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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

I'm sort of in the same boat with Frank Miller. I really liked The Dark Knight Returns because I thought it was a great deconstruction that showed the dark side of vigilantism and power fantasies visual references to Birth of a Nation and all that.

I was pretty of disappointed when I found out that Miller actually wasn't ironic. Thankfully there's plenty other comic writers I still enjoy.

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There has always been a fascist undertone to superhero comics. Most other authors grapple with it - struggle to balance social sense against men who succeed where society fails by force of their superhuman powers. It's a tough needle to thread.

Miller didn't try, he went the opposite direction. It's no wonder that it worked shockingly well when an author decided to full on embrace what was always there.

The government is weak, only the strongman can bring order, the freaks and deviants must be brought in line and not coddled, the violent youths will only understand brutality... It was all there and he picked it up and polished it and made it shine.

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

Alan Moore for me. Lots of people know Watchmen is about what would "really" happens if super heroes existed, and that lived rent free in my mind for years.

But 2 things really made it click. Alan saying Rorschach (who I thought was a great character) was basically Batman-in-the-real-world, which killed Batman for me. The nail on the head was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2yZwh_gCIU about Marvelmen and I don't remember if it's in the video or I read somewhere else, but it's when a super-hero that can manipulate reality, which in fact there's about a hundred of them in Marvel / DC, decides money is the root of all evil and vanishes money from the planet, and the world descends in complete chaos.

And now that actually lives rent free for me, as a young men angry at the hyper-capitalism and consumption we live in, who used to occasionally think the world would be better without money, I now realize that would indeed plunge humanity into a freaking mess.

I now enjoy watching Marvel and DC movies for the spectacle and action scenes, but I sorta don't enjoy most comics (at least the superhero genre) anymore.

What I think it's funny is that it just took me a long time to realize this. Actual superhero writers know exactly who they're writing for, angsty 13-year boys, see for example the interview here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dfI_2dscGE

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.

People are perhaps nervous about exactly where the line is between what Alan Moore writes about in for example "Lost Girls" and what Alan Moore might really believe about adolescent girls and sex.

Similar to how people were nervous about Luc Besson who made the film Léon about the relationship between an underage girl and a middle aged hitman, not so long after marrying his very pregnant 16 year old girlfriend. Besson has in more recent years been accused of rape by several young women.

I’ll add that Lost Girls was illustrated by his then-wife Melinda Gebbie. So, with luck, any hidden or inappropriate attitudes towards towards young girls would have been thoroughly examined and (hopefully) tempered by said relationship.

That said, I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that Alan harbors any bad habits, as is being theorized.

> illustrated by his then-wife Melinda Gebbie.

I think this timeline is backwards? Lost Girls was illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, who he subsequently married - and as far as I know they are still married.

It could be. I'll take your word for it. I don't actually know the particulars except that they were married around that era.

Lost Girls is a good point (I haven't read it, but I know the rap on it, and I know the rap on Moore, and yeah I'd probably be pretty squicked out).

I didn't know that about Besson! You may have ruined Léon for me. You really need to believe there's no question where Besson stands on sexual relationships between generations to stomach that movie.

What are you suggesting Alan Moore might really believe about adolescent girls and sex?

Oh yeah, I am not comparing their motivations, I get why Miller does what he does and why Moore does it. Just telling my own personal path with comics, what basically killed the idea of a "superhero". I now abhor the idea of a Batman, from either the perspective that vigilantism is stupid and not how we should be solving real world problems, or the absurdity of a billionaire-by-day is the best detective-martial-artist in the world.

I don't know, I guess it just took me ~25 years to realize the silliness of it all. Comics were my escapism growing up, and I guess I used to think of them differently.

this is why I think irony has turned into an anti-pattern, not specifically the Miller example but that it's been successful before. people have covered themselves with a shroud of "oh but I'm being ironic" with a wink and nudge in the ribs but are profiting off of their irony from those who espouse in the values expressed in the "irony" and from those who think they are being ironic.

That's an observation that David Foster Wallace made in his E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction piece.

"The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

I never finished Infinite Jest.

I wonder what he would have thought about Netflix.

>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.

Moore didn't write Rorschach as crazy, he wrote him as a fanatic ("Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise."). In the book the prison psychiatrist becomes deeply disturbed by Rorschach's world view because he's not necessarily wrong. It's definitely an exploration of what Batman's modus operandi would look like in the real world.

Rorshach is definetly crazy- while Watchmen is a serious book on its face- there's a bit of mad magazine style sillyness where Rorshack will torture everyone in a bar- inflicting pain and suffering- then whine he's "depressed" while oblivious to the people he hurt.

He also considers a crank tabloid the only legitimate source of news.

Moore grew up on mad magazine and there's a bit of parody in Rorshack even though other scenes are played more seriously.

Moore himself said that he wrote Rorschach to be "a nutcase". :)

yeah uh, the character who wrote this journal https://watchmen.fandom.com/wiki/Rorschach%27s_Journal was definitely just fanatically obsessive, no other problems there. Not to mention that the inability to compromise is not actually a feature of a well-functioning mind.

Alan Moore's point is that kind of violence (oh, you just knock him out, no harm done) doesn't exist. If you knock someone unconscious, you're lucky if they only suffer minor brain damage. Someone who goes around at night and giving people brain damage (if not outright murdering them) because they broke some moral code is a sociopath. There isn't "safe, good guy" violence and "dangerous bad guy" violence, it's all lethal violence.

when I saw he goes for the kill because... obviously he goes for the kill because he is insane but in story logic he must go for the kill because otherwise how does he remain alive, the argument for his behavior underlying the story is that his insanity allows him to deploy greater forces against his antagonists in both the police and criminal milieu than they can individually muster because he is not restrained by any impulse or constrained by any rational sense of self-preservation (his ability to keep cool in the prison as he defeats his enemies is again a symptom of his insanity, because he does not worry about his own death he is able to cooly ensure his own survival in situations where another person's fear would render them less effective. Another common feature of the insanity as superpower trope.)

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...

Worm has the basic issue that most of the answers to those questions don't actually make much sense, and end up justified outside the page by the presence of a secret conspiracy that's arranged everything to work that way with a set of uniquely powerful super-abilities.

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.

Marvel is once again hinting at doing something with Miracleman. A month or so ago some Kang the Conqueror comic ended with a Miracle Man logo. Word has it they will be releasing an omnibus of Moore and Gaiman and Buckingham have finished at least 4 issues of The Silver Age.

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!

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