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There's a pretty good critical line of argument that gets brought up from time to time about Ellis's Transmetropolitan as a direct reaction to the Tony Blair era in British politics, and about the influence of Margaret Thatcher's era on British genre fiction of the '80s and '90s. There's a ton of it in the first and third volumes of The Invisibles, for example.Lightning Lord posted:Bill Willingham regularly injected his politics outright into Fables, often in a clumsy way. For whatever it's worth, it's not just Fables. Much of his work on the Comico series Elementals is a sort of right-wing reaction to the popular comics of the mid-'80s, and in a few ways, is well ahead of its time (the protagonists are at least as willing to kill as the Authority would be 15 years later), but there are more than a couple of conservative screeds during his run. It's a very Reagan sort of superhero comic. I also remember at least one pretty right-wing speech delivered by Detective Chimp, of all characters, in Shadowpact. Willingham is an interesting writer, but every so often, his siege mentality over being a conservative in the comics industry gets the better of him.
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Apr 15, 2017 21:31
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Neurosis posted:Another Warren Ellis book with pretty blatant politics is Black Summer, which is basically him admonishing people who really advocate revolution against democratic governments. It's okay. I'd quibble with that reading. I've put a lot of thought into that book in particular since an acquaintance, back when it came out in 2007, would not shut up about how Black Summer was a slap in the face to American conservatives. Above all else, Black Summer is part of Ellis's "Beware the Superman" trilogy, where he's deconstructing some stereotypical superhero plot or another, along with No Hero and Supergod. Black Summer in particular has a lot bound up in it about the death penalty, the value of violent revolution, and vigilantism. It does have a couple of different sequences where a character goes off on a rant about something or another, but I don't think those rants work as Ellis putting his own perspectives into the characters' mouths, as those rants tend to come from characters who have been thoroughly compromised in one way or another. Kathryn has a big pro-death penalty argument at one point, but Kathryn is depicted as an extremist even before she starts jamming homemade cybernetics into her body; Tom Noir has the somewhat-famous "Lee Harvey Oswald" speech that closes out the book, but Tom is a suicidal wreck who spends almost the entire story making poor decisions. To be fair to the political reading, I don't think the book would exist at all if not for the George W. Bush years, and specifically the controversy that surrounded Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies. You could rewrite it to be about any presidential administration by changing all of one word balloon in one issue, but still, it's explicitly a book about an A-list superhero deciding the best thing to do at that point in time is to bust into the White House and crush the president's skull. That said, the big rant directed at John Horus that closes the book is mostly an admonishment about naivete, I think, rather than an attack against the idea of revolution. It's a rant about how crazy you'd have to be, given history and common sense, to think that simply removing the guy at the head of the table is going to bring about systemic change. Basically, the idea in the book is that sometimes violence is your only option, but you have to be very careful with it or you end up a monster, and there's no guarantee that you'll get the reaction you want.
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Apr 16, 2017 07:30
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Neurosis posted:Edit: I'd be interested on what thoughts you have on Supergods and No Hero, too; my memories of them are pretty hazy - No Hero is about heroes as status quo-enforcers ala the Avengers, Supergods is a riff on the Miracleman take on superheroes as transcendental posthumans? I don't think either of them are anywhere near as strong as Black Summer. Supergods has that Ellis problem where it doesn't end so much as it just kind of stops, and is basically a Cold War story from what I recall; various nations design custom superhumans until a couple of them get too powerful to stop. I haven't reread it since it came out. No Hero is an interesting alternate history, but I think its ending (and its level of gore, and even its protagonist...) does it a serious disservice. It's definitely an attack on the idea of the superhero as an agent of the status quo, except here, it's rather explicitly their preferred status quo; the group in the book is led by a shady Lex Luthor/Charles Xavier-type who has done some none-too-subtle tinkering with the world to make it the way he wants it, which includes racial segregation and some forcible disarmament. He's also made himself and his organization so crucial to that status quo that, when they're removed, the entire world starts to burn down about ten minutes later. Neither are as aggressively political as Black Summer turned out to be; both are shorter, and neither have as strong a central concept or cast. More importantly, Supergods is well outside the remit of a thread about political comics, and No Hero is only there if you turn your head and squint.
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Apr 16, 2017 09:54
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NikkolasKing posted:But are Miller and Dixon alone? We all know Fox News and their assorted assholes love to rant on about how the liberals control everything but it does seem to me like comic books might indeed be a predominantly liberal or Left Wing industry. Ethan Van Sciver is conservative. I remember he used to get into big Twitter arguments with people like Gail Simone, and glancing at that now, he's still pretty right-wing. There's also a penciler for DC Comics named Mike S. Miller (he's in the rotation of artists for the Injustice weekly comic) who's a favorite punching bag over in the D&D political cartoons thread. He had a webcomic for about ten minutes called "Electronic Tigers" that was nothing but right-wing Socratic arguments (let me explain why the theory of evolution is wrong by using Yu-Go-Oh cards), often being delivered to his half-Asian fantasy girlfriend. Being predominantly liberal/left-wing, at least by American standards, isn't unique to comic books. It's the case for most creative fields in North America. (It's part of what gave rise to that whole Sad Puppies clusterfuck. A handful of Science Fiction Writers' Guild members felt they were being marginalized due to their political beliefs.) That, in turn, is probably some combination of simple geography (most of the big publishers, film studios, TV stations, and music producers are based in New York or California, which are both reliably more left-wing than much of the rest of the country) and how big a tent "left of center" has become in modern American political discourse. It does not take very much at all in 2017 America to be considered a liberal.
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Apr 18, 2017 09:59
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Going back, "Who Dares Wins" seems like it's set in some kind of offshoot of the primary DCU, rather than being ostensibly in the main continuity. It's bad enough that, at this point, Tommy has killed hundreds of low-level mobsters and Z-list supervillains without Batman crawling up his nose again (although as the series points out, Hitman was running concurrently with a bunch of big Bat-stories like "No Man's Land," so Batman was busy as hell), but then four SAS guys show up and between them, wipe out an entire crime family. It's one of those stories that is actually penalized by being part of a shared universe, because by rights, the larger DCU should've been more involved than it was. Also, Ennis was 25 when Hitman started. That blows my mind.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:16
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If webcomics are kosher for the discussion, there's a complete online adaptation of the libertarian novel The Probability Broach that kinda has to be seen to be believed. There's a lot on that site, actually. La Muse is weird as hell in a Robert Anton Wilson sense, but it's an easy enough read.
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May 9, 2017 01:15
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You know, it's been a while. I bet there are people who haven't heard of Liberality for All, starring cyborg freedom fighter Sean Hannity.
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May 10, 2017 23:05
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Samovar posted:Yknow, people always talk about separating the work from the author... But I've found that harder and harder to do as of late. That was probably easier to do when the sum total of your knowledge about the author came from a one-paragraph blurb on the back of the book, if that. Now you can open a browser tab and in ten minutes, discover things about an author that almost force you to radically reevaluate his or her work. (Non-political example: I'm a big fan of the Spenser series of detective novels, but didn't know until relatively recently that the protagonist is very much a fictionalized representation of the original author, who shares the same hobbies, military experience, ancestry, and general build. I would have had no way of knowing that before the Internet.) On the other hand, some of the real winners of yesteryear have never been shy about letting you know all about their terrible opinions. Bill Willingham used to rant his rear end off on the inside back cover of Elementals.
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May 12, 2017 01:06
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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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