Look around you. In any single direction, you can find fodder for a great horror film, dramatic comedy, video game, or biography. In fact, the same applies to most every day in anybody’s life. Yet, the majority of comics literature only focuses a light on the genre of super-heroics. Even if you escape the mainstream, you still have books labeled with such restraining categories as “Fantasy” or “Historical Fiction.”
Through the practice of categorizing books like this, we are harming the reader by dissuading them from potentially great works of literature because the nuances held within are whitewashed by a broad category. Likewise, we are hurting literature and art overall by telling creators their work needs to fit within one heading or another. The blunt classification used by bookstores, be they chain or independent, ultimately lessens the legitimacy of craft in the many works that pass through their doors.
But what does this have to do with Bryan Lee O’Malley?
O’Malley is, in many ways, the underground Moses of independent comics. It is by his example that many creators have been inspired to create the Monster/Romance/Ninja/Western that has been brewing in their heads since childhood. It is by his success that many publishers have deemed such formerly preposterous premises as potential successes. The meta-fictional, genre-bounding narrative of Scott Pilgrim*, broke the chains of bondage keeping many comikers within the shadow of the Big Two.
Personally, before reading any of O’Malley’s work, I had been imprisoned to the old and musty storytelling devices of old. A furrowed brow would represent anger, but how could one represent the buildup to said anger? O’Malley solved this problem by injected the influence of videogames and RPG’s into his work. Dwindling health bars began appearing over characters, alerting readers to oncoming illness, while the accumulation of experience points let the readers know that the character had learned something.
It is through O’Malley and Scott Pilgrim that I gained the confidence to break down any of the walls imprisoning creativity and add whatever tools were at the ready so as to represent the abstract concepts, such as experience and success. Life does not possess boundaries, despite how much we think otherwise, so why should literature?
Lesson Learned: Use whatever tools are necessary to get an idea across and a job done.
*For the Record: O’Malley has a few other non-SP centric, but regardless of their quality, I’m sticking with Scott Pilgrim for this brief jaunt into essay.
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