I think, probably, the first time I knew that Frank Miller was losing it was the line "Deadly little Miho", in either Big Fat Kill (probably) or Family Values.
A tiny little oriental girl ninja gang enforcer. "Deadly little Miho". Yeah, uh, Frank, your fetishes have overwhelmed your sense.
Before that point, Frank Miller had varied from good to brilliant in a career with many seminal high points. Sin City itself was a remarkable stylistic achievement, and it earned a lot of points for being genuine hard-boiled noir in a market overwhelmingly dominated by superheroes. But "deadly little Miho" was where the cracks became clearly visible.
It was Dark Knight Strikes Again where I knew that Frank Miller had lost it. It wasn't a particular moment, it was just the complete farrago of senselessness, where no character is recognizable and no plot element coherent. I admit that I speculated, at least in part, that the sheer incompetence was just Frank taking the piss, but ultimately, I concluded, no, it's just bad.
I mean, sure, he had the classic Krusty excuse "They backed a truckload of money up to my house--I'm not made of stone!" But that excuses hackery, not risibility.
I know for sure that All-Star Batman & Robin was where I knew that Frank Miller had lost it, wasn't going to get it back, and didn't want it back.
Frank Miller's impact on modern superhero comics is extraordinary, let there be no doubt of that, but I do not believe that he will create anything worth owning again. He has outlived his genius.
Not that I have a strong opinion or anything.
Posted by Greg at January 31, 2007 3:59 PM
[gpm adds: The link is to a webcomic. It is not spam.]
The two-word rebuttal of that comic is, of course "Martha Washington."
On the other hand, Martha Washington Saves The World would be where I'd mark 'lost it', several years prior to DKSA.
(And I'd probably split off 'didn't want it back' to go with the announcement of Batman:Holy Terror.)
DK2 is a dramatically misunderstood black-humor book that mocked both the superhero genre and fandom itself.
Which is probably why so many fans loathe that series.
"Uh, I meant to do that!" is the one of the oldest excuses for shoddy creative work in the book, which is all it is here.
I might be willing to consider the "black-humor" defense if there were, in fact, any evidence of humor (black or otherwise) in the book. If it was meant as black humor, it is easily the least funny, least blackest, black humor work in the history of the English language.
As far as mocking fandom goes (which, of course, would be incredibly daring because no one ever mocks comic book fandom), the only mocking that Miller is to himself and possibly his friends as he yucks up the fact that so many fans, expecting a sequal to DKR in some meaningful sense of the word "sequel," were stupid enough to actually shell out money for this pile o' horse apples.
A more likely explanation of fan loathing is that fandom is not, in fact, as stupid as Miller now seems to think it is and they quite correctly loathe it because it is simply a wretched piece of work.
I can't blame Frank. I did my best work decades ago too and they still pay me a lot of money. I'm sure all the criticism makes him cry all the way to the bank.
"Uh, I meant to do that!" is the one of the oldest excuses for shoddy creative work in the book
Preceded only by "Anybody who doesn't like this must not get it." The mockery in DKS and All-Star Batman & Robin is painfully, teeth-grindingly obvious and it doesn't do a thing to alleviate their many other flaws; that's why they fail.
Bingo! I've got "cry all the way to the bank", "what great comic have you created", free space, "you just don't get it", and "you can't judge it from the promotional material" for the win.
I don't know their was a contest or I would have tried harder. I guess winners get to continue NOT buying FM's current books and losers get to continue complaining about them not coming out in a timely manner. (The old joke: this food is so bad. I know and the portions are so small.)
It's no coincidence that the only people I know who loved DK2 and All-Star Bats also have a frothing hatred of Paul Levitz.
I don't like them, but I still enjoy complaining about them not coming out in a timely manner.
It's the principle of the thing.
Lewis:
It's not a contest. To help keep our License to Curmudge, behind the scenes the Curmudgeons play "Invalid Response to Criticism Bingo". Every time somebody pulls out a favorite old chestnut like "you don't get the joke", we get to mark off the corresponding square on our cards.
I still have this painful memory of reading the bit in DK2 with the attempted punchline about Superman and Wonder Woman making the Earth move... and realizing he was trying to make a joke and just failing miserably.
I take it DK2 didn't get better as it ended. I stopped buying it, haven't seen the tpb in the library, and haven't been curious enough to put in an inter-library order.
I think the "I just bought the Photoshop Wow! book" coloring was the worst part of DK2, at least from what I recall.
The sad part is, Dark Knight Returns had a ton of satirical elements in it. Perhaps he doesn't understand that a good bbq sauce can enhance ribs, but if the ribs suck, the sauce can only cover so much.
Explain concern of "Deadly little Miho." I do agree with the DK2 commentary (and no, it didn't get any better...though I liked a bit of the Plastic Man take...but only a bit...). I do agree about what little of the All-Star Batman stories that I perused. But I don't get the "deadly little Miho." THAT was the point where you realized his fetish was peeking through the cracks? You mean the REST of the whorish gang of dominatrix stereotypes didn't get you there?
Personally, I loved the gang of whores. I also loved the linked webcomic that accurately portrays his love of them, too. And all of ours. Let's face it, prostitution sells well in the media. It seems a year or two doesn't go by when an actress gets to play a prostitute to much acclaim. It is almost a rite of passage. And we eat it up...be it the fantasy whore Julia Roberts in PRETTY WOMAN to the tragic whore in LEAVING LOS VEGAS and some nods to Elizabeth Shue, with another that same year with MIGHTY APHRODITE.
Men, we love them whores. And whores with ninja swords and roller skates. Sweet. SIN CITY was a fetish version of noir and not a single stereotype went undone. So why "deadly little Miho" as the point of new return for Frank Miller? Especially when there was so much around that title that was good compared to his more recent work.
Dammit, Lewis, if you'd trotted out "So why don't you drop it already?" one comment earlier I would have won.
You lucked out this time, Morrow.
Not so fast, Marc. I was only an "It's just a comic book" away from Bingo myself. That game was wide open.
If we're talking about Frank Miller losing it, I'm surprised no one's mentioned his appearance in NPR's Talk of the Nation last week. They were doing a show on writers and artists on their own ideas of the state of the union. Miller sounded paranoid and frightened as he described the "existential foe" currently facing off against the U.S. and the West. To be charitable, I suppose he might've just sounded nervous, but I'd expect that he'd have gotten used to media by now. You can click through to the broadcast here (Frank's intro starts at about 30:38 into the show), or I put together a quick transcript of some of the juicier parts. Here's his opening:
Well, I don't--I really don't find myself worrying so much about the state of the union as I do about, um, the state of the home front. It seems to me quite obvious that our, our country, and the entire western world, is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants, and we're behaving like a collapsing empire.
And then there's this a little ways in:
Let's finally talk about the enemy. Somebody--for some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we're up against, uh, and the sixth-century barbarism they actually represent. These people saw peoples' heads off. They enslave women, they genetically mutilate their daughters. Um, they, they, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. Um, I'm speaking into a microphone that never could've been a product of their culture. And I'm living in a city where 3,000 of my neighbors were killed by, uh, thieves of airplanes they never could've built.
Finally, he closes with this:
Nobody questions why we, uh, after Pearl Harbor, attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism. We’re doing the same thing now.
INTERVIEWER: Well, they did declare war on us, by the way.
Yeah, but what I mean is--so did Iraq.
Miller's entire segment is about five minutes long. It's worth it just to hear his demeanor and tone of voice.
I take it DK2 didn't get better as it ended.
A world...not a world, an infinite multiverse of "no" to that one.
The moment I realized that Frank Miller had lost it* was upon realizing that his misogynist values infect everything he writes.
*It of course, meaning anything resembling talent, ever.
"DK2 is a dramatically misunderstood black-humor book that mocked both the superhero genre and fandom itself. Which is probably why so many fans loathe that series."
Pussey! mocked both the superhero genre and fandom itself, and it was great. DKSA was just awful in every way.
I don't think I ever read a book by Miller which I would have considered a work of genius. C'mon, guys... Shakespeare was a genius, Einstein, James Joyce, Alan Moore... But Miller? Good works: Dark Knight Retuns, Batman: Year One, Daredevil... that's all. All of his stories are the same, with this childish "macho way of life". He only changes the background and the characters (a little). The rest is the same in each work.
George, I think that Daredevil: Born Again is probably the best work that Marvel has ever published.
Doug: Those Miller quotes are really disturbing. He's apparently a card-carrying member of the Dennis Miller 1st Pissing-Themselves Brigade.
I mean, it's not like Western mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy (et al.) aren't based on work done during the flowering of the Caliphate, when my ancestors (and his) were still grubbing in the dirt with sticks.
Did Iraq actually formally declare war on us?
fil:
It's a question of degree more than of kind. At least most of the whores of Old Town use guns and are tall enough to be allowed onto the Teacup Ride at Disneyland.
Greg: You're right. We don't call the symbols we use for our numbers "Arabic numerals" for nothing. And I'm not aware that Iraq ever declared war on us, but I'd have to doublecheck for a definitive answer.
Arabic numerals are actually from India. Islamic civilization certainly has a lot of accomplishments, but a lot was piggy backed on the Greeks, and a lot of Islamic philosophy is spent slowly abandoning any pre-Koranic corpus. And one of the reasons our ancestors were "grubbing in the dirt with sticks" (not accurate of course) was the destruction of the old Meditteranean cultural and trade unity by the Muslim invaders.
I don't think Iraq ever declared war on us, but they were definitely in violation of the agreement to end the original Gulf War and Saddam did try to kill a former US President. Once you factor in the ongoing aerial support of the Kurds and intermittent bombing, it seems like war to me. One can question the strategic decision to attack Iraq in 2003, but the casus belli seems overdetermined if anything.
If you mean "overdetermined" in the sense that Bush and the neocons were willing to provide any cause for war, and kept providing new ones from imaginary links to 9/11 to imaginary weapons of mass destruction until they found one that the general public accepted, then yes, "overdetermined" is accurate.
and Saddam did try to kill a former US President
So we've been told, but Seymour Hersh cast some serious doubts on this story back in 1993.
And that "aerial support of the Kurds and intermittent bombing"... that was us. Hardly evidence for Miller's bizarre claim that Iraq declared war on us (he seems to be confusing Iraq and al-Qaeda).
Chris: Science and human civilization in general are progressive, and everybody's advances piggyback on their predecessors. An awful lot of advances happened a very small number of times (sometimes once) and spread.
What I'm saying is that Miller's arguing that Islamic culture (or possibly just Iraq) couldn't build (presumably "invent") microphones or airplanes, and suggesting that Islam's sixth century barbarism is typical, displays an ignorance of Islamic history in particular and a xenophobic misapprehension of anthropology in general.
On to "Mediterranean cultural and trade unity": When? At the Roman Empire's height, perhaps, but the Empire and the Pax Romana crumbled long before Islam, from internal strife, the Germans, and the Persians.
Can any of the various modern Islamic cultures (much less Afghanistan's, which is the one Miller appears to have been talking about) really be said to be 'the same' culture as the Caliphate at it's height? I mean, there's an awful lot of major traumas between here and there all over the globe (various European and Ottomon colonization and decolonization, not to mention the Caliphate's own end)...
(Oh, and every single time Iraq's radars targeted a plane enforcing the no-fly zones, that was a perfectly fine fresh Casus Bellum right there. Happened about every month, IIRC.)
Couple of points:
they genetically mutilate their daughters
Am I the only one who noticed something wrong with this statement? (Maybe we all read too many comic books.)
It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism. We’re doing the same thing now.
The Islamic radicals are not fascists. How can we defeat an ideology (which is what we're actually at "war" with) when we don't understand it?
(Our enemy isn't really 'global' either. Sure, a terrorist could pop up anywhere, but it's hardly the same thing as a global threat.)
they genetically mutilate their daughters
Am I the only one who noticed something wrong with this statement? (Maybe we all read too many comic books.)
There are at least two things wrong with it, but one might just be a transcription error--"genetically" should, obviously, be "genitally". If that's Miller's error, he deserves sound mockery for it.
The other error, of course, is that female genital mutilation is not an Islamic practice--it's widespread in parts of the world that are non-Islamic and is also found in a few bordering places which are Islamic.
I intentionally typed genetically instead of genitally because that's what it sounds like to me (and I gave it another listen before writing this response). I won't argue that he probably intended to say genitally, though, because at least that makes sense, even if, as you point out, it's factually incorrect.
Also, I think it was clear that Miller was losing it as early as the one-two punch of awfulness that was Martha Washington (a political satire grounded in no political reality I've ever encountered) and Hard Boiled (a slapstick violence comedy with the comedy surgically removed). The early Sin City actually looked like a step back towards sanity.
