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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6680641" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]: First, my favorite threads at EnWorld are of two types.  Ones where people share useful game content and help each other out DM to DM, and ones like this which resemble the rambling nerdy conversations about seemingly trivial things taken very seriously because maybe they aren't really so trivial, that we'd have face to face as friends and fellow gamers.Secondly, as for where comics and graphic novels are today, I really fear that the medium is once again being held back by how easy it is to substitute shock value for story telling.  So much of what passes for comic book art these days is badly written and has as its real selling point how over the top it is.  In my opinion, the only thing worse than censorship is a complete lack of restraint.   It's like waffling back and forth between extreme law and extreme chaos.  On the one end you have something as sterile as an infinite crystal.   And on the other end... you have something as sterile as an infinite void.  There are times that a story needs to deal with sex, violence, dysfunction, cruelty, addiction and other serious themes.  There is a time for the grotesque or the provocative in art.  But if you were to remove the depiction of those things from the story, and without the depiction of those things there wouldn't be anything left of interest, then chances are you have neither a very good story nor a very interesting treatment of the themes.   The deft story teller has subtlety, and its a definite lack of subtlety that pervades the way modern graphic stories are told.  But on the animation front, I think the opposite prevails.  For the last 20 years or so we have been in the true Golden Age of animation, and the medium has I think finally evolved into a mature art form.  If you look at the work of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and others I don't think we've ever had as many well written, beautifully made animated movies as we do now.  If I were listing greatest animation of all time, almost all of it would be very recent.  'Avatar: The Last Airbender' was probably the greatest animated series ever made.  'The Incredibles', 'Wreck-It-Ralph', 'Inside Out', 'Toy Story II', 'Spirited Away', 'Howl's Moving Castle', 'Tangled', 'The Wind Rises' and tons of other movies hit levels that entertain both kids and adults.  And that's to not even get into the question of whether CGI mean most of the movies we watch are in some sense animated art.The only real weakness I'm seeing in animation right now is... stuff related to comic books, where if anything we are regressing.  DC really helped kick this off with the original Batman: The Animated series, which was a heavily censored title that nonetheless managed to have great story telling.  But since bucking the censors, instead of using this freedom to tell more mature stories, it seems like every series tries to out do itself in cheap pushing the boundaries violence and innuendo and is not doing the expensive process of writing well and crafting art (with or without violence, sex, or whatever the story needs).  If I were going to remake The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, I'd want more freedom than the original story tellers had.  I'd like to see the kids deal with the consequences of having killed something, and the conflict within the group that caused - particularly as foreshadowing and building the tension for 'The Dragon's Graveyard'.  I'd like Bobby to have the freedom to actually use his club as a club occasionally.  I'd like to have Bobby, Sheila and maybe even Hank explicitly foster kids or orphans with troubled pasts which are only hinted at in episodes like 'City on the Edge of Midnight'.  I'd like to show backstory of Sheila shoplifting and living on the streets that explains why she is the thief, but also why she is the moral heart of the group.  I'd like to show fear and deprivation on the screen more than the original.     I've got ideas for a finale that involves that sword in the Dragon's Graveyard and who it is meant for if not the kids.  I'd like to do tons of things you couldn't do with a mid-80's Saturday morning cartoon.  But ultimately, none of that would make the cartoon better in and of itself.   The cartoon would be judged not on that, or whether it had 'adult themes', but whether the story was better.</blockquote>

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