I liked Dark Knight Returns quite a bit and I've read it a few times but every time I get to the part with the woman with swastikas tattooed on her boobs I can't help but wonder what the point of that was.
Strikes Back was bad. Then Holy Terror came out and it was a xenophobic caricature. Since then I haven't had much interest in anything he's done. I did see a comment from him that seems to indicate he's walked back some of his extremist views but I've moved on.
Did you revise your opinion of the Miller's entire oeuvre after Holy Terror? That's what happened to me with Dave Sim and Cerebus at some point; like, you see the previous work in a previous light, and it doesn't work anymore. It's like that episode of The Office where Brian Baumgartner sells James Spader on "the oatmeal raisin cookie idea" in a meeting, only to realize after later hearing about "the Big Mac idea" that "it was always just cookies. ...".
That's I think one of the big critical narratives about Miller --- it was always just cookies.
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.
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.
I think that's probably the big idea behind this critique, right? It's not that Frank Miller has bad ideas (though...) --- it's that when you realize he wasn't really kidding, he's much less interesting. His work isn't thoughtful; it's just id.
Not a comic, but I had this reaction to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". When I read it as a teenager, I was blown away by the subtle and brilliant satire. When I read it again as an adult and realized he was actually just a fascist, it was deflating.
The great thing about this is how many people first experienced "Starship Troopers" through the Verhoeven movie, which was, in retrospect, incredibly subversive; like, he actually reclaimed the work from its author. A neat trick!
That was quite a "one-of-a-kind" experience for me with Starship Troopers. The movie was straight up taking the entirely predictable "Atlas Shrugged, but with commie space insect alien warfare" book source and turned it into a satire on the original material. And not just that, they executed it masterfully.
I've never encountered anything like that since then, and if someone has suggestions of a similar "source material => adaptation" experience, those recommendations would be heavily appreciated.
Verhoeven famously gave up on reading Starship Troopers after a few chapters, calling it “boring and depressing.”[0] He was a kid during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands and couldn’t stomach the pro-war, pro-military, openly jingoistic messaging. He had to be talked into making the movie, and only then when he was allowed to put a satirical twist on it. It’s quite a good trick he pulled!
I don't think Heinlein per se was a fascist, he was a man strongly attracted to fascist style thought, which I think was a common feature of many reasonably intelligent people of his generation (hence the great upflarings of fascism they lived through) but I don't think he ever succumbed fully to the attraction in the same way I believe Miller has - probably because he lived through a war against a fascist country.
The most disturbing thing about Starship Troopers are people who quote characters to make point about real world. (I have seen that multiple times on HN)
It is just ... not an argument. It is all made up!
Why is it disturbing? It makes perfect sense. People quote art because the quote encapsulates something they want to express in a nice package.
Those people already have the concept of what they want to express in their head but sometimes it is not fully formed. It is nebulous and it would take an entire rant to express.
Artists spent time polishing the form, tweaking and retweaking. A preposition here, a synonym there. That polishing results in some very sticky quotes. And sometimes those quotes are close enough to what people want to express and so the quote sticks.
I dare you to find a nicer way to express the meaning behind "With great power comes great responsibility". It's a dumb quote we all know, yet it is perfect.
It is one thing when you use it as phrasing, it is another if you use it as "out of nowhere" claim as if it applied to the real world.
> I dare you to find a nicer way to express the meaning behind "With great power comes great responsibility". It's a dumb quote we all know, yet it is perfect.
I don't recall this one to be used as argument. Probably it does not really say anything applicable to anything. It works because it is vague enough for anyone to project feelings into.
> People quote fictional characters for the same reason they quote anything else. The quote is a nice package.
Except that similar factual claim is never said outside of those quotes. They are used as truism, argument by authority, but content of it is not actually argued.
> Do you feel like random quotes from a known genius like Einstein are somehow worth more?
I actually rarely see those being used to make specific claims. Those tend to be vague. As argument they would be similarly bad, but they are not used that way.
> Do you feel that quotes from fiction that people do not believe is fiction (scripture) are worth more?
I never ever seen quote from scripture being used as argument in HN.
And yes, someone treating Heinlein as Catholics treat Bible would indeed be disturbing.
Generally Harry Potter and Star Wars (and recently Marvel movies) are the biggest culprits. There's a subreddit dedicated to making fun of the phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/
I had edited out parts my earlier post before submitting it, and one thing I removed was how I was more replying to you about Cerebus and David Sim. At least Dark Knight Returns was a miniseries and non-canon. Cerebus hurt because of the re-evaluation of the work, but also because I didn't really know much about Sim's beliefs for a while and had more invested in the project.
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.
> It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk
Stephen King notoriously was a drunk and an addict for many years, and he is on record saying he barely remembers writing "Cujo", which was an international bestseller and won multiple awards.
Many stellar artists struggled with addiction, while still producing art.
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?”
Again: it's likely the author didn't even write the headline, especially since the sentiment doesn't occur really anywhere in the piece itself. I'm having trouble believing someone who is this deeply acquainted with Miller is somehow unaware of Maus.
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.
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.
The long, tedious Fitzgerald stuff I can deal with, but his later openness about his wacky political beliefs colors all the previous work for me; like, I can start to see what he was actually trying to say with some of it, and I can't unsee it or substitute my own perceptions from the first time I read it. It's pretty much ruined for me, except to thumb through Gerhard's backgrounds.
Read Shakespeare if you do not want a women with swastikas tattooed on her boobs to muddle the perfection of the work. Read Miller if that is exactly what you are in the market for.
Strikes Back was bad. Then Holy Terror came out and it was a xenophobic caricature. Since then I haven't had much interest in anything he's done. I did see a comment from him that seems to indicate he's walked back some of his extremist views but I've moved on.