Let's Talk About Realism In Comics And Why It's BS

Hi, I'm David Harth, and this week, it's time for something completely different. I'm not going to complain about Marvel, the MCU, or the fans of both. That's right. I know, I know. You're shocked. Anyway, let's talk about Realism in comics and why it's bad.

That's right, bad. Buckle up, buttercup.

So, for a lot of people, Realism in comics is important. It's basically the butter on the bread. Sure, superheroes are cool, but without the Realism of the medium, a lot of people would go away. They want the violence, the moral greys, the plots out of R-rated movies. They want Watchmen. Or what they think Watchmen is. So, let's take a second to talk about how Watchmen basically ruined the comics industry.

Watchmen is a brilliant work of fiction by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. You've heard of it. Everyone has. If you're reading this website and comics, you at least know what Watchmen is, and you almost certainly know the twist. You almost certainly have watched the movie and the HBO show. My God, that HBO show. So good. Watchmen works on so many different levels. The craftsmanship on every page is apparent to anyone who knows a lot about the comic medium, and it's amazing. Moore does so many revolutionary things with the comic format, and Gibbons brings them to life. There's so much artistry on every page, both in words and in pictures, and that's why comic fans, people like me who inspect pages and understand layouts and things like that, love it. Then there's the stuff everyone else loves.

That's the violence, the adult themes, all of that sort of thing. The surface-level stuff that everyone sees. I mean, I read Watchmen for the first time when I was 18 in 1999, and I loved the violence and all of that stuff. That said, Wizard magazine had prepared me for it, and I had been reading Preacher since mid '97. So, I had read violent, profane comics. Watchmen was not my first rodeo with adult themes. So, the violence in the comic was cool, but it wasn't even the first graphic violence in comics I had seen. In fact, compared to Preacher, Watchmen is kind of tame. Still, reading Watchmen, I could see the artistry with my eight years of comic reading at the time. This was a powerful story, and even though I knew what was going to happen- again, because of Wizard magazine- the experience of reading Watchmen was something special. Still, I get why so many people thought the violence was a big deal, especially reading it before Watchmen changed the industry. I was living in a post-Watchmen world already, so it wasn't as shocking to me.

However, you can tell by how the industry evolved after Watchmen that too many people learned the wrong lesson from it. They didn't see Moore and Gibbons's artistry so much as they saw the violence. To them, the violence was the revolution. To them, the fact that you could have Rorschach breaking people's fingers for information and throwing boiling fat in their faces. You can have sex scenes like the one between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. You could have a naked dude walk around blowing up all kinds of people. Surface impressions are easy to get. Watchmen is so much more.

So, you had a bunch of people start believing that was what comics were and what comics should be. They missed Moore's writing, the sheer brilliance of it, and focused on the spectacle of the story and the adult themes. They missed the literary flourishes that Moore threw in. To them, Moore and Gibbons went all out with the violence and the adult stuff, and that was what made the comic good.

To them, Realism in comics was violence. Realism was sex. Realism was hard-edged.

So, here's the problem with that- the '90s. The '90s were full of comics that took Realism to mean violence, to mean sex. A lot of it came from younger American creators, the ones who read Watchmen at a young age and didn't get what they were reading. Some of it came from American creators who didn't have the talent to make the stuff Moore did work. The British creators who came after Moore, though, never did that sort of thing. They got it. They understood that violence was a tool, but stories needed more than violence to be realistic. At their most extreme in The Invisibles and Kill Your Boyfriend, even Grant Morrison understood that violence was just a part of the repertoire. In fact, what made Morrison's work in The Invisibles and Kill Your Boyfriend so great is that both books are the opposite of realistic. If anything, they're hyper-real, which is a whole other subject for another time. I'm not going into a Grant Morrison tangent here.

So, Realism in comics came to mean violence, sex, cursing. Grey morality. Now, I'll admit, sometimes, it worked. For example, post-Crisis DC made its bones off of being more realistic than pre-Crisis DC. Honestly, as a teen, I wouldn't have liked the less realistic pre-Crisis days. Marvel had always used Realism rather well, but it was still fantastic; until the '90s, that is. In the '90s, so many books tried to be extreme, tried to do the anti-hero, tried to make things real. As I've gotten older, I've enjoyed the more fantastic aspects of things. Now, I'm going to try to get back around to my thesis because I feel like I've been rambling.

Realism in comics is bullshit.

That's not to say those Ed Brubaker crime books are bullshit. That's not to say that there are no realistic books on the stands and the ones that exist are bullshit. It's that there is no realism in comics. It's all exaggerated. It has to be. It's all an affectation. Sure, you can do a violent, "real" book, but it isn't real because there's no such thing as real. I grew up around a bunch of Vietnam vets and criminals who lived very violent lives. Ask some of them about real violence. Except for some very special types, they aren't going to tell you violence is fun or entertaining. So, that's not exactly realistic.

What's next? How about the sex? Is that realism? I mean, real people have sex, right? Well, sure. But is it anything like comic sex? I mean, is Sex Criminals realistic? Is Preacher? I think we all can agree the answer is sometimes. The question is, what is sex in comics? Is it just women in skimpy costumes? Is it actual sex scenes? The answer isn't easy, but people seem to think that sort of thing makes comics realistic because sex happens to people. Most people. Except, like, incels. The problem with comic sex is it's just kind of titillation, and that's it. There's nothing real about it. You don't feel the heat or the sweat. You don't have anyone writhing on you. It's as fake as the violence.

What about the cursing is real, right? I mean, in real life, I curse like a sailor. I only started throwing actual curse words into this lately because I saw one of the other writers do it, and even then, it's only shit and stuff like that. I'm not dropping nearly as many "F" bombs or "C" blasts as I do in real life. So, sure, some cursing is realistic for some people but do comics need it? Does it make them any more mature, or does it just break a taboo?

What else is considered real? Oh yeah, grey morality. Rorschach. You know, killing bad guys and stuff. Superheroes as Dirty Harry. Well, we've seen what happens when cops take the law into their own hands, haven't we? Grey morality is real, but I feel like society has proven that it's terrible. Our capitalist society is built on grey morality and… yeah. We're doing really well with that, aren't we?

So, if I can't see where I'm going with it, here's the Cliff Notes version- all of things considered "realistic" in comics are bullshit. Violence isn't some great, entertaining thing. It's a terrible, visceral thing and comics rarely try to do that, and when they do, the audience barely understands the subtext of the scene and goes for the titillation of the violence. Same with the sex. There's nothing real about comic sex because there's nothing real about sex in any piece of entertainment. Sex is a physical thing. Fiction will never really capture it. Cursing is sort of real, but it's not really needed, just like in real life. Grey morals, heroes who kill, anti-heroes? Yeah, that shit is terrible. All of the things that people consider real in comics aren't. There's nothing real about them. They're the trappings of Realism.

People think that graphic violence makes the fights real, but it doesn't because nothing can make them real without getting hit. The tang of adrenaline. The shattering pain. That's real.

Dude, superheroes are more real than you or I will ever be because they'll be here long after we're gone. That's the reality of comics. That's Realism in comics. Throwing in the violence and the sex and all that doesn't make them real. Here's an example. Joker is a monster. He's a mass murderer of the worst kind and by now, putting him in an asylum is ridiculous. All of that is a symptom of "realism" in comics. So, why hasn't he gotten the death penalty? Why hasn't anyone sat Batman down and explained to him the calculus of not killing Joker? Batman not breaking Joker's neck is dooming thousands. At this point, Batman would be justified in killing the Joker. By making the Joker into a mass murderer and not having Batman end him, you're making Batman culpable for so much death. That's what Realism in comics gets you. It messes things up.

Superheroes don't need what we think of as Realism. You want comics to be mature? Fine. Do you know what's mature about Watchmen? It's not the violence but the emotion. It's Nite Owl feeling inadequate. It's the Comedian being a sadist. It's Silk Spectre's quest for love and acceptance. It's Ozymandias's quiet desperation in the face of Armageddon. That's real. Emotion. That's something that we can all understand. Violence isn't going to happen to everyone. Sex doesn't mean maturity because high schoolers have sex, and we all know they aren't mature. Cursing doesn't mean mature. I started cursing at six. Grey morality doesn't mean mature, in fact, it's almost the opposite of mature because you can't even choose a side. Emotion is mature. Emotion connects us.

Realism in comics is stupid because, for the most part, people's idea of Realism is R-rated action movies, but that's not real. That's just graphic. Graphic doesn't mean real. It's bullshit. I'm not saying I'm against all of those things in comics. My favorite hero is Wolverine, and I love Grant Morrison's stuff. My favorite indie book of recent years is The Wicked+The Divine which is full of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, and more violence and blood than you can imagine. I like all of those things in my entertainment. I also know there's nothing real about it. I don't love Wic+Div because of the sex, drugs, and blood, I love it because of the emotion of the characters, the sadness, the pain, the star worship, and the search for happiness. Wolverine isn't my favorite because of the violence; he's my favorite because of the struggle, the pain, the man who tries to be better. That's what I like about those things. I like the sheer imagination of something like Flex Mentallo or Nameless. The violence and such is just part of the story.

So, in closing, because I've been working for like ten hours today and it's late AF, Realism in comics is bullshit because there's nothing real about what is considered real in comics. The violence, the sex, the cursing, none of that makes a comic real. None of it makes it mature. You want a mature comic? You want a real comic? Put the emotion in there. Emotion is real. That's something that every reader can get down with. Putting the emotion in there can make it mature. You don't need the violence. That doesn't make it real. It's part, but it's not the whole thing.

So, that's all. I think I've got it across. I'm going to go now. I don't know what I'm going to do next week. Maybe I'll talk about Wolverine. I don't know. Anyway, follow me on Twitter. I'm not sure if anyone even reads this little vanity column of mine. Bye.