Halo halo

Age doesn’t matter, backgrounds don’t matter, nothing matters. You have four teammates, they can be anybody, and you either know how to click with them or you don’t. 

— Bill Simmons

Not even Christmas carols have been re-recorded as often and as faithfully as comic characters are revisited. What’s the creator’s reward for fidelity to this massive tide of familiar subject matter? The reader’s openness to a massive tide of unfamiliar ideas. How many different opinions, worldviews and moods have been expressed through Batman to his faithful monthly followers? Compare Morrison’s Batman to Sprang’s for an idea of the gamut, and that’s not even counting fan portrayals. (I recall an internet meme here on LiveJournal in which a thousand different artists drew and posted a thousand very different pictures of Batgirl within a few days. For fun.) The gamut of outlooks Batman’s readers accept is much broader than what those same people will accept from unfamiliar characters. Like the Grimms’ fairytales, Batman has escaped into the wild to become a folk narrative — a familiar vessel for (potentially) unfamiliar ideas.

…

I think fine artists reverse the dynamic I described, giving their audience familiar ideas (“Iconoclasm again! Home sweet home…”) through unfamiliar subject matter (“I’ve never seen iconoclasm packaged THIS way before!”). It works because, as you said, there’s a small but wealthy audience for that sort of thing: too superficially hip to accept familiar subject matter, but too deeply sentimental to accept new ideas.

           — Jesse Hamm

(pages from Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier)

The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.

Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe. Tetlock found that his experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only The Nation and conservatives to read only National Review. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan.

— Louis Menand on Philip Tetlock, “Everybody’s an Expert”, New Yorker, 5 Dec 2005

(panels:  Carol Swain & Bruce Paley after Lee & Kirby, from Giraffes in My Hair: a Rock’n’Roll Life)