The one criterion I apply first to judging almost any comic book story — or film or novel or television drama — any story presentation not intended to be taken as parody or farce — is simply this: *Did I believe it?*<\/p>\n
While I was reading the story, did I accept unquestioningly that it was actually happening?<\/p>\n
Note that I’m *not* talking about what fans used to call “willing suspension of disbelief.” Willing suspension necessarily implies the recognition of some need to suspend belief. My test requires an *unwilling* suspension of disbelief. Either I’m transported by the story into its reality without conscious effort, or I’m not. If not, the story fails the test.<\/p>\n
And if it fails the believability test, almost nothing else matters. The writing may be technically excellent and even highly original. The art may be stunning. So what?<\/p>\n
A technically excellent, stunningly beautiful artifice is still just a trick.<\/p>\n
And that’s the problem I have with many of the crossover series, and a lot of other comic books these days. I just don’t believe them. As stories, they feel constructed, not told. They feel unconvincing…”made up.”<\/p>\n
Make any sense?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The one criterion I apply first to judging almost any comic book story — or film or novel or television drama — any story presentation not intended to be taken as parody or farce — is simply this: *Did I believe it?* While I was reading the story, did I accept unquestioningly that it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}