![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Frank Miller: Misogynistic, Hyperviolent and Just a Little in Love With George - Must Be Thursday...
For my comics-reading brothers and sisters out there: one seriously po'd review of 300. According to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trinityofone, 300, the movie adapted from Frank Miller's 1999 comic about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, is grotesquely violent, flagrantly misogynistic and vulgarly jingoistic, which sounds not unlike every Frank Miller comic I've ever read.
If you heard him interviewed on NPR last month, you know that he has a shockingly bad grasp of the chronology of World War II and the history of Islam. Miller has also, rather unfortunately, fallen prey to a reactionary type of hyper-patriotism in the wake of 9/11. Miller was at home in New York City on the day and he's not the only one to witness the fall of the Twin Towers and the aftermath who, in my opinion, lost his frakking mind and his ability to think reasonably on the issue of confronting terrorism and the fascistic Islamic sects that support and suborn terrorism from their adherents (this syndrome isn't limited to Americans eiterh - The Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno is also a sufferer). For all that, Miller's still a cracking good writer in the Raymond Chandler vien who's Marlowe novels about LA in the 30s and 40s are Miller's most identifiable inspiration for Basin City.
Miller changed my life (and scores of others) and the way I look at narrative with The Dark Knight Returns when I was a teen and his Sin City books and 300, which I consider Miller's best work, live in that pile of books I reread faithfully every few years (Robin McKinley's Deerskin and Dalmar novels, Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold, A Vision of Light and In Pursuit of the Green Lion by Judith Merkle Riley, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Alias by Brian Michael Bendis, David Brin's Uplift novels and Twelfth Night by hi'self among others - just to give the interested an idea of my reading habits). I consider Miller to be one of the better American writers currently out there but there's no question that the man likes to write about violence, violent men, sex, violent sex, broads, whores and Dames to Kill For.
Yeah, he likes to draw women with big boobs - which makes him no better and no worse than Frank Cho and every other damn comics book artist I've ever read (including more than one of the girls) - and he probably voted for Bush in 2004. But on the other hand, I like his work, his visceral prose and rude, outsized art. I like his recurring libertarian streak - not surprising for a man who's chosen medium features violent vigilanteism as its most enduring trope - and how he turns superheroics into a meditation on the ability and responsibility of the individual to act in The Dark Knight Returns - a theme Miller returns to again and again in Sin City and 300.
Personal responsibility, the idea that, in Miller's wordso, you've got to "do the right thing and damn the consequences", is a compelling idea. Heroic sacrifice, as a literary trope from the Round Table to Farscape, fascinates me and Miller's telling of the Battle of Thermopylae is the product of Hollywood epics and Herodotus equally: elegiactic and bittersweet - probably the best comic book I've ever read. Naturally, I plan to see the movie.
As for the rest... ?
trinityofone, 300, the movie adapted from Frank Miller's 1999 comic about the Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae, is grotesquely violent, flagrantly misogynistic and vulgarly jingoistic, which sounds not unlike every Frank Miller comic I've ever read. If you heard him interviewed on NPR last month, you know that he has a shockingly bad grasp of the chronology of World War II and the history of Islam. Miller has also, rather unfortunately, fallen prey to a reactionary type of hyper-patriotism in the wake of 9/11. Miller was at home in New York City on the day and he's not the only one to witness the fall of the Twin Towers and the aftermath who, in my opinion, lost his frakking mind and his ability to think reasonably on the issue of confronting terrorism and the fascistic Islamic sects that support and suborn terrorism from their adherents (this syndrome isn't limited to Americans eiterh - The Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno is also a sufferer). For all that, Miller's still a cracking good writer in the Raymond Chandler vien who's Marlowe novels about LA in the 30s and 40s are Miller's most identifiable inspiration for Basin City.
Miller changed my life (and scores of others) and the way I look at narrative with The Dark Knight Returns when I was a teen and his Sin City books and 300, which I consider Miller's best work, live in that pile of books I reread faithfully every few years (Robin McKinley's Deerskin and Dalmar novels, Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold, A Vision of Light and In Pursuit of the Green Lion by Judith Merkle Riley, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Alias by Brian Michael Bendis, David Brin's Uplift novels and Twelfth Night by hi'self among others - just to give the interested an idea of my reading habits). I consider Miller to be one of the better American writers currently out there but there's no question that the man likes to write about violence, violent men, sex, violent sex, broads, whores and Dames to Kill For.
Yeah, he likes to draw women with big boobs - which makes him no better and no worse than Frank Cho and every other damn comics book artist I've ever read (including more than one of the girls) - and he probably voted for Bush in 2004. But on the other hand, I like his work, his visceral prose and rude, outsized art. I like his recurring libertarian streak - not surprising for a man who's chosen medium features violent vigilanteism as its most enduring trope - and how he turns superheroics into a meditation on the ability and responsibility of the individual to act in The Dark Knight Returns - a theme Miller returns to again and again in Sin City and 300.
Personal responsibility, the idea that, in Miller's wordso, you've got to "do the right thing and damn the consequences", is a compelling idea. Heroic sacrifice, as a literary trope from the Round Table to Farscape, fascinates me and Miller's telling of the Battle of Thermopylae is the product of Hollywood epics and Herodotus equally: elegiactic and bittersweet - probably the best comic book I've ever read. Naturally, I plan to see the movie.
As for the rest... ?