Middle-Aged and Irrelevant---U2?

Rock and roll, the young man's game:

The U2 soundtrack is different. It's the impossible dream that somehow rock and roll can be made congruent with adulthood. U2 doesn't carry it alone. Bruce Springsteen, similarly, thinks of his music in grand, if not messianic, terms. Who else would have the audacity to make a "September 11th album," its title track written in the disembodied voice of a dead firefighter? And yet when Springsteen performs the song, he gyrates and pumps his fist in the same way he did when he was young.

Springsteen, U2, and a few others make the same promise: that adolescent longings and music can address the problems of global politics, life and death. But the outside world, impersonal and indifferent, usually can't be bothered with emotional appeals. Rock is a dream that dies hard.

Don't tell Bono that, though. The poor guy is still out there, chasing it. Sure, he's well paid, but you know what they say about money and happiness. It's the same with money and dignity.

This is the problem with comic books today as well. The constant search for "relevance", the effort to make them more "adult". The medium is quite simply an adolescent's medium. Your typical comic book writer does nothing more than regurgitate cliches, slavishly emulating the comics he loved as a kid or (in the case of the older writers) merely recycling their old work. The artists eschew anatomy for the thrill of drawing enormous pecs and breasts. The vast majority of it is simply unreadable crap, made moreso by the introduction of "relevant" political screed which was already stale when they first contemplated it listening to Pink Floyd while stoned in their parents' basement.

If you're going to play rock, drop the pretension and play it without apology. If you're going to be "an artist", then you'd better find another musical genre, as rock is much too limiting for such adult interests. It's too shallow. Dive into the blues or torch songs or something capable of more than slapping riffs and quasi-mystical verses together. And I say that as an unabashed rock fan.

Same thing with comics. If you're going to write them, put your head down and write the best you can, but don't presume you're cranking out "King Lear" every 30 days. If you feel compelled to tell more mature stories, you'd be better suited to choose a more mature medium. Michelangelo didn't draw on sackcloth, you know.