Essey: Old vs. New?

Readers, I come here today with a question I have in light of reading Fantomas (still working on it), and rereading Century.

Is modern fiction better than old fiction? Was Alan Moore right?
Well in my opinion...their more like equals actually.

True, pop culture has gotten a bit sterile in some areas (look at Twilight for example) but in others it’s really quite an advancement over it’s predecessors.

Take a look at comic books and science fiction for starters, during the early days of their existence our limited knowledge (while works could be more flexible) kept us unable to devise more advanced scientific concepts like the Multiverse and Quantum physics. Plus, the comic book stories (while a tad too dark at times) can develop characters much better after their years of development as a media form.

And then there’s anime, that stuff is fantastic, it never caught on until the recent couple of decades but that’s kind of the point of its introduction. Anime was largely unknown for many years, but when the late eighties hit, we began to find a whole new set of wild and fascinating stories that only the wildly imaginative Japanese writers could have created.

In fact, if my impression is right, the modern anime series are even better than the older series. Quite the reversal of Moore’s complaints.

Now then, webcomics are an area that’s extremely grey. Since newspaper comics have peaked and aren’t even half as common as they were back in the forties, when they were as plentiful as raindrops and sand, and as diversified as a 32 color rainbow. Webcomics have became quite plentiful and there are literally thousands of them.

But there’s a problem with that, because webcomics are so easy to make, while all talented writers have a chance to show their talents by creating great stories, any asshole who thinks they can draw also thinks their the hottest thing since Jack Kirby, especially where Sonichu is concerned…so while we have a lot of great comics, there’s a lot of horrible and shitty ones too. It’s not a perfect system.

And then there’s video games, sure plenty of them have no plots or stories at all, but there are a lot of them that not only have good ones, but have some of the most epic plots of all, the master storytelling of the Bioshock and the Grand Theft Auto series gives us some very important examples. Not to mention Mass Effect, which NBC News referred to as one of the best sci-fi series of all time. In fact, they might be one of the best kinds of media forms in existence since the whole concept is that they’re stories you can interact with in a way only very few other kinds of stories can offer.

So anyways, is new fiction better than old fiction? Well, in my opinion, it really just depends on taste, personally I think that stories from all periods of time are really just as good or bad as any look of fiction can be. All that really depends is who makes it. There’s really no shortage of ideas, so maybe there are some declines in pop culture but there are ways to bring its quality back up too, we just need the right writer…

Anyways, that’s my thoughts on modern fiction vs. old timey fiction.

I’d like to add to this that there’s going to be a change in my updating schedule, to avoid rushed posts and deadlines, I’m just going to post posts whenever I actually have one to post. Rest assured I plan to still post them often, but this should help make sure I don’t end up sacrificing quality.

Peace dudes, it’s a brave new world…and I hope to have something really cool for my next post.