Comics Fondle

Obviously, Brian K. Vaughan has had some creative writing classes. Unimaginative ones. He pays homage to them in Swamp Thing #3, an atrocious done-in-one set on a crabbing ship. The issue opens all right–Tefé keeps trying to get her narration right… until Vaughan reveals it isn’t Tefé narrating, but one of her shipmates, a young writer writing a chapter in her voice. Taken under those conditions–the narration being for a novel and not a comic book–it’s terribly written (a big problem with the story is it’s never clear whether or not the writer is supposed to be bad… I mean, I think he’s a complete douche bag, but I also think writing a story like this one is the act of a douche… so it’s unclear). I mean, to continue the parenthetical free of the curved lines, if the guy’s just a shitty writer who goes crazy then it’s just about a crazy guy… if it’s about an author… well….

But whatever. It’s real shitty, the melodrama Vaughan works out for the boat. It’s barely “Days of Our Lives,” much less the Compsons. It has little to do with Swamp Thing either in the sense of being about a swamp monster (I know, I know, I’m just whining) or in the sense of being about the comic’s main character, Tefé. It reads like a dumb short story Vaughan adapted for a comic book. Hopefully. Stories like this one make me wonder what editors Joan Hilty and Heidi MacDonald were thinking–maybe they figured pretentious drivel (specialized pretentious drivel too… “Kill Your Darlings” is for a select number of people, most of whom know what AWP stands for) stood in for good comic book writing? Did Vertigo go to pot because of editing like this example? They sold out quality to try to get college goth fans of Neil Gaiman to pick up something else?

I was all excited about Vaughan’s Swamp Thing after the first two issues, but this one is like an air raid siren… still, even when being pretentious, Vaughan does have a (banal) baseline of competency (I mean, I think he was at NYU so, even though their creative writing classes are probably bullshit, they’re likely competent bullshit).

D

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