The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them (2016)

What's the thing you thought Moore was doing ironically that it turned out he was (disturbingly) doing non-ironically? That's the point being made in the parent comment: that Frank Miller is traded in the culture as someone making an ironic commentary on violence and jingoism, but is in fact non-ironically captive to it.

I feel like people generally trade in the idea that Alan Moore is a creative lunatic with crazy ideas; you're getting what it says on the tin with him.

>Alan saying Rorschach (who I thought was a great character) was basically Batman-in-the-real-world, which killed Batman for me.

I mean Alan talks a lot of shit doesn't he, yes he's Batman in the real world if he wasn't super rich. Why's that important? Because Rorschach has to make up for his lack of wealth, Batman's superpower, with the superpower of basically being crazy (an offensive but rather common trope in fiction).

Obviously Batman is crazy as well because being a superhero is really a crazy thing, but because he has the buffer of wealth his insanity does not manifest in the same ways it would have to with someone who does not have his resources, for example Rorschach kills his criminals quite frequently because he does not have the luxury of sending them through the system and then catching them again some years down the road, he goes for the kill in any confrontation because he doesn't have the resources to knock people out, all those stun bombs and body armor and whatever that Batman has costs money.

In fact a basic critical reasoning would be that Nite Owl and Rorschach together are Moore's Batman critique - when they are together Rorschach's mental issues are kept in check, but as they separate Rorschach becomes crazier and Nite Owl more ineffective to deal with the fantastical world of violence and crime comic books imagine.

In the other direction, Warren Ellis used the last volume of _StormWatch_ to show how evil the hither-to "morally grey" characters were, and fire up _The Authority_ to replace them: a super-team that wanted to actually make the world a better place.

(They tried and failed, but at least they tried.)

It's possible to tell superhero comics that don't fall into the traps, but I don't think it can be done directly in the medium of continuing comics: without a planned conclusion, it becomes self-negating or self-parodying.

A different critique is offered by Wildbow's _Worm_, a giant webnovel that tried to provide consistent reasons for all the superhero comic tropes: why do mass-murdering villains get to live? Why do they escape from custody so regularly? How do they store their money? What's most important, thinking or action? The novel is 1.7 million words long, and has generated about 250 million words of fanfic...

Miracleman essentially demolishes capitalism at the end of Moore's run of Miracleman, and this is, at least initially, a complete success.

Gaiman took over Miracleman from there, intending to write three arcs. The first arc exists and I believe is still in print, having been re-published by Marvel a few years back, "Miracleman: The Golden Age".

Gaiman began the next arc, the Silver Age, the first issues exist, but legal problems (as often before) interfered. Today I believe officially there's some other problem and Marvel claims it will eventually publish the whole series, but realistically Gaiman has better things to do with his time than write comic books. The rest will probably never be published, even though I have them on order (and have had for many years) at an excellent comic book shop and I would like nothing more than to receive those books and pay in full.

Golden Age shows us what Moore describes very briefly at the very end of his story, a Utopia.

It digs into some details. Despite living in a Utopia, people are still people. A woman's husband is unfaithful, a man finds all the women he meets to be wanting and has to be shown that's his flaw, not theirs, school children are still cruel to each other for no reason. Importantly to me this series extensively features my favourite comic book character, Winter. I think Winter's Tale might be the very best single comic book issue I ever read, partly because (in the story within a story which dominates the issue) it completely violates all the rules about comic book stories on the justification that this is a children's book and so those rules don't apply. You couldn't tell this story about Winter in a normal comic book because it has no stakes, she's just ludicrously powerful and does whatever she wants, and that's it.

I've been averse to the superhero genre for some time, but a better solution for that super-hero laden medium is to follow specific writers and artists.

Like, just forget about the impossible continuity, and just let certain writers tell a story within that world.

Those writers often have other hits in non-super hero comic books, and they often keep the same team around them either for some typography style or art.

This has let me enjoy some real gems!

Yup, Nietzsche’s Übermensch was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis.

I'll always enjoy the work of H.P. Lovecraft. I don't care who he was.

I think it would be a different if I was actually giving that person money. If I'm funding somebody, I want to know where my money is going.

> 9/11 was not and did not presage any kind of existential threat

Agreed. That wasn't at all clear at the time though. You can feel an existential threat without one existing.

You nailed it. Scott Adams, too, to a certain degree. It's a bit of frame breaking when one finds out a creator has an outsized personality. There's a bit of projection involved in taking in art, and finding there is a great differenced between the imagined creator of a work and the actual creator forces a reinterpretation. It's unavoidable. Maybe Jane Fonda and people with Barberella posters who disagreed with her real life views, for an older example.

I think it's particular painful with Frank Miller because the work becomes much less interesting than how a number of us had read it initially.

A lot of things you consume when you are younger looks bad when you are older. Tastes change. Experience gives you insight. Unfortunately that’s just life.

This article would have been more interesting 10-15 years ago or so (DKR was first published in 1986!). I don’t remember the industry as a whole evolving for the better until after the speculation phase. And then we all wisen up. This article brings out the old condescending man in me: “you finally got it kid, good job”.

And there’s lots of new, better comics! The author never thought to branch out? Just “taught me hate them?”

I think it was Miller just giving into his worst tendencies. Like Sim, there is a period where you can write off the crazy as just being eccentricities but then, especially with Sim, the minor digression becomes the major theme of the work and I just had to walk away.

For me the thing about Cerebus is that Church & State is fucking hilarious despite everything.

People vary in where they get off that train, I own as far as Reads, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend anybody else to read beyond Melmoth, but I think you're missing out if you skip the whole thing because Sim is an awful human being.

God, Sim. Dave Sim.

Dave Sim blasted his brain open with acid and had a vision of how his goofy Conan parody would be a 300 issue treatise on the nature of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine and never realized that those two principles are only loosely tied to what we call “men” and “women”, then threw in a ton of baggage from his failed relationships and made a huge mess.

He is also a master of the form and one of the best letterers out there, I recently picked up a cheap copy of Flight and the way the text integrated into the composition was astounding, even if it was a story where his problems with women were all hanging out. And then there’s the later story where Cerebus sits around a mostly-empty bar arguing with himself for like thirty issues, and Sim pulls out all the stops in his lettering to actually make this exciting to read.

I learnt a lot about comics from his work, his influence lurks in my own comics here and there, but he is well into Problematic Fave territory for me and I will never insist that anyone should read his work if they don’t feel like picking around the misogyny woven through it.

A couple years after this article was written, Miller tried to rehab his image. In part by distancing himself from Holy Terror, in part by saying he had been drinking heavily: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-x...

I dunno, that mostly reads like a guy trying to improve his image to sell some new books. It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk. Or, there's lots of famously drunk artists, none of whom wrote All-Star Batman and Robin.

I don’t perceive her as pushing remedies, but I think they are suggested. The suggestion is that the works would be better if they adhered closer to “reality” or if the psychological tension was overtly comprehended and demonstrated by the writer rather than a tacit element. Many politically conscious people are just clueing into what literary criticism has long understood, although the conclusions drawn by the bulk of good literary criticism is, in my opinion, the exact opposite of those drawn by today’s reactionaries.

Essentially, I think the article discounts the merit of a regressive fantasy. Today’s comic book media complex is very involute. Characters often explicitly state these regressive elements, the sexual tension, and etc. It is novel for a while, especially when it is in vogue for a largely illiterate populace to rediscover matters of criticism that literature has always encompassed; but it is just as likely to become brittle and inbred as the big boob, prostitute, truncated demise tropes are.

Like I said, these are fair points that the author makes. It is, however, just as easy to point and laugh at someone that doesn’t seem to comprehend that they have not broken out of the aesthetic cycle, that they have failed to transcend, as it is to point and laugh at the latent homoeroticism of 300. All that being said, these are comic books, and I stopped reading them when I stopped getting pimples for good reason.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to watch grown men dribble a leather ball around and act like every foul called against them is a grievous insult to blood and legacy.

Given that she doesn't say anything about what the alternatives should be, we can only speculate. But she would seem to be implicitly pushing that comics should be written from the upper-middle-class, westernized, college-educated liberal worldview: characters' race and sex should be interchangeable, every combination of physical characteristics should be represented but shown as irrelevant to their behaviour and culture. Characters from any time or space should naturally hold the same moral positions as any respectable westernized college-educated liberal; the reader should never be so much as exposed to characters with offensive views, much less asked to try to understand or sympathise with them. Religious and cultural differences are as precious as they are purely decorative; it's impossible for them to lead to deep moral conflicts between decent people (and of course anyone who isn't a straight white male is always decent).

Of course that's a reductive, unsympathetic view on what she's saying - but so is her approach to Miller. Perhaps she'll come up with a positive, expansive direction for comics to go in, one that makes for a richer and more deeply textured world rather than one that flattens all characters into the superficially-diverse-but-deeply-identical mold. But that's not the direction I've generally seen from people saying things like this.

I believe that given a pie of content from comic book targeted at young male adult the pie dedicated to action is way larger than the pie dedicated to romance - and the flatness of woman carachter has more to do with audience interests / space dedicated to romance than writers' skills.

that said I too hate that non protagonist women are mostly treated as props to a story and protagonist women mostly embody male tropes in a woman body - I think there can be much more than that.

I agree with the writer’s point too, and I’ve always found Batman to be a cynical character who is a questionable “hero” at best.

But it’s an important character to many people, and I think the visceral reaction to this kind of criticism is because these critics have a ton of political power in certain settings and tend to trigger reactions that go over the top.

Isn't this insistence what we teach kids though? We make them read and analyze novels even when they have little context to put those ideas into. You can read too deeply into everything, even when it isn't the author's intent.

On the other hand, some of the things in popular culture are what teach us about what the world is like. For example, I would wager that more people are taught what guns are like by video games and movies, than the actual physical objects themselves. This means that there is some purpose to analysing popular products from a variety of angles. It might teach us new things about the world. We probably do it from the same few (political) angles too often though.

Extraordinarily rarely; it's even quite rare (outside of novels catering to specific fetishes) for a lead male character to not be quite successful in whatever their life-activity currently is.

> I don't think the article is good, either; in fact, I think it's pretty lazy,

In what way? The article is what it says on the tin.

I agree, which is why I never found Frank Miller in any way appealing.

Just noting that Starship Troopers the movie has a rather different flavor than Miller's film adaptations, as regards what people recognize as ironic, or earnest, or problematic.

> But a retrospective look at his work shows that much of what was read at the time as an ironic deconstruction of comic book tropes (the same sort of thing Watchmen is rightly praised for) is probably non-ironic; it's just straight-faced pulp id.

Yes but that is actually really interesting! We thought he was really clever by ironically exposing the inherent fascist tendencies in the superhero genre. Turns out he wasn't ironic, he just wrote what the liked. But...why does that change the quality of the comic? It still does the same thing, he just removed the excuse that allowed us to enjoy it "ironically". Frank Miller is the honest one, it is the rest of us who have been exposed.

Also notable how Rorschach is everyones favorite character in Watchmen. He is obviously intended as deconstruction of the vigilante hero, exaggerating all the negative traits and unfortunate implications of the type. And everybody loves the character!

I'm not actually a romance novel enthusiast, I'm just parodying the article. From my point of view the article is a complaint about how Frank Miller, an author who specializes in writing edgy grimdark superhero comics for teenage boys, doesn't write the kind of character that might appeal to a 20-30 something feminist.

Are you saying Harry Potter himself was nerdy? Because he definitely never did homework or studied and lucked into every solution he ran into by dumb luck.

Hermione was nerdy, but was usually made fun of for being nerdy, and was a love interest despite her nerdy ways.

On a side note, Japanese light pop fiction actually primarily does cater to the nerdy people/kids, to the point of excess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_novel

Much of it is "sappy guy gets the girl(s)" type stories or other power fantasies/wish fulfillment of various kinds. (Or bookish girl gets found by prince charming or multiple prince charmings.) It's very popular over there. It's been a persistent thought in my mind why this type of stuff isn't written in the US (or if it is, I can't find it).

I don't get this joke. I get Wayne Brady's - there are no black characters on Friends, but I don't get Colin's part. I tried watching the clip but I still don't understand it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djX7aDuqi48

Super hero comics are not. These super hero comics might be?

I think the point is that you can hate Frank Miller's work without hating all comics.

My point is that not everything appeals equally to all people. The reason dime-store romance novels aren't centered on nerdy boys is because they are trying to entertain adult women. Frank Miller's comics are about edgy superheroes, violence, and sex from a perspective that's trying to appeal to teenage boys.

If you're trying to write a book that appeals equally to all people without offending anyone, I think you'll end up with something anodyne. Some authors have a consistent style or niche and I don't think anything is wrong with that.

Finally, it's also not true that there are no romance novels focused on nerdy boys. There are plenty. Likewise, there are plenty of comic books where women or girls are portrayed well or are the focus of the story.

A critique has to be insightful and relevant to be interesting. You can critique Lebron James for the Stanley cups he didn't win, and that would be just as invalid as critiquing Frank Miller for the characters he didn't portray.

Now it's you who are projecting. My fantasy is a functioning civilization, not killing criminals or imagining excitedly what will happen to a child molester in prison.

edit: honestly, if politics is about anything, it's law and order. The fact that "politics" has become a euphemism for discussions of race, sex, and gender and indignantly expected to be totally separated from the processes of governing is bizarre.

Right-wingers fantasize about the justice they'd mete out if they weren't restrained by liberal guilt. Liberals despair about the justice that they have to mete out to protect their ideal society.

>The textbook lowbrow dismissal

Now that's just parphrasing how I described the article - only I tied it to specifics more, and also revealed something interesting: that such a denunciation is so cliche, that I knew who the artist would be just from reading the title (which is true, I did guess it correctly and then opened it and saw that I had called it).

When I was a teenager, I probably would have dug violent vigilantism (like I enjoyed "Mad Max" when it came out at that time). My own art back then reflected a cynical, dark, post-apocalyptic future (likely inspired by films like "A Boy and His Dog" as an example).

Story time: in those days the "copy shops" were ma and pa (the way the original video rental stores were) and the nearest copy shop where I took some of my art to be "Xeroxed" was, apparently, run by a born-again Christian.

When I picked up my art he felt I needed a preachin' to. "Why spend your talents making the world a darker place?" Why not make positive art?" (Or something along those lines. I think "glory of God" was in there too and was in fact the tell.)

I thought at the time how boring that would be, how "non-cool", "non-art" that was. I laughed it off.

Three decades later I can begin to appreciate his disappointment in younger me. The world events since (and since I got older and started paying attention) have informed me that indeed there is already too many horrific (real) things in the world.

Older me now just can't enjoy, for example, a Quentin Tarantino film (no doubt teen me would have loved it though).

I have no interest in Frank Miller. I don't want to live in his world, don't care even to look at it.

There are people who "hate" for a living, like the pundits you can see on cable news shows. I am not saying she is one - I know next to nothing about her - just that these people generally exist, and your assumption that she must not hate comics might be a little flawed.