The other day, I sold all of my ‘Sin City’ trade paperbacks.
I didn’t do it as a grand gesture or anything; I was making one of my occasional trawls through my bookshelves, clearing out the stuff that I didn’t think I’d miss and selling it to Half Price Books. But it struck me as significant that when I looked at a series I’d once greatly enjoyed, all I could think of was how much of a gigantic douchebag Frank Miller was, and how badly his desperate “misogyny and machismo” act made him equally worthy of pity and contempt. (And also that he hadn’t done anything worth reading in years…it’s hard for me to pick up ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, knowing that it inevitably led to ‘The Dark Knight Strikes Back’.) And so I sold them.
Now, this isn’t a grand announcement of how I’m done waiting for Frank Miller’s work to be good again, the way I just did with Marvel and DC. It’s not intended to be a statement of moral superiority: “Why are you still following Frank Miller, don’t you know that you’re giving money to a man who kills puppies and hates freedom and loves ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’ and…” (Et cetera.) It’s just that it struck me that everyone has that breaking point, even if it’s different for each person and different things trigger it. Everyone has that point where they can no longer separate the art from the artist, and they just can’t keep following a person’s work because as talented as they are, that person is a thundering asshole. Dave Sim hit that point for me, Orson Scott Card did too, and as mentioned, Frank Miller finally reached that level as well.
(And let me stress, this is different from suddenly realizing that someone’s actually horrifically untalented and that everything you thought you liked from them was really just superficially entertaining in a glossy way that covered up its huge, fundamental flaws. That’s what we call a “Mark Millar” moment.)
But I was interested in finding out what makes it happen for other people. Is it politics? Is it a series of particularly personally offensive works? Is it just ugly personal practices, like finding out that someone ripped off their business partners to get all the proceeds from an AMC TV series? (Not that I really care about it…I wasn’t following Robert Kirkman even before that…but it strikes me as something that might turn some people away from his work as well.) Is it gradual, or sudden? I’d like this to be as open and friendly a discussion as possible, so try to avoid saying things like, “I can’t believe you haven’t given up on (Orson Scott Card, Frank Miller, Dave Sim) yet, don’t you realize how terrible he is?” Or, for that matter, “How dare you slag off on (Orson Scott Card, Frank Miller, Dave Sim), don’t you realize he’s really a wonderful person who’s absolutely right about women being black voids of emotion that swallow men’s divine light of reason?” Let’s try to keep it to what makes that moment happen, and how you handle it when it does.
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I tend to separate the works from the creator. Well, I do once I’ve read them, and if I dislike a creator, I may stop reading his/her new material. Though, it’s usually more because I focus on the work, and kind of ignore who it’s written by until after I’ve finished it.
Well, that explains the constant calls for Marvel to destroy their continuity like DC does every few years.
I hope they never do. Their work has been very good through the last years, even if individual events sucked. Their “grand storyline”, however, has been built very nicely.
Normally I couldn’t give a stuff where the art came from; all I ask is that it be good.
But I haven’t been able to watch anything by Roman Polanski since I read his victim’s statement. Which on the one hand is a pity because he is a genuinely great filmmaker, but on the other hand fuck him, he’s evil.
Somehow I’ve managed to avoid this. What I do instead is find out what an unrelenting douche Sim or Card or etc. is, and never pick up any of their work, no matter how acclaimed it is. Ender’s Game may be genius, the first however many issues of Cerebus done before Sim went stupid may be amazing… I’m never gonna know.
That said, I have a feeling I may be reaching the breaking point on Miller myself. His pathetic little anti-Occupy rant was extra sad and stupid for a man who, judging from Dark Knight Strikes Again just for one, was thinking a lot of the same things Occupy is now saying before there was an Occupy to say them, but got scared out of his principles Dennis Miller style. (Huh, must be the name…)
But all that did was make me notice the annoying little tics about his work more sharply: the problems with women, the obsession with manly men BUT the presentation of gay men as either evil or comic relief, the naked hatred of psychiatry…
(Which to me all spells “a deeply closeted man who got told something by his shrink that he wasn’t ready to hear,” but who am I to say?)
I’m almost scared to finally read his original run on Daredevil. How many symptoms of Milleritis am I going to catch onto, and are they going to spoil the whole thing for me?
There’s an old story that William Penn had trouble reconciling that the fashion of his day said that men of his station should carry a sword with the fact that Quaker’s are supposed to be pacifists. So he went to George Fox and asked him what to do. Fox told him to “carry his sword for as long as he could.”
I’m kind of surprised a discussion of how terrible Frank Miller is made me think of that. To contribute, for me it was his handling of Wonder Woman in All Star Batman and Robin that finally made me accept just how terrible he was.
It’s a complex issue. Part of me wants to say “I read the work on its own,” but no I don’t; I can’t separate out what I know about the artist anymore than I can separate out what I know about an artist’s previous works–or anymore than I can separate out how my blood sugar is doing that day. If you can, that’s great.
Now I also distinguish between “mistakes” and “bad politics.” “Artist X got a DUI” is probably a mistake; “Artist X has a history of anti-Semitic statements” is bad politics. I can forgive mistakes more easily than ongoing problems.
And I’d probably also distinguish between “dead” and “could potentially have an effect on issues I care about.” Ezra Pound may be an anit-Semite, but he’s not giving money to anti-Semitics groups, so I could buy a book of his stuff. But if I buy something by Miller, and he profits, where does that money go?
I don’t want to be put into the role of tracking down everyone’s donations or votes and restricting my viewing habits to people whose politics I agree; but these things (donations, votes) affect people’s lives seriously, like that recent letter from a dad disowning his gay son. (I’m not saying that act can be traced to any particular artist, only as an example of how politics–which we often think of as abstract and out there–can be really personal and concrete.)
But it also helps that a lot of these people who have terrible problems in their politics also have terrible problems in their work. I’m sure I liked Ender’s Game when I was young and thought that revenge fantasies of omnipotence were awesome, but now I can read it and see where he has to cheat to come out with his solution.
But these are also situations where it’s easy to identify one particular artist. With something like movies–where there are often armies of people behind the making–it gets more complex. Mel Gibson may have problems but when Jodie Foster casts him in a movie, I’m not going to punish the whole movie for that decision.
In defense of The Dark Knight Strikes Again, you’re witnessing someone have a nervous breakdown while writing a comic. And it has Batman fly a plane into LexCorp tower right before 9/11, which did not help Miller’s sanity in all likelihood.
That said, his work has gone from writing psycho action women (Electra), to sarcastically misogynistic (The Big Fat Kill), to earnestly misogynistic (All-Star). And that poisons a lot of what came before.
And I won’t start reading anything by people I know to be assholes. So, no Enders Game for me.
This kind of happened to me with Alan Moore. It was a combination of holier-than-thou attitude, moral double-standards (no one should mess with your characters once you’re done with them? Let’s ask Bram Stoker & Jules Verne how they feel about that), and the fact the The Black Dossier nearly cost me an internship because he just HAD to reproduce 18th century porn on era-accurate paper right in the middle of the book where the folds naturally open to.
A copy of “Infinite Jest” fell on my foot and broke my toe, and ever since I curse David Foster Wallace’s name unto all eternity.
I tend to agree with BenjaminJB that many times there are flaws in works that only come to light after repeated readings (and aging). I understand completely why young adults love Ender’s Game but I think from an adult’s perspective it’s kind of scary. My example of falling out of love with a beloved writer is Dan Simmons. Great early stuff (from what I remember) but later works fatally seasoned with old white man cranky.
Seriously though, I give Dave Sim a pass because he is literally mentally ill. Never mind his feelings on women, he believes that doctors are possessed by demons and that the Beatles (not their music, their VERY EXISTENCE) are a secret message from the demiurge.
Not to disrail the conversation completely but I stopped reading the Ender’s Game series about Bean when I realised that a major plotpoint was genetic samples that could be turned into a baby was treated as a baby.
That, and the Innocent Killer essay about Ender Wiggin by John Kessell.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
Not really arguing with you Jack-Pumpkinhead, but Alan Moore’s position is a little more nuanced than “no one should ever use my characters.” The agreement he had with DC was that a year after Watchmen went out of print, the rights would revert from DC to him. DC has never let Watchmen go out of print so he never got the rights (and the money that goes with them) that he was expecting.
In contrast all the creators of characters in LXG got to financially benefit from their characters throughout their lifetime before the characters eventually entered the public domain.
That said Moore hasn’t exactly made his case to the public well and is more than a little insane, so your mileage may very.
I generally TRY to separate the creator from the work but it ain’t always easy. Then again, there are great works of art that I realize are great works of art that I will have nothing to do with because I despise the person (or people) who made it. Polanski’s a good example. Phil Spector is another.
Frank Miller mad the Spirit so that was it for him, in my opinion. Everything that came after (and before, for that matter) is kinda irrelevant. And the Sin City books, while interesting at the time, don’t hold up that well upon rereading. (Neither does Sandman, for that matter.)
Alan Moore gets a pass from me and I honestly don’t understand the vitriol directed towards him. Bram Stoker, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe – all these people were dead for decades before Moore did his works based on their works. Plus, DC treated him badly on more than one occasion, very badly indeed, financially as well as morally as well as intellectually.
Dave Sim? Dave Sim believes what he believes. If you don’t like what he believes, then don’t read his work. But don’t begrudge him his opinions. They’re HIS opinions and if you don’t like them, no one is forcing you to expose yourself to them. Silencing him, shouting him down, censoring him – this reinforces his beliefs to himself and gives him an opportunity to say “SEE? I was right all along.”
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I’d rather KNOW FOR A FACT that Creator A is a racist or a mysogynist than have to parse every line of his/her work, looking for clues about their true beliefs.
Boycotting even a partial list of great anti-semites would mean chucking out a great deal of classical music, tons of great novels, all Disney movies and all Ford automobiles. (And probably Chevy’s too, for all we know.)You’ve ridden in a Ford automobile? Why do you hate Jews? IBM sold things to the Nazis. So did Coca Cola. Hell, Volkswagon! Hugo Boss! Mitsubishi made planes for the Imperial Japanese army. Tanks, too.
I will never read another mainstream DC comic ever again, ever since Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis and the nu 52. (Also, I think they bear more than a small amount of responsiblity for the Aurora shooting but that’s just me.)
On the other hand, I’ll look at Marvel comics, even though they’ve screwed over Steve Gerber, Gary Friedrich, Steve Ditko and a little fellow name of Jack Kirby, all the while allowing Stan Lee to rewrite history, collect money for doing nothing and generally being a tiresome blowhard who does nothing but toot his own horn (or play his ocarina, to be more accurrate.)
Know who I REALLY hate? Kanye West. Seriously, fuck him. He’s got the kind of face that if you started punching it, you’d never stop.
When I found out how homophobic OSC is, it broke my heart. Really and truly. Speaker For The Dead is one of my 10 favorite books ever, and it just hurt.
(Also, what you called a “Mark Millar” moment sounded a hell of a lot more like a “Jeph Loeb” moment to me.)
I have to separate the creator from their works. If I didn’t read the works of assholes, I’d’ve missed so much.
That said, you can always buy used (and I do, for some people).
A Mark Millar moment–ha!
It’s such a sad feeling. A sense of pure disappointment. “You painted such worlds of wonder… but now I can taste nothing but ashes.”
I think part of it comes from when creators use their creation as a platform. Not even necessarily a place to vent their spleen directly, but a support. They stand up and say “My works are enormously popular. Therefore, when I speak people will listen.” And then they speak, and what they say is so banal that you can’t feel anything but let down.
When little ideas are put into a creative work, you look at that and say “This sucks. Why would anyone publish this crap?” And it’s done. When someone whose works encouraged you to think big ideas goes on to fixate on such petty little things, it makes you have second thoughts about what you thought before. You start wondering “Was this always there in him? Is it at the core of that stuff that I liked, and I just never noticed? And if it wasn’t, and the things I thought were there, what made him throw it all away for such… crap?”
I still like Miller’s Sin City work, and Dark Knight Returns (not so much the sequel). And volume 1 of ASSBAR is HILARIOUS. Not intentionally, of course. Not even going to bother with his new stuff, or 300, or any of the rest of it, not because he’s said anything I disagree with (unless he’s explicitly shown that he’s misogynist or homophobic or some such, outside of his work) but because his quality of work has gone down.
You know who I won’t support any more who hasn’t been brought up? Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. That guy’s a misogynist and a half.
Sometimes it’s things that the writers say, the positions they espouse, and other things of that nature.
But a lot of the time, it’s super-fans who turn into five year olds, earnestly insisting that their golden boy creator can do no wrong and is made of solid gold, and asking, oh, by the way, HATER WHO IS JEALOUS OF SAID CREATOR’S ENORMOUS PENIS, that Creator also cured cancer and AIDs and saved a busload of orphans from Hitler-Stalin, p.s., where’s your comic that redefines English literature at?
I’m sure if we could see deep enough into any creator’s soul, we’d see something to provoke us to destroy everything of theirs we own. But then, they don’t necessarily allow their odious and twisted beliefs to permeate their work.
I find I can give creators a relatively wide berth, as long as they don’t saturate their works with the worst bits of themselves. Miller’s allowed his demons to become his muses, and he’s approaching unreadability because of it. Kirkman’s business dealings don’t bleed from every page of The Walking Dead (thank God, because there’s enough else that does), so his latitude with me is more profound. I don’t rule out the possibility of an artist’s invisible aspect intruding on their work so much that the work becomes unbearable to me — I don’t want to hold the art responsible for its creator’s flaws — but none jump to mind immediately.
As for what makes that happen…it’s either an statement that the offensive stuff they put in their work is how they feel (like Orson Scott Card) a horrible moral indiscretion (as soon as Lady Gaga ripped off that charity for Japanese tsunami relief, I couldn’t be a fan of hers anymore) or it’s some really awful output (I don’t think I’ll ever see another M. Night Shyamalan movie again, aside from the two good ones he made). However, if what they did wasn’t too bad, they can recover in my eyes (like Metallica did. I realized that while Lars was acting like a douche, they were right on that Napster thing, and Death Magnetic was pretty damn good). Also, I give a bit of a pass on old stuff that was fair for its day (Robert E Howard was really racist, but lived in the South and died in the 1930s, and it wasn’t too explicit in his work, so I can read Conan without much problem)
I’d like to think that I try to not use a person’s public persona as an ad hominem attack on their work. However, when their work starts showing that it’s a Mary Sue/Gary Stu platform for their nonsense, I have to give it up. Granted, there is the problem of taking the Admiral Thrawn position and psychoanalyzing a creator based on their art, which isn’t entirely fair. But there’s only so much of “god-like manipulator of events to teach these poor idiots what I already know” plots I can swallow before I decide that there might just be a wee bit of an attitude problem with Moore. Luckily, it usually corresponds with the works getting wrapped up in their own importance, so it’s easier to leave.
Then again, it might just be the problems in the art itself, and then layering on the public persona to explain them. For instance, I find reading “It” troublesome, not just for the child rape, but knowing the kind of drug fueled bender that created it. Yet, I haven’t a problem with King’s works that aren’t similarly plagued.
I think it just comes to a point where you can’t place a good peice of art over your own ideas and values. So I think it’s not just what a creator does themselves but about where you are as person in your life.
I mean, I’m glad to say I always thought Sin City was stupid. I never really got why people loved it. But I still think Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One are great. But after Miller’s growing crappiness and that bizare rant, I don’t know. I mean, in reality they’re just a bunch of comics.
Frank Miller wasn’t really an issue for me because I always knew his political leanings were pretty much unintelligible. His earlier work is OK but the fact that he devolved into a proto Cro-magnon state was no real surprise.
The biggest one for me – not comics – was Beck. I used to love Beck and while I sort of vaguely knew he had some Scientology in his family background I very fastidiously avoided finding out anything more. But after a while he stopped being chary about it and began talking openly about belonging to the Church. At that point I couldn’t ignore it anymore – if you’re a Scientologist your income is tithed and that money goes towards supporting a white slavery cult. So all my Beck CDs go in the closet.
White Slavery cult? I’ve never heard about $cientology being involved in human traffic, and I’m pretty up on that stuff.
Artist I used to love but can’t stand their politics: Larry Niven. Especially that ‘spread rumours that hospitals commit organlegging’ bit.
Shame you dropped out when you did. In 06 or so, a new generation of Marvel writers came in. You’ll still get a lot of shades of grey and Dark Reign was a lot of what you didn’t want, but the tertiary Marvel books, stuff by Fred Van Lente, and Greg Pak, and Jeff Parker, and yeah, Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen and on a slightly edgier bent Rick Remender and Jason Aaron, and Cristos Gage, and DnA with the cosmic stuff, and Jonathan God Damn Hickman, who just wrote the best Fantastic Four Run since Lee/Kirby.
Just avoid the big crossover for the most part (And marvel really lets you so long as you’re not reading Avengers, honestly, except for in things like Initiative and Avengers Academy where they make a very self contained tie-in and you’re golden.
There are a lot of creators that I used to love but don’t read anymore because either the quality of their work has declined or I have no interest in what they’re currently working on. The big two has shown a phenomenal ability to put the right creative team on the wrong comic in recent years.
As much as it’s made me aware of great things that I otherwise never would have known about, the internet has also sort of ruined comics for me. I used to be a moderator at a message board that had a very heavy creator presence and as a result I’m very aware of which comics professionals are genuinely nice people, which ones are just trying to shill product and don’t really care what readers think, and which ones are terrible people who would have been banned if they were a normal poster and not the guy writing that month’s “X-Men”. Knowing that someone is openly hostile to fans sort of kills my ability to enjoy any product they put out.
On the other hand, I’ll never be on the fence on a Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir project. If what they’re working on sounds remotely interesting then I’ll get it simply because I think they’re awesome people.
As a bad person, it feels wrong of me to judge talented creators for being bad people. So I just interest myself in the quality of the work and not the quality of the worker.
Card may be a thundering douchenozzle, but I’ll keep reading as long as he keeps up his writing quality. Eventually he’ll die and the problem will solve itself nicely.
Sometimes you can be an insufferable prick and get away with it because of the quality of your work. You can’t if your writing is generic at best.
You want to see a comic book artist go crazy? Go over to the JBF and mention that the Church of Anti-religion has more zealots than Christianity…and that instead of a bible…they find comfort in Scientific American…and that their prophets are just angry guys who don’t like being told what to do…and that the “weekly” atheist thread on his site is their church service. He’ll drop a loaf and pass out from anger.
Honestly…if a creator is an ass….I can’t make myself buy anything they produce.
I don’t think I’ve ever yet had the problem where a creator’s work is breath-taking but their personal politics are awful, creating an actual conflict. What generally happens is that finding out a creator’s awful politics makes you notice the places it bleeds through in the work, places minor enough you can skim over it if you’re not already aware. (Like OSC’s celibate gay scientist who finally marries a woman and manages to have a baby “the natural way,” AWKWARD.) Inevitably these are things that make the work *less good* – creators you like have weak spots too, but there isn’t usually anything to draw attention to them over the strong points.
For a slightly different example, I used to identify very strongly with Amanda Palmer – well, we have a lot of similarities in the identity department – and this helped her songs hit home harder, because it was easier to sink into the persona/perspective of the musical I. Unfortunately a combination of her poor handling of fans’ objections to one of her side projects and some general twitter oversaturation has thrown me out of that particular form of hero worship. I still enjoy her music, but it’s easier to notice the stuff I never exactly liked but ignored for the stuff I did like. I don’t know if that will ever hit the point of abandoning her entirely, like it has for others, but it’s definitely moved her down a few notches.
Hey, long time reader (okay, maybe 2-4 years and most of that was “Who’s Who”).
I personally was never into comics or graphic novels until I started reading some of the reviews and character bios on this and another site. But around my first year in the USAF I started reading a few collections and graphic novels (Watchmen, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Crisis ad Infinitum, etc.) and simply loved them.
I have to say as a new comic fan who doesn’t really follow books that well and could care less about the author that I am unaffected by how the artist may be personally or politically.
I wonder if this is related to my not being familiar with the individual comics writers or not. For example I know of various companies that are on opposite sides of political issues (won’t go into the issues because it isn’t relevant, just say they are related to recent media frenzies) and I have had no moral qualms about buying from either or.
As another example I return to this website every week even though I know I don’t agree with the political views of it’s authors and (a significant portion of it’s) commenters.
Basically I like what I like regardless of who’s selling it and kinda wonder if that leaves me in the minority.
When the Blob ate the Wasp. It just flipped a switch and my long enjoyment of Loeb was done.
Can’t explain it. I don’t have a moral axe to grind about it. It just took me as a fan and said “no more for me”.
the one issue that makes me completely and immediately give up on a (contemporary) artists work is homophobia. im gay, and i just cant deal with homophobic artists, simple as that.
No matter how dopy Frank Miller’s politics is, I’m not going to get rid of my copy of Batman Year One. However, as his work seems to be getting more political, I get less interested in reading it.
David Eddings. This was a hard one for me to reach, because I grew up reading the Belgariad and the Mallorean over and over again. And it wasn’t a political break. It took a very long time (probably longer than it should have) but then I read the first book in the Dreamers series, and that was that. I found the good guys to be overpowered, arrogantly superior, and self-righteous, to the point where I was rooting for the villains. And that annoyance with the protagonists started bleeding back into the other books as well.
And like a lot of posters here, I can still see why the books would appeal to a YA audience, even if I no longer find it appealing myself. But then, what’s the difference between these books, and what we’re (and I realize I’m using “we” very expansively) reading now? Are we going to look back in ten years’ time at our Game of Thrones and Court of Owls and so forth and go “well, I’m glad I’ve gotten over *that.*”
I’m another fan who’s found that after I learn a creator is some kind of an extreme creep, any traces of their problems in their work are suddenly as vivid as black light paint under a UV lamp.
I’ve also noticed, though, that the kind of creator who makes their obnoxiousness well enough known for me to hear about it is also the sort of person who can’t help getting it all over their work everywhere to a ruinous aesthetic degree. And, yes, I’m looking straight at Orson Scott Card, here. I wasn’t much surprised to find out about his overtly nasty activities given the downward drift in his writing. Or perhaps I was just growing up to see what had always been there?
@Mark Temporis – Read up on Sea Org, particularly the testimonials of the lucky few people who escaped imprisonment at sea and their “one billion year” labor contracts.
I have to say, this is one of the most interesting discussions I’ve seen come up on this blog. Well done.
This has only rarely happened to me with work that I truly loved. The one case that springs to mind is an artist I admired and spoke to online on a regular basis, until he lost his shit on me over something I said. I still think his work is brilliant, but I can’t look at it without thinking “what a jerk.”
A friend once interviewed Warren Ellis, and told him how nervous he was to meet him. Ellis turned out to be really nice, but he told my friend he once had the chance to meet Hunter S. Thompson… and refused. Ellis was terrified Thompson would be a prick (which was likely) and he didn’t want to taint his love of the man’s writing.
‘Marvel 1985’ was some kind of reverse-Mark Millar moment for me. After practicing for decades he finally wrote a comic book that was pretty competent.
I’m still pretty mad at Grant Morrison for tricking me into reading Millar’s run on Swamp Thing twenty years ago, but I’m mostly over it now.
I’ve dropped any number of creators for a variety of reasons.
Some I have dropped b/c their personal moral/ethical stances are revealed to be at odds with their public work. I dislike hypocrisy. Moral failings I can understand and overlook, but not when it makes the whole body of work suspect.
I will not support any person or group that is actively supporting injustice. I give a lot of crackpots leeway so long as their nutty ideas aren’t harming / threatening to harm innocent 3rd parties.
Some people I no longer follow b/c they’re raging jackasses. Life is too short.
Two creators and one company I no longer patronize b/c they have deliberately caused harm to several friends of mine.
Many I drop b/c they either lost their chops or became boring / repetitive.
fortunately for me I skim right over who’s writing something most of the time, so I don’t know anything about them.
I am getting pretty annoyed with DC, having just read that they have an editorial mandate that the heroes should be carrying a “great burden”
“Everyone has that point where they can no longer separate the art from the artist, and they just can’t keep following a person’s work because as talented as they are, that person is a thundering asshole.”
Well, no, John. Not “everyone” does, so please don’t presume.
The art is the art. If the creator’s assoholic tendencies become reflected in the art, then the art suffers, and when the art suffers, I dump the artist. When I choose to stop following a creator’s work, it’s because of the art, not *just* because the creator is a dick.
I’m not going to refuse to watch “Pulp Fiction” just because Travolta is a Scientologist nutjob who made “Battlefield: Earth”. I’m not going to refuse to read “Batman: Year One” or DKR just because Miller turned out to be a misogynist douchebag. I’m not going to refuse to enjoy “The Hunt For Red October” just because Clancy’s later work devolved into tiresome Limbaugh-wet-dream soapboxery. My music collection would look pretty thin if I threw out every artist who had sex with an underage groupie.
Art stands independent from the creator, and from other art the creator makes. Art can and should be judged on its own merits. If the art is so infused with the creator’s asshattery that it’s sucky art, then that’s a good reason to reject it. But the creator’s asshattery, in and of itself, especially post-creation asshattery, ought not to be.
The only Millar I’ve read was Red Son, and I thought that was pretty good.
As for Miller, I only really liked Sin City and 300 for the art, so I have no problem separating them from his politics. Caravaggio was an asshole too.
Never read his Daredevil, but you can see the seeds of the crazy germinating in the Ronin miniseries.
and @Ex: You are free to keep reading OSC as you like– but keep in mind that if you are buying new works of his you are effectively giving him money to put behind groups like the National Organization for Marriage. This may or may not bother you.
Card was my first modern sci/fi novelist (after having grown up on Heinlein, Asimov and Dick), and I own all of the Bean/Enderverse books. The compromise I’ve reached with myself is that I don’t buy or read anything ELSE that he’s written, but I won’t let his bigotry get in the way of enjoying works that I grew up with, loved, and, most notably, purchased before I became aware of what an asshole he is.
Concerning OCS: He actually lives near me and writes a column for a weekly local right-wing soapbox “news” paper called the Rhino Times. It’s called “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything.” It is basically a homophobic, right-wing Andy Rooney rant in column form, in which Card mostly complains about incredibly banal things.
So around here, if you say “Orson Scott Card” no one thinks Ender’s Game. They think “Oh, that old cranky guy that writes for the Rhino?” It was years before somebody was telling me about his books and I realized the guy is a famous sci-fi author.
This is interesting. However, I find it is a two edged sword.
Orson Scott Card is a devote Mormon, and to be honest, none of his stances on any type of sexuality surprised me in the least. I have that background knowledge, and I can accept because I know where he is coming from.
Another commenter mentioned Conan, and at the time of writing racism was an institution in the US, and everyone was racist- same with Mark Twain, or Fitzgerald. Since I am aware of this I can find no fault with these.
It does not excuse or forgive the positions, but it allows one to take a step back and see the art through the proper frame of reference. The writers background makes a difference, but it does not make a great work any lesser.
However, that gets to the flip side of the coin, where the artist’s politics and beliefs actively inhibit the creation of a great work. I think that is the point where I draw the line. Miller’s All Star Batman is unenjoyable to me, mainly because of the politics and beliefs that bleed through. Morrison’s Invisibles and Filth are god-awful because of his beliefs (and damn near unreadable). Heinlein’s later works like To Sail Beyond the Sunset, are plagued with it as well. The list goes on and on. That’s the point where I draw the line, when the politics and beliefs get in the way of the good story.
It’s best to do some research into what a particular writer supports, and if it is opposite of what you feel, proceed with caution.
@wsmcneil Preach on, yo.
I haven’t bought a new Frank Miller book in years, but my autographed DKR is a treasure. I don’t think I’d want to shake Orson Scott Crad’s hand, but I find myself re-reading Ender’s Game every three to five years or so. (I check a copy out of the library.). Both of these creators’ later work is inseperable from their politics, but that’s because they pretty much choose them to be – Miller has proudly referred to HOLY TERROR as “propaganda”; Card lost any future purchases from me when Nean started refering to Petra’s fertilized eggs as his babies.
More often for me, I drop out on a creator whose work stops challenging me. It was a blow to the chest when i finally realized that the Brian Michael Bendis who wrote JINX and TORSO and TOTAL SELL OUT and the first 30 or so issues of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN wasn’t the guy who was now writing the AVENGERS. He’d become this complete other dude, a guy who wrote crappy superhero comics I didn’t want to read anymore.
I’m in the “haven’t gotten to that point” camp. Maybe I will someday. But I purposefully try to avoid caring about what my favorite artist/writers/musicians say or do outside of their work. They produce and I consume; why can’t that be enough? I was at the Baltimore Comic Con last year and sat in on a panel where some writer was talking about how you need to really be out there with a blog, twitter feed, and active in forums to really make it these days. He said people no longer buy your writing, but you as a person. That struck me as insane and pathetic. I have people in my life (friends, family, stuff like that) so why would I need to so involve myself in the life of a writer (or whatever) in order to enjoy his or her work? Is that really relevant to their work? I don’t think it is.
@LAZtheinfamous
Were you thinking of something specific, regarding Twain? Accusations of racism against him, whether by the standards of his times or ours, usually fall apart. Not that he was a saint – anti-Semitic attitudes were something he stuggled with and not always successfully, for example.
But, Fitzgerald, I don’t know much about that guy. What were his racist beliefs?
There’s some creators that I’ve turned away from completely. I used to love Loeb, but find his only good work in comics is when he teams with Tim Sale. They seem to bring out the best in each other.
I stopped giving a crap about Peter David after the whole debacle with Scans Daily. Then again, the two series of his I enjoyed – Fallen Angel and X-Factor – had become much less interesting. The former started a non-nonsensical crossover with Shi (I heard later there was an Angel-related crossover, too, which disinterested me further). X-Factor started great but then became just another mutant book tied down with crossovers.
I used to own most of JMS’ Amazing Spider-Man run. I nearly sold them all off with the Gwen/Osborne story, but then sold them all after One More Day.
Frank Miller, honestly, I’ve thought about selling some of stuff. But I separate Miller into two different categories: 80s & early 90s Miller and Modern Miller. The earlier Miller may have had some of his Milleresque tendencies, but they were followed up with some great storytelling. Sin City may be misogynistic at times, but it’s also playing right into the noir setting and femme fatales. Anything after Sin City is when Miller basically went nuts.
So the political aspect of things has me thinking.
There are plenty of creators – even some I agree with – that are so abrasive in conveying their beliefs that it’s hard to enjoy their work. There are quite a few creators whose agenda is so obvious that their work becomes too formulaic to enjoy even if you agree with what they’re saying.
What about the opposite? I’m a pretty liberal guy but I can think of at least two very conservative writers whose work I enjoy.
Bill Willingham – I love everything he’s done for Vertigo (Fables, Sandman spin-offs, Proposition Player). Granted his superhero stuff is underwhelming (and his work on the Bat-books is downright awful).
Chuck Dixon – One of the definitive Batman writers (still the best writer Robin and Nightwing have ever had). Does great action comics (especially martial arts comics). Still denies Conner Hawke is gay (did he READ his own Green Arrow run?).
I think tossing someone’s earlier work falls into a different category from not buying their current stuff. I can think of several fantasy writers (Laurel K. Hamilton, Terry Goodkind) whose early books I liked, then their series, I thought, went off the rails. Doesn’t make me want to toss the early ones though.
Card being anti-gay is one thing. But arguing that legal gay marriage in California would justify straight couples rising up in armed revolt (it’s just like the fight against the British in 1776!).
On 1930s authors: No, not every one is a racist. Paul Ernst’s Avenger series cast one of the hero’s team as an intelligent black man with a college degree. But I’m not bothered by authors of that era being racist/sexist unless it seeps into their work (as it sometimes does, even with writers I like).
Paul Ernst’s Avenger series cast one of the hero’s team as an intelligent black man with a college degree.
Who was married to an intelligent black woman with a college degree, iirc.
When I was in high school and starting college, I liked McFarlane’s work on Spider-Man and Spawn. But then I read several interviews with him and he was an arrogant, rude jerk. So I stopped giving him my money. Same with Erik Larson. And same with Jeph Loeb, although the fact that his work became pretty terrible contributed to that too.
You gave up on Dave Sim for being an asshole long ago, but waited until now for Miller? Your priorities are screwed up.
Mark Twain often gets called racist because of the language used in Huck Finn, which always boggles my mind. If you actually read the book, you realize the language is the characters speaking contemporary common American English for the time period. Much more importantly, you realize the book itself not only is not racist, but it goes well beyond that, into direct anti-racism.
Bret Easton Ellis, long considered by many to be a one-trick pony, has thanks to to advent of Twitter proven that his books are less moral observation and more wishful thinking. Guy is a horrendous tool whose self-loathing homosexuality taints the majority of anything he has to say.
On the other hand, I’ll never be on the fence on a Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir project. If what they’re working on sounds remotely interesting then I’ll get it simply because I think they’re awesome people.
*fist bump*
Like most of the above, there are a lot of reasons why I’ll stop buying a writer or artist’s work: major decline in quality, unreliable delivery, excessively problematic content, buying into their own hype, repeatedly being an asshole in public, refusing to look at their own work critically, odious opinions on equality and human rights and so on. OSC, PAD, Sims, Simone, JMS, Millar, and Miller are some of the creators whose work I’ve either dropped or never read due to combinations of the above, and there are others whose work I won’t read unless it’s in a trade because I don’t trust them to actually finish a project. I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything, though, because there are a lot of products out there competing for my time and entertainment dollar. The odds of me being able to find something I’ll enjoy just as much — if not more — than what I’m missing out on are pretty darn good and there’s the bonus of there being no internal conflict.
re Lovecraft & Howard: Yeas ago I did quite a bit of research on the two for an Eclipse project that, alas, never came to fruition (you would have loved it: Alex Ross was to be the artist)
Howard was very much a product of his time and community, but in his work you see him struggling against this. In his fiction at least he recognized the brotherhood of men of valor and while his heroes may have all been idealized white wish fulfillments, he certain had plenty of sympathetic non-white characters who were his heroes’ equals.
Lovecraft, I was dismayed to learn, was a raging racist asshat, apparently never having had any significant first hand experience with African-Americans but writing the most vile sort of trash and hateful doggerel about them.
(That’s just a sampling of the paradoxes of their personalities & friendship. Lovecraft was an expert marksman with a pistol, Howard was a notoriously bad shot.)
Ah, I knew I was forgetting someone. I honestly haven’t been able to read a single thing from PAD since his Scans Daily siege. It does help that his work felt same-ish for some time before that, but that was the one moment that a creator, completely divorced from the art itself, made him/herself indigestible to me. I’ll give Macfarlane/Liefeld more leeway than I will PAD, and I realize that’s not wholly rational, well, it’s still there.
I tend to agree with Neil Gaiman in this regard. There are three qualities that will get one far in the area of being a creator: Being talented, being punctual, and being nice, and usually, a person can get by on two. I tend to let a creator slide if they only have two of these qualities, but if they slip to one or zero, I tend to lose interest.
I walked clean away from Fables when Willingham spent two pages defending torture as a practice. Haven’t looked back. Every time I see a snippet of Willingham’s work posted someplace, it tends to make me feel I made the right decision.
Quit Mark Millar entirely when I realized that The Ultimates was not a deadpan parody, that we were meant to be enjoying it at face value. It was around the same time that he was ruining The Authority, which made it easier.
Gave up on Frank Miller for the same reasons as everyone. Look back at Dark Knight Returns now and just shake my head. I swear, for years we thought he was subtly deconstructing the essentially fascist underpinnings of the Batman mythos by calling attention to them in a confrontational and creative way. Nope… turns out he’s just a motherfucking fascist.
I give up on a creator when their personal shit seeps in and ruins the work. I still watch Polanski films because he’s still a great director, but I buy them used so as not to directly support them, because he’s a kid-raping justice-fleeing bastard. Same deal with Card. Sims and Miller both seem to be mentally ill assholes, and that’s left them incapable of producing readable comics now, but it doesn’t take away from their past work for me, and Miller’s Daredevil still has pride of place in my collection. Bill Willingham’s politics are diametrically opposite mine, but Fables is still one of the best books on the stands and when his politics seep in it’s usually justifiable in-character (not always. Bigby’s pro-Israel speech was just stupid), so he hasn’t yet crossed the line for me.
Yeah, I can live with Fables defending torture*. People seem to forget that these characters (even the “good” guys) are NOT nice people. There’s a reason amnesty for past crimes is one of the first things that happens when a Fable joins the refugees.
The Big Bad Wolf defending some of Israel’s more extreme practices did come out of left field though.
*Now having to WATCH Black Mask torture Stephanie Brown with a power drill in War Games was enough to make me drop Robin and break a complete run of nearly 100 issues. Hey kids, comics!
[…] A comic book based (but widely applicable) thought: When do you give up on a creator? […]
I hated OSC for a while after he went openly homophobic, but now I pity the poor bastard, because a careful reading of his work has convinced me that he’s a brutally self-repressed and self-loathing gay man. Card is so deep in the closet he can see Narnia.
And here’s someone no one else has mentioned so far: Piers Anthony. I was amused by his work when I was a teenager, but over time the undercurrents of pedophilia became harder and harder to ignore. “Firefly” was the last straw — he portrays the sexual relationship between a five-year-old girl and a thirty-year-old man as a GOOD THING and has the judge who sentences the man to jail broken up over her inability to do otherwise. It’s reached the point where I’m amazed Anthony’s work is published in mass market print and not furtively posted to Internet porn sites.
Funny. No one’s mentioned George Lucas. So I shall, shall I?
George Lucas IS THE NICEST MAN IN THE WORLD.
All his children, now grown, are adopted. He plucked three random children from … whatever life they had and loved them and raised them. He and his wife of many, many years. They managed to create a stable life for themselves, as a family, admidst more wealth than can possibly be imagined. (I dunno. I can imagine quite a bit.) He did this 20 years before it became “cool” to do it (cf. Brangelina, Madonna, Sandra Bullock, anyone who’s ever chosen off the menu of Chinese babies [‘Choose “Girl Baby” OR “Girl Baby”. It’s fun super happy luckytime now!’]
No one in George Lucas’ family has ever caused a whiff of scandal. There has been no evidence, EVER, of any shennanigans of any kind.
People cry when Joe Paterno’s name is disparaged. But apparently get all “butt-hurt” when they realize that GEORGE LUCAS RAPED MY CHILDHOOD BECAUSE HAN SHOT FIRST DURR.”
And you all drive your kids in Fords to a Disney movie but Orson Scott Card is too much to take.
Really? Maybe a chicken sandwich will calm you down …
Has George Lucas ever openly advocated the armed overthrow of any government that legalizes gay marriage?
Because Orson Scott Card HAS.
Whether or not he has the issues I ascribe to him above, that is fucking uncalled for.
For the record, I have long since given up on George Lucas *as a creator*, but I don’t think I’ve ever insulted him any more than “he sold out as a creator, and did so for no good reason because he was already well on his way to becoming ridiculously wealthy.” I have nothing but the greatest respect for him as a family man and decent human being.
All I said was “No one’s mentioned George Lucas yet.”
… which I guess were the magic words.
SHAZAM! \I mean … KIMOTA! /
AW, WHATEVER. Never said YOU PERSONALLY insulted George Lucas. BUT PEOPLE HAVE, fot no good reason.
And YES, Han shot first.
” People seem to forget that these characters (even the “good” guys) are NOT nice people. ”
I’m a pretty big asshole
I still don’t inflict prolonged pain on helpless people under a pretense of wanting information.
In my second post above, I really should have said “Have Disney or Ford ever…” instead of George Lucas.
Lucas, for me, is an example of a creator who doesn’t know when to quit. Add the bonus of being too rich to have anyone willing to say to to his ideas, and it;s little wonder his ideas run off the rails.
I’m delighted to hear he is a nice person. I still like the original SW movie
EML skrev:
For the most part, this. I started wondering if anyone would mention it right after MK told the story of Anton’s marriage. Between that and Zdorab in the Homecoming series, and possibly others I haven’t noticed, it’s not hard to figure out.
I’d dispute whether “self-repressed” is an accurate word, given that he’s doing it to please his god and earn his own godhood, but I can’t deny “self-loathing” nor that I feel my soul divided by pity just the same.
One of my favorite convention panel names of all time was one that ran for years at Arisia called “I Met My Favorite Author on the Elevator, and Now He’s Not My Favorite Author Anymore”.
I think the internet has been the vehicle for an amazing amount of self-inflicted harm to creators. PAD, John Byrne, Scott Adams, a dozen more I’ll remember as soon as I post this and it’s too late to add their names–all of them have behaved so badly on the internet that I can’t think of their work without remembering what douchenozzles they’ve behaved like.
Like most of the above, there are a lot of reasons why I’ll stop buying a writer or artist’s work: major decline in quality, unreliable delivery, excessively problematic content, buying into their own hype, repeatedly being an asshole in public, refusing to look at their own work critically, odious opinions on equality and human rights and so on. OSC, PAD, Sims, Simone, JMS, Millar, and Miller are some of the creators whose work I’ve either dropped or never read due to combinations of the above, and there are others whose work I won’t read unless it’s in a trade because I don’t trust them to actually finish a project.
This is the first time I’ve seen Gail Simone’s name lumped in with the rest, and I’m curious whether I missed something. Is it an issue with the quality of her work, or is there a controversy I am unaware of involving her?
@Greg
I stopped reading Simone due to multiple factors. One’s the quality of the work — the only works of hers I ever really liked was her first stint on Birds of Prey and the early Secret Six stuff, and, even aside that I usually consider it a bad sign when I can’t warm up to any of a writer’s original work, her second run on BoP pretty much erased any lingering affection I had for the first. She’s also one of those writers who comes across as glad to take backpats for her efforts at comic book diversity, but I’ve seen her get incredibly defensive when called on problematic content in her own work or statements (the whole “I never said I was an ally!” thing, “Some characters deserved to be fridged!”, and the flounce/not-flounce/flounce at Scans_Daily come to mind), and that sort of thing leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Also, while I understand that someone’s not going to slag off on the folks signing your paycheck, her cheerleading for NuDC, even up to the point suggesting fans keep buying books they don’t want from a company who doesn’t give two farts about their concerns just so that the writer doesn’t suffer, really grates. She’s certainly not in Dave Sims territory, but between all of that, there’s not a lot of reason for me to read anything she’s attached to.
Gail Simone has become a bit of a company apologist* and her current work doesn’t appeal to me anymore (mostly because I don’t care about Firestorm and Babs as Batgirl is a slap in the face) but she doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the other people mentioned.
*Lets face it, that’s what happens when you become successful somewhere.
Has anyone mentioned Geoff Johns yet? Horrible writer with a really unpleasant philosophy towards superhero comics. Supposedly a wonderful human being.
Never (for reasons exogenous to the work, that is), and I consider people who do to be, in fact, bad people.
Of course, at this point I do almost all of my media consumption through public libraries, where my contribution to any given creator’s livelihood is so marginal as to be morally irrelevant. But still.
@Beacon
Like everything else, I think that depends on what a reader considers a deal breaker. For example, I’m a queer, female reader with a multi-ethnic background, so I imagine issues of diversity and respectful representation stand out more strongly for me than most of the DC/Marvel target audience. Simone showed up my radar because she’s a vocal proponent of diversity in the medium, which was enough to get me picking up her work, but seeing evidence that she doesn’t think she should have to endure the same criticism leveled at her colleagues for her own missteps on that front might have been enough to get me to drop her books even if I’d been in love with more of them. For me, it’s a turn-off on the same level as JMS’ delays and lackluster stories, Millar’s pandering, or PAD’s ego — not as off-putting as OSC’s bigotry or Sims’ misogynistic rantings, but still enough that I’ve no reason to buy her work.
@Suzene
Honestly I lost sight of the original premise of the thread and got too involved to the side discussion about which creators we dislike as human beings.
I don’t think Gail is a bad person and it bothers me to see her listed alongside Frank Miller and the others.
Still, I know many have given up on her work for very valid reasons.
Personally I don’t feel I’ve “given up on her” but she hasn’t given me anything I want to read since Secret Six ended (and that went out with a whimper).
Eh, I don’t care about a writer’s politics, world views, etc. I’m not paying for that crap, and quite honestly don’t care if it is in there or not. What I DO care about is an entertaining story, well told (in whatever form that takes).
Miller? Eh, he’s gone off the deep end, and started believing his own bullsh*t. Ditto Alan Moore. Hell, I look at Alan Moore and see a guy who could have avoided 99% of his professional woes by simply reading his damn contracts (a bit of an oversimplification, but seriously, the guy has been grinding the same damn axes for years).
Difference is that Alan Moore still entertains me. I LOVE how utterly off-the-deep-end LoEG has gotten. LOVE it. I’ll buy whatever LoEG stuff he wants to put out.
Miller? Haven’t read anything of his worth reading in years. And I dug certain aspects of DKSB (mainly the potential of the concepts, unrealized as most of them were).
Bottomline, keep me engaged and I’ll stick with you. Don’t and I won’t.
Best example is Jeph Loeb, who killed THREE properties for me (Hulk, the Ultimates, and…hell, let’s just include the entire Ultimate U). His work on Hulk, a title/property I have actively followed since the age of three, nearly drove me from the title until Pak/Parker mercifully rescued it.
Kinda waiting on Mark Waid to do that now, actually…Aaron’s occasionally fun, but his Hulk is falling flat for me DAMN quick.
“(Also, I think they bear more than a small amount of responsiblity for the Aurora shooting but that’s just me.)”
Care to explain? I’m not seeing it.
I used to read Fables, but I couldn’t enjoy it anymore after the great Fables crossover had Jack basically raping Rose Red, who was suffering severe depression and clearly not capable of consenting to the ‘relationship’ forced on her. Now I know Jack is supposed to be a bastard, but many of the other characters who just accepted it were supposed to be sympathetic.
While I absolutely believe a work should be judged/enjoyed/hated independent of its creator, I have a hard time following that myself. I really can’t separate the two. The creator-killer for me isn’t always politics, but just plain jackassery. I guess I chalk Miller’s misogyny up as “jackassery” rather than politics, but either way, to me, in the long run, I think it’s more important that you’re a good person than being good at your job. As mentioned above, George Lucas is someone who takes a lot of shit but seems to be a genuinely good person. Another one I keep in mind is Rob Liefeld. Compared to some of his peers (Frank Miller, John Byrne, etc), Liefeld never seems to shoot his mouth off with offensive statements. But more than that, the guy is the Internet’s whipping boy. He’s mocked, villified, hell, people go up to him at cons and say rude things to him. And still, the guy seems to take it all in good humour, rather than letting it turn him into an angry bitter ball of rage. I might reject some creators because of their personal statements, but I’m kind of fond of others as well.
Liefeld is an odd one. Yes, he does come across as relatively good humoured a lot of the time (not always), but he does so by dismissing every criticism of his work as ‘haters’ when the fact is that many of the criticisms are valid.
Even allowing for individual style, his work is technically poor in ways that he has made no effort to correct in twenty years. And even in his latest work he fails to keep costume or background details consistent from panel to panel. That’s simply unprofessional.
I have the Orson Scott Card Box in my head. It’s where I put my personal feelings about a creator in order to continue enjoying something they did in the past. It’s named for OSC because I like Ender’s Game, even if I don’t like any of his other work.
Other people get shoved in as necessary. Frank Miller, for instance, who used to do great things and who now says things I don’t particularly like. Alan Moore, who does brilliant things and yet who…is Alan Moore, for all that entails. Will Shetterly, who wrote or co-wrote books I greatly enjoyed, but whose political views are far afield of my own comfort zone. John C. Wright, a fascinating writer and a born-again Christian homophobe. And so on.
Some creators are irredeemable in my opinion; not even the OSC Box can help me put up with their shenanigans. I won’t go into names, why summon trouble.
Every case is dealt with on an individual basis.
Coincidentally, Liefeld shot his mouth off on Twitter a week ago, deriding any creative team that’s worked on Deadpool in the last few years as “D-listers”:
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/JoshWildingNewsAndReviews/news/?a=65055
I’ve kind of found his constantly attaching himself to Deadpool’s creation recently to be pathetic. The character was a blatant Deathstroke ripoff who would have never persevered were it not for Fabian Nicieza or Joe Kelly in the 90’s.
And I wish it still existed, because Gail Simone vs. Dave Sim was a fun read:
http://www.comicsbeat.com/2008/02/05/finally-the-one-youve-been-waiting-for-simsimone/
“I walked clean away from Fables when Willingham spent two pages defending torture as a practice.”
Not sure how this was done, but was it so much Willingham as it was a character through which he was providing that perspective?
Regardless of how you feel about torture, pedophilia, murder, etc., sometimes characters who are of that stripe can add a gravitas or perspective to the work that actually enriches it.
Does the character of Bill Maplewood in “Happiness” sicken me, for example? Absolutely. But he’s SUPPOSED to, which makes any indications of any other aspect of his character resonate all the more.
There’s a spiritual – as distinct from religious – aspect to narrative art, and probably some other art as well. To the extent that srories shape you, they should engage the best part of you. The part that loves rather than hates and that doesn’t blindly worship power.
Okay, time to get to the point. I read/watch stuff from people with whom I disagree. If a writer whose work I like supported the Iraq War, I’m not going to drop him just over that. If he thinks torture is a dandy idea or shows signs of bigotry in general, that’s probably going to come out in the work in ways that I won’t enjoy. Here’s where Card and Simmons come in.
Mark Millar is an unusual case. I don’t know much about his politics, or about him personally. It’s quite possible I’d adore him if I met him. But when I gave The Ultimates a chance, I found that I despised everyone I was supposed to be rooting for, including even Samuel L Jackson. Also he seems to think the Pym/Wasp domestic abuse story was so awesome it should be recycled forever. So that’s warned me off his work in general.
I’m brainfarting on where torture was portrayed in Fables. I’d have to look at it to be sure. While some of it is Willingham’s conservatism (the above-mentioned Israel bit,) the characters are often portrayed as old-fashioned to the point of regressive.
The Jack/Rose thing didn’t bother me as such because Jack of Fables made him into a MUCH worse person than they ever portrayed him in the original series, and it fit his developed character, and as for the others accepting it, they knew Rose was in a spiral, and they knew she and Jack used to be an item. Presumably, they saw it less as rape and more as backsliding.
For me, it’s actually Garth Ennis. So much of his work these days is of the “Everything’s shite, especially Jaysis and superheroes” genre that it’s actually retroactively ruined Preacher for me.
So PAD’s crime was to go against people stealing his work. I’m sure he was rather sanctimonious about it, as he tends to be, but when you drill down to the core, remove all the BS about “promotion” and “reviews” and actually helping etc, it’s about people were upset that he didn’t like them stealing his work.
Someone above mentioned that they forgave Lars Ulrich, and in thinking about it, I suppose to be consitent, I have to, as well…but I still think his music sucks.
On Peter David and Scans Daily:
A while back there was a story about a political cartoonist who went after a website whose members reposted his strips to make fun of them. He was claiming “theft” and they responded “I don’t think you know how the internet works”. Technically the political cartoonist is right. Technically. It still comes off as a childish knee-jerk reaction to critics (“I’m gonna shut down that thieving liberal website for good”)
The PAD/SD thing is pretty much the same thing … except PAD’s work wasn’t posted in its entirety … and people only posted it so they could praise it. PAD is technically in the right but those two factors make his behavior way more dickish than anything the political cartoonist did. PAD didn’t go after critics; he went after his own fans and lost a bunch in the process.
You’d think that a guy who came from a marketing background, was among the first writers to have an online presence, and owes so much of his recent success to the internet (I loved Captain Marvel but I never would have seen the last two years of that series if not for Jemas’ silly “U-Decide” stunt) would know better than to shoot himself in the foot like that.
Peter David was being promoted on Scans Daily, and there was a fan backlash over the hell he was putting two characters through (characters he did not create, by the way, so it was his idiosyncratic interpretation of possible repercussions of a character’s power set). And PAD apparently showed up and one of the readers there basically told him his work was awful (rather rudely) and…things fell apart.
But I think it was partly a fan backlash against his work on critical lines that spilled into an argument over whether he had the right to exclude specific pages from reviews.
Big fight. But it wasn’t really that Scans Daily was robbing him, it was (at least partly) that they created a penumbra of fans who weren’t buying his book but knew about it, and who found out he thought a story about a father accidentally absorbing his newborn son was a good idea in a Marvel comic, and disagreed to the point of disgust.
I try not to hold Beck, or any of the various Scientology actors, responsible for the sins of Sea Org/Gold Base/Miscavige. I guess you can blame Tom Cruise, who seems to be the golden boy of the church, but I wonder how much in the dark he is.
Doesn’t mean that it’s not disturbing, finding out someone is in that kind of group.
I’m still personally trying to understand why I don’t watch Polanski out of moral reasons but still listen to Phil Spector’s music. Maybe it’s because Spector is clearly insane and has been for years and people tolerated it because of his level of success, even when he was regularly pointing guns at people (even The Ramones!). Maybe it’s because a great deal of my life has been influenced by his work, and it’s hard to just let go of something as amazing as The Ronettes. I don’t know.
I don’t think I’ve actively stopped following a creator because of moral reasons, though. Declining talent, sure. I was upset to find out that Tim O’Brien and Junot Diaz are huge leches, but that’s not totally a dealbreaker for me. I saw a couple Polanski films when I was younger before I really knew about what he did, but I never followed him. I got rid of my copy of Jeepers Creepers when I found out about Victor Salva’s molestation conviction – and man, when you watch the Jeepers Creepers movies knowing that, they’re very obviously about sexual predation of young in a way that makes me wonder why anybody allowed those films to be made by him.
I should say, though, that I’m giving serious consideration to discontinuing any support of the creators involved in Before Watchmen. Moore may be pretentious and kinda crazy, but I think he got the shaft, and these creators are seriously undermining their own rights and reputation by being involved in such a disgusting cash-in product.
“Moore may be pretentious and kinda crazy, but I think he got the shaft, and these creators are seriously undermining their own rights and reputation by being involved in such a disgusting cash-in product.”
Eh, with this stuff I find myself in the somewhat untenable position of not wanting to judge what I haven’t read yet not really wanting to read it one bit.
How is Junot Diaz a leech?
Was looking at old posts, came across this one, and was glad to see that I not only wasn’t the only one who could lose interest in reading work by a certain creator for these kinds of reasons, but also that I didn’t need to specify Peter David because he’s already been brought up here.
Scans Daily wasn’t what originally soured me on him, though. It reinforced what I’d already decided about him (specifically, that he can be a pretty big jackass), but the thing that originally soured me on him was his stance on Israel, which basically boils down to “They have a right to defend themselves, and so what if that means non-Israelis get blown up because those non-Israelis were probably bad people anyway, and those idiots on that flotilla shouldn’t have tried to break the blockade because THEY WERE WARNED bad things would happen if they did so it’s their own damn fault they got shot…” etc.
[…] A comic book based (but widely applicable) thought: When do you give up on a creator? […]