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Sex, Violence, Tension and Comic Books - An Interview with Gerard Jones
GJ: What happens is, bills get written. So you start to see legislation popping up late in the cycle. Once a bill’s been written, even if the courts subsequently knock it down, which seems to be happening, just the fact that the bill got passed, and now it’s in some politicians resume. The pressure to keep doing more begins to dissipate. Then, I think a lot of regular people who are worried about it, at least they’ve heard that the government’s doing something. So it’s not unlikely that during the flurry of legislation, which might be when the industry is most frightened, that might actually be when it’s about to stop. GS: Your background is largely in comics. How are these moral attacks against games similar to historical attacks against comic books? GJ: When I started Killing Monsters, what was informing my research is that I knew, in the early 50's, comic books in the U.S. had been attacked ferociously, and I knew that had passed; nobody was much worried about it. Doing more research I discovered back in 1940 and 41 there had been an earlier flurry. It’s the same thing. With a new medium, suddenly kids were reading these things and collecting them fanatically. What scares adults most is when kids aren’t just picking up something casually, but seem crazy about it. Pokemon was scary a few years ago. Suddenly they’re so into this thing, and it’s not something that we as adults gave them. So there’s the sense of some other, something seducing my child. Most new media tend to be rather crude. They’re hitting the high notes before they’ve got the nuances. So the first impression through adult eyes is that my kid’s heart has been stolen by this cheesy thing. It’s a threat. Again, as you get to the point where the middle-aged people who tend to drive these cultural dialogues actually grew up on the thing, it gets better. By the 1960's, the people who were writing the articles, teaching the psychology, rising in government, they had all read Superman when they were young. The idea that Superman was harmful seemed absurd. GS: But comic books still haven’t really entered the mainstream. GJ: Comics, in their early days, were pretty much ubiquitous. There was a point where almost every kid at least read them occasionally. But comics is one medium that never really hit the mainstream, which I think is the carry-over from that furor in the fifties. That’s one case where I think the alarmism really did change the direction of the field. Also, I think when T.V. showed up it pulled a lot of that kid time and attention elsewhere, and left comics as sort of a geek thing. GS: But couldn’t the assignment of that geek status be a response to the threat of the new medium you described? GJ: Games seem to be going universal at this point. The numbers are extraordinary. True, there are still stigmas. Part of that is the fact that the people who are forty and up still kind of dictate the status quo. It’s younger people who drive mass culture tastes, but it’s people, say forty to sixty, who drive arguments about what’s scary or threatening or in bad taste. There’s this definite generational split. It’ll be interesting to see how games are viewed a little further down the line. Pretty soon we’re going to get to the place where our tenured professors probably grew up on games. GS: As a kid growing up with comic books, not video games, were there certain comics that you remember as your personal violence release valves? GJ: Back to your geek question first, because I think the two relate. People, especially when they’re young, if they get in to a medium that’s shunned or looked down upon or criticized, and they discover the joys of it, fall in love with it, there is very much a desire to identify themselves around it. That’s what all these geek cultures are. It’s a duality though. I remember comics going through this in the 80's. Oh, I wish we were respected; I wish they loved us. In fact, Alan Moore, a comic book writer who helped adult-ify comics, he was one of those who was saying, comics are a real art form. Years later he wrote a great editorial. We used to want comics to have just as much respect as every other medium. What on earth were we thinking? Because the more they got out there, the more those same things happened. I think there’s almost been a willful retracting of the geek culture. GS: But in the last few years, it seems comics have been given another shot at the commercial mainstream, through venues like Barnes and Noble that carry graphic novels and manga. GJ: What’s happening, and I think this is a good thing for the field, is there are works that can be reviewed in the New York Times, and there are areas that are still safe for geekdom. I think manga initially had that appeal. Then there’s the cheesy Spider-Man stuff, which is a bread and butter for many of the publishers. GS: And which has a lot in common with the repetitive licencing issue in video games. GJ: Really, it becomes a corporate strategy for keeping the trademark alive, rather than expressing itself. But in terms of my own experience, I grew up in a pretty depressed household, and was in fact sort of locked in on myself, and over strained in the beginning of adolescence, and for me it was Marvel comics that provided this whole other self. Back then it was still the initial creative surge. A lot of the material was being done by Stan Lee and a lot of the guys who kicked it off. I remember feeling this liberation, a sense of acceptance, like someone else knew what I was feeling. For maybe two or three years I was a really big comics fan, then I left it behind. I ended up writing them later. They very much served a purpose. I really look at that period as a watershed for me, even socially. At a time when I was having a really hard time connecting to anyone, my strongest links were with other comics fans. GS: You mentioned in your talk that, compared to movie characters, people are less likely to emulate vide game characters, because they’re “smaller.” Where do comics fit in there? GJ: With super hero comics anyway, which was pretty much all we had at that time, little kids can want to be Spider-Man, but that begins to seem sillier as you get older. I think one of the things that makes super heros so not scary, is it would be absurd to be them. Wishing I were the Hulk, that I’d get all big and green, that’s just fantasizing. It’s different when you start to get into movies. Most of us can watch a movie about a bank heist and know that we’re never going to do that. But a few people, who are probably already at the edges of society, might think, I wish I could do that, and maybe I can. My hunch though is that video games would inspire less of that. Because you are actually doing it, in a way, so you have the experience of completing this process, as opposed to just watching a movie star do something. But also, there’s something inherently unglamorous about a character you are controlling. Part of what makes people want to emulate movies is that those people seem so much bigger and more glorious. Even while exciting us, they stir up our feelings of inadequacy. And I don’t know if that’s very likely to happen when you are, in effect, the god. |
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