General Notes/Thoughts about Comics

If anybody knows me a little bit, they would know I’m a fan of comic books. They are INCREDIBLY popular nowadays. Most of the Marvel movies make over $2 billion worldwide. They’re prominent in movies, television shows, and even video games are based off of them.

Yesterday the list for the 2019 Academy Awards came out and Black Panther is nominated for Best Picture, along with 6 other categories. That’s insane.

I don’t think it’ll win best picture, but it’s kind-of neat that it got nominated if the people voting actually thought it deserved the award and weren’t just catering to people to try and bring the award show’s viewership up.

(That’s a discussion for another time)

Ten years ago if you told me that a comic book movie was nominated for Best Picture, I could not even start to attempt to believe it. Sadly, comics inherently have a juvenile connotation. I hate that idea, but for a long period of time it’s what many people thought when they were first becoming popular. It’s definitely starting to change, though.

Comics and Comic Book Movies are being more focused on now. Just this last semester at KU, the costume director for Black Panther, Ruth Carter, came to campus and talked about her experiences. It was a really fun moment and I was glad that it happened.

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A few weeks ago I talked about the new DC movie Aquaman, and while I personally didn’t like it, a lot of other people did, and so far it has made over $1 billion worldwide.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was also an incredible film with both its animation and its storytelling. This is another comic book movie that’s nominated in the Oscars, for Best Animated Feature. I really hope it wins that category. The movie looks exactly like a comic book feels.

If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, I suggest watching the movie and picking up a comic book. Some of the best images I’ve seen lately have been from comic books. Their stories and images compliment each other beautifully.

To me, comics have a special way to tell stories that books or television shows/movies can’t do, and each series is different.

Comics can have a lot of humor in them:

Comics also can be incredibly serious at times. One of the most recent series I’ve read had some of the most intense scenes I’ve seen recently, and that’s because of the great combination of writer and artist.

This 12 issue series’ scene resonated with me a lot because of how real it all was and how the hero was just trying to survive normal life; he has a son now, but just a year ago in this (back in issue one) he was found bleeding out in the bathroom.

Sure, there’s some superhero fighting moments, but they seem to be more in the background for these pages. To me, it talks about how the mask the hero wears is even more of a mask to hide them from themselves, and it’s new, and unspoken before now, and it matters to me. Kids often pretend to be their favorite superhero, and when I’m reading a comic that I can actually relate to and isn’t some big strong dude fighting a giant robot, it speaks to me on a whole other level.

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Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Black Panther will win Best Picture. I really don’t think The Academy will stray from their “Pure Cinema” and actually vote for it, but who knows. They tried to create a “Popular Film” category for it, so I think that already shows their opinions on Superhero films. Hopefully they’ll at least win Best Costume Design and Infinity War wins Best Visual Effects. They made an entire purple man out of CGI and he was a very interesting character. That’s very impressive.

I’m not going to talk about video games or TV shows based off of comics in this post. I might do that some other time, who knows.

I don’t think I’ll be able to say exactly what comics people should read. Everyone has different tastes and maybe the ones I like won’t be enjoyable to others. I do suggest that if you enjoy the movies and have been interested in reading some comics, go to a store and buy a few. You never know what you’ll enjoy until you do.

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