- RAB’s got a great post here about the first comic he read in New York.
- Kyle Baker reviews The Spirit, and it’s the best thing ever. The review I mean. At least as good as agriculture.
-Funnybook Babylon have asked if there are any great comics creators who stayed great over 50 (excluding Kirby, Moebius, and Tezuka because that would kill the argument). I can think of Chaykin, Gerber, Aragones, Dave Gibbons, Campbell, Otomo, Herge, Darrow, Mezieres, and Sienkiewicz. Then again, that’s a list of greats so it might be cheating. I think Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan are both over 50, but I can’t verify that. Also as they point out, Alan Moore completed Promethea before he did and Miller on turned 50 two years ago. Near as I can tell, Steranko hasn’t done sequential work since the mid-80s. Wasn’t Kurtzman working (and doing good shit) well into his 60s? I never liked that Sick Boy logic, anyway. Sure, lots of people lose it when they get old. But there’s always a Scott Walker, a Miyazaki, a guy who maintains a standard throughout their career, sometimes getting better.
A better question – how many rappers/groups can stay great after five albums? Shit, Public Enemy only made it to 4. So did Ice Cube.
Sick Boy was right about Lou Reed though.
- Amypoodle’s latest Rogue’s Review, which is pretty much something brand new.
- The Comic Collective has a 3-part video interview with Cameron Stewart @ last years Mocca. Part One, Part Two, and here’s the last part where he talks about Seaguy:
3 comments
01/07/2009 at 10:52 pm
pillock
I think it’s a very deep and interesting topic, this “talent flames out” business — because it seems to me it just isn’t true as a principle at all, however there could easily be many side-issue aspects to it that could make it appear true in certain cases. Just finished reading a longish essay on Picasso and Cezanne which suggests that the wunderkind phenomenon has been taken to be a common thing, part of normal artistic development — when if you think about it for a minute, the whole point there is that the wunderkind is supposed to be a bit of a freak, a wild card, an aberration…someone whose peak inspiration arrives decades ahead of time. So why do we sometimes think otherwise? In the essay I just read, the author’s pretty convincing about most artists producing the majority of their best work somewhere between their late forties and the early sixties…and Sick Boy would of course disagree, but in itself that suggests something interesting going on, don’t you think?
01/08/2009 at 5:20 am
sean witzke
I think it has to be different for different art forms. In comics, I think once the skill set is established there’s a period before it atrophies into a “style” and then it gets harder to keep it going because it’s not a new experience every time. Tucker wrote something on Comixology a little while back about how Sean Murphy worked on a bunch of crappy shows and learned all the particulars and tricks and then went on to do the Shield. That makes a lot of sense to me.
In music, it’s definitely a young guy’s game except when it’s not (although all the bands from the 90s that you thought would burn out have made their most interesting music ten and fifteen years into their career which seems kind of counterintuitive).
There was a great thing I saw where Tarantino was going on about how filmmakers are only good as long as they can get it up anymore. He’s probably right.
With writers I don’t know if there’s a set expiration date. I like the idea that you hit a peak and you’ve got five or ten years and then it’s time to find something else to do.
The best thing about Sick Boy is how everything he says turns out to be true about EVERYONE in that movie. Danny Boyle is the only one who is still respectable. Oh and Kelly MacDonald. But she was the youngest, so it still might be true.
01/08/2009 at 12:58 pm
pillock
Hmm, makes me want to write a thousand words…
Here’s the thing, I think: no one over fifty can skate by anymore on their mediocre work being found popular by know-nothings. That’s the real metric: older artists rarely have rabid followings made up of the artistically-indifferent. Although it’s gotta be said that some people do experience a sudden collapse or disappearance, whether it’s business pressures working their will on them (Gerber fled to Dungeons & Dragons; Herb Trimpe was made to draw like Liefeld), or because they’ve actually bottomed out with what they’ve got to say.
…Thinking here of Jackson Browne’s Colbert performance of that shitty “My Band And I Are Going Down To Cuba To Talk With The People There” song, eerily reminiscent of Kris Kristofferson’s horrible flame-out on Johnny Carson called (I think) something like “There Was A Man Named Mahatma Gandhi…!” Like a whole song that sounded like Jason Black answering a question on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, it should’ve been called “There Was A Man Named Mahatma Gandhi, Regis…!”…horrendous and career-destroying…
But what I say about that is: what are the factors? What made Browne or Kristofferson lose their shit so terribly awfully? Meanwhile I’ve heard a couple Stones songs in the last ten years that I thought were really good, and how freakin’ improbable is that? You could call it “attentiveness to market”, but I don’t think that really covers it…any way you slice it, “Steel Wheels” was not an up-to-snuff Stones record. And anyway here’s another counterexample: Rush. Not that I’m a big Rush maniac or anything, but whatever it was that was available for them not to lose, they still haven’t lost it.
I dunno. I think it’s all about the pressure of the audience. And different artists (musicians, theoretical physicists, painters, etc.) have different audiences, and therefore different levels of responsivity to issues of money, prestige, success…effort. I think you’re lucky if you can find an audience whose artistic needs change as yours do: otherwise you’ll get crunched (or worse: flooded), and have to adapt, either well or poorly.
Either way, the equation here seems like it could be “old+good=unusual”…but maybe the real equations are “young+average+doing it anyway+popular=not very unusual”, and “old+average+doing it anyway+popular=damned unusual”.
For, you know, whatever reason.
Hey, thanks for the essay buttons at the top of the page, Sean! Finally watched Hellboy II tonight — gonna have to post on it, very remarkable.