The politics of Frank Miller

[fpb]

Well, well, well. It seems that my rooted detestation of Frank Miller and all his criminal works roused more interest among my friends than any other controversial idea I could toss at them. Well, then, on your own heads be it.

I have a deep, personal, vindictive hatred for Frank Miller, the cartoonist who originated 300

Comments

[privatemaladict]

My impression, based on the trailers and things I've heard about the film, is that it's a typical "boy's movie" - lots of gory violence and not much plot or emotional depth. I don't really have anything against "historical fiction" - i.e. movies and books which contradict history - if it gives me a good story and characters I like. I loved Gladiator, for example. But 300 doesn't really sound like something I'd enjoy. I might still see it, if someone drags me, but I won't go out of my way.

[dirigibletrance]

Folks, 300 doesn't even *pretend* to be historically accurate. It's warrior-fantasy that's loosely set in a pseudo-historical setting.

[fpb]

It is murder fantasy with a Fascist message. Either respond to my article, or don't pretend to have read it.

[dirigibletrance]

Nobody's pretending anything, FPB. I found myself unable to finish your article, because the level of vitriol was making me uncomfortable.

It's more understable if you're a cartoonist yourself that you'd be so mad about this. I have musician friends that completely fly off the handle regarding the works produced by certain other musicians, and I never really understand why.

Whatever, though. Be mad if you want to.

[dirigibletrance]

Sounds like you have more a problem with the Noir genre in general, and with gritty, hopeless tales.

But geez, dude. He's just a comic-book artist. 300 was just a action-movie that nobody will remember in a few months. Give it a rest. This isn't worth the time and energy you're expending to hate him.

[fpb]

Perhaps you missed my bit damning Victor D.Hanson for being an arrogant sod who thought comics were beneath him. Or all my posts about various aspects of the comics artform. So let me spell it out for you: I am a cartoonist myself; I regard comics as the eleventh muse (movies are the tenth) and equal in dignity and achievement to any other art; and Frank Miller, God help us, came into comics with more visible and thunderous talent than anyone I can remember. That makes his treachery the more vile, "too good to be so" [a traitor] "and too bad to live,/ Since the more fair and crystal is the sky,/ The uglier seem the cloud that in it fly." Yeah, and he who composed those lines was, in his day, also treated as an irrelevant commercial hack whose stuff would not last ten years.

[johncwright]

Is it worth your time? I think it is. Comics create a deeper and longer lasting impression in the mind than practically any other art form: movies are a close second; novels trail in at a third.

I can still recall specific frames and panals of the first comic I ever read, a Doctor Strange illustrated by Rudy Nebres, who had a command of the human body rarely seen then or now. Nothing is going to be forgotten: impressionable minds will be impressed, and Mr. Miller's philosophy, if only as a set of images, will help form the moral atmosphere of the next generation.

[perkinwarbeck2]

Art informs the zeitgeist. It is important. Calling it what it is is important. Maybe nobody will remember it, but I think what they will vaguely remember is oiled abs and violence and the perverted travesty of history that the wonderful king led the brave few to die against the wishes of the pusillanimous politicians -- just like the ones calling for a retreat from an unwinnable war now.

[fpb]

I am a cartoonist, and besides I spent most of the nineties writing reviews for Britain's leading comics-related publication, Comics International. Somewhere in this LJ there are a few other items about comics - an attack on the ideology that underlies the X-Men universe, a critical essay on Jack Kirby, and a couple of other things. Pardon me, but it is seven in the morning where I live, and I am barely awake, so I am a bit too sluggish to go search through four years of archives for the exact places.

[superversive]

I saw 300, partly out of morbid curiosity, partly because our very sane friend Mr. Ahmadinejad says it was made by order of the CIA as a blood libel against the Iranian people, to put the American people in the mood for another war. I react to such paranoia in rather odd ways. Either I went to see the movie to have a good laugh at the expense of all concerned, or because they were going to revoke my Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy membership if I didn’t obey the Secret Masters of Neocon, I forget which. I therefore rounded up a couple of friends to face the ordeal with me, and hoped some good might come of it. I reasoned that any film capable of making Ahmadinejad even more hyperbolically batty than he was before could not be altogether bad.

300 was not altogether bad. It did contain one historically accurate detail. When the Persians launched their frontal assault on Leonidas’ position, the line of contact between the two armies was correctly portrayed as an enormous scrum from which the football had been mysteriously removed beforehand

[fpb]

I am glad you think I did not overreact to the evil of mr.Miller's work; but you must remember I did not watch the movie. (I knew far too well what to expect.) Your description of it, by the way, reminds me of a BBC documentary on Roman war I watches a few years back: http://fpb.livejournal.com/3848.html.

[baduin]

Yes! Exactly. Leonidas first is lecturing about keeping the line, and then they are leaping about like Aragorn in the film. But those 10 seconds were perfect.

The wacko here vs the wacko there.

[avandeg]

Iran and their crazy leader are the focus of this film. When you create an enemy, you use contemporary fears and the effiminate egotistical megalomaniac (Xerxes) is supposed to be whoever is the biggest threat now. Life imitates art and vice versa. Whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first, by talking about it we are creating more chickens

[curia_regis]

Hi. I hope you don't mind that I'm commenting on your LJ. :) I just was browsing.

I honestly have no background on this, but I thought the movie was interesting.

Anyway, I know we didn't really defriend each other on the best of terms, but I was wondering how you were?

[fpb]

"We didn't defriend each other on the best of terms" is kind of redundant, is it not? One can hardly defriend another person in a friendly manner - even though I tried my best to explain that I still kept my esteem for you. If anyone was at fault, I was, so don't be apologetic. (Nonetheless - if anyone wanted an indication of the distance between us, one could not find a better instance than you saying that a movie I spent several paragraphs to damn to lower Hell, was "interesting"!) As for how I am - pretty much the same: in debt, polemical, and fat.

Thanks for dropping by and feel free to do so any time.

[curia_regis]

Well you could have somebody defriending somebody because they don't know them that welll, or because they are too busy to read their flist. And then you can have horrible fights that lead to defriending. I mean, yeah, kinda redundant, but not necessarily that much.

I didn't really want to lose you as a friend, but it kinda happened.

[fpb]

I still think of you as a friend. I cannot agree with you on important things, but if you ever need a friend, call on me and I'll be there. That's a promise.