open season on piece of shit Frank Miller

[Jeff]

Everyone groks that Rorschach from Watchmen, the Hells Kitchen lunatic right wing vigilante, was Moore skewering Miller, right?

My take is that Moore was skewering Ditko, and that Miller is dancing in front of the mirror dressed in Ditko's skin.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^I would disagree but for the poetry and imagery...I concede to your layered veils of references.

[operator kos]

http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/2011/11/14/the-antiwar-comic-in-response-to-frank-miller

[Jeff]

Beautiful, operator. Thanks.

[IanEye]

My take is that Moore was skewering Ditko, and that Miller is dancing in front of the mirror dressed in Ditko's skin.

*



*

[Hammer of Los]

..

IanEye, that is brilliant.

Steve Ditko was always my favourite comic book artist.

Dr Strange, Spiderman, Rac Shade the Changing Man from Meta Luna etx.

But you are right. That Frank Miller is one large steaming pile of dog poo.

I've got a baaad feeling about Mr Miller.

Dark Knight indeed. Heroes dont act like that. Heroes only resort to violence to protect the innocent. I thought everyone knew that.

Protection GOOD. Preemption BAD.

Love you ALL!

..

[justdrew]

you know who did a great job on the batman mythos is the Marshal Law series, in which batman was called "Private Eye"

yeah, Rorschach may be more Ditko than Miller, but it may well be they're both rolled up in it.

look here and you can see Ditko's old character, "the Question" who's "mask" is somewhat a lot like Rorschach (tho without the pattern).

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/search/label/Ditko
it'll be on the second page, so "show older posts" to get to them.

[JackRiddler]

.

Batman, Miller, Ditko, Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson... With Raw Shark Moore isn't skewering any one of them, but all of them. One character as reductio ad absurdum, and yet 10 times more real and 10 times more memorable than the rest of that lot put together.

.

[Nordic]

What is it with guys named Miller? First Dennis, now Frank.

[Jeff]

This seems a safe thread to confess my love for Batman: The Brave and the Bold.



And the final episode, in which Bat-Mite tires of the lighter incarnation and uses his fifth dimensional magic to make the show jump the shark? Best. Ending. Ever.

[utopiate]

Occupy Frank Miller or what?

[JackRiddler]

.

Ah, the irresistible self-love of reposts.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 389x413207

Tell the Spartans They Died For Your Sins
(What I Learned From "300" - A Review)

Edited on Wed Mar-14-07 09:54 PM by JackRiddler

Spartans! The math leaves no doubt that as a born Peloponesian from the Mani, I have the blood of your kings running through my veins. If the issue of Leonidas and Queen Gorgo survive to this day, then I am among them. Take that, all you who fancy yourselves royalty.

Spartans, I do not romanticize your state, child-rearing practices, love of war, or the enslavement of your fellow Peloponesians. Still, I admire your love of freedom and I love your history. I long for a faithful depiction of the Greco-Persian wars in classic Hollywood manner: the machinations, the cities, the mustering and march of the Xerxian army, the clever witch of Delphi, the fleets and storms, the armored phalanxes, the betrayals and yes, the blood. Look to the HBO series "Rome" for an idea of how (relative) faithfulness to historical settings can be combined with both soap opera and artistic spectacle.

As far as spectacle, story-telling, choreography and visual aesthetics go, the current box-office magnet on the most glorified of Spartan exploits is a work of art. For the first time, a computer-generated work persuades and pleases the eye, presenting iconic painterly images through every sepia-toned frame. Snowflakes and waves of tall grass worthy of the 19th century French landscape painters, piles of skulls and ogres from Bosch, brightly-clad Persian ninjas framed in black as they fall into a bottomless well. The ghosts of Goya applaud.

But were the skies of Greece ever this perpetually gloomy? Alas, the movie's departures from truth are more ominous than a mere slur upon the weather. Audiences do not require accurate history from their blockbusters or even from works of conscious film mythology like "300," but in this case the distortions are systematic and skewed to deliver an agenda. This does not involve a allegory specific to the Bush regime and its wars, as some mistakenly believe, although those unavoidably inform our reception of any war film released in 2007. No. The film transports a far older and more widespread idea, about Free Europe versus the evil monolith of Oriental Asia.

Racism lurks right below the film's surface message of freedom's fight to the death against "tyranny and mysticism." Strange but no surprise, it is Africans who receive the worst treatment. The Persian rulers were not black but relatively light-skinned descendants of the warlike Aryans; the latter had considered themselves superior to the darker-skinned peoples they subjugated. Their empire ran from the gates of India to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, but did not extend beyond Egypt, and thus ruled over a relatively low number of black Africans known as Nubians. Yet the film features many black soldiers and agents of Persia, all shown as malevolent, carnal, unrelenting beasts. These characters are not taken from the fifth century BCE but recruited straight from the Sauronic hordes of Middle Earth. At one point a closeup of an ogrish black man dissolves into complete darkness, showing only the brights of his eyes, a classic trope of filmed racism. Since the Greeks of the time would have had pretty much the same shade of skin as most of the Persians (whose army included a large number of vassal Greeks!) the filmmakers' casting of the respective armies suggests a conscious use of racist equations: dark=bad, light=good.

In comparison to what follows, "300" opens with a relatively truthful rendering of a Spartan boy's childhood. At the edge of a cliff, an archaic eugenicist judges the newborn healthy enough not to be thrown to its death. At eight years the boy is taken from his mother and trained in the harsh life of war. A few years later he is put out in the wilderness for his initiation to manhood, to wander and survive alone. He kills a ravenous, attacking wolf, again of a species that seems to have wandered in from Tolkien.

The next stage of a Spartan's upbringing is omitted, however. We do not see how the boy is selected by a sponsor from among the adult warriors, a man who will mentor him and be free to use the boy for sex. We do not see how physical love among males was employed as the emotional glue that bound together the Spartan soldiers and made them all the more ferocious in each other's defense. There is no child sex and no hint that anything is homosexual in Frank Miller's Sparta. Tellingly, at one point the King spits out his contempt for Athenians as soft-living philosophers: "Those boy-lovers!" The film thus explicitly claims the direct opposite of the Spartan "boy-loving" reality. Need we wonder why?

Sparta was a group of five villages clinging to a ragged mountain, not the magisterial Athenian city seen from afar in "300." From here its warriors subjugated the Messinian helots, the slaves who exceeded the Spartans by seven to eight times in number. Zero of them make an appearance in the film. The city had two kings in a basic division of powers, but no reference is made to that here. Leonidas stands for heroism, bravery and the good. His domestic antagonists are led by the five Ephors, who in the real history were the periodically elected representatives of the Spartan male citizenry. The film transforms the city's one democratic institution, the Ephors, into a lifetime coven of mystic elders, wizards who hand down fatwas from an isolated mountain redoubt. They display grotesque facial sores, dead ringers for the Emperor from "Starwars." These pervert quintuplets are accorded tribute from Sparta in the form of the most beautiful young women, who serve them as drugged-up oracles and sex slaves. Along with a number of other Spartan traitors, the Ephors are seen taking a payoff from the aforementioned Persian ogre, which is not inconceivable given the known weakness of Spartan officials for the forbidden lures of luxury and gold. Only the one true King and his loyalists withstand the internal creep of softness and corruption. Three hundred of them march forth to defend Greece, disobeying the Ephors' orders to stay home for a religious party. This is a blow for rationality and courage, but in a world where such qualities come from inherited natural character.

Why are these soldiers naked? Perhaps the film's omission of the helots leaves no one to carry all the heavy iron gear and provisions a proper ancient army would lug about. And since when are ancient Greeks so tall, and so devoid of body hair? Granted, classical vases depict upright idealized warriors chucking spears in their smooth-skinned buff, so this much is in keeping with the spirit of Greek art.

The 300 come upon the abandoned, burning remains of a city and discover that its butchered population has been wrapped into a death-sculpture around a single, massive tree, framed by the moon. Have we understood the stakes yet? Then they run into their allies, an army of non-Spartan wimps, potters and blacksmiths a foot shorter than the Laconians, earnestly trying to do their own semi-naked part in the defense of the Shire, and not an Athenian among them. Also missing are the total of 5,000 other Greek troops, including the 700 Thespians who stayed with the Spartans to die in the final stand at Thermopylae, but whose public relations department never captured historical imagination in the same way, perhaps because their one-liners were not as pithy and memorable. Would you pay to see a film called "1000"?

All along the army has been shadowed by the movie's Gollum. Beefier than the one in the Lord of the Rings, this Gollum is hunched-over in slope-headed deformity. He is supposed to be Ephialtes, the traitor who actually lived near Thermopylae and showed the Persians the goat-path that allowed them to surround the pass and finally kill the Greek defenders with a shower of arrows from above. The movie recasts him into a Spartan wannabe, a runt who somehow avoided the eugenics program and now approaches Leonidas in the hope that he might be accepted as one of the guys. The king sees that Ephialtes cannot hold his shield any higher than three feet, and rejects him with a note of pity. This is what passes for the film's humanistic understanding of the Other: Ephialtes's weakness and betrayal is a function of bad genetics, and it's not really his fault that he wasn't thrown into the pit of dead babies when he was a newborn. The battle of high ideals that Thermopylae has embodied through the course of Western history is reduced, in this 21st century rendering, to a matter of conflicting essentialisms of character as reflected in physical form. In the clash of civilizations, ugly is bad, handsome is good.

The Spartans spot the enemy hordes and take up their positions in the narrow pass. In a rock-and-roll interlude, they cheer as a propitious storm drowns a part of the Persian fleet. The day of battle dawns. The human waves of Asia charge forth in their foppish gear. Body parts fly in a kung-fu ballet of splatter-spewing metal. The Spartans prevail, their ranks untouched by even one casualty. The sky darkens with the famous shower of arrows shot by the Persians – Cowards!, the Spartans call -- but they hold their shields close and tight, and again emerge without casualties. A second wave of mask-wielding special forces, known as the Immortals, now mounts a wall the Spartans have built from the bloody corpses of the prior attack waves, again to be repelled. The first of the Spartans falls, the gentle son of Leonidas's captain. The film had set him up for the traditional, heart-tugging role of First Victim at an earlier roll-call of the troops. No surprise: the soft die first.

Now Xerxes' magnificent train rides up on the backs of a few hundred slaves, and he steps down from his throne for a parlay. The emperor presents eight feet of muscle, hairless, carrying more piercings than pores. He speaks in a stereo voice about two feet below the lowest human basso, and for all this is still just another vain, puff-powdered girly-man of the Orient who thinks he's God. Readers of Frank Miller will recognize him as a stylish cousin to the gang leader in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," and it is in proper bat-fashion that the Greek king stalks forward to confront him, alone. Leonidas rejects an offer to be the satrap of a Persian Greece, and denies a final call for his men to surrender their arms: Molon labe! ("Come and get them!") He promises that before he dies, he will draw Xerxes's immortal blood. I wonder if that counts as a spoiler?

From there the road is clear. The damaged Ephialtes is brought to the Emperor's tent and allowed to revel in its scenes of Sodom and Gommorah in exchange for surrendering the key piece of intelligence. Meanwhile, back in Sparta, Gorgo is forced into sex by the sweet-talking but rotten head of the town's appeasement faction, one night before she brilliantly outmaneuvers him in council and sticks him with the long knife we knew all along would be his lot. His 30 pieces of Persian gold scatter on the bloodstained floor: Traitors!, cry the old men of Sparta, and at once the nation is united. (For any who this year think they see a Bush in Leonidas, consider that our chickenhawk figurehead is only one military disaster away from being associated next year with the traitor faction, whose love of gold has stripped our forces of their body armor.)

Back at the pass, Leonidas releases the Greek wimps to go south and train to fight another day. With them he sends a single Spartan, chosen not because he has lost an eye but because he is the best of their story-tellers. We realize this man, until now unseen, has all along been the film's narrator. He has told the tale in the framing device of a fireside speech to a group of soldiers, on some later, as-yet unspecified occasion.

The Spartans are surrounded. Leonidas makes a gesture of mercy for Ephialtes, then bows down before the Emperor's train and lays down his helmet and shield. Will the Persians take this obvious bait? Have they still not understood the inner strength of the men they face? Leonidas rises to hurl a spear that spins in slo-mo as it travels thirty yards, slashes Xerxes's face, and strikes his train's backboard. The wounded Emperor signals, the arrows rain down a final time, all goes black. The camera rises up and out to reveal a stunning tableau of the dead king, full of arrows but face unmarred, in crucifixial rest, surrounded by the bodies of his comrades, sanctified and beautiful.

Cut to the narrator, who concludes his tale and rises to lead a unit in the combined forces of Greece, one year later, 30,000 men united and ready for the final rout of the demoralized Persian forces at Plataea. With a roar, the free men charge into history, leaving this student of the Persian wars with a last question: Where are the Athenians? Don't I remember from Herodotus that this whole war started as the Persian response to an Athenian campaign to free the Greek vassal states of Asia Minor? I also seem to recall that Athenians led the way in each of the most important victories – at Marathon near-singlehandedly, at Salamis scuttling the Persian navy and forcing the withdrawal of Xerxes and the majority of his armies from Greece, and indeed at Plataea as equals to the Spartans against the Persian rump.

To which the acolytes of Frank Miller may well respond: "Those boy-lovers? Please. A footnote." America needs Spartans.

[undead]

Sparta was a group of five villages clinging to a ragged mountain, not the magisterial Athenian city seen from afar in "300."

Don't forget the huge waves crashing against the landlocked city's walls.

[semper occultus]

Ah, the irresistible self-love of reposts.

...well you wouldn't want to type that out again would you ?

as public acts of self-love go its probably the least offensive & unhygienic...what did you think of Sin City ?....found that left a nastily unpleasant psychic residue....

[justdrew]

has anyone read the David Brin piece I linked in the OP, it's very worth reading

(nice take-down Jack )