Sunday, August 2, 2009

My Heroes

So It's roughly a month away from Pilots season for T.V. Quite exciting and me being the T.V junky I am, I am waiting for the new shows and the season premieres of old favourites.

At this time, Leverage and Burn Notice have both been on the screens in their summer spots, but it really is the Fall/Spring shows that I am excited for. Heroes and Lie To Me, being two of my returning favourites. Lie to me comes back to us on a monday this season and is hands down one of the most intelligent, fantastic entertaining pieces of art in a long time. And then theres Heroes.

Heroes is my popcorn superpowered Lover who enticed me with just what I wanted and said, it's okay your wife can watch too. Ever since seeing the pilot a couple of weeks before it was shown on television I was enraptured. This was the show for me. Several superpowered characters integrated in to real life situations with a super powered serial killed thrown in for good measure. It's like they spied on my dreams and said, "okay, Serialised Television show catered just for Loz Cook coming through." Of course I lapped it all up. And so, it seemed, did everyone else. Heroes became the geeky media darling loved by fans and critics alike. Then the writers strike happened (And thank the heavens this didn't extend to comics or... well, bad things might have happened). Heroes gave us a great season 2 that was cut short because of the strike. Now I loved Season 2, despite the ultra annoying Maya, who should have died instead of her brother, but still did not ruin my enjoyment of the show. The New Orleans crowd had me hooked. Season three also gave me what I wanted. More interaction and battle between the super powered characters. The Villains and other characters hooked me and kept me fascinated in almost the same way the X-Men had(and still do) to this day. But there was a problem. The fanboys.

Okay I confess, I'm a comics geek (note I said Geek, NOT NERD, NOT FANBOY, Geek. There is a difference). This isn't a surprise, but I love my comics, and I can be quite obsessed sometimes. It's not even the collectors bug. It's not that I have to have so many issues and collectors items, because I don't. But I do have a substantial collection, most of which reside In about 15 packing boxes in the attic at home. "Oh that I had them here in the USA." Anyway what I'm saying is, Im a plot and story whore. I need my fix of characterisation, plot, story, suspense, intrigue and cliffhangers. Oh the cliffhangers. That feeling after reading the last page of a comic book and painfully, but also excitedly knowing that you have to wait for another month until you find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? It's all part of the fun and entertainment.

Anyway I digress, Comics are alot like T.V in this respect, and the reason I bring up Heroes and comics together is that on an message board or fan site, you will always get fanboy perspectives and holier than thou opinions. Heroes took a nose dive in popularity. It's almost as though it's cool and intelligent to say that this show is just not as good as it was in the first season and that it's headed for cancellation. Everyone seems like they want a shred of poor torn old heroes. I have to disagree. I've enjoyed Heroes as much this last season as I did the 2nd and the 1st. As I explained, Im a story, plot whore. So what is behind all this discomfort? Let me give you my opinion, like so many other fans.

The thing with T.V shows, and Comics for that matter, is, The longer a show is produced, the more, over zealous fans think they know and should decide what makes it good and what will keep it good. We all think we're owed the exact television we're subjected to and we all think that we have a right to make those desci. Let me explain a bit more.

I think that with a medium we have no control over, you have to just wait for it and see what comes. If you don't like it, you can choose not to subject yourself to it again or wait for the next juicy morsel to entertain you. It's that simple. But to continue to bitch about about it not giving you what YOU want, is just a bit silly. What's stupider still, is to continue to watch it and still complain.

Well just to end this little portion of writing, heres Garth Ennis on comics publishing.


"What we're talking about here, I think, is conventional wisdom, which by its very nature is soundbite-driven and often highly reflexive. I used to handle the letter column during Preacher's monthly run, and I saw a pattern of criticism develop there in what I soon realized was a very predictable way - year two's not as good as year one, year two was wonderful but year three's lost it, this is just a lot of violence and swearing, all he's trying to do is get noticed - repeated ad infinitum. It's one of the reasons I don't bother with message boards and reviews and things, which I believe are largely a distraction.

What I look at instead are the sales figures, which answer the most important question of all: Can I keep writing the story I want to write?"

Here here Garth.

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