Armored Vehicles

I don't know how I missed this, but ace comics critic Douglas Wolk recently engaged in a lengthy, fascinating interview with comics blogger Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter, talking about the state of the medium, the health of the modern superhero, and the brilliance of Matt Fraction's ongoing run on The Invincible Iron Man. Embedded within the Spurgeon-Wolk piece is an equally fascinating back-and-forth between Fraction and one of his heroes, Denny O'Neil: the two men have a grand time talking about the armored hero they've both written, how the editor-writer-artist relationship has changed in the last forty years, and what the future holds for the funnybook. It's worth reading the two pieces back-to-back, as Spurgeon-Wolk and Fraction-O'Neil are coming at some of the same issues from either side of the reader-writer divide. But the commonalities of the two articles suggest that it's not so much a divide anymore as a fascinating dynamic of creation and reception, the disparate pieces coming together like one of Tony Stark's sleek, powerful inventions.