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I just know how it was resolved yesterday: Turns out that whenever the magic girl that made Cap young again actually split him into two versions of himself: That's all based on what I read about it yesterday on spoiler sites as opposed to reading it throughout, so if my details are off, please correct me.
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May 18, 2017 16:16
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NikkolasKing posted:Miller seems like a pretty self-aware guy. He just doesn't really care about what others think of him. But the interviews I read with him in he book about him showed he's aware of, say, how psychotic his Batman is. or that Leonidas was absolutely no hero. Miller absolutely believes that Leonidas was a hero: Five issues and 130 pages later, Miller has immersed himself into what may become one of his greatest works. “Looking at the project (from an artist’s per- spective),” Miller admits, “300 has a real wide-screen feel to it, because it’s a story composed across double page spreads. It’s been a real challenge for me to depict a story with such incredible scope. But as a writer, 300 has challenged me even more so, because of it’s pure, unadulterated heroism. There is nothing cynical about this story, and there’s nothing temporary about it.
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May 18, 2017 17:27
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Alhazred posted:Miller absolutely believes that Leonidas was a hero: Hm, fair enough. Thanks for the quote. I was mainly going by what was in the book I was reading: quote:Back in 1998, discussing 300 with Christopher Brayshaw in the Comics Journal, Miller acknowledges the historical irony of Greece, the epitome of civil organization and intellectualism in the ancient West, needing a nation-state of cold-blooded warriors to fight its battles. In another context, he tells Brayshaw, he might have invited readers to ponder that irony and consider its paradoxical relationship to the development of democratic ideals.19 He does not do so in this context, however. For Miller, 300 is all about the necessity of saving civilization—Western civilization—from barbarism. The three hundred Spartans did what was necessary; they lost the battle, badly, but without their sacrifice, discipline, and utterly unambiguous worldview, we would apparently still be living in mud huts today.
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May 18, 2017 17:40
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zoux posted:Well, educate me my friend. Why would anybody want to have a discussion with you when you've pre-emptively declared that anyone on the other side of the argument is just in it for the virtue signaling?
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May 18, 2017 20:20
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NikkolasKing posted:Hm, fair enough. Thanks for the quote. I was mainly going by what was in the book I was reading: Man that's a nice slice of racism combined with some historical revisionism. Persia was more advanced than Greece at the time, and the "300" (not mentioned, the couple thousand hellots they brought who also died, or the Theban contingent whose home sold them out and had nowhere to retreat to) did just about gently caress and all. Sparta didn't enter the war until the Athenian led fleet won decisively at Salamis and effectively ended the Persian campaign. Whatever you think of the Persian war, the takeaway about Sparta is that they were a pile of useless nazis who hung back while others did the bleeding.
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May 18, 2017 20:25
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Kai Tave posted:Why would anybody want to have a discussion with you when you've pre-emptively declared that anyone on the other side of the argument is just in it for the virtue signaling? Yup. Didn't quite make the connection, but "performative wokeness" is the exact same idea as virtue signaling. People can't be interested in a cause because it effects them or people they know, or even that they believe in something. They have to try to be getting cool points, and Zoux is just too cynically hip to ever give a drat about anything.
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May 18, 2017 20:40
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That's hilarious. It's not your views that are performative, it's the personal attacks on the people who are trying to have a good faith discussion.
zoux fucked around with this message at 21:30 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 20:45
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rkajdi posted:He wrote a comics that describes sex between a minor and adults in a way that an actual pedo could crank to. Comics already have a seedy unbelly of weird fetish comics that do a decent part to keep LCS nerd dungeons the way they are. I think this is a bit reductive but it does touch on why I think Lost Girls-- and a lot of Moore's latter-day stuff-- is wildly flawed and its own worst enemy (I gave up on Providence VERY quickly because I'm fed up with Moore's treatment of sexual violence-- I think LOEG was when I first started noticing how hosed it is, and LG certainly falls within that perimeter). That being said, I want to own that as much as I feel ethically and reflexively repulsed by his sexual aesthetics as a victim of sexual abuse AND as someone who has a cursory understanding of how not to be a dipshit in 2017, Moore is capable of writing brilliant stuff with well-articulated theses, even if I don't want to wade through completely tasteless rape scenes to get to them. Like, again, I'm probably never going to read LG because it alarms and wounds me as a survivor of sexual abuse, and because I think that he shoots himself in the foot in trying to make the point he's trying to make. However if somebody I knew was writing serious scholarship on Moore I think it's absolutely a keystone text for that period of his career and I think WHY it fails is sort of interesting. To wit, it's trying to do two things at once: 1) present an example of "benign" pornography a la Angela Carter's Sadeian Woman for comics. This is good and bad. Bad because Carter is VERY wrong in that book for a bunch of reasons (while de Sade doesn't represent women as "breeding machines" he DOES EXPLICITLY represent them as pleasure machines-- this isn't just me picking nits-- it's me knowing when and how de Sade read la Mettrie; also she should have known better than to aver that de Sade was the FIRST writer to think about women this way, as it ignores centuries of works written by, uh, women), good because he's pointing at a real need in the industry to rethink how it treats sexuality, what it considers taboo and what it doesn't, and how sex can be made aesthetically pleasing, legitimately sexy, AND ethical in terms of representing consent and power. Which again, I think can be done, and I know a lot of women, particularly queer women, have comics that they find empowering and entertaining in that vein. But for Moore, in practice what this means is "my comic has interesting page layouts, the palette of a mix between Little Nemo in Slumberland and Bazooka Joe and the allusions to Egon Schiele are whatever are kind of amusing." 2) present what is, essentially, a sexual horror story. In it's own way LG is more terrifying and sickening than From Hell beneath the pastel colors and vaseline penciling-- each main character is shown to have their consent stripped away by men with power over them, and each character's testimonies of pleasure and jouissance is tainted by the half-suppressed memories of violent sexual trauma. Moore absolutely does not want people to jerk off to this book-- or if he does he's history's most virtuosic piece of poo poo-- because what he's trying to do-- I think-- is give his most damning portrait yet of how ideologies sexuality and adolescence worked in the late 19th/early 20th c. and how it irreperably hosed up a generation of young women and turned a generation of men into monsters. Unfortunately he fails. He doesn't need to have failed-- this kind of thing is pulled off pretty regularly in other mediums. Dennis Cooper made a career of it and Patricia Lockwood's big breakthrough was, rightfully, the long poem "Rape Joke." The problem is, of course, that you really probably can't have this particular cake and eat it too. It would be so, so difficult to pull off telling a serious tragedy about the repercussions of abuse, and intermingle it with very well-drawn, brightly colored pastiches of period-accurate smut. It doesn't work as porn because, as noted, it's depicting atrocious acts happening to subjects without any form of consent. It doesn't work as a serious indictment of Victorian/Edwardian sexuality because it's preoccupied with being formally fun n' flirty. It isn't sexy and at the same time it isn't serious. It feels trivial and glib at the same time as it feels self-righteous and ponderous. It just kind of makes you mad at Alan Moore-- and when a few years later he wrote a scene of Voldemort committing date-rape as a joke scene, I was like, yeah, ok, I'm not going to take him seriously about this anymore, and I'm going to pick what texts of his I keep up with extremely cautiously. Honestly when I read it I felt sick. I wish it was better than it is though and I think it's important to acknowledge what he was trying to do. I really wish I knew what was wrong with him, and for a long-time my thesis was that his read on sex is so filtered through gnostic and neoplatonic metaphors-- in which "marriage," for instance, isn't literal marriage, and "ravishment" isn't literal rape-- and he just happened to be completely clueless about how this looks to any other human being. But I reread From Hell recently and you can see the beginnings of it. His treatment of sex and class is thoughtful and nuanced there, but taken all together it starts to look a bit like slut-shaming-- like the punishment of women for having sex is at least in part karmic justice. So right-- it's thoughful and nuanced and effective, but it's still pretty lovely. My fear is that he just doesn't give a poo poo and that considered representations of women and sexuality-- actually let's go all the way and say morally sound representations of women and sexuality-- is just something he doesn't really give a poo poo about on more than a theoretical level.
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May 18, 2017 21:06
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zoux posted:That's hilarious. It's not your views that are performative, it's the personal attacks on the people who are trying to have a good faith discussion.  " so color me shocked people aren't engaging with you with good faith and aplomb.
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May 19, 2017 14:47
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Edge & Christian posted:Many people have wasted their time trying to explain all of the flaws of Nick Spencer and his Secret Empire story and the general reponse back (including yours) has been almost exclusively "lol u mad he's not a nazi it's comics he'll be fine kirby did it lol u mad nazi baby lol" and this is like the fourth thread on this board alone where people are talking about it and you're the one who sort of swept in with 'you dumb fukken babies he's not a nazi lol lol Well apologies for not reading those other threads I guess. What I said was it's pretty obvious that Marvel isn't promoting fascism it's more like it's just another fake out plot and guess what: it was.
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May 19, 2017 14:58
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zoux posted:Well apologies for not reading those other threads I guess. The exact same comic also continues a really dumb (and more substantially gross) thing where the other "main" Steve Rogers is the Supreme Commander of the Hydra States of America and yes he's altered by cosmic magic and yes he's a fascist dictator but you know, he's not a bad fascist dictator, he feels really bad about having to demolish entire cities and he doesn't want to sign off on death camps and yes he has literal Nazis in his cabinet of the Hydra High Council but he doesn't want them there but sometimes you've got to make compromises to do the "right" thing and I'm sure that neither Marvel nor Nick Spencer want people to think "fascism is awesome" but they're literally taking half-measures to keep "evil" Captain America from being too evil but it is sending a terrible message. It's like how throughout the initial HydraCap story they keep pulling back from having Steve Rogers be a murderer and even the character has internal dialogue about not wanting to be a murderer but all that means is that he literally hires hitmen to murder his enemies, or contrives scenarios where hey, I may have led my enemy into a trap full of demons who eat him alive but I didn't murder him, or he gets someone else to poison his enemy because Captain America doesn't kill his enemies, he just commands they get poisoned to death. Or he agonizes about whether or not he can smother his friend with a pillow but whew, they took him off of life support for injuries sustained when Captain America non-lethally pushed his friend out of an airplane, so it's not like Captain America murdered that guy, he just died in the hospital. The only person he actually kills is Red Skull, and he's fine with killing Red Skull because hes's a NAZI and a MURDEROUS MADMAN getting in the way of Steve's Kinder Gentler Fascist Rule that still involves like every single checkmark of what the actual historical Nazis wanted to do, but you know, just to protect everyone for their own good, not for Nazi reasons. The overall message is basically "yes, Captain America is a fascist in bed with Nazis whose collective endgame is a genocidal attack on freedom with the intent of setting up a Fourth Reich but... but... but... he's not a NAZI. Cap would never be a Nazi! He's not even really a full fascist. He's not that bad. You can work with Nazis and Fascists and still be a fundamentally decent guy who made some tough, potentially bad decisions" which is not "LOL Marvel loves Nazis and Captain America is a Nazi forever" but is still fundamentally lovely and gross. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 15:14 on May 19, 2017 |
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May 19, 2017 15:10
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zoux posted:That's hilarious. It's not your views that are performative, it's the personal attacks on the people who are trying to have a good faith discussion. Oh stop sealioning, you're not fooling anybody at this point.
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May 19, 2017 15:51
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akulanization posted:Man that's a nice slice of racism combined with some historical revisionism. Persia was more advanced than Greece at the time, and the "300" (not mentioned, the couple thousand hellots they brought who also died, or the Theban contingent whose home sold them out and had nowhere to retreat to) did just about gently caress and all. Sparta didn't enter the war until the Athenian led fleet won decisively at Salamis and effectively ended the Persian campaign. Whatever you think of the Persian war, the takeaway about Sparta is that they were a pile of useless nazis who hung back while others did the bleeding. Not to mention that Persia actually backed the greek city states in the Corinthian war where Sparta tried to conquer all of ancient Greece.
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May 19, 2017 17:45
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Even ignoring all of the history side of things, it's just bad storytelling to have such a one dimensional villain especially when the hero is pretty one dimensional. That's why Punisher and Dredd comics can be so good. I love 300 because of it's simplicity. But a page explaining a litte about Xerxes history would have been great. Or even his Pop Darius I. I always liked this story about his rise to power from Herodotus. him and his brothers are competing for the crown (I nabbed it from Wikipedia, because it's a cool story. Darius I was a much more interesting character)Herodotus via Wikipedia posted:To decide who would become the monarch, six of them decided on a test, with Otanes abstaining, as he had no interest in being king. They were to gather outside the palace, mounted on their horses at sunrise, and the man whose horse neighed first in recognition of the rising sun would become king. According to Herodotus, Darius had a slave, Oebares, who rubbed his hand over the genitals of a mare that Darius favored. When the six gathered, Oebares placed his hands beside the nostrils of Darius's horse, who became excited at the scent and neighed. This was followed by lightning and thunder, leading the others to dismount and kneel before Darius in recognition of his apparent divine providence. In this account, Darius himself favored that he achieved the throne not through fraud, but cunning, even erecting a statue of himself mounted on his neighing horse with the inscription: "Darius, son of Hystaspes, obtained the sovereignty of Persia by the sagacity of his horse and the ingenious contrivance of Oebares, his groom." Thanks Edge & Christian for the lowdown on Cap. I was kinda hopeful it would be like Superior Spider-Man which was much better than I expected it to be. I read up on the reactions to certain things like Hydra/Nazi Cap lifting Mjolnir aka: "2017's must have prison tat" and folks being asked to wear Hydra gear in comic shops. Part of me wants to say they are over reacting. But considering the current political climate and especially the writer's history. I think it's understandable why some people are concerned. It's rare to discuss this kind of thing with people who actually have intelligence and knowledge and there is a ton of great stuff to talk about. It feels to me like you can draw a line between the early 2000's (specifically 9/11) and before more than you can any other time in comic book history. There are other factors I am sure must have contributed. Everything from the emergence of easy internet and digital printing to more independent publishers. But you read a comic made in the last 20 odd years and you can usually tell without looking at the date. I was re-reading some old Spider-Man comics and you feel the change very quickly reading them all at once. Especially when M.J Straczynski takes over. To start it off, Lets take Mark Miller. Probably the writer singly most responsible for the current perception of comic books in popular culture. If you consider the comics that have massively shaped the MCU. It's works like Civil War and Ultimates both written mostly by Mark Miller. Add to that his run on Warren Ellis' Authority, Which was primarily about the idea of a Justice League style group of heros trying to solve world problems by murdering dictators and doing press interviews where they discussed politics. Not that the comic hit pop culture hard. But it was a testing ground for his politically aware heros. (I know he did not have a long run on Authority, but his stories stand out) More than anyone else he really tried to connect super heros with the man on the street. Kick rear end is the most obvious example of this. But Miller has always had this layer of cynicism that many felt was out of place in the aw shucks world of comics. (The Kick rear end and Wanted comics feature a LOT more rape than the movies) I suppose what I would like to know is people's general opinions on Miller. For the sake of argument I think it's worth separating what you think about his actual writing versus his politics. (Feel free to virtue signal all you want. It's an open discussion) I would also encourage opinions on people like Straczynski and Bendis. Arguably two of the other people having a huge effect on the MCU. Anyone really whose personal views helped shape the stuff we are seeing on screen now basically. Lonos Oboe fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 19, 2017 |
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May 19, 2017 21:10
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Lonos Oboe posted:Thanks Edge & Christian for the lowdown on Cap. I was kinda hopeful it would be like Superior Spider-Man which was much better than I expected it to be. quote:It feels to me like you can draw a line between the early 2000's (specifically 9/11) and before more than you can any other time in comic book history. There are other factors I am sure must have contributed. Everything from the emergence of easy internet and digital printing to more independent publishers. But you read a comic made in the last 20 odd years and you can usually tell without looking at the date. I was re-reading some old Spider-Man comics and you feel the change very quickly reading them all at once. Especially when M.J Straczynski takes over. quote:To start it off, Lets take Mark Miller. Probably the writer singly most responsible for the current perception of comic books in popular culture. If you consider the comics that have massively shaped the MCU. It's works like Civil War and Ultimates both written mostly by Mark Miller. Add to that his run on Warren Ellis' Authority, Which was primarily about the idea of a Justice League style group of heros trying to solve world problems by murdering dictators and doing press interviews where they discussed politics. Not that the comic hit pop culture hard. But it was a testing ground for his politically aware heros. (I know he did not have a long run on Authority, but his stories stand out) quote:More than anyone else he really tried to connect super heros with the man on the street. Kick rear end is the most obvious example of this. But Miller has always had this layer of cynicism that many felt was out of place in the aw shucks world of comics. (The Kick rear end and Wanted comics feature a LOT more rape than the movies) quote:I suppose what I would like to know is people's general opinions on Miller. For the sake of argument I think it's worth separating what you think about his actual writing versus his politics. (Feel free to virtue signal all you want. It's an open discussion) I would also encourage opinions on people like Straczynski and Bendis. Arguably two of the other people having a huge effect on the MCU. Anyone really whose personal views helped shape the stuff we are seeing on screen now basically.
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May 19, 2017 21:46
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Lonos Oboe posted:I suppose what I would like to know is people's general opinions on Miller. For the sake of argument I think it's worth separating what you think about his actual writing versus his politics. Miller is one of the most influential creators in modern comic book history, and nobody can take that away from him. He's easily one of the top ten pencilers of the Bronze Age, and he's closer to the top three than the bottom. I'd go so far as to say that he's like Casablanca; so much of what came after him owes a stylistic debt to him that if you go back and read the work that put him on the map, it doesn't look like that big of a deal anymore. In particular, he's the grandfather of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, since the first few issues of their original series are an explicit homage to his Daredevil run, and you can trace most of the '90s-era "killer superhero in an urban blight" fiction straight back to Miller. As a writer, there's nobody else quite like him. If I didn't already know about him getting mugged repeatedly in '70s and '80s New York City, I'd at least suspect it, because a lot of Miller's output is seething with an earned distrust of civilization. When he's working on something like Sin City where that plays in its favor, it's compelling precisely because of how desperate and dirty it is. Anything outside of that (dis)comfort zone, however, is pretty dire stuff. At best, it's mediocre, like his Robocop scripts; at worst, you get an objectivist fever dream like the Martha Washington series.
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May 19, 2017 23:36
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Edge & Christian posted:The overall message is basically "yes, Captain America is a fascist in bed with Nazis whose collective endgame is a genocidal attack on freedom with the intent of setting up a Fourth Reich but... but... but... he's not a NAZI. Cap would never be a Nazi! He's not even really a full fascist. He's not that bad. You can work with Nazis and Fascists and still be a fundamentally decent guy who made some tough, potentially bad decisions" which is not "LOL Marvel loves Nazis and Captain America is a Nazi forever" but is still fundamentally lovely and gross. Lonos Oboe posted:Thanks Edge & Christian for the lowdown on Cap. I was kinda hopeful it would be like Superior Spider-Man which was much better than I expected it to be. I read up on the reactions to certain things like Hydra/Nazi Cap lifting Mjolnir aka: "2017's must have prison tat" and folks being asked to wear Hydra gear in comic shops. Part of me wants to say they are over reacting. But considering the current political climate and especially the writer's history. I think it's understandable why some people are concerned. This pretty much sums it up, to which I would add that people don't think that Marvel's new mandate is to make Captain America a Nazi forever and those whose argument is "well well, looks like Cap isn't going to stay a Nazi forever, whodathunk?" are either missing the point or simply being obtuse in their rush to deliver the hottest takes. People think that it's dumb and tasteless for Marvel to decide in this the year of our lord 2017, when white supremacists and "racial realists" are feeling way more comfortable proudly coming out, to write a comic book where Marvel's iconic Nazi-punching superhero, the creation of a couple of Jewish boys from New York City back during WWII, gets turned into a secret Nazi for the equivalent of "big event" clickbait. Nick Spencer's and Marvel's constant attempts to justify everything by repeatedly insisting that "Hydra totally aren't Nazis guys, this isn't a story about Nazis, stop making it about Nazis" is honestly kind of cowardly and pathetic. Nobody actually buys that line especially when the Marvel movies, television show, and even other actual Marvel comics are like "oh yeah, Hydra are Nazis, gently caress those guys." They want the controversy they're courting to rake in all that sweet big event moolah but then they whine when people call it out for what it very obviously is. I was actually going to try and expand on my thoughts a bit more once I got home from work but I guess someone already sort of did it for me which I appreciate because I'm extremely lazy. Now all that said, this is the thread about writers whose politics leak into their comics work, so: quote:“I’m the most hated man in America today,” Spencer told the Daily Beast a year ago. Some of the criticism directed at him has been vicious: variously charged as a fascist, white supremacist and even a Nazi, all of which are completely baseless. On the one hand, I agree that Nick Spencer (probably) isn't a fascist, white supremacist, or Nazi. On the other hand, a look at some of the highlights of Nick Spencer's failed political career does in fact help paint the picture of the sort of person happy to go to bat for a ~visionary story~ about what if Captain America...was a Nazi??? in 2017 in between admonishing people on Twitter for taking joy in watching Richard Spencer get punched in the face. I am completely willing to believe that Nick Spencer isn't a literal Nazi irl but I'm also willing to believe that Nick Spencer is a lovely, clueless person comfortably insulated from the wider repercussions of the dumb poo poo he does by the warm embrace of his own rear end in a top hat, and the story he's writing doesn't even sound that fuckin good anyway so all of this is for nothing but another big dumb event destined to be swept under the rug except for the occasional quip in a Deadpool comic and a splash page of Nazi Cap hefting Mjolnir that's destined to wind up on a bootleg t-shirt sold alongside "heritage not hate" memorabilia.
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May 20, 2017 06:19
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I want to say this is a really interesting thread that I'm surprised I didn't catch at the start, and it taught me what "missing stair" means.
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May 24, 2017 04:19
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A lot of Spencer's actions in the 90s were in service of the broken windows policing mentality that was so popular then. I agree calling him a Nazi isn't fair or accurate, but it doesn't absolve him of his dumbassery or excuse his political stances. Also I bumped this thread because it's an interesting subject and deserves to continue.Zachack posted:Of the little I've read of early Hate I'm inclined to say Bagge, but again, era and I could be totally off. Peter Bagge is a libertarian, but he's the kind that hates war and is socially permissive rather than just some dude who wants no taxes and no rules on capitalism. He had a column and a cartooning space in Reason magazine where he shat on Bush all the time, for example. Edge & Christian posted:Also worth noting in terms of this interaction, the Dave Sim timeline is basically this: It's been rumored for aeons that Sim had an affair with Wendy Pini. Do you think there's any truth to that? Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 10:44
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