Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", continued further
socialist said...
Any more, for any more?
Other contributors solicited...
5:51 AM Sunshine2316 said...
Sure, I'll contribute. I thought the reivew was fascinating. I'm a big fan of Maurice's work and this review made me want to go read the comic. I also hear Frank Miller is a wonderful writer and that his story-telling, while violent, is great. Thanks Maurice!
2:57 PM Liz said...
Er, yeah... well no-one is saying that Maurice is a bad REVIEWER!!
Yeah. Sunshine, I believe you are a girl, same gender as me. I honestly do believe that there is very little in Frank Miller's work to interest female readers. He does not write for our benefit; he is largely interested in promoting his vision of (rather old and tired, but with disturbing and nihilistic "modern" elements) "machoness"... his ideas according to the socialist description would be "backward". According to the feminist take on it... he is just stale, a dead end. And I hardly dare imagine what the GLBT (if you know what that signifies!) camp think of him... again not a lot, I'd think.
He is just against all progressive movements. His idea of Batman/Bruce Wayne finally abandoning the city he loves, Gotham, and going with a few of his friends old and new to camp out in the woods, militia-style, proves it! (It's rather like what Heinrich Himmler believed: ie that cities/civilization were the home of Jews and corruption! Funnily enough, a lot of the negative (if not "villainous") characters in this GN are Jewish, too... Miller's Batman punches a female police chief named "Yindel" in the face! (So: Anti-feminist, anti-semitic... I don't know why the CEO of DC Comics, a certain Ms. Kahn, was stupid enough to publish this!) Other Jews are portrayed as dupes or hopeless liberals. Should have made the company think again, but it didn't... well I have no good opinion of US popular culture on the whole these days!
Plus - Miller's Batman in NO WAY is sexy! Quite the opposite: he's very unattractive both physically and personality-wise.
So what is the point of him?
This, by the way, is why a Hollywood film based on that GN was NEVER made... the offensiveness to various groups, plus the unsexiness.
And never will be made!
6:53 AM socialist liz said...
Yeah, I think it's time for me to come out... "liz" and "socialist" are the same person, OK? I'm still using my "given" name over at Kevin's blog...
But yeah, sure, HJers: My name is Liz and I am a socialist... Not an American one, though I do assure you, there are more of that persuasion in the US, than your media will admit!
What I'm really waiting for, is, hopefully, someone who can see things a little bit from my point of view regarding the above work (however much they like Maurice's reviews in general.)
What we really need, is for someone who has read "Dark Knight Returns", either when it first came out, or more recently... and who can see problems in it, as a Christian reader.
I have criticised it from both a socialist and a "minority group" perspective, pointed out some of its flaws from that regard: what I would like is for a Christian reviewer... probably one of the others on this site... Elizabeth Leitch? Mr Furches? Anybody? to come forward and say: Actually, for me, I had problems with...
Because I think that would fairly illustrate the problems, as it were!
I have always said that it is my belief that it is nigh-on impossible, maybe counter-productive, to try and "read" Christian messages, into *not only secular authors*, that will work, but rather into ones with a generally anti-Christian (and anti-human?) agenda!
I don't think that really works very well!
Anyway. And I still think I was right to push the Miller's Batman/Mussolini comparison, and to demand on a Christian site an answer to the question: well, if none of us (as Christians or whatever - all good-thinking people!) would be expected to admire such people in politics...
...how come they are allowable nowadays as comic book heroes? (Hey, how about a "Saddam Hussein" Batman?)
(Actually, I think Hollywood, though it more-or-less accepted the "amoral Batman" idea for its first two Batman adaptations, has moved away more and more from that... and actually did quite an about face with "Batman Begins", however they tried to promote it as a return to the Burton ethos, it wasn't: quite the opposite! That was quite a liberal movie. Po-faced, serious, not very entertaining: but liberal. Quite sincere, in my view. But sadly not utopian!)
7:12 AM socialist liz said...
And I'm sure Maurice wouldn't admire a "Fidel Castro" Batman either... I'm sure he'd have something to say about a red-style dictator hero!
SO Maurice... why no comment on a "hero" who is prepared to torture others by putting glass into their arms?? For instance?
Actually, one of the weird things about Miller's magnum opus; one of my "quibbles" concerning it which I wanted to discuss (but only if we have enough people on here who have read the comic, like Mark Stokes)... is that, for a lot of the time, you can't really SEE what Miller's Batman is doing... but a lot of what is negative is "implied", and much of it seems to have happened "off-screen"... for example, Bats totes a machine gun, but I can't remember seeing him actually shoot a man down with it, though I believe he does... I think that a LOT of this vagueness and "artsi-fartsiness" is actually caused by the TENSION between the rules of comic books (superheroes don't kill - REMEMBER??) and the "new rules" of "action movies", Schwarzenegger and so on, when it doesn't matter how many bodies the hero cuts down, the more, the merrier... REALLY I think that the editors such as Dennis O'Neil should have taken a breath here and said to the writers: OK, comics aren't Schwarzenegger movies and superheroes aren't Rambo... THAT MEANS, FRANK: that not only do I not want you and your acolytes graphically portraying that type of action (so as to frighten the "censors"), I don't want you "suggesting" it, either: I want a better kind of ethos! "Adult comic" does not mean an artsified version of a shootemup movie!
But being a coward, he didn't.
So, comics fanboys, what happens to Two-Face in the end, in this "masterpiece"? I believe that Batman in fact throws him off that building... or he "slips"... but it IS in fact never really shown!
How PRECISELY does the Joker die... I USED to think, as your summarizer at the above link thought, that the Batman actually, gruesomely, twisted his spine vertically, to break it, and that the Joker finally finished himself off by moving his neck around (obviously, he didn't want to be paralysed!)
But, a couple of months ago, when I came to re-read that vile thing, I found that I couldn't find the *actual panel*, where the Batman picks him up and actually does it... there are a few where he actually TALKS a good game, such as: "I've always known, Joker, that the only thing you ever needed was my two hands", or something like that.. I forget the original phrase... but anyway, the original does have plenty of opportunity for double entendre and mockery, which the Joker COULD very easily take advantage of (I know I would!) but Frank, not being a witty man, fails to, you see. He just doesn't have the dialogue skills, to endow his Joker with "sass". Therefore the very climax of the comic... falls flat! I'd accept a slaying of the Joker if he went down fighting and objecting (and making the Batman feel inadequate!) all the way... as with Milton's fine Satan!
Yeah, Bats here makes plenty of threats to his arch-adversary... but actually, on that re-reading, it looked more like the Joker fell off something and broke his spine!! Maybe the Batman pushed him, again!! (Miller's Batman, you are a coward.)
You see, you can't see what's going on in most of these panels: I kid you not, unsuspecting reader!! Miller just DOES NOT MAKE IT CLEAR; and for that, for my money, technically he's a very bad writer. And this he has in common with several other modern Bat-writers, namely, for one, Grant Morrison.
None of them can write fiction, you know!! Loads of their stories are full of the most MASSIVE plot holes and non-sequiturs.
And then when Miller carries on with his screeds and pages upon pages of verbal-less, dialogueless, speech-and-thought-bubble-less "fiction", you lot praise him as being a "great visual storyteller"!
My bum! He just can't think of the dialogue, or the thought bubbles! Or of a good narrative box...
The ONLY scene where this actually works (which I believe was the one in fact nabbed by a certain Mr Schumacher and screenwriters) is, possibly, in the "flashback" where Bruce falls into a cave as a child, and he crawls along for ages... and encounters... the "Bat demon!"
Yeah, like there are actually any giant bats living in caves in the north-eastern United States! Was what I thought upon reading it first. (I was determined to hold them to scientific possibility, you see, for Batman always had sort of a science basis!)
But then... quite a lot later...I began to see it had... possibilities. (One of Miller's very few scenes that does!)
After all, that could very well have been a dream sequence... young Bruce could have been stunned from the fall... he could have been hallucinating... so that all ties in nicely to what some of us may think about "shamanism".
But Frank Miller doesn't really KNOW about that sort of thing anyway: because "Ayn Randists" don't.
And you can't make the whole of a comic a "dream sequence"; that is to say, non-linear, confusing, and full of plot holes!!
Because that is what it then becomes... a BLACK HOLE of annoying writing and worse ideology!
7:58 AM socialist liz said...
Wot, no more for any more.... sigh.
Well. I suppose that without further stimulation, I must soon talk myself dry... which is probably what Maurice wants!
Ah! Before anything else is said, though, I must thank him for coming through on his promise to review this by-now vintage title for this site, so that *I* can have a chance to get at it in public! (On such a heavily-visited and search-engined website!) At last! (And hopefully my grumblings WILL, likewise, be seized upon by some sort of searchbot and archived for all eternity - I dearly want my objections to "DKR" to be so, whereas I don't care if it picks up that I said that Frank Miller, with his unhealthy "Batman and Robin" comic has paedophile obsessions...he undoubtedly has some very unhealthy ideas about sex, that man, but that's not the chief reason I dislike him! It's political - and artistic objections, that drive me contra him.)
Maurice provides me with a nice little pulpit, every now and again.
Because, you see... this was ALL very frustrating for me.. because in the mid-to-late-Eighties, when all these comics first came out, in the "new style"... there was absolutely nowhere you could go, nowhere someone like me could go, to discuss these "developments". There just weren't any fora for comic book fans - or foes! And the comic books themselves never seemed to publish letters from foreign readers. In Britain, comic books weren't taken very seriously by most people anyway... I still doubt whether they are now... it's a good question! It's always been a sort of "cult" interest, anyway: any comic book character has; including TV tie-ins like Buffy. Or Alien. Or whatever. All sci fi is cult.
During the early 90s, when both my research into old comics and my ire with the new were reaching a peak... there were likewise VERY few outlets for this sort of interest, positive or negative. [I managed to get an 800-word letter-cum-article published in a British comics trade magazine ONCE. In 1993. Actually, I've found part of that now on the Internet, believe it or not - but only a snippet!] There was no internet then - no proper internet: the WWW only started in, I think it was, '93... and definitely no "blogs" or anything like that, till a good few years after that. Pity. I would have enjoyed a chance for a good blog, in my mid-twenties! I would have made one with a new entry for every bad comic I ever read... Now I just don't have that sustained kind of energy.
But still my dislike of Frank Miller and cohorts smoulders... I think one of the most annoying things is, that BECAUSE they are comics, not movies, or anything like that, they are never discussed seriously and thoroughly by TV, newspapers etc; therefore pre the blogs and easy internet access for the likes of me, a public discussion of the subject, or even listening to one, was simply impossible. [There could have been one on British radio, eg Radio 4, but I never caught one! I honestly think that hardly anyone was interested in seriously disussing the subject!] Without public access like this, many of the subjects which oppress so many of us out here simply get ignored and are impossible to discuss, period. Pre the internet, so many of us never mind could not compete with the vomitings of the mass media, it was so seldom that we could even get a voice "out there", never mind even "heard"! (I'm sure that a lot of Christians as well as those of minority political parties have had this experience.)
So, thank you, Internet! Thank you, HJ!
Movies for some reason, though they are a relatively new form, ever since about the 1930s have been taken "seriously"... and comics, never, and that applies to the opinions of socialist websites too... go figure!
So this is the basic breakdown of the situation:
1) Comics are only taken seriously by a) their fans b) a very thin layer of "trendy media" type people. This was the case in the 80s, and is still more-or-less the case today... I think there is more pressure now, on the mainstream media, to regard comics as serious, since they have become such a "salmon farm" for movies, as one critic for an important web publication put it. [Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com] But I still don't think that a lot of more senior critics are biting. I'm not surprised guys... they're still not worth it, by and large!
2) I think they are, however, worth serious sociological discussion, and this is only ever done in the very occasional book, of media analysis, whatever. One title like this I found useful for this purpose was "The Many Lives of the Batman", by Pearson and Uricchio... though it didn't go back as far as the original comics, for some unaccountable reason... AND it was "censored" by the folks at DC... it was quite a positive book on the whole, but *because* the editors decided to conclude it with an essay of their own, mildly sceptical in tone, which contained some Marxist terms and analysis... the DC/Warner stuffed shirts wouldn't let them use any of the Batman pictures, from comics or the movie, as illustrations or even on the cover... so they had to give it a really bland cover! (I'm sure they could fight it now, under the "fair use" legislation, like wikipedia does.. but I daresay in the early 90s they couldn't be bothered.) They explained why inside. I NOTICE things like that; and I resent the DC people for them! If EVER you think that there is free speech in your country... well... DESPITE the First Amendment provision... just look at things like that! That is a bye the bye, but I found it very telling. If something has the word "Marx" anywhere on it, DC wants to censor it... DC, you should be ashamed of yourselves for all time, you and whoever was responsible for that decision then. They deserve to go to the pagan hell for all liars and oath-breakers, and generally hypocritical people.
Conclusion: Comics have a lot more SOCIAL significance than people think that they do. They also point up certain.... ideological fashions. They certainly have bags of influence on other fiction media, which is why *I* believe they deserve to be seriously studied.
But - do they make good reading material? No, most of the modern ones don't, in fact. IMO. Why? Because they are too pretentious.
The older "pulp" was far better in terms of entertainment, and for several other reasons, primarily ideological ones.
The "new school" in comics has really made out of the entire modern medium one gigantic missed opportunity. One, to produce something populist - it has strived instead for "artiness" and arrived more often than not at pretension. Two, to continue the ideals of comicdom's past, but to in addition, take a leaf from the "underground" comics of the 1960s (which are still published today) in which stock characters such as superheroes, etc, are used as witty political commentary and left-wing satire.
Modern "mainstream" comics have veered much too far to the political right. (Not for populist reasons; hardly anybody shares those values, which is why comics today are such a fringe medium, and only trumpet the twisted views of a few twisted people like F.M.)
Them's the facts, gentle readers - and don't I know 'em!
8:26 AM
Any more, for any more?
Other contributors solicited...
5:51 AM Sunshine2316 said...
Sure, I'll contribute. I thought the reivew was fascinating. I'm a big fan of Maurice's work and this review made me want to go read the comic. I also hear Frank Miller is a wonderful writer and that his story-telling, while violent, is great. Thanks Maurice!
2:57 PM Liz said...
Er, yeah... well no-one is saying that Maurice is a bad REVIEWER!!
Yeah. Sunshine, I believe you are a girl, same gender as me. I honestly do believe that there is very little in Frank Miller's work to interest female readers. He does not write for our benefit; he is largely interested in promoting his vision of (rather old and tired, but with disturbing and nihilistic "modern" elements) "machoness"... his ideas according to the socialist description would be "backward". According to the feminist take on it... he is just stale, a dead end. And I hardly dare imagine what the GLBT (if you know what that signifies!) camp think of him... again not a lot, I'd think.
He is just against all progressive movements. His idea of Batman/Bruce Wayne finally abandoning the city he loves, Gotham, and going with a few of his friends old and new to camp out in the woods, militia-style, proves it! (It's rather like what Heinrich Himmler believed: ie that cities/civilization were the home of Jews and corruption! Funnily enough, a lot of the negative (if not "villainous") characters in this GN are Jewish, too... Miller's Batman punches a female police chief named "Yindel" in the face! (So: Anti-feminist, anti-semitic... I don't know why the CEO of DC Comics, a certain Ms. Kahn, was stupid enough to publish this!) Other Jews are portrayed as dupes or hopeless liberals. Should have made the company think again, but it didn't... well I have no good opinion of US popular culture on the whole these days!
Plus - Miller's Batman in NO WAY is sexy! Quite the opposite: he's very unattractive both physically and personality-wise.
So what is the point of him?
This, by the way, is why a Hollywood film based on that GN was NEVER made... the offensiveness to various groups, plus the unsexiness.
And never will be made!
6:53 AM socialist liz said...
Yeah, I think it's time for me to come out... "liz" and "socialist" are the same person, OK? I'm still using my "given" name over at Kevin's blog...
But yeah, sure, HJers: My name is Liz and I am a socialist... Not an American one, though I do assure you, there are more of that persuasion in the US, than your media will admit!
What I'm really waiting for, is, hopefully, someone who can see things a little bit from my point of view regarding the above work (however much they like Maurice's reviews in general.)
What we really need, is for someone who has read "Dark Knight Returns", either when it first came out, or more recently... and who can see problems in it, as a Christian reader.
I have criticised it from both a socialist and a "minority group" perspective, pointed out some of its flaws from that regard: what I would like is for a Christian reviewer... probably one of the others on this site... Elizabeth Leitch? Mr Furches? Anybody? to come forward and say: Actually, for me, I had problems with...
Because I think that would fairly illustrate the problems, as it were!
I have always said that it is my belief that it is nigh-on impossible, maybe counter-productive, to try and "read" Christian messages, into *not only secular authors*, that will work, but rather into ones with a generally anti-Christian (and anti-human?) agenda!
I don't think that really works very well!
Anyway. And I still think I was right to push the Miller's Batman/Mussolini comparison, and to demand on a Christian site an answer to the question: well, if none of us (as Christians or whatever - all good-thinking people!) would be expected to admire such people in politics...
...how come they are allowable nowadays as comic book heroes? (Hey, how about a "Saddam Hussein" Batman?)
(Actually, I think Hollywood, though it more-or-less accepted the "amoral Batman" idea for its first two Batman adaptations, has moved away more and more from that... and actually did quite an about face with "Batman Begins", however they tried to promote it as a return to the Burton ethos, it wasn't: quite the opposite! That was quite a liberal movie. Po-faced, serious, not very entertaining: but liberal. Quite sincere, in my view. But sadly not utopian!)
7:12 AM socialist liz said...
And I'm sure Maurice wouldn't admire a "Fidel Castro" Batman either... I'm sure he'd have something to say about a red-style dictator hero!
SO Maurice... why no comment on a "hero" who is prepared to torture others by putting glass into their arms?? For instance?
Actually, one of the weird things about Miller's magnum opus; one of my "quibbles" concerning it which I wanted to discuss (but only if we have enough people on here who have read the comic, like Mark Stokes)... is that, for a lot of the time, you can't really SEE what Miller's Batman is doing... but a lot of what is negative is "implied", and much of it seems to have happened "off-screen"... for example, Bats totes a machine gun, but I can't remember seeing him actually shoot a man down with it, though I believe he does... I think that a LOT of this vagueness and "artsi-fartsiness" is actually caused by the TENSION between the rules of comic books (superheroes don't kill - REMEMBER??) and the "new rules" of "action movies", Schwarzenegger and so on, when it doesn't matter how many bodies the hero cuts down, the more, the merrier... REALLY I think that the editors such as Dennis O'Neil should have taken a breath here and said to the writers: OK, comics aren't Schwarzenegger movies and superheroes aren't Rambo... THAT MEANS, FRANK: that not only do I not want you and your acolytes graphically portraying that type of action (so as to frighten the "censors"), I don't want you "suggesting" it, either: I want a better kind of ethos! "Adult comic" does not mean an artsified version of a shootemup movie!
But being a coward, he didn't.
So, comics fanboys, what happens to Two-Face in the end, in this "masterpiece"? I believe that Batman in fact throws him off that building... or he "slips"... but it IS in fact never really shown!
How PRECISELY does the Joker die... I USED to think, as your summarizer at the above link thought, that the Batman actually, gruesomely, twisted his spine vertically, to break it, and that the Joker finally finished himself off by moving his neck around (obviously, he didn't want to be paralysed!)
But, a couple of months ago, when I came to re-read that vile thing, I found that I couldn't find the *actual panel*, where the Batman picks him up and actually does it... there are a few where he actually TALKS a good game, such as: "I've always known, Joker, that the only thing you ever needed was my two hands", or something like that.. I forget the original phrase... but anyway, the original does have plenty of opportunity for double entendre and mockery, which the Joker COULD very easily take advantage of (I know I would!) but Frank, not being a witty man, fails to, you see. He just doesn't have the dialogue skills, to endow his Joker with "sass". Therefore the very climax of the comic... falls flat! I'd accept a slaying of the Joker if he went down fighting and objecting (and making the Batman feel inadequate!) all the way... as with Milton's fine Satan!
Yeah, Bats here makes plenty of threats to his arch-adversary... but actually, on that re-reading, it looked more like the Joker fell off something and broke his spine!! Maybe the Batman pushed him, again!! (Miller's Batman, you are a coward.)
You see, you can't see what's going on in most of these panels: I kid you not, unsuspecting reader!! Miller just DOES NOT MAKE IT CLEAR; and for that, for my money, technically he's a very bad writer. And this he has in common with several other modern Bat-writers, namely, for one, Grant Morrison.
None of them can write fiction, you know!! Loads of their stories are full of the most MASSIVE plot holes and non-sequiturs.
And then when Miller carries on with his screeds and pages upon pages of verbal-less, dialogueless, speech-and-thought-bubble-less "fiction", you lot praise him as being a "great visual storyteller"!
My bum! He just can't think of the dialogue, or the thought bubbles! Or of a good narrative box...
The ONLY scene where this actually works (which I believe was the one in fact nabbed by a certain Mr Schumacher and screenwriters) is, possibly, in the "flashback" where Bruce falls into a cave as a child, and he crawls along for ages... and encounters... the "Bat demon!"
Yeah, like there are actually any giant bats living in caves in the north-eastern United States! Was what I thought upon reading it first. (I was determined to hold them to scientific possibility, you see, for Batman always had sort of a science basis!)
But then... quite a lot later...I began to see it had... possibilities. (One of Miller's very few scenes that does!)
After all, that could very well have been a dream sequence... young Bruce could have been stunned from the fall... he could have been hallucinating... so that all ties in nicely to what some of us may think about "shamanism".
But Frank Miller doesn't really KNOW about that sort of thing anyway: because "Ayn Randists" don't.
And you can't make the whole of a comic a "dream sequence"; that is to say, non-linear, confusing, and full of plot holes!!
Because that is what it then becomes... a BLACK HOLE of annoying writing and worse ideology!
7:58 AM socialist liz said...
Wot, no more for any more.... sigh.
Well. I suppose that without further stimulation, I must soon talk myself dry... which is probably what Maurice wants!
Ah! Before anything else is said, though, I must thank him for coming through on his promise to review this by-now vintage title for this site, so that *I* can have a chance to get at it in public! (On such a heavily-visited and search-engined website!) At last! (And hopefully my grumblings WILL, likewise, be seized upon by some sort of searchbot and archived for all eternity - I dearly want my objections to "DKR" to be so, whereas I don't care if it picks up that I said that Frank Miller, with his unhealthy "Batman and Robin" comic has paedophile obsessions...he undoubtedly has some very unhealthy ideas about sex, that man, but that's not the chief reason I dislike him! It's political - and artistic objections, that drive me contra him.)
Maurice provides me with a nice little pulpit, every now and again.
Because, you see... this was ALL very frustrating for me.. because in the mid-to-late-Eighties, when all these comics first came out, in the "new style"... there was absolutely nowhere you could go, nowhere someone like me could go, to discuss these "developments". There just weren't any fora for comic book fans - or foes! And the comic books themselves never seemed to publish letters from foreign readers. In Britain, comic books weren't taken very seriously by most people anyway... I still doubt whether they are now... it's a good question! It's always been a sort of "cult" interest, anyway: any comic book character has; including TV tie-ins like Buffy. Or Alien. Or whatever. All sci fi is cult.
During the early 90s, when both my research into old comics and my ire with the new were reaching a peak... there were likewise VERY few outlets for this sort of interest, positive or negative. [I managed to get an 800-word letter-cum-article published in a British comics trade magazine ONCE. In 1993. Actually, I've found part of that now on the Internet, believe it or not - but only a snippet!] There was no internet then - no proper internet: the WWW only started in, I think it was, '93... and definitely no "blogs" or anything like that, till a good few years after that. Pity. I would have enjoyed a chance for a good blog, in my mid-twenties! I would have made one with a new entry for every bad comic I ever read... Now I just don't have that sustained kind of energy.
But still my dislike of Frank Miller and cohorts smoulders... I think one of the most annoying things is, that BECAUSE they are comics, not movies, or anything like that, they are never discussed seriously and thoroughly by TV, newspapers etc; therefore pre the blogs and easy internet access for the likes of me, a public discussion of the subject, or even listening to one, was simply impossible. [There could have been one on British radio, eg Radio 4, but I never caught one! I honestly think that hardly anyone was interested in seriously disussing the subject!] Without public access like this, many of the subjects which oppress so many of us out here simply get ignored and are impossible to discuss, period. Pre the internet, so many of us never mind could not compete with the vomitings of the mass media, it was so seldom that we could even get a voice "out there", never mind even "heard"! (I'm sure that a lot of Christians as well as those of minority political parties have had this experience.)
So, thank you, Internet! Thank you, HJ!
Movies for some reason, though they are a relatively new form, ever since about the 1930s have been taken "seriously"... and comics, never, and that applies to the opinions of socialist websites too... go figure!
So this is the basic breakdown of the situation:
1) Comics are only taken seriously by a) their fans b) a very thin layer of "trendy media" type people. This was the case in the 80s, and is still more-or-less the case today... I think there is more pressure now, on the mainstream media, to regard comics as serious, since they have become such a "salmon farm" for movies, as one critic for an important web publication put it. [Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com] But I still don't think that a lot of more senior critics are biting. I'm not surprised guys... they're still not worth it, by and large!
2) I think they are, however, worth serious sociological discussion, and this is only ever done in the very occasional book, of media analysis, whatever. One title like this I found useful for this purpose was "The Many Lives of the Batman", by Pearson and Uricchio... though it didn't go back as far as the original comics, for some unaccountable reason... AND it was "censored" by the folks at DC... it was quite a positive book on the whole, but *because* the editors decided to conclude it with an essay of their own, mildly sceptical in tone, which contained some Marxist terms and analysis... the DC/Warner stuffed shirts wouldn't let them use any of the Batman pictures, from comics or the movie, as illustrations or even on the cover... so they had to give it a really bland cover! (I'm sure they could fight it now, under the "fair use" legislation, like wikipedia does.. but I daresay in the early 90s they couldn't be bothered.) They explained why inside. I NOTICE things like that; and I resent the DC people for them! If EVER you think that there is free speech in your country... well... DESPITE the First Amendment provision... just look at things like that! That is a bye the bye, but I found it very telling. If something has the word "Marx" anywhere on it, DC wants to censor it... DC, you should be ashamed of yourselves for all time, you and whoever was responsible for that decision then. They deserve to go to the pagan hell for all liars and oath-breakers, and generally hypocritical people.
Conclusion: Comics have a lot more SOCIAL significance than people think that they do. They also point up certain.... ideological fashions. They certainly have bags of influence on other fiction media, which is why *I* believe they deserve to be seriously studied.
But - do they make good reading material? No, most of the modern ones don't, in fact. IMO. Why? Because they are too pretentious.
The older "pulp" was far better in terms of entertainment, and for several other reasons, primarily ideological ones.
The "new school" in comics has really made out of the entire modern medium one gigantic missed opportunity. One, to produce something populist - it has strived instead for "artiness" and arrived more often than not at pretension. Two, to continue the ideals of comicdom's past, but to in addition, take a leaf from the "underground" comics of the 1960s (which are still published today) in which stock characters such as superheroes, etc, are used as witty political commentary and left-wing satire.
Modern "mainstream" comics have veered much too far to the political right. (Not for populist reasons; hardly anybody shares those values, which is why comics today are such a fringe medium, and only trumpet the twisted views of a few twisted people like F.M.)
Them's the facts, gentle readers - and don't I know 'em!
8:26 AM