Monday, I wrote about how MAD magazine was switching to quarterly circulation. I briefly and offhandedly noted how a lot of the outlets reporting the news were making “What, Me Worry?” jokes in their headlines, and that’s what I want to talk about today: The lazy shorthand used to refer to anything related to comics or graphic novels.
Haven’t we moved beyond the time when “Bam! Pow!” references were useful? (Was there ever a time when they actually were needed?) It’s been four decades since the campy Batman TV show made the references possible, and its legacy still lives on with hack headline writers everywhere. (See also any “Holy box office!” or similar reference.) Over the time since the show ended, we’ve had some ups and downs with comics in the mainstream consciousness, and, admittedly, some of the movies and TV shows that have come down the pike since then have done nothing to improve the medium’s reputation. But a lot of them have, and in a spectacular way. It’s almost tiresome at this point to keep mentioning The Dark Knight and Iron Man, so I’ll use, say, Road to Perdition and Spider-Man as examples. There’s good there, and it’s not silly. And I would at the very least offer this pragmatic advice to headline scribes: Most of your readers aren’t old enough to remember that TV show anymore, and the ones who are are tired of the clichés. Find something new.
 
 
 

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