One more thing. Since this blog seems increasingly dedicated to talking about whatever Dirk Deppey’s talking about, I just want to call attention to his characterization of the upcoming young-adult romance comic Trouble, by superstar writer Mark Millar:
QUOTE: “Millar’s work reads like it’s [sic] job is to produce a hit comic which leads to bigger paychecks on better projects.”
I haven’t read the book yet, and I plan on doing so because books for this audience interest me on a professional level, but hoo doggy, has Dirk pinpointed a problem with much of Millar’s work at this point. Good God, has there ever been a smugger comic-book writer? Or one more convinced that everything he touches turns to gold, which in turn will enable him to touch more soon-to-be-golden things? His self-satisfaction with his own work and relentless broadcasting of same would make the Stan Lee who called Fantastic Four “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine” blush. There are a lot of great comics writers who evince a certain self-confidence in their own intelligence and abilities–for example, Alan Moore or Grant Morrison (Millar’s fellow Scotsman, as well as his mentor). But these guys are often making bold conceptual, stylistic and philosophical strides within their comics. Millar can write some killer superhero books (The Authority, Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates), but when all is said and done they’re straightforward, if well-written and “decompressed,” slugfests, the sole philosophical underpinning of which is some tedious kneejerk-liberal “the smart, humanistic thing to do would be to have the army hand out Girl Scout cookies, because this would solve all the world’s problems” sophomore-year dorm-room pop politics. Lately Millar has taken to complementing this smug style with ridiculous overstated would-be epigrams, which bare not even a tangential relationship with reality, in his columns and interviews: to paraphrase, “There’s no racism to speak of in Scotland,” “There are no indie writers today that can even touch the best superhero writers in terms of quality,” “Comic book writers will be the dot-com billionaires of the next decade,” and so on.
It’s probably titanically idiotic to poo all over the biggest writer in an industry I hope to work in soon, unless of course Mr. Millar takes the same turn-the-other-cheek approach he espouses in his comics, where, for instance, he has lead X-Man Cyclops “forgive” Wolverine for trying to kill him in order to steal his girlfriend and then expects us all to sit around and applaud this course of action as “the gateway to the future of post-humanity” or somesuch gobbledygook. Really my point is that I love 90% of every comic I’ve read by Millar–I’m just worried that his head’s getting so big that if he ever writes his autobiography it’ll have to appear in The Journal of MODOK Studies.
(Jesus God, was that ever an inside geekjoke. I apologize to everyone.)