Hi there! I'm ModernZorker, and if you've ever dropped by the blog before, you're already aware of my not-so-secret shame: I love dumb comics.
Cases in point: I'm the moron who...
... is slowly trying to read and review every Gen 13 comic in roughly chronological story order.
... spent over 2,500 valuable words (and untold hours of my life) researching and writing about Deathmate, one of the dumbest intra-company crossovers in the history of the medium.
... spent another 1,400 words talking about the trading cards spawned by said Deathmate debacle.
... compiled a short list of some different lingerie/swimsuit/cheesecake books published from the 80s to the 2000s.
... shamed his good buddy @blewitt on several occasions by using his face to review NSFW comics without using the NSFW tag!
... spent three months straight trying to untangle the big pile of shoelaces and pool noodles that is Razor's early story chronology.
... won a comic contest for a second version of a book I already had in my collection, then spent a day comparing and contrasting the differences between the two versions.
If you've been looking for the Real Deal of the "I'm Not Like Other Girls" comic book bloggers, then my friend, I'm sorry, but you found me. Hit the 'back' button now, because it only gets more painful from here.
What Makes A Comic Book "Dumb"?
Glad you asked. See that cover image of Fight Man #1 up top? That's a "dumb" comic. It doesn't exist for any other purpose than to be dumb. It was published in 1993 as a fifty-page one-shot you could spend $2.00 of your hard-earned money on. Because it's a one-shot set in its own universe created by Evan (Milk & Cheese) Dorkin, it contains some thirty "first appearance" character credits, making it inadvertently a massive "key" book for people who collect first appearances of characters. Dorkin brought Fight Man out of retirement ten years later for a two-issue guest appearance in the pages of Agent X, which ties him into the Deadpool universe, and now this moronic blob of Dark Age idiocy will set you back $3.00. This, as you will no doubt notice, is a dollar more than what it cost of your 1993 lunch money.
That, by any stretch of the imagination, is capital-D Dumb.
The comics industry is almost the only place you can experience this level of stupid lunacy. That isn't to say you never see it in other markets, but the fact it happens so regularly in this specific one should be cause for celebration. And buddy, I've been celebrating it since about 1985.
Why?
Because often the dumbest things make for the best stories.
I don't mean professionally. You cannot possibly read Fight Man and come away with a greater appreciation for the artform and its ability to transform the human condition. Even with Dorkin's writing, it's still not a good, or even reasonably funny, story. It exists solely because he pitched it to Marvel, and they were like, "It's 1993, and anything with a #1 on the cover will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, so why not?". There's no reason to own Fight Man #1.
But I do anyway.
So why the hell am I so proud of that? I don't really know. Part of why I'm writing this is because I want to figure that shit out. But the more I puzzle over not just Fight Man and all those other entries up there, but also 95% of what's in all those long boxes tolerated by my ever-suffering wife, the more certain I am that I absolutely love it all.
I think what it comes down to is this: the comic book hobby has, especially over the last ten to fifteen years, become far too serious for its own good. For all the abuse that gets hurled at the Dark Ages of the 90s, about how speculation and endless cover gimmicks caused an inflationary bubble which, when it popped, delivered catastrophic consequences to the industry as a whole, you cannot claim the era wasn't fun.
Fight Man is just one easy example of this, but the 90s was full of similar weapons-grade nonsense that, nevertheless, was just a good time. Image, Dark Horse, Antarctic Press, Chaos!, London Night, Top Cow, and other studios and imprints were full to bursting with creator-owned content that existed mainly to put a smile on the faces of the people who bought and read their products. Do you think Ben Dunn thought anybody would be talking about the time he packaged a VHS tape with a special edition of a Warrior Nun Areala comic almost thirty years later?
Of course not. Even in 1997, that was dumb. But I was all over it anyway.
But back in the day, the driving force behind the hobby was people throwing money at things because they were big, dumb fun. Sure, there was a very small sub-set of people who were looking at comics as a (really moronic) investment strategy, but it still seemed like most people were in the hobby because they enjoyed the hobby for what it was.
Nowadays, there's a growing trend for comic collectors to prize owning their material over reading their material. How else do you explain the fact that tens of millions of perfectly good issues are now locked in CGC coffins, never to be touched again by human hands, or read by human eyes? I'm the last guy to argue against preservation, and there's something to be said for owning an important book which you've had slabbed and graded, especially if you're partial to the cover artwork and can display it somewhere.
But that's not why I got into comics. I got into them because I have fun reading them. And to my way of thinking, it's almost insulting to put a comic like Fight Man #1 into a CGC slab so it can never be enjoyed (or ridiculed) again.
I'm not saying it's wrong, mind you. There's definitely a good argument to be made for preserving even the dumbest (especially the dumbest) aspects of the hobby. But still, isn't it kind of sad to turn something that could be read and enjoyed (or ridiculed) into what amounts to a physical NFT?
I'm not going to be around forever. When I'm gone, somebody is going to wind up with my comic collection, even if it's just some sketchy-looking, New-Jersey-living mofo who runs his own comic book store. But whoever that winds up being, I want them to flip through, enjoy, and yes, even ridicule the stuff I spent hours of time (and literal thousands of dollars) enjoying and ridiculing.
Basically, I'm hoping that future someone loves dumb comics at least as much as I do.
Until then, though, I'm gonna keep filling long boxes, because this stuff is awesome! And since this platform insists on paying me for writing about them, I'm not going away.
Long live the Dumb!