The Songs of Johnny Go

I was always kinda baffled by the letters columns. I never read any comic regularly, so the letters columns were like being at a party where you don't know anybody, but everybody else knows each other and it talking volubly about the last party. One to which you weren't invited, but weren't exactly disinvited; you just needed to start showing up. And scrambling to catch up, in a way that you never quite felt even from the stories themselves.

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tragical-mirth.livejournal.com

A friend and I set up some fan clubs for certain characters, and we had those letters published complete with our addresses at the time. We made up newsletters/fanzines and everything. Ahh, the early 90s. :)

Unfortunately the early 90s also brought us shitty X-comics like X-Force. I recognized it was bad at the time, but much like my current so-bad-it's-good love of shitty comics and Torchwood, I read every single issue of it up until the point where Marvel pissed me off and I dropped comics altogether. My secret shame in life is that I have a letter in one of those early issues. The funny thing is that I think it was published in an issue after I stopped buying.

At least I think. I could be confusing it with an Excalibur, and the whole X-Force thing might just have been a bad dream. If only.

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I always just saw it as a way for opinionated people to be opinionated, just like letters to magazines and whatnot. Do you feel the same way about people write into, say, Entertainment Weekly? ... where I've also been published?

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Yes, I feel that way about pretty much any specialty magazine. I love reading other people's specialty magazines; it's oddly voyeuristic. The content is informative, but it's the letters and the advertising that really gives the feel for who these people really are (albeit a rather perverse view of it).

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Probably the healthier way of things, but damn it, I'm too in touch with my passionate opinionated opinions about comics and whatnot!

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To follow up a bit... the difference with comic books, though, is that they're fictional. It's not exactly interactive storytelling, since the later issues have probably already been written by the time the letters get in, but the letters communicate in the same way that letters in any magazine do.

It's a bit like having a kind of consensual hallucination that ordinary storytelling doesn't have, with the readers buying into it as a kind of collective rather than individual experience as it unfolds.

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I miss them. I miss people being told they are silly by snarky editorial interns.

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I'm getting so tired of this "ewww, the 90s" attitude. Yeah, the guys who founded Image suck and it sucks that people emulated them, on the other hand, that was the mainstream, and the mainstream is ALWAYS shit. I mean, rare exceptions, yes, but, I mean, that's just the way of it. There were some truly great books released in the 90s, they just weren't the ones that sold 8 and 12 million copies. Just as many bad comics came out in the 80s, and the 70s, and the 60s and the 50s, 40s. You name it. See, most comics are complete shit. That is just their nature. They are disposable product. Sometimes it's really good disposable product, and sometimes it's even god damn ART, but most of the time it's shit. It's product. The 90s is no more guilty of that than any other time.

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sharkbites.livejournal.com

Never in a comic but I had a silly joke published in the LA Times called 'Pint Sized Punchlines'.

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The difference, I think, is that the 90's was the only time when that crap mainstream became marketed as a huge investment opportunity and shoved down everyone's throats to the point that the industry nearly ate itself. The mainstream is always (mostly) shit, but I don't know if they were ever so aggressively loud about it.

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Me too. But I also don't miss jackhole editors being condescending to fans with legitimate complaints or criticism. Why no, the teenage Hal Jordan fan is still not bitter at GL editor Kevin Dooley all these years later, why do you ask?

I wonder if Dooley was also responsible for Guy becoming Vuldarian!Warrior...

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Personally, I wouldn't enjoy any fiction if I didn't have the opportunity to parse it out with other people, even just to read their own opinions and commentary. Like, I never got hooked onto HARRY POTTER, and for years I tried to figure out why these not-particularly-brilliant books earned such a rabid following. It's because of the fan interaction it engenders. LOST was very much the same way. And really, isn't STAR TREK as well?

But I don't know if people always buy into the "collective experience." The best editors in letters columns offer a diversity of opinion. Unless you mean that there are sub-collectives even then, people who love it for the same reasons and people who hate it for the same reasons, without individual thought in between? I'm not sure I get it.

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That counts!

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Almost definitely. Guy would have been part of the group of comics dooley was editing as a GL character.

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Was it you I'd talked to about the theory that Helfer leaving GL and JLI as editor is when it all started going to shit?

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It's always baffling to know which long-running fictions will catch on and which won't. Any book could have been HARRY POTTER, as the final book made abundantly clear: she wasn't setting up any great secrets to puzzle out. The same goes for LOST, actually.

In fact, do any long-running series with a defined end point ever wind up with satisfactory conclusions? I think there's more to it than just "hey, it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to"; nobody ever seems to be thrilled.

STAR TREK is a bit different, in that it faded away rather than burning out, and perhaps should have been left that way. It's more similar to what happens in comic books, I think.

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