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Of course, audacity is what has always been good about comics. Even if it has always been widely ignored, I’m starting to think it’s the single most important factor. To paraphrase Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, audacity will get you through times of no craft better than craft will get you through times of no audacity.
As many have learned over the years. I’ve noticed this has always been a source of extreme annoyance to comics talent who’ve spent years perfecting their craft but demonstrate not a hint of audacity in their performance, and are largely ignored and unlionized while those they generally consider lesser talents than themselves because those others don’t demonstrate perhaps the same level of craft they do. (I’ve also noticed those who obsess about that kind of thing generally aren’t as talented as they prefer to believe, but that’s another topic.) I don’t subscribe to much of the “cyclical theory” of comics, but audacity and comics go hand in hand back to the beginning of the medium.
So what’s audacity? In social terms, it’s behaving above your station. The concept itself evokes a social network of dominants and submissives, elite and commoners. Audacity used to be something that could get you killed, if you were on society’s lower rungs but spoke or acted as an equal to someone on the upper rungs. But audacity was always a necessary component to any kind of democratizing social change, in fact a catalyst for most social changes good or bad. Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door was audacity. The American Revolution was audacity. Audacity still isn’t much appreciated by those who consider themselves in charge, because social audacity is insubordination. Frequently the term is applied to some person or work that “flies in the face of common decency.” Even — in a democratic society more often than not — self-presumed elites traditionally have behaved audaciously if self-servingly, but it’s only characterized as such after they fall from power (if then) because elites view their own audacious behavior not as audacity but as birthright. In a democratic society, the terms shift slightly; audacity is what characterizes the flagrant movement of a person or small subset beyond what society in general has decided to accept as the norm.

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