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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
>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.
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.
Conflating an artist with their art is always a mistake.
Great works of art transcend the artist, and frankly, the artist usually doesn’t understand the work any better than anyone else.
If you ask a writer or painter or musician … especially musicians/lyricists what their work is about you will always get a disappointing answer, if the piece is any good.
They don’t know what it is, where it came from, they just manifested it.
It's often disappointing, I've found, to hear an artist talk about their own work.
The artist rarely, if ever, lives up to my expectations of them, as the creator of something I like.
Instead, I've started to look at artists as separate people, who are capable of creating work I like, but otherwise I try to think of them as entirely separate, and hope I can come to appreciate/like them for who they are, beyond just, the "vessel" for the art I like.
Yeah, especially when the artist is super complicated. Like, I'd rather enjoy Michael Jacksons music without having to bring in the weird questions about who Michael Jackson was
> While speaking to NPR about his personal reaction to the September 11th attacks a few months later, Miller would say: "For the first time in my life I know how it feels to face an existential menace." I think that I've never heard something so white, straight, male and sheltered. He will eventually repackage the idea as simply Holy Terror, after jettisoning any reference to the superhero.
I think most people felt that way after seeing the attacks. I am weary of any writer who makes it a "white, straight, male and sheltered" thing to be worried about one of the worst terror attacks on our soil. It's a human thing, and for Americans who had never served in combat, it would be the first time they ever felt a threat that real; "existential menace" means, implying the existence of a threat. Innocent lives were lost, a lot of lives, and it shook a nation.
I only bring it up because of how unnecessary that seemingly flippant remark was to me. Whether or not Miller was a good guy or not doesn't mean the deaths of thousands is a proof of his race, sex, etc.; it comes off as hateful which is a real shame, I am more likely to question the author's intent. Personally i don't disagree with most of the article, I would have liked a more thorough review of what the writer is talking about when she mentions different troubling things about the comics, as i would have to read it myself to see what they are even talking about.
(EDIT: i re-read the last few points and i retract that i agree with most; i think i disagree with most of her points. Sometimes i give benefit of the doubt, only to look again and realize the take is mostly vapid)
An "existential menace" does not mean "the existence of threat", and 9/11 was not and did not presage any kind of existential threat. It is in fact a "sheltered" thing to think it is, and that it is uniquely so in America; minority communities in the US did and still regularly face existential threats, and suffer loss of innocent lives as a result of them.
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.
These are fair points for someone that works in the industry and wishes to engage critically with her anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom would call it. I doubt if her critique, in itself, leads to a rhetorical basis that is any more aesthetically sound. In good time, another writer will undoubtedly point out how flimsy the reactionary storytelling of the 2020s was. At least along this one axis, I am unconvinced by this article that Miller’s lurid pulp is much different from the remedies the author suggests. The proof is in the pudding.
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.
…in fact, that’s not what she’s saying at all. She is free to criticize the work without making a positive case for something else, and she does. You have projected what you think she’d rather see into the essay—it’s not there.
I actively don't seek out information about the artist I like. There's exactly nothing to gain by knowing who they are and what their views on the world are. It's better to stay ignorant and enjoy their work.
Example: I read the Dragons of Autumn Twilight (etc) books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman in the early 90s. The book series was hugely influential on my youth.
I didn't know Tracy Hickman is male until way into the current millennium.
I read the annotated chronicles, which obviously reveals more about the authors' backgrounds, but thought it was interesting to see how they'd straddle the line between writing things they believed and things they didn't.
For me, the best Frank Miller Story is his Daredevil Born Again story arc. It has a great and very motivational story (I don't wont to tell much) and excellent drawings by D. Mazzucchelli. This story is on my top 2 comics ever along with Alan Moore's Watchmen.
Sounds like you're not the audience the blogger was writing for.
As someone who fancies female characters being written as more than a love interest or someone to be raped, and don't believe sexual ambiguity makes a villain more frightening, I'm on board with what she's writing.
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.
I wouldn’t only because I’m not a “student” of Batman or Miller and honestly don’t know much about it.
No political axe to grind about Batman or Miller, it’s just not a character or style that I personally care for. My wife loves Tim Burton stuff, I do not. I love old school Star Trek, she would rather watch the weather channel lol.
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.
You may be right but it's too bad then: they have a platform and an eager audience and are wasting an opportunity to depict a mature and healthy relationship in comics.
I mean, they are on thin ice - can you imagine the ruckus parents would do at anything but cis? or the ruckus blogger would do if every "mature and healthy" relationship gets portrayed as necessarily cis? I see them using tropes also as a quick way out.
albeit there's some interesting takes if you search around, like in the amazon "invincible" - but I guess a miniseries has more space for it, and it's for a more adult audience to begin with.
These are Frank Miller comics. The "how would parents react" stuff is right out the window. Gaiman did a whole bunch of stuff with non-hetero sexuality for DC, and he gets TV series to this day.
The cartoonist who does “Phoebe And Her Unicorn” recently noted that she sold more books last year than all of Marvel. And she’s well behind folks like Dav Pilkey and Raina Telgemeier.
This is an open secret in the comics world, the “comic book industry” dedicated largely to superheros is only a tiny fragment of the comics sold now. Imported manga started eating their lunch years ago, too.
The flip side of Poe's Law. Fifteen years ago, my father used to love rense.com and a couple of other conspiracy sites. He thought it was good fun. He thought the people running and contributing to them were just blowing off steam by poking dark fun at how stupid people could be, basically liberals doing some mean-spirited LARPing as conservatives. Knowing that some people would take them seriously just made it funnier in his mind.
I never asked him later (like after 2016) if he had revised his estimate of how many people on those sites were deadly serious versus poking fun.
When I first got my hands on a Frank Miller graphic novel, I had been led to believe that it was a critical examination of how people are seduced by violence, be careful when you look into the abyss, etc., but I was old enough to realize as I read it that the reason it was wildly popular was because it worked as wish fulfillment violence porn, and I couldn't see any sign that the author intended it to be read in any other way. Not that I was too good to enjoy it on that level, but after I finished it, I felt that it would be wrong to go back for more.
I say this as someone who still occasionally pulls up a YouTube video of a supercut of 300 up against the song "Tangerine Speedo" to emphasize the accidental homoeroticism of the movie, just for giggles: it's a graphic novel. Art oversimplifies to make its points, and graphic novels are no stranger to that. Perhaps they are even the best example of doing so.
That it doesn't align with your personal politics at the time is not a crime. It's not even interesting. I can imagine fewer things more boring than someone going over a work with a fine-toothed comb looking for violations of their own personal Hays Code. None of them will turn that level of inspection on their ideological pets, only their "problematic faves."
I dare her: do romance novels next, and do it from a men's rights perspective. I've read my fair share of them, they're all a real crapfest if you want to think of men as actual people instead of living props in the Happily Ever After each heroine is owed. But that doesn't sell clicks on Polygon.
It's ok to go through 300 to laugh at homoeroticism, but not ok to discuss the points that art is trying to make when it oversimplifies?
My only problem with this is the cultural critic's insistence on assigning everything they enjoy with a complex intellectual meaning and significance. It's self-praise, in the guise of analysis, used to rationalize the sheer amount of time spent consuming popular products of the culture industry.
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.
There is a reason to read for what it says to you, rather than what the author says or even what they say it says. The art means whatever it means to you.
Teachers often teach that very badly, but the lesson is buried in there. Discover what you like, then inquire about why you like it and how it does that.
It's not about teaching you about the world. It's about teaching you about yourself, and then about other people.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution. The messages that they communicate are the closest thing to actual direct mega-corporate speech that exists. The institutions who produce these things are the bad guys. Their primary messages are optimistic happy consumption to defy death, or cynical world-weathered resignation to unavoidable consumption.
All of this speech comes from like 10 world-spanning companies and everyone is on everyone else's board.
Books and indie games usually aren't much different, because they are imitative of the dominant content owners. A world of fanfic. And of course, in the case of books, the world has about 4 publishers that sell 80% of them.
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution.
Books aren't expensive to publish like theatrically released movies and AAA games. According to the 2019 Publishers Weekly ranking of global publishers, Penguin Random House issues 15,000 titles a year with revenues of 3434 million Euros (2018). That puts cost-per-title well under $0.25 million whereas AAA games start at tens of millions per title. I don't know if ROI is similar but initial cost to bring a new work to market is much lower for a book.
Not to mention that, despite the terrible ways they manipulate it, Amazon's self-publishing programs are genuinely cheap and reasonably easy to use. And if you don't need to make money from your art, you can host it at any number of sites for free or your own for more time than money.
No one is saying it's a crime, and actually no one is going over the work with a fine toothed comb looking for violations -- these things stand out plain as day to readers who are disappointed to only see people like themselves caricatured or reduced to mere plot devices in works that they had come to cherish.
I don't think the article is good, either; in fact, I think it's pretty lazy, but telling a woman to go read romance novels and complain about them instead feels... reductive.
A person will feel the urge to criticize something if they care about it. She's criticizing comic books because she loves these comic books. She probably doesn't care about romance novels. Instead of saying "Go criticize romance novels instead!" have you considered, well, having someone who likes romance novels criticize romance novels for you? It'd be way more effective.
I use computers. I relentlessly criticize software. I wouldn't be able to do a good job at it if I was told "Oh, you have criticisms of modern software? Go critique architecture from your lens!"
This woman knows comic books. She loves comic books. She has some criticisms about comic books. This doesn't mean she knows or cares about romance novels. I use computers. I love computers. I have some criticisms about computers. I don't know the first thing about architecture.
Paying people to complain about things has never made much sense to me. Roger Egbert was the laziest form of entertainment. Reviews are pointless in an era of ubiquitous communication, and public critique never truly leads to better art as much as it leads to safer art.
I'm against the article's existence, but I'm also against the idea that the author should be told to complain about romance novels, too. The criticism of the criticism is bad, but the initial criticism is still boring and offers nothing new.
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 dare her: do romance novels next, and do it from a men's rights perspective.
There is some weird gatekeeping in this thread. The blogger is a self-proclaimed lover of comic books writing a critique of Frank Millers work - and you demand she write about romance novels? Where is is suggested she even have any interest in that genre?
Boring and utterly uninteresting people that are deeply convinced their cliche ideas and prejudices are important are the most tiresome phenomena of this age of decadence of Occidental Civilization.
I wonder if the Roman Empire had the same problem, and if so, I think it died of boredom.
> "The 80-page giant comic cost 25 cents," he concludes, "but I bought it anyway." ... Miller doesn't mention who wrote, who drew, who edited the book that made him a fan
For a professional comics journalist and fan of the Dark Knight detective, it's strange she brings this up as though it's some dark historical mystery. A little online research suggests that it was 80-page Giant #12, published July 1965.
Her questions about who wrote, drew, edited it are answered in the link below:
Her point that you missed is that he didn't credit his inspirations, not that it's a mystery. It stands out from most comic writers and artists because talking about your inspirations is such a standard thing for people in the field.
What I find interesting about this article is that the author mentions the ways in which she's disadvantaged compared to Frank Miller (she's mixed-race and female to his straight white male), but if you read between the lines, she's quite financially privileged. She's looking at college campuses at 15, her parents bought her expensive new books, she goes to college right after high school and majors in Creative Writing, she's managing a news site at 24 which usually means she's either got unpaid internships, startup help, or a writing network already.
It's not the author's fault, but it'd be really nice if these types of articles started reckoning with the author's privileges and not just their marginalizations. If Frank Miller alienated her because his viewpoint over-saturates his work, how is she going to make sure her work doesn't do the same to poor mixed-race women? Or trans women?
If there's an actual interest in making sure different viewpoints are represented and better stories are told (the part I personally care about), then why do articles so often get boiled down to 'pay attention to my particular identities'?
I don't know, I guess I don't know what the point of the piece is.
Well, there's a whole thread here talking about what the point of the piece is.
Miller is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Alan Moore as an author famous for bringing sophisticated, adult-oriented storytelling to comics and thus broadening the genre.
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. That's nothing new to comics; he just happens to have done it stylishly enough to attract fresh attention.
So: if Miller's work speaks mostly to young white males, then it's failed to accomplish the artistic goal he's credited for. If it's really meant for adults, that's even worse: then what you have here is something akin to Heinlein and "Starship Troopers" (perhaps substituting jingoism for fascism).
That's the critique in a nutshell. If you don't care about the artistic merit of Miller's writing, then the piece is definitely not written for you.
It has more or less nothing to do with privilege analysis.
> 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 don't think you can plausibly read Watchmen and not understand the commentary that the Rorschach character is making on the genre. If you like the character, his subtext is part of your opinion.
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.
how is she going to make sure her work doesn't do the same to poor mixed-race women? Or trans women?
One role in the modern publishing industry is “diversity consultant”, which expands to “someone who is sensitive to this sort of thing who will read your in-progress work and tell you how well or badly you’re doing with representing people who are Not You”.
I'm 15. I read romance novels constantly. I begin to notice that the male love interests are all muscular billionaire vampire pirate bad boys with a dark side yearning to be tamed. No romance novelist ever writes a love interest who is an awkward teen boy who likes to read all day and play Magic the Gathering and video games all night. Why can't romance novelists represent me?
(Because it apparently wasn't obvious, OP is not actually a 15 year old purveyor of young adult romance fiction. His post is mimicking the writing style of the article ("I'm 20 and a creative writing major...").)
BTW, there's a GoodReads list entitled "Nerdy Guys Are Hot" containing 114 books. And that list is obviously incomplete. For example, Harry Potter -- the most popular youth fiction series ever -- has a nerdy main character and plenty of romance subplots.
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.
Yes, in a certain sense, although a slightly more accurate characterization might be that Harry Potter is a nerd's idea of a hero. Although I have to admit my knowledge of the series is rather superficial, so perhaps I'm wrong.
> he definitely never did homework or studied and lucked into every solution he ran into by dumb luck.
Nerdy doesn't necessarily imply industrious or studious. I wouldn't say the average MtG or DnD player was a particularly good student at my high school.
Harry didn't play DnD or MtG though. He lived in a magical world, and while some of those magical things occasionally caught his attention, he wasn't really deeply interested in any of it. His main concerns were social: casting unsubstantiated aspersions on Snape and Malfoy and occasionally being correct. He didn't care about any of his classes. His only real love was Quidditch, which he was naturally talented at, making him, if anything, a jock.
Rethinking through the series, which I have re-read within the past year, the only truly nerdy moments he has all involve girls; and then only really at the beginning of his involvement with girls. Very quickly, he begins to have quite mature thoughts regarding his relationships, even if he doesn't always make the right choices.
Harry Potter addressed this when Harry learned that his dad was Snape's childhood bully and cuckold.
Tina Fey also did a good exploration of this idea in 30 Rock S3E5 "Reunion" when Liz Lemon has to face the reality that she wasn't the nerdy victim but the bully. It's a recurring theme in media because no one ever thinks they're the bad guy. It's especially hard to tell when you're young and haven't learned how to be a human yet.
All that said, I don't think Harry was a bully. Malfoy was pretty unambiguously antagonistic. Snape was more antihero, but did make a point to antagonize Harry when he could. Harry mistook the antagonization as evidence that Snape was up to bad dealings because "I'm the good guy and my enemies are bad", but even this gets flipped on its head throughout the series. Malfoy doesn't become humanized until they show his family life in detail and even then he only redeems himself in the home stretch.
"Nerds idea of a hero" is a perfect way to represent it. Heroes thought up for nerds are non-threatening and approachable, unlike ancient heroes, who are threatening, great leaders of men, and often openly flaunt their "noble" lineage (Beowulf, Odysseus,etc.) Ancient heroes also often book real challenges to their hero status from their close allies.
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 watched two episodes of Komi Can't Communicate on Netflix and felt that. I thought it was good though, maybe it would have helped my socially anxious younger self.
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.
Because he's bald and older (and very much eccentric), and Friends was fundamentally about young people in New York with no realistic means of support. The sequence is poking fun at the idea that race is the sole obstacle to paradise.
The joke is Colin is a bald guy who wouldn't be considered attractive. (I suppose Gunther is an example of that, but leeway for main cast vs. occasional supporting role)
There are romance novelists that do that ! i am not a romance specialist, but i know they exist. I advise to search a bit, maybe ask your local library. Romance is a really wide genre, the biggest, with a lot of different niche. It exist. I promise you.
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.
For me, as a fan of other kinds of escapist entertainment, the feeling of "ugh why am I not just doing this" is really easy to trigger, and it ruins the immersion and the fun. I need the fantasy to be not just attractive, but also unattainable, so that I don't start wondering, "If I'm so excited about this, why don't I take the relatively straightforward steps to experience it for myself?"
For example, imagine watching a Top Gear episode about the latest Ford Fiesta. Most of the fun of the show is the presenters, how they talk about the cars, and how much fun they seem to be having. I'm sure watching them I could get pretty excited about the Ford Fiesta. It could be a great episode! Except the fact that I could rent one for a day for $35 would force me to think about why I don't actually want to do that, why I would rather watch a TV show about driving it rather than driving it for myself, and the difference between fantasy and reality, and then the excitement evaporates pretty fast.
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.
Polo's criticism of Miller isn't rooted in its appeal to teenaged boys. It's taking dead aim at Miller's reputation as a forerunner for "comics for adults", and as a skilled deconstructer of superhero archetypes on a level with Alan Moore. So this rebuttal doesn't really say much, does it?
Polo is criticizing Miller in a way that you could not, for instance, criticize Todd MacFarlane, who had the clearly defined audience you're thinking of. It wouldn't make sense; of course MacFarlane's work was silly and superficial; that's the point.
This is a thing people say a lot about Roger Ebert --- that part of his skill as a critic was his ability to put himself in the shoes of the intended audience for a piece, and evaluate it on those terms, so that for instance he could give 4 stars to "Iron Man", the same rating he'd give to "Tokyo Story".
Polo's criticism here is compatible with Ebert's approach.
The word "adult" is used once in that post and in context it is about how a 12 year old thought the comics were meant for adults. Where do you get the idea that Miller's reputation is "comics for adults"? The author, for example, read them as a child. My impression is that mostly these comics are read by teen boys. If your impression is that they are read by adults then I suppose one of us would need to bring in some data to break the impasse. If I wanted to research it I would use the Google ad word tool to check the demographics of who searches for "Frank Miller" and his different comic books.
Miller's comics are known to be "gritty", violent, whatever. That's his style. The author liked it when she was a child and doesn't like it having grown up. That seems not too remarkable to me.
Are you familiar with Miller or do you come by your understanding of him just from this piece? Because Miller is like, on the vanguard of the "comics for adults" movement. It would be like saying Salvador Dalí is known for his surrealist work; it hardly needs a cite.
The author probably didn't even write the headline, which is the only place that sentiment appears in the piece. I'm pretty confident she's aware of Love and Rockets, Bone, and Maus.
Maybe it's helpful just to mentally substitute "superhero comics" for "comics".
That seems like the interesting discussion to have, right? Whether there are superhero comics that confound Miller-ism.
I can't really think of any, though maybe early-1990s X-Men, which had a palpable subtext about bigotry long before that was a super trendy idea (making the series antagonist himself an opponent of bigotry was a pretty slick move).
Sandman stands in my mind. Though, most folks don't think of those as super hero.
I think most of that is definitionally, though. If you accept that super hero comics are bad, you probably consider any good ones to not be super hero.
Edit: that said, Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader is undeniably a super hero comic. Complete with an amazing call out to Goodnight Moon.
Edit2: Perez's Wonder Woman set is highly regarded, I think. In many ways more feminist than current works, from my memory.
It's so not a superhero comic that DC actually came up with a new imprint for it and Hellblazer. It was, very briefly, a Moore-style sendup of superhero comics ("sleep, and if you wish, you may dream of the city of focative mirrors"), but shed that almost immediately when Gaiman got his footing.
But like, I stopped reading superhero comics pretty quickly (I got to comics late, with Punisher [gag] and X-Men, and switched within like a year to the Vertigo/Cerebus/Comix stuff). So for all I know, there's a long "Aquaman" arc where he subtextually confronts misogyny or contemplates Rawlsianism.
My only qualm is that I feel that is shifting definitions. I'm reminded of folks calling what Gaiman writes as graphic novels, not comics. Which... Seems silly. Especially since I remember buying them, as comics.
This sort of point would be much stronger if it was not too apparent you don't know what is in romance books nor surrounding culture nor types of conflicts going on in there.
Maybe first is the wrong world but they are the ideological ancestors of the Third Reich.
In Sparta your genes determined if you where either a proper person who whose only purpose was to out breed (and for a man fight) or a helot subhuman who did all the work.
Racist really isn't the right word. Sparta wouldn't have a concept of "race." It was an extreme oligarchy based on the persecution and terrorization of the Helots, 90% of the population for the benefit of the elite 10%, a system everyone was born into. But there was the possibility of being "freed" or of a Spartan to lose their citizenship, making it not equivalent to racism. It was inherently vile, deadly, and is unfairly revered in the modern day in a way that is quite disturbing, but racist is simply not the right word.
You're not being asked for that kind of concern. It's a retrospective critique of an artist, and a negative one. That's all. Criticism would be super boring if it was never negative.
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.
> At least until comics are no longer being produced because the straight male-hating audience is actually not as big as they think it is.
Having just read an article about how the author learned to love comics from a creator who hated her, it’s a shame that you don’t think straight males would be able to do the same.
There's nothing that appeals more to right-wing nationalists than cop-worshiping vigilantes. On the other hand, there's nothing that appeals more to middle-class liberals than vigilantes that are wracked with guilt.
edit: so the result is that liberals project guilt onto the guiltless protagonists of rightist creators, or decide that the entire thing is a complex satirical statement.
No need to divide it along political boundaries: vigilantism is a power-fantasy for everyone that has ever been at the receiving end of someone or agency with authority over them.
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.
Giving the facile psyche of the day (or, for that matter, 2016 as well) and the need for facile denunciation of anything that doesn't share the ideology of the day, I knew who the comic writer would be before I opened the page. Opened it anyway to verify and wasn't dissapointed.
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).
Your rebuttal here is that you saw a "facile" takedown of a comics author and thought "this can only be Frank Miller, no other comics author ever engenders facile takedowns"? I'm skeptical.
It said "made me love comics" so I immediately thought "so that was someome prominent in the past" and then "taught me to have them" meant "ok, so he's controversial enough to warrant a 'I was triggered when I understood those comics/his personal ideas' article" - put two and two together and bingo.
If it said the same about a sci-fi author, I'd have guessed someone like Heinlein (or maybe Asimov).
Nah, people are allowed to critique literature. If you enjoy it without wanting to think about it, that's your right; her right is to think about it and write about what she's thinking.
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.
Hating comics because you don't like Frank Miller sounds like a huge overreaction. If you don't like Frank Miller, just stop reading his comics. Or, better yet, roll your eyes at some elements of his work, admire others, learn what you can from them, and form the nuanced opinions we need in our complicated world.
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.
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.