Comics! Yeah.
Johnny Bacardi didn’t like The Dark Knight Strikes Again one bit, and tells me and Dirk Deppey so in no uncertain terms. Johnny, I think you’re misinterpreting both the target of Miller’s ire and his motives for expressing it. I don’t see the book as a “take the money and run” toss-off at all–Miller has explicitly stated that the lo-fi look of the altcomix at SPX were a big inspiration here, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that he just crapped this out because he was irritated with the demand for him to do a superhero comic and wanted to get back to “ancient Greece and Elmore Leonard.” If there’s a single comics professional alive who could spend the rest of his whole life doing any goddamn thing he chose, it’s Frank Miller. He only returned to Batman because he wanted to, and he only wanted to, I think, because he felt the whole damn thing needed to be blown up and started over again. Re-read the exchange between Wonder Woman and Superman in which WW berates Supes for basically becoming a boring pussy–that’s Frank Miller talking to the people who make superhero comics, not the people (like you and I, Johnny) who still read them hoping to be entertained.
Johnny also takes issue with the way David Fiore compares Alex Ross to Leni Riefenstahl. Please forgive me if I don’t dive into this debate with the gusto you might expect from someone who is such an enthusiastic devotee of comics and enemy of fascism, but Christ on a crutch, I’ve seen this argument on the Comics Journal messboard so many times I could plotz. The crux of the debate seems to me to center on whether or not certain artistic techniques (specifically heroic portraits of powerful, physically fit people shot from low angles) are inherently fascist, a notion that always seemed ridiculous to me. It came up a lot during my film school days in terms of the award ceremony sequence at the end of Star Wars. Yes, that scene was cribbed from Riefenstahl’s work, but seeing as how the award ceremony celebrated the defeat of a fascist regime, it seems to me you’d have to go through a lot of “but-but-but”s to explain how this is, in fact, National Socialism with Wookiees. (This goes double because of all the big movies made by the maverick late-60s/1970s generation of American directors, this is the only one I can think of in which the revolution actually succeeds.) It’s no more a fascist film than The Godfather is Communist because it cribbed montage techniques from Eisenstein. Similarly, it seems silly to argue that Ross is a fascist (i’ve seen it be done, believe me) because you can see the bottom of his characters’ chins, which is why I don’t think that’s what David is arguing–what he’s saying is that Ross’s work promotes uncritical valuation of heroes for their hero-ness. I think that’s a fair critique–judging from interviews with the fellow Ross seems to be a bright, insightful guy with altogether too much “respect” for the superheroes he’s made a living off of, as though he truly believes the “modern Pantheon” myth-marketing scheme his work has helped create. I don’t think that’s particularly healthy, but nor do I think it’s particularly fascist. (Seems to me a far more cogent criticism of his work would be that the men all look like gym teachers, the women all look like guards at a women’s correctional facility, and ambient white light finds its way everygoddamnwhere in every one of his paintings, like sand when you get home from the beach.)