Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns", review discussions continued further
one.
11:38 AM
Maurice Broaddus said...
i remove posts that are too long. i'm interested in converasations, not manifestos.
12:32 PM socialist liz said...
1) You and your pals tend to remove things at whim.
2) For "conversations", we need "conversees". We need a bunch of people having a discussion. (For some reason, this is ALWAYS easier on message boards than on blogs - you should see imdb.com! But then again, there are some bigger idiots on there, than I have ever met on HJ. (One for example was a man who said he liked Jello Biafra, yet was a supporter of a) Bush b) Bush's war c) Joe McCarthy!))
Neah, you're all right. (All you on here.) But maybe Christian means "vicar's sewing circle", because I have noticed a reluctance (overpolite?) to get into debate - proper debate, with people taking different positions.... you must have done it at school!
Come on people, join in! If you don't like what I say, knock it down! With words.
3) In order to get beyond shallowness (which I notice you seem to have a problem with on your own board, Maurice: never with the things you write personally, but with the level of debate you "allow")... there has to be a level of discussion and repartee that gets more deeply into things than little 2 or 3-line repartees will allow. (I'll let you off, since you write the reviews at the top of the whole thing, and they are generally quite long, considered, etc.)
Kevin, someone, help me out!!!!
(Oh. And I don't see why it's such a "manifesto", to for example, point out the anti-feminist and anti-gay leanings and messages of Frank Miller... and so it's not a "manifesto" to write a review comparing Miller's Batman to Jesus Christ?)
Hmm.
3:29 PM socialist liz said... However, ironically, the Joker was still playing the “old game” by the “old rules”, a villain out of step with the times; almost more interested in wanting to re-live old times than anything else.
Yeah - Mr J, for all his destructive ways, is, like me, a traditionalist!! (And we're proud of it! Even if it means being "out of step!")
Anyway, who MADE the "new rules" - and why should Mr J take them on board?? He probably had a hard enough time the first time around, finding a set of criminal rules he liked - but obviously he did!! So... once you feel comfortable, why change?? Just because some idiot thinks you should kill a few more people unaccountably?
What's not broke, don't fix. What is - destroy!
Of COURSE he wants to play "the old game by the old rules", Maurice. Game-playing is ever his delight. And there is only one reason Joker can't do it here: it is BECAUSE Frank Miller suggests (because obviously he has already cooked up the idea, alone or along with pals of his SUCH AS Alan Moore and Jim Starlin) that the Joker had, *previous to the action of DKR*, it was only vaguely hinted at then - *done something so terrible and personal to the Batman that it can no longer be forgiven by him*, ie "and now it's personal"... as the movies in the 80s used to say!! Only this is only HINTED at in Frank Miller's work, in a very kind of... I don't know, it lacks honesty anyway. And transparency. I mean, if he had WANTED to say that "The Joker has gotten worse and transformed from Trickster villain into an utter cross between Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter"... he should have said so! But he never does in the novel; he makes out almost as if the Joker had always been like that in the old comics. Which is a lie; so it is NOT "sticking to the essence of the original" at all. CON-ic, I have always said, rather than com-ic!! That's what I think of practically all modern comics. I hate 'em. (Most of the Batman ones.)
Anyway: we could SEE that something had gone wrong, because of the absence of certain key characters, and the hints at the "fate" of Jason Todd, Robin no. 2. This was all borne out within a couple of years by a couple of revolting works by the aforementioned Moore and Starlin, one crippling off Barbara Gordon, the next - following right on its heels - gruesomely killing Jason. And yet they made out that the latter occurrence, in particular, was due to other reasons ("the readers not liking the character", etc), and that in the end it was they that had the "final decision", when how COULD it have been if their new Venerable Bede, Frank Miller, had already laid down the sticky end of Jason as gospel truth?! Setup!
Readers' polls my ass!! Hey Yanks.. ha ha ha... I can think of other elections which have been rigged! (OH HOW THE JOKER WOULD LAUGH AT THAT PARALLEL!)
DC management are not to be trusted. They are evil. Their "top" writers are corrupt and hypocritical. And you're all hacks really, guys. I hate you. (Ihatefrankmiller.com would be a more likely website title for me!!)
The fact IS, that the Joker truly has a lot more common SENSE than that which Frank suggests. He would never do anything that would ensure his demise at the Batman's hands. He just gets a kick out of annoying the guy... now you know why we are so close, Maurice!! OH yes!
Really J'd like to annoy the tights off the Batman until they are both so old and grey that they can no longer move out of their wheelchairs.
THAT is the Joker's idea of bliss.
And it's the fact that the modern writers really don't know the villains that causes the artistic failure of most of what they write.
I should know! I'm a villain, too. (That for these purposes means someone who is out of step with the current society and actually rejects so many of its - ahem - "values".)
In these “end times”, superheroes were essentially outlawed, not permitted to operate without license. License that Superman has and Batman does not.
The above paragraph by you points up what, now that I come to think of it, possibly the only "pertinent" element in the entire book - ie, it contains no real social criticism (it seems to be, as I have remarked, mostly a tirade against women, transsexuals, greenhaired gays, and youth "punk" gangs!)
BUT - what I was going to say - is that it points out that in a "modern" or "post-post-modern" or WTF society you want to call it like us - a highly technological one anyway - everything has become so tightly controlled that *any* individualism, even "volunteerism" (in the old liberal sense - always told you original superheroes were better described as liberals than "vigilantes"!) is tightly controlled or proscribed... Miller says that Superman would be allowed to continue because he "agrees to play by the rules" (Ah, but WOULD he?? If he decided, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT THE AMERICAN GOVT. HAD BECOME FASCIST?!?! *I'd like to see a story exploring that!* I don't think any benevolent alien would team up with a government like THAT.) And, equally, in the modern world, Batman, because he is more the individualist (true, TRUE, I think... never let me say that Frank Miller hits *nothing* on the head melads, he *did* pinpoint the sexuality of the Joker accurately (except for the killing as sex bit IMO!) at a time when no-one before had OVERTLY gone into it, in a story!)
Batman as the individualist is denied his superhero "license".
Well I wouldn't put that past the current Bush government, certainly. Their FEMA wouldn't even let volunteer helpers or the Red Cross go inside the Katrina disaster zone to help. The US govt. is a collection of pompous evil bureaucrats, now more than ever - and the time they get kicked out - en masse - will be the time to rejoice.
So ol' Millerboy isn't 100% off in everything. But still... the answer to all these problems isn't to go off doing survivalism in the woods, is it?? (A typical 80s fallacy!) I think he's been reading too many tracts by, er-hem, Kurt Saxon, and the usual "Aryan" suspects...
As a socialist I can however only describe Frank Miller's ideology, if he has one, as "politically confused". 1:16 AM socialist liz said...
Just a couple of extra remarks, while we still wait for Kevin to join the discussion... I'm sure that he will be along SOMETIME.
1) I've always thought that Batman, being so rich - if he found himself in utter disagreement with the political climate of the day, (its venality especially, no doubt) he could use his fabulous wealth to fight it, and to set it off kilter, certainly. Like a sort of billionaire philanthropist, which he is. George Soros. Ralph Nader. (Though I think the latter is only a millionaire, I have seen Batman compared to Nader before now - or was it the other way?)
That would be better than faking your own death and running away from civilization, eh, though, Maurice??
"Be ye wise as doves and cunning as serpents". That's always been one of my favourite Bible verses!!
These characters are symbols, certainly. The secret to all magic is in using the symbols to good effect and CORRECTLY.
Mmm. And I don't think that the problem - then (80s) as now, was "social AND governmental IMPOTENCE"... I'll tell you what it's more like: Governmental and bureaucratic OVER-potence, to the ever-increasing extent of living in a state that approaches ever closer to "corporatism" or fascism (just go over to the site www.worldtraveler.com and have a browse around, it contains many digests of works by serious political authors: and you will see that many of these, including of course, Noam Chomsky, have been forecasting this situation for many years!!)... and the impotence of the "organised resistance", most of which is still pleased to call itself "the left" or "the liberals".
Liberalism as a political force in America is practically DEAD; *that* is the problem for old-time comics, which were as I keep on saying, FOUNDED on this doctrine. I shall have to prove it in my book since no idiot critic has to my knowledge said it: I seem to be the only person perceptive enough to cut through to the chase!
Well - at least it's pretty dead among the UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS; its former supporters among the elite. (The Democratic leadership, then.) I wouldn't say the same about the "grass-roots". Oh, and Hollywood seems to have been finally waking up to political movies...)
2) =I'd like to know something, Mr Maurice Broaddus!= I'm asking you - not because it's happened on this blog page, but on previous occasions - whenever I've said something like "well perhaps we should take a few steps back in comics" (or whatever) "to the ideals of the past when they seemed to have more [idealism]"... you've always reacted violently to that! "We can't go back", you've fulminated - (almost like I'm advocating a return to the days of US slavery or immediate post-slavery, for example! Well, obviously I'm not and neither are most people, but they still think that Abraham Lincoln's ideas were worth a million of George Bush's - know what I mean??)
There are obviously things in previous (popular) culture we can learn from, no?? I'm not talking about "nostalgia", I'm not talking about "tribute bands" or "70s nights". I'm talking about seeing where our culture has gone wrong, and - maybe - picking up some strands again from an earlier iteration of it (SAY THE 60S, SAY!!) before it all started to go so WRONG...
Because obviously it HAS gone wrong. Not even Frank Miller approved of it in the 80s (though I think that it is a safe bet to say that the older that man gets, the more conventionally right-wing he gets, and after "9/11" he seemed to be right in with the Bush camp, no question.)
Anyway: cultures can decline, as well as improve. (I don't know whether you believe in "progress"?? People used to, that's all I know!)
And if one refuses to face up to facts, then a) culture could either slide back to the Stone Age... not quite what we neo-pagans have in mind I can tell you! (Anyway "a simpler life" is impossible without VAST population die-off.)
Or b) we could enter into a new period of barbarism: a New Roman Empire or quasi-Nazi period. (That means the RETURN of racism, OK?? Read Joanne Rowling's books - I think they are VERY prophetic in this regard - they contain all sorts of VEILED references to racism and analogies with fascism!!)
So I *really* don't think that without a concerted effort to examine and critique and weed out our current culture, there is much hope for humanity - well, the West - at all.
That means you can't just do the comfortable bourgeois thing and make like an ostrich. And it also means you must find some way in which to... deal with my questions which say things to the effect like: "well, why not go back to some thoughts which they had in the not-so-distant past??"
Why NOT?? I've always HATED growing up in the 80s and 90s. Absolutely loathed it. It ensured me a miserable life: I can tell you that!
Tagline: Loki was the first arsonist!!
1:53 AM
i remove posts that are too long. i'm interested in converasations, not manifestos.
12:32 PM socialist liz said...
1) You and your pals tend to remove things at whim.
2) For "conversations", we need "conversees". We need a bunch of people having a discussion. (For some reason, this is ALWAYS easier on message boards than on blogs - you should see imdb.com! But then again, there are some bigger idiots on there, than I have ever met on HJ. (One for example was a man who said he liked Jello Biafra, yet was a supporter of a) Bush b) Bush's war c) Joe McCarthy!))
Neah, you're all right. (All you on here.) But maybe Christian means "vicar's sewing circle", because I have noticed a reluctance (overpolite?) to get into debate - proper debate, with people taking different positions.... you must have done it at school!
Come on people, join in! If you don't like what I say, knock it down! With words.
3) In order to get beyond shallowness (which I notice you seem to have a problem with on your own board, Maurice: never with the things you write personally, but with the level of debate you "allow")... there has to be a level of discussion and repartee that gets more deeply into things than little 2 or 3-line repartees will allow. (I'll let you off, since you write the reviews at the top of the whole thing, and they are generally quite long, considered, etc.)
Kevin, someone, help me out!!!!
(Oh. And I don't see why it's such a "manifesto", to for example, point out the anti-feminist and anti-gay leanings and messages of Frank Miller... and so it's not a "manifesto" to write a review comparing Miller's Batman to Jesus Christ?)
Hmm.
3:29 PM socialist liz said... However, ironically, the Joker was still playing the “old game” by the “old rules”, a villain out of step with the times; almost more interested in wanting to re-live old times than anything else.
Yeah - Mr J, for all his destructive ways, is, like me, a traditionalist!! (And we're proud of it! Even if it means being "out of step!")
Anyway, who MADE the "new rules" - and why should Mr J take them on board?? He probably had a hard enough time the first time around, finding a set of criminal rules he liked - but obviously he did!! So... once you feel comfortable, why change?? Just because some idiot thinks you should kill a few more people unaccountably?
What's not broke, don't fix. What is - destroy!
Of COURSE he wants to play "the old game by the old rules", Maurice. Game-playing is ever his delight. And there is only one reason Joker can't do it here: it is BECAUSE Frank Miller suggests (because obviously he has already cooked up the idea, alone or along with pals of his SUCH AS Alan Moore and Jim Starlin) that the Joker had, *previous to the action of DKR*, it was only vaguely hinted at then - *done something so terrible and personal to the Batman that it can no longer be forgiven by him*, ie "and now it's personal"... as the movies in the 80s used to say!! Only this is only HINTED at in Frank Miller's work, in a very kind of... I don't know, it lacks honesty anyway. And transparency. I mean, if he had WANTED to say that "The Joker has gotten worse and transformed from Trickster villain into an utter cross between Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter"... he should have said so! But he never does in the novel; he makes out almost as if the Joker had always been like that in the old comics. Which is a lie; so it is NOT "sticking to the essence of the original" at all. CON-ic, I have always said, rather than com-ic!! That's what I think of practically all modern comics. I hate 'em. (Most of the Batman ones.)
Anyway: we could SEE that something had gone wrong, because of the absence of certain key characters, and the hints at the "fate" of Jason Todd, Robin no. 2. This was all borne out within a couple of years by a couple of revolting works by the aforementioned Moore and Starlin, one crippling off Barbara Gordon, the next - following right on its heels - gruesomely killing Jason. And yet they made out that the latter occurrence, in particular, was due to other reasons ("the readers not liking the character", etc), and that in the end it was they that had the "final decision", when how COULD it have been if their new Venerable Bede, Frank Miller, had already laid down the sticky end of Jason as gospel truth?! Setup!
Readers' polls my ass!! Hey Yanks.. ha ha ha... I can think of other elections which have been rigged! (OH HOW THE JOKER WOULD LAUGH AT THAT PARALLEL!)
DC management are not to be trusted. They are evil. Their "top" writers are corrupt and hypocritical. And you're all hacks really, guys. I hate you. (Ihatefrankmiller.com would be a more likely website title for me!!)
The fact IS, that the Joker truly has a lot more common SENSE than that which Frank suggests. He would never do anything that would ensure his demise at the Batman's hands. He just gets a kick out of annoying the guy... now you know why we are so close, Maurice!! OH yes!
Really J'd like to annoy the tights off the Batman until they are both so old and grey that they can no longer move out of their wheelchairs.
THAT is the Joker's idea of bliss.
And it's the fact that the modern writers really don't know the villains that causes the artistic failure of most of what they write.
I should know! I'm a villain, too. (That for these purposes means someone who is out of step with the current society and actually rejects so many of its - ahem - "values".)
In these “end times”, superheroes were essentially outlawed, not permitted to operate without license. License that Superman has and Batman does not.
The above paragraph by you points up what, now that I come to think of it, possibly the only "pertinent" element in the entire book - ie, it contains no real social criticism (it seems to be, as I have remarked, mostly a tirade against women, transsexuals, greenhaired gays, and youth "punk" gangs!)
BUT - what I was going to say - is that it points out that in a "modern" or "post-post-modern" or WTF society you want to call it like us - a highly technological one anyway - everything has become so tightly controlled that *any* individualism, even "volunteerism" (in the old liberal sense - always told you original superheroes were better described as liberals than "vigilantes"!) is tightly controlled or proscribed... Miller says that Superman would be allowed to continue because he "agrees to play by the rules" (Ah, but WOULD he?? If he decided, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT THE AMERICAN GOVT. HAD BECOME FASCIST?!?! *I'd like to see a story exploring that!* I don't think any benevolent alien would team up with a government like THAT.) And, equally, in the modern world, Batman, because he is more the individualist (true, TRUE, I think... never let me say that Frank Miller hits *nothing* on the head melads, he *did* pinpoint the sexuality of the Joker accurately (except for the killing as sex bit IMO!) at a time when no-one before had OVERTLY gone into it, in a story!)
Batman as the individualist is denied his superhero "license".
Well I wouldn't put that past the current Bush government, certainly. Their FEMA wouldn't even let volunteer helpers or the Red Cross go inside the Katrina disaster zone to help. The US govt. is a collection of pompous evil bureaucrats, now more than ever - and the time they get kicked out - en masse - will be the time to rejoice.
So ol' Millerboy isn't 100% off in everything. But still... the answer to all these problems isn't to go off doing survivalism in the woods, is it?? (A typical 80s fallacy!) I think he's been reading too many tracts by, er-hem, Kurt Saxon, and the usual "Aryan" suspects...
As a socialist I can however only describe Frank Miller's ideology, if he has one, as "politically confused". 1:16 AM socialist liz said...
Just a couple of extra remarks, while we still wait for Kevin to join the discussion... I'm sure that he will be along SOMETIME.
1) I've always thought that Batman, being so rich - if he found himself in utter disagreement with the political climate of the day, (its venality especially, no doubt) he could use his fabulous wealth to fight it, and to set it off kilter, certainly. Like a sort of billionaire philanthropist, which he is. George Soros. Ralph Nader. (Though I think the latter is only a millionaire, I have seen Batman compared to Nader before now - or was it the other way?)
That would be better than faking your own death and running away from civilization, eh, though, Maurice??
"Be ye wise as doves and cunning as serpents". That's always been one of my favourite Bible verses!!
These characters are symbols, certainly. The secret to all magic is in using the symbols to good effect and CORRECTLY.
Mmm. And I don't think that the problem - then (80s) as now, was "social AND governmental IMPOTENCE"... I'll tell you what it's more like: Governmental and bureaucratic OVER-potence, to the ever-increasing extent of living in a state that approaches ever closer to "corporatism" or fascism (just go over to the site www.worldtraveler.com and have a browse around, it contains many digests of works by serious political authors: and you will see that many of these, including of course, Noam Chomsky, have been forecasting this situation for many years!!)... and the impotence of the "organised resistance", most of which is still pleased to call itself "the left" or "the liberals".
Liberalism as a political force in America is practically DEAD; *that* is the problem for old-time comics, which were as I keep on saying, FOUNDED on this doctrine. I shall have to prove it in my book since no idiot critic has to my knowledge said it: I seem to be the only person perceptive enough to cut through to the chase!
Well - at least it's pretty dead among the UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS; its former supporters among the elite. (The Democratic leadership, then.) I wouldn't say the same about the "grass-roots". Oh, and Hollywood seems to have been finally waking up to political movies...)
2) =I'd like to know something, Mr Maurice Broaddus!= I'm asking you - not because it's happened on this blog page, but on previous occasions - whenever I've said something like "well perhaps we should take a few steps back in comics" (or whatever) "to the ideals of the past when they seemed to have more [idealism]"... you've always reacted violently to that! "We can't go back", you've fulminated - (almost like I'm advocating a return to the days of US slavery or immediate post-slavery, for example! Well, obviously I'm not and neither are most people, but they still think that Abraham Lincoln's ideas were worth a million of George Bush's - know what I mean??)
There are obviously things in previous (popular) culture we can learn from, no?? I'm not talking about "nostalgia", I'm not talking about "tribute bands" or "70s nights". I'm talking about seeing where our culture has gone wrong, and - maybe - picking up some strands again from an earlier iteration of it (SAY THE 60S, SAY!!) before it all started to go so WRONG...
Because obviously it HAS gone wrong. Not even Frank Miller approved of it in the 80s (though I think that it is a safe bet to say that the older that man gets, the more conventionally right-wing he gets, and after "9/11" he seemed to be right in with the Bush camp, no question.)
Anyway: cultures can decline, as well as improve. (I don't know whether you believe in "progress"?? People used to, that's all I know!)
And if one refuses to face up to facts, then a) culture could either slide back to the Stone Age... not quite what we neo-pagans have in mind I can tell you! (Anyway "a simpler life" is impossible without VAST population die-off.)
Or b) we could enter into a new period of barbarism: a New Roman Empire or quasi-Nazi period. (That means the RETURN of racism, OK?? Read Joanne Rowling's books - I think they are VERY prophetic in this regard - they contain all sorts of VEILED references to racism and analogies with fascism!!)
So I *really* don't think that without a concerted effort to examine and critique and weed out our current culture, there is much hope for humanity - well, the West - at all.
That means you can't just do the comfortable bourgeois thing and make like an ostrich. And it also means you must find some way in which to... deal with my questions which say things to the effect like: "well, why not go back to some thoughts which they had in the not-so-distant past??"
Why NOT?? I've always HATED growing up in the 80s and 90s. Absolutely loathed it. It ensured me a miserable life: I can tell you that!
Tagline: Loki was the first arsonist!!
1:53 AM