*Vomits on the floor, eyes bleed.*God the Art, it's FATAL bad.
*Vomits blood*
thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/lin...
I don't think the Stupid of the story even needs to be gone over. Just that Art alone puts it in the top five worst comics ever made for me.
It's really quite simple...
If you don't like reading Frank Miller's work... don't read Frank Miller's work.
I mean really that art? The plot?
Have you heard about "All Star Batman and Robin," the greatest comic ever?
That has got to be the worst art I have ever seen in a comic, of course thats one of the things that made it so great.
I wonder if that comic is as bad as that video. When I see smug snarky guys like that shouting all the time I feel the urge to punch someone. And I'm a really peaceful guy.
/shrug
I don't think the comic was that bad, but I didn't take it seriously, either. I mean yeah, it got pretty darn silly, but if you're looking for stuff that always makes sense you probably shouldn't be looking at super-hero comics.
Letting something that's Crap slide as crap because "well it's a X" when there are plenty of Good things from X isn't really a good excuse, for bad writing.
But that art.. Especially. That makes 90s Comic art look good in comparison.
Seriously, we get you don't like it. You're not alone. A lot of people have problems with Frank Miller's work. But there comes a point where your distaste starts to look a lot a hatedom, where it's not merely enough for you to not like it, but you have to make others not like it as well.
The problem is, you've still bought the comic. Money that in all likelyhood you will never get back and money in all likelyhood, that has just been used to encourage said lazy writing and drawing.
Seriously, you won't like everything out there. That's a simple fact of life. Sometimes you find stuff you really like (Young Avengers!). Sometimes you... don't (Civil War...). Sometimes you're happy with your purchase (Runaways!). Sometimes you're... not. (Anything to do with Ultimatum...)
So quite simply, if you've read some of Frank Miller's stuff and found it not to your taste, then don't keep reading Frank Miller's stuff. Or if you simply must read it anyway because of your masochistic comic-kinks, then borrow it from a friend or library instead of buying it.
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1Favorite part: Emma giving a moral smackdown to Tony. When you have Emma friggin' Frost giving you a moral smackdown, you should be seeing red flags. Second favorite part was probably Stature walking out on Captain America saying something to the effect of "I wanted to be a hero. This isn't it."
I'm really not sure where that came from. Yeah, she fills the same role as team psychic and sharing Scott's bed, but that's about where the similarities end. I don't think you'd ever seen Jean write a letter saying "Honey, I'm out for milk, eggs, and assassination. Love Emma"
I just like cracking the joke. There was art for the pair of them at one time where they were the same gal, with different hair colors and outfits. Couple that, with her well coupling with Scott, and role in the team. The jokes among my circle of close friends naturally spawned from that. Before that, thanks to the movies, and some comics we always make the Bi Logan, and Bi Scott jokes, where they are secret lovers.
You should see what we've done to Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. (Obi Wan is a Pill Popping Stoner Alcoholic. And Anakin is the Traumatized* Teen Emo Kid)
*traumatized by the things Yoda did because Anakin was "too old"
Yeah messed up. But absolutely hilarious stuff truly.
Sometime during the 90s, probably when he was wrapping up his work on “SinCity,” Frank Miller got a case of the brain eater, which is a terrible condition where an artist has an alien parasite from another dimension devours their talent. Joking aside, a part of what is irritating about Miller’s work over the last decade is the material he produced in the two decades before that was (and remains) top notch stuff. “The Dark Knight Returns,” “Batman Year One,” and “SinCity” are all quality products. However, “The Dark Knight Strikes Again” and “All Star Batman and Robin” are poor quality by any standards and inexcusably poor quality by Miller’s previous work. That said, I go over books myself and check reviews before I make a purchase of comic book, or just about anything else for that matter.
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1I'm pretty sure someone later ret-conned this, but Miller still tried, I'm pretty sure.
Joking aside, a part of what is irritating about Miller’s work over the last decade is the material he produced in the two decades before that was (and remains) top notch stuff. “The Dark Knight Returns,” “Batman Year One,” and “SinCity” are all quality products. However, “The Dark Knight Strikes Again” and “All Star Batman and Robin” are poor quality by any standards and inexcusably poor quality by Miller’s previous work. That said, I go over books myself and check reviews before I make a purchase of comic book, or just about anything else for that matter.
Yup. The tragedy here is not how bad the comics are, it is how bad they are in comparison to Miller's body of work. This is the comic equivalent of Robert De Niro starring in Analyze This and Meet the Parents. This is the man who did Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter and The Godfaher Part II for Bog's sake! To fall so far, to produce such crap, actually sullies the reputation of your prior great work.
And I haven't read Frank Miller's more recent works, but I enjoyed "Batman: Year One", "The Dark Knight Returns", "The Dark Knight Strikes Again", and "Sin City". So even if his writing has greatly declined, its kind of like he earned the right to be crappy (if he really is) with his previous work.
So, just to be clear, is Batman: Year One where Miller turned Catomwan into a child prostitute1, or was it some other comic he did that in?
Just a prostitute, not a child prostitute... and that was retconned into being a call girl (which is not quite the same thing) and then that was hand waved away.
So, just to be clear, is Batman: Year One where Miller turned Catomwan into a child prostitute1, or was it some other comic he did that in?
Just a prostitute, not a child prostitute... and that was retconned into being a call girl (which is not quite the same thing) and then that was hand waved away.
In Dark Knight Returns he established a connection between Catwoman and prostitutes, as she ran a call girl service in that one. In Year One, she is in all of like three panels, looking out a window in a dominatrix outfit while a young Bruce Wayne gets his cheeks handed to him by a pimp and his posse.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense for the character. More sense than a lot of other origins that have been put out there over the years.
In any event, I don't know what happened to Miller, but his name these days makes me less likely to buy something.
Then one day he was drawing a page for his upcoming comic in which a group of heroic terrorists crash their flying car into the White House in a bid to topple the US government, and he looked out his window and realized that actual terrorists had flown an actual plane into an actual building in order to actually topple the actual US government, and he lost all ability to empathize with his less noble characters, which was a serious problem given the niche he had sort of carved out for himself. His perspective took a deep plunge into the nationalist side and the quality and depth of his writing went right along with it.
If you look at the foreword in one of the Dark Knight Returns editions, he talks about how Batman is objectively kind of a fascist jerk, and that part of the fantasy is that we all assume that Batman agrees with us on everything so we don't mind that he's perfectly comfortable pounding people's faces until they do what he tells them to, and he wanted to examine what kind of world we would have to live in for somebody like that to be considered a hero, and how it would affect other aspects of Bruce Wayne's life to think like that. Then if you look at the foreword to Dark Knight Strikes Back he talks about how he started off thinking Batman was the hero, and then 9/11 happened and he realized Batman was really the villain all along. The flying car scene made it into the book but he rewrote the ending completely.
The lesson here is that tunnel vision makes for bad writing. You need to be able to empathize with your characters, especially the ones you disagree with. Maybe if Miller changes genres to something that deals more with themes that he is still conflicted about instead of themes he seems to have made up his mind with complete finality, his writing will improve significantly again.
My god. The art.. Oh god
If you think that is bad, check this out:
minipainting-guild.net/eo/eoart.html
minipainting-guild.net/eo/eoart2.html
It never bothered me much because the story did not dwell on the prostitution [...]
If he could write one story withotu prostitutes, whores, or women of similar ilk, I might give him a pass. As is, it's just another reason I can't take Frank Miller seriously and require pretty stellar reviews before I'll see anything of his these days.
It never bothered me much because the story did not dwell on the prostitution [...]
If he could write one story withotu prostitutes, whores, or women of similar ilk, I might give him a pass. As is, it's just another reason I can't take Frank Miller seriously and require pretty stellar reviews before I'll see anything of his these days.
That's not fair. Sometimes he has call girls, ladies of the night, streetwalkers, hookers, harlots, and even escorts. So really he runs the whole gamut of female characters.
She was just a ****.
Damn you Boraxe I could have live my whole life without seeing those. It's a testament to just how many people were doing drugs in the 70s and early 80s to see art like that. It's also a testament to just how bored people were to play D&D with art that was that attrocious.