressly well over small, intimate personal stuff. The argument could be made that comics are actually at their best with small, quiet moments. But when I think about things unique to comics, scale is something it has over most  other art forms. Because film can do so many things but it’s never able to grasp the huge in the way that comics do. Even massive crowd scenes don’t work the same way as they used to. CGI crowds doesn’t feel the same as several hundred people on a hill listening to Spartacus. The thing about film is it’s most imaginative creators – people like Terry Gilliam, Luc Besson, young Ridley Scott and the like – are straining against budgetary and technological limitations. Comics has creators who think in grandoise fashion. Home to Katushiro Otomo and Geoff Darrow. Brandon Graham and (pre-animation) Miyazaki. Moebius! Jack Kirby! People with ideas so immense they only work in this bastard little medium.

But, interesting as that is, comics excel at producing the strange.

There’s the thing that Grant Morrison has stated – that comics are at their best when they are “even more bizarre, because the one thing comics can do is weirdness and strangeness and surrealism, and they do that better than movies“. Which he calls “lo-fi weirdness”.  And they do there’s something just in the basic language of comics that allows for an almost anything to happen without the reader being pulled out of it. Pretty much because we know that it’s just drawings on paper. The ridiculous and the sublime routinely sit side by side, if not in the same instance. Which is why, as stupid as it gets, the silver age stuff still works so well. Those Drake/Premiani Doom Patrol issues are some of the best comics ever made and they make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Taiyo Matsumoto may be more famous for Tenkonkinkreet but fully explodes in No. 5, which reads like The Prisoner by way of Lennon drawings, a Benneton ad, anphetimenes, and the Forever People. I have no idea the context, but the story is profound. Few other art forms could contain Madman, Popbot, Dr. 13, Stray Toasters, Transmetropolitian, Scott Pilgrim, Scary Go Round, Rogan Gosh, G0dland, the exploitation-era 70s marvel books, Seth Fisher, incredibly stupid Legion of Superheroes stories, manga porn, any insane thing you can think of will work because COMICS DON’T NEED TO MAKE SENSE.

And yeah, there’s everything Morrison ever did. Radical changes in scale, dream logic, chaos magic butting up against quantum physics against drug psychosis, religion and time travel and talking animals, death being colorblind, sentient universes being mined for technologies, subway pirates, swarms of death sperm, etc. Morrison is the arbiter of comics-as-chaos, interested in pushing the reader into a new space. His work seeks to elicit an emotional reaction by any means necessary*, be it through profound characterization, structural trickery, or big fuckoff pink goo monster from the disney corporation.

In comics there’s hardly any way to violate the reality of the situation unlike film. Beyond that it’s a visual medium, so concepts which would be difficult for most people to imagine are simply presented the same way as the everyday. And because of this flattened learning curve even the most run of the mill crappy superhero monthly traffics in multiple bizarre and massive ideas. Comics are the place where the impossible makes sense, where scale isn’t a factor. It’s an artform built for big, insane shit.

Doesn’t life need more big, insane shit?

*yeah, and while I’m at it, fuck Tim Callahan and his emotionless detachment.