No matter how long Tim O’Neil will continue his series on Dave Sim and Cerebus, the following is the most insightful comment he has made during it:
But for the longest time the dialogue inside the industry was completely dominated by competing views of masculinity, with only so much room for women as was provided by the stupendously large breasts of female superheroes. Some of the most formally adventurous and aesthetically rewarding work produced in the late eighties and the nineties was the product of artists who grew up in the hothouse of men’s adventure stories rebelling against the conventions of the dominant power fantasy by producing successive waves of anti-power fantasy – impotence fantasies such as I Never Liked You, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, the aforementioned Jimmy Corrigan, American Splendor (which, to be fair, began in the seventies when the undergrounds were not yet entirely dead), almost everything by Clowes with (of course!) the exception of Ghost World. Which is not to say that this was the only ideological current stirring the tide in comics, but with so many of the medium’s foremost talents dedicated to untangling questions of masculine identity, it’s hard not to see that male identity exerted a powerful force on the evolution of the medium in our lifetimes.
Which is the sort of comment that’s incredibly obvious once somebody else thought of it. It wasn’t a secret that the socalled alternative American comics scene in the eighties and nineties was reacting vehemently against the decades long supremacy of superhero comics, setting itself in opposition to this supposed mainstream, but to look at it through the prism of masculinity? Genius.