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Frank Miller Has Completely Lost It
I'm not sure if this belongs in the Politics category or the comics one, but after reading this blog post by Frank Miller, I truly believe that he has gone completely crazy, and I no longer have any respect for the man.
Anarchy
“Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.
I used to be a HUGE Frank Miller fan. What he did with Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, even Sin City were revolutionary. Now, he's like a caricature of his former self.
It was bad when I read all the negative reviews of Holy Terror, but after this, I don't think I will ever buy another Frank Miller comic again.
Anarchy
“Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.
I used to be a HUGE Frank Miller fan. What he did with Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, even Sin City were revolutionary. Now, he's like a caricature of his former self.
It was bad when I read all the negative reviews of Holy Terror, but after this, I don't think I will ever buy another Frank Miller comic again.
Post edited by jabrams007 on
Comments
It's sad, really.
"Dear Frank,
I used to be your biggest fan.
You're now dead to me.
After reading your blog and suffering through "Holy Terror," I don't ever need to pay money for your entertainment, again.
Holy Terror is a MESS. It's sloppy, pedantic, on the nose, silly and confusing. It doesn't make a clear point, at all, which is odd because it was obviously your purposed to make a point, not to tell a good story.
Remind me again which regiment you served with? Oh, right, you were drawing cartoons at the age of those Occupy folks you suggest should enlist. Because if there's one thing a soldier can look forward to these days, it's trusting that his/her superiors will send them to do the right thing and really get the job done.
Like eliminate Al Quaeda overseas. Good mission. The Marines and Army have done that.
Root out sleeper terrorists on American soil. Good idea. The FBI does that, and they do it, well.
So how should the rest of us fight terror? Oh, right, by not rocking the boat. Never complaining, just stewing in our anger and writing angry screeds online and in comic books. Gettin' the ol' job done, aren't we, Frank? Thank God we've got you on that wall, because we need you on that wall.
Remember the Frank Miller who donated to groups that supported creator-owned companies? The guy who printed "Give 'em an inch, they'll take a Mile" in big bold letters on the back cover of one of his books? He was talking about CORPORATIONS, not big government.
He was protesting corporations that exploit their workers.
Remember the Frank Miller that co-founded his own comic publishing company, Legend, and extolled the accomplishment of the Image comics founders who left the big bad Marvel all at the same time? You know, those guys who staged a...let's see, what's the term for it...oh, yeah, a...walkout. Just walked off their jobs, the lazy fucks! Gave the finger to that gracious corporation that so generously employed them and thousands of others, to go..."freelance." Yeccch. Just the word itself makes me feel grimy.
In short, just to be as clear as propaganda: the young Frank Miller would look at what you've aged into and be sick.
On a personal note, I've been trying to decide for months if I should sell my old Frank Miller comics to make some decent cash or save them to give to my nephew when he's old enough to appreciate them. I'd like to think that he would be as inspired by them as I was, that they might even change the course of his creative ambitions as they did for me.
Fuck it, I'm going to Ebay right now and unloading these tainted piles of crap. And I hope you're currently working on some new lunatic book so I can scoff at it as I buy other books by still relevant artists.
I wonder if John Byrne has become a right-wing psycho nutjob, too? Nah, he's Canadian and wayyy too nice a guy for that. But you never know, these days, you never know."
It's a real shame, he used to be a comic genius.
I've covered this topic many times. Plenty of people throughout history have been talented and created great works of art while simultaneously being bad people. I don't think there's any hypocrisy in respecting someone's body of work while disrespecting the person themselves.
Mike Tyson is always my go to example. He's an abhorrent human being, and he knows it. But the fights in his heyday were a glory to behold.
Take a Lit102 class and you will quickly learn to separate art and artist. The art always stands on its own, as a separate thing from the artist.
I don't really care that Frank Miller is a nutjob. It's when he spends his time supporting those views instead of making awesome comics, then I get sad.
Ehhhhhhhh. I'm on the fence about this. It's a matter of scope and scale, I think, and the degree to which the two are actually separable.
I'll use my go-to example from the metal panel: NSBM - National Socialist Black Metal. Supporting the art is tantamount to supporting the ideology behind it, because you give the artist the resources they need, and the attention they need, to continue spreading abhorrent ideas. It's the problem that we encounter when we pay attention to trolls, or loud-mouth political pundits.
Our collective societal values will determine the limit of what is considered acceptable. I'm sure if Frank Miller was spouting Nazi propaganda and started putting it in his comics, you'd stop buying his stuff even if it was good, because the idea is simply reprehensible.
EDIT: Well, OK, if Miller was advocating for the gassing of Jews using Batman as a vehicle. If he just makes Batman look like an asshole, that's all good and well.
In that regard, the only thing that distinguished Chick from Miller is the degree to which the art is mashed up with the message, and the amount that you can extract from it otherwise. And it generally goes that as someone gets nuttier, their art tends to become heavily muddled with their ideology.
Voting with your dollars and so on.
EDIT: And I'm honestly on the fence about them. I don't discuss Chick tracts routinely for the same reason I try to minimize legitimate consideration of any argument put forth by, say, Glen Beck or Ann Coulter. It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, because repeating the ideology means that you will give it the breeding ground it needs to thrive, but you need to discuss it in order to form an intelligent opinion.
This is absolutely something I can see Frank Miller's borderline-suicidal-Fuck-everyone-punch-crime-till-it's-liver-explodes Batman from DKR saying, in character and without a hint of acknowledgement to the fourth wall, not to mention a good half the characters in Sin City, Marv in particular, but also Dwight, Hartigan and Wallace. Shit, it wouldn't even be too out of place in the mouth of Born again era Daredevil.
Lest you forget, Batman is kind enough, and eccentric enough to randomly adopt children.