5 ms·

I liked Dark Knight Returns quite a bit and I've read it a few times but every time I get to the part with the woman with swastikas tattooed on her boobs I can'

I liked Dark Knight Returns quite a bit and I've read it a few times but every time I get to the part with the woman with swastikas tattooed on her boobs I can't help but wonder what the point of that was. Strikes Back was bad. Then Holy Terror came out and it was a xenophobic caricature. Since then I haven't had much interest in anything he's done. I did see a comment from him that seems to indicate he's walked back some of his extremist views but I've moved on.

tptacek 5y ago
Did you revise your opinion of the Miller's entire oeuvre after Holy Terror? That's what happened to me with Dave Sim and Cerebus at some point; like, you see the previous work in a previous light, and it doesn't work anymore. It's like that episode of The Office where Brian Baumgartner sells James Spader on "the oatmeal raisin cookie idea" in a meeting, only to realize after later hearing about "the Big Mac idea" that "it was always just cookies. ...". That's I think one of the big critical narratives about Miller --- it was always just cookies.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  You nailed it. Scott Adams, too, to a certain degree. It's a bit of frame breaking when one finds out a creator has an outsized personality. There's a bit of projection involved in taking in art, and finding there is a great differenced between the imagined creator of a work and the actual creator forces a reinterpretation. It's unavoidable. Maybe Jane Fonda and people with Barberella posters who disagreed with her real life views, for an older example. I think it's particular painful with Frank Miller because the work becomes much less interesting than how a number of us had read it initially.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I think that's probably the big idea behind this critique, right? It's not that Frank Miller has bad ideas (though...) --- it's that when you realize he wasn't really kidding, he's much less interesting. His work isn't thoughtful; it's just id.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      Not a comic, but I had this reaction to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". When I read it as a teenager, I was blown away by the subtle and brilliant satire. When I read it again as an adult and realized he was actually just a fascist, it was deflating.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        The great thing about this is how many people first experienced "Starship Troopers" through the Verhoeven movie, which was, in retrospect, incredibly subversive; like, he actually reclaimed the work from its author. A neat trick!
        filoleg 5y ago
        That was quite a "one-of-a-kind" experience for me with Starship Troopers. The movie was straight up taking the entirely predictable "Atlas Shrugged, but with commie space insect alien warfare" book source and turned it into a satire on the original material. And not just that, they executed it masterfully. I've never encountered anything like that since then, and if someone has suggestions of a similar "source material => adaptation" experience, those recommendations would be heavily appreciated.
        brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Verhoeven famously gave up on reading Starship Troopers after a few chapters, calling it “boring and depressing.”[0] He was a kid during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands and couldn’t stomach the pro-war, pro-military, openly jingoistic messaging. He had to be talked into making the movie, and only then when he was allowed to put a satirical twist on it. It’s quite a good trick he pulled! [0] https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-troopers-director-never-read-the-book/ https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-t...
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        I don't think Heinlein per se was a fascist, he was a man strongly attracted to fascist style thought, which I think was a common feature of many reasonably intelligent people of his generation (hence the great upflarings of fascism they lived through) but I don't think he ever succumbed fully to the attraction in the same way I believe Miller has - probably because he lived through a war against a fascist country.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  A lot of things you consume when you are younger looks bad when you are older. Tastes change. Experience gives you insight. Unfortunately that’s just life. This article would have been more interesting 10-15 years ago or so (DKR was first published in 1986!). I don’t remember the industry as a whole evolving for the better until after the speculation phase. And then we all wisen up. This article brings out the old condescending man in me: “you finally got it kid, good job”. And there’s lots of new, better comics! The author never thought to branch out? Just “taught me hate them?”
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Again: it's likely the author didn't even write the headline, especially since the sentiment doesn't occur really anywhere in the piece itself. I'm having trouble believing someone who is this deeply acquainted with Miller is somehow unaware of Maus.
- jccalhoun 5y ago
  I think it was Miller just giving into his worst tendencies. Like Sim, there is a period where you can write off the crazy as just being eccentricities but then, especially with Sim, the minor digression becomes the major theme of the work and I just had to walk away.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The long, tedious Fitzgerald stuff I can deal with, but his later openness about his wacky political beliefs colors all the previous work for me; like, I can start to see what he was actually trying to say with some of it, and I can't unsee it or substitute my own perceptions from the first time I read it. It's pretty much ruined for me, except to thumb through Gerhard's backgrounds.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  For me the thing about Cerebus is that Church & State is fucking hilarious despite everything. People vary in where they get off that train, I own as far as Reads, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend anybody else to read beyond Melmoth, but I think you're missing out if you skip the whole thing because Sim is an awful human being.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I certainly can't fault anyone for feeling that way. I've still got all the books on my shelf; I'm not burning them or anything.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  God, Sim. Dave Sim. Dave Sim blasted his brain open with acid and had a vision of how his goofy Conan parody would be a 300 issue treatise on the nature of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine and never realized that those two principles are only loosely tied to what we call “men” and “women”, then threw in a ton of baggage from his failed relationships and made a huge mess. He is also a master of the form and one of the best letterers out there, I recently picked up a cheap copy of Flight and the way the text integrated into the composition was astounding, even if it was a story where his problems with women were all hanging out. And then there’s the later story where Cerebus sits around a mostly-empty bar arguing with himself for like thirty issues, and Sim pulls out all the stops in his lettering to actually make this exciting to read. I learnt a lot about comics from his work, his influence lurks in my own comics here and there, but he is well into Problematic Fave territory for me and I will never insist that anyone should read his work if they don’t feel like picking around the misogyny woven through it.
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  A couple years after this article was written, Miller tried to rehab his image. In part by distancing himself from Holy Terror, in part by saying he had been drinking heavily: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-xerxes-cursed-sin-city-the-dark-knight-returns https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-x... I dunno, that mostly reads like a guy trying to improve his image to sell some new books. It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk. Or, there's lots of famously drunk artists, none of whom wrote All-Star Batman and Robin.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    > It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk Stephen King notoriously was a drunk and an addict for many years, and he is on record saying he barely remembers writing "Cujo", which was an international bestseller and won multiple awards. Many stellar artists struggled with addiction, while still producing art.
blockwriter 5y ago
Read Shakespeare if you do not want a women with swastikas tattooed on her boobs to muddle the perfection of the work. Read Miller if that is exactly what you are in the market for.

tptacek 5y ago

Did you revise your opinion of the Miller's entire oeuvre after Holy Terror? That's what happened to me with Dave Sim and Cerebus at some point; like, you see the previous work in a previous light, and it doesn't work anymore. It's like that episode of The Office where Brian Baumgartner sells James Spader on "the oatmeal raisin cookie idea" in a meeting, only to realize after later hearing about "the Big Mac idea" that "it was always just cookies. ...". That's I think one of the big critical narratives about Miller --- it was always just cookies.

throwaway5752 5y ago
You nailed it. Scott Adams, too, to a certain degree. It's a bit of frame breaking when one finds out a creator has an outsized personality. There's a bit of projection involved in taking in art, and finding there is a great differenced between the imagined creator of a work and the actual creator forces a reinterpretation. It's unavoidable. Maybe Jane Fonda and people with Barberella posters who disagreed with her real life views, for an older example. I think it's particular painful with Frank Miller because the work becomes much less interesting than how a number of us had read it initially.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I think that's probably the big idea behind this critique, right? It's not that Frank Miller has bad ideas (though...) --- it's that when you realize he wasn't really kidding, he's much less interesting. His work isn't thoughtful; it's just id.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    Not a comic, but I had this reaction to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". When I read it as a teenager, I was blown away by the subtle and brilliant satire. When I read it again as an adult and realized he was actually just a fascist, it was deflating.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      The great thing about this is how many people first experienced "Starship Troopers" through the Verhoeven movie, which was, in retrospect, incredibly subversive; like, he actually reclaimed the work from its author. A neat trick!
      - filoleg 5y ago
        That was quite a "one-of-a-kind" experience for me with Starship Troopers. The movie was straight up taking the entirely predictable "Atlas Shrugged, but with commie space insect alien warfare" book source and turned it into a satire on the original material. And not just that, they executed it masterfully. I've never encountered anything like that since then, and if someone has suggestions of a similar "source material => adaptation" experience, those recommendations would be heavily appreciated.
      - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Verhoeven famously gave up on reading Starship Troopers after a few chapters, calling it “boring and depressing.”[0] He was a kid during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands and couldn’t stomach the pro-war, pro-military, openly jingoistic messaging. He had to be talked into making the movie, and only then when he was allowed to put a satirical twist on it. It’s quite a good trick he pulled! [0] https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-troopers-director-never-read-the-book/ https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-t...
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I don't think Heinlein per se was a fascist, he was a man strongly attracted to fascist style thought, which I think was a common feature of many reasonably intelligent people of his generation (hence the great upflarings of fascism they lived through) but I don't think he ever succumbed fully to the attraction in the same way I believe Miller has - probably because he lived through a war against a fascist country.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
A lot of things you consume when you are younger looks bad when you are older. Tastes change. Experience gives you insight. Unfortunately that’s just life. This article would have been more interesting 10-15 years ago or so (DKR was first published in 1986!). I don’t remember the industry as a whole evolving for the better until after the speculation phase. And then we all wisen up. This article brings out the old condescending man in me: “you finally got it kid, good job”. And there’s lots of new, better comics! The author never thought to branch out? Just “taught me hate them?”
- tptacek 5y ago
  Again: it's likely the author didn't even write the headline, especially since the sentiment doesn't occur really anywhere in the piece itself. I'm having trouble believing someone who is this deeply acquainted with Miller is somehow unaware of Maus.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I think it was Miller just giving into his worst tendencies. Like Sim, there is a period where you can write off the crazy as just being eccentricities but then, especially with Sim, the minor digression becomes the major theme of the work and I just had to walk away.
- tptacek 5y ago
  The long, tedious Fitzgerald stuff I can deal with, but his later openness about his wacky political beliefs colors all the previous work for me; like, I can start to see what he was actually trying to say with some of it, and I can't unsee it or substitute my own perceptions from the first time I read it. It's pretty much ruined for me, except to thumb through Gerhard's backgrounds.
tialaramex 5y ago
For me the thing about Cerebus is that Church & State is fucking hilarious despite everything. People vary in where they get off that train, I own as far as Reads, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend anybody else to read beyond Melmoth, but I think you're missing out if you skip the whole thing because Sim is an awful human being.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I certainly can't fault anyone for feeling that way. I've still got all the books on my shelf; I'm not burning them or anything.
egypturnash 5y ago
God, Sim. Dave Sim. Dave Sim blasted his brain open with acid and had a vision of how his goofy Conan parody would be a 300 issue treatise on the nature of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine and never realized that those two principles are only loosely tied to what we call “men” and “women”, then threw in a ton of baggage from his failed relationships and made a huge mess. He is also a master of the form and one of the best letterers out there, I recently picked up a cheap copy of Flight and the way the text integrated into the composition was astounding, even if it was a story where his problems with women were all hanging out. And then there’s the later story where Cerebus sits around a mostly-empty bar arguing with himself for like thirty issues, and Sim pulls out all the stops in his lettering to actually make this exciting to read. I learnt a lot about comics from his work, his influence lurks in my own comics here and there, but he is well into Problematic Fave territory for me and I will never insist that anyone should read his work if they don’t feel like picking around the misogyny woven through it.
kevinmchugh 5y ago
A couple years after this article was written, Miller tried to rehab his image. In part by distancing himself from Holy Terror, in part by saying he had been drinking heavily: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-xerxes-cursed-sin-city-the-dark-knight-returns https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-x... I dunno, that mostly reads like a guy trying to improve his image to sell some new books. It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk. Or, there's lots of famously drunk artists, none of whom wrote All-Star Batman and Robin.
- riffraff 5y ago
  > It's hard to imagine writing and drawing a hundred pages while drunk Stephen King notoriously was a drunk and an addict for many years, and he is on record saying he barely remembers writing "Cujo", which was an international bestseller and won multiple awards. Many stellar artists struggled with addiction, while still producing art.

blockwriter 5y ago

Read Shakespeare if you do not want a women with swastikas tattooed on her boobs to muddle the perfection of the work. Read Miller if that is exactly what you are in the market for.