The Comic Book Industry 2015: Decadence, nostalgia, identity politics and western decline

Do you remember that scene in ‘Interview with the Vampire’ where the vampire Armand (Antonio Banderas) begs Louis (Brad Pitt) to take him away from the boring vampires that are driving him insane with their inability to connect to the world around them?

That feeling of being stuck within a group that is unwilling, or unable to reflect/connect with the reality around them is pretty much how I feel about 99% of the comic books that I read today.

I read two last night. The Hangman #1 (Dark Circle Comics) is about a gangster, and a ghost vigilante. It’s cliché, uninteresting, perfunctory, going through the motions, reflecting nothing, saying nothing, and not even trying to. Plus, it’s half a comic, so you are not even getting good value for money.

The second comic book was Batman Europa #1 (DC). Just think of all of the things that are going on in Europe right now, all of the issues with immigration, terrorism, austerity and mass unemployment. Is any of this reflected in Batman Europa #1? No, it’s not. The book is set in ‘Berlin’ but the references are cold-war era, and read like the writer has done a quick five-minute search on Wikipedia. Batman is fighting Joker. He has infected him with a virus. The Joker has it as well. They have to work together to find a cure. What has this got to do with anything that is happening in Europe in 2015?

The Hangman #1 and Batman Europa #1 have ‘cool’ front covers, and decent artwork, but that’s all they have to offer. They are all surface, no meaning, and in that sense they are the perfect embodiment of the comic book industry as it is today.

Who wants to read a bunch of left-wing college Marxism, nostalgia and cold-war references that are woefully out of touch with the neo-liberal western world as it is today? Not me, that’s for sure. I don’t want identity politics. I don’t want nostalgia, and I don’t want to die from ennui like the Armand character in Interview with the Vampire.

I know that a lot of comic book fans are happy with the status quo of the comic book industry, but I need more, and that is why I am starting to write my own narratives.

If comic book writers are unwilling or unable to connect with the world as it is today, then I’ll do it for myself. I have to. I have a lot to say. I want to create, to express myself, and to talk about how the west is crumbling into nostalgic decay through the deliberate avoidance of reality.

Batman Europa #1 and Hangman #1 are not bad comic books. They are not interesting enough to be bad. They are average, and that’s all they are trying to be.

Give me bad over average any day of the week. At least bad conjures up some kind of emotion. Average just leaves me feeling empty, like Armand. Nothing bad was happening to him, he was just very, very bored. That movie was released in 1994, but in many ways the character of Armand reflects the state not just of the comic book industry, but of western culture as it is today.

Here’s a reality check. Collectively speaking, our culture is in decline. We are now vulnerable to attack from rival cultures (Islam) but the weakness comes from within.

The baby-boomer generation of the 1960’s has left a generation of soft, insecure people that are unwilling, or unable to defend themselves from attack, and rather than defend what has been built before, they are actively working (whether consciously or not) to destroy it from within. That’s the hard truth, and you are not going to see it being reflected in contemporary comic books due to politically correct ‘diversity’ training that comes from the ‘progressive’ Marxists in state funded university systems.

Why are western elites, working within governments institutions, funding their own decline? That’s a complicated issue, but in short, it’s to bring about their New World Order. Order out of chaos, they will destroy the old to bring about the new.

To fix a problem, the first thing that you need to do is to identify that there is a problem in the first place. I have identified it, and I plan to do something about it. I will write my own narratives, my own stories, and my own comic books. I will write them again and again and again until I get very good at it. I’m not going to wait around for somebody else to do it, because it’s very clear to me now that that’s not going to happen.

Can you write a culture out of decline? Probably not, but you can at least document it as it happens, and so that is what I will do.