Moments, Momentum & Monuments

Tim a un très bon article de critique sur l'évolution des superhéros depuis les années 90-2000. Il explique notamment comment les meilleurs comics après Alan Moore (et notamment après ses deux histoires de Superman For the Man Who Has Everything et Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?) se sont un peu figés dans une esthétique qu'il appelle "momentisme" : chercher à synthétiser les meilleurs moments d'un personnage et les rejouer avec le plus de densité. Cela décrit très bien à la fois Busiek ou Morrison mais aussi Geoff Johns, dont les histoires ont aussi cet air de synthèse récapitulative.

Cela crée un cycle de "momentisme" presque académique et de déconstruction ironique, puis de réaction néo-classique.

Every good superhero comic, after Watchmen, had to be about superhero comics. Everything was "deconstructed", up to and including the most plebian examples from the contemporary scene. Kurt Busiek's Avengers was about creating the Platonic ideal of an Avengers comic, a reaction to the disrepair into which many of the company's flagship franchises had fallen by the late 90s. Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers is a comic that is very explicitely intended to mark a clean break with the "old school" Avengers style - it's a superhero team book with the mannerisms and dialogue tics of an HBO crime drama. Bendis' Mighty Avengers was an attempt by him to write an "old school" Avengers book while simultaneously maintaining many of the faux-naturalistic narrative techniques he'd previously utilized for New; Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers is a neoclassical reaction to Bendis' New, an extremely mannered and deliberate return to the franchise's most elemental form. To a degree this self-referentially becomes self-parody, and nowhere is this more obvious than the readers themselves, who (like myself) see trends and metatext hiding behind every bullrush, long past the point of absurdity. But this is the market and this is the creative climate we've built for ourselves.