I’ve read this three times, and I have no idea what you’re trying to say, much less how it relates to the fundamental fallacy I pointed out.
I read the link in the OP but no other coverage of Maher’s comments.
First I think there are a lot of people out there just daring someone to offend them. When that’s your going-in position then it’s easy to rant about Maher.
Second, I don’t see anything in his comments that disparage Stan Lee, although he does disparage comic books in general. His point is more of a general one about the culture. I can see where he’s coming from but I think he has completely missed the shift about how our culture views comic books and comic book stories. When I was a kid (50s-60s) kids read comic books. If you were an adult who read comic books, everyone thought you were like Goober Pyle. A lot of modern interest in comic books started as a nostalgia boom driven by baby boomer collectors. I’m not sure what the demographics of comic book readers looks like today but I don’t think a 10-year-old can afford comic books any more. I used to get the DC comics for a dime (an 80-Page Giant cost a quarter). Today, movie producers figure it’s lower risk to put out another Spider-Man movie than come up with a single new idea.
But comic books have evolved–characters have become more complex, the stories are darker and more nuanced, and many other features that attract older readers. Today’s comics are not the ones from 50 years ago that Maher says are for kids. (I am not a comic book fan, but I have enjoyed some of the Batman movies, a couple of the Spider-Man movies, and the first couple of seasons of Daredevil on Netflix, and now wish I had been buying Marvel instead of DC when I was a kid.)
The outrage against Maher is overblown when it’s just his bloviating. If you think Maher’s an asshole, it’s easier to just ignore him. I don’t know why people give him permission to get them angry. It’s not like he can sign executive orders or something. Save the outrage for someone who actually does things that hurt other people.
When was the last time you picked up a comic book? :eek:
Yeah, that was poorly worded.
I think Maher might have been saying something along the lines of, no comic book Stan Lee (and by extension, Lee’s peers in what are commonly known as comic books) was ever involved with is sophisticated literature. I see nothing wrong with his opinion. Maybe he believes this about graphic novels also, but since he didn’t mention them specifically, it is not fair to assume he was including them.
I don’t really understand people who get actually sad about someone like Stan Lee dying (aside from his close family and friends).
He was 95 so not really a surprise. It’s less of a surprise than when Bowie or Robin Williams died. People were like “I was in shock and numb the whole day”, why?
Bill Maher’s job is to say things so that people will say his name and he got plenty of that. If you get offended by his comment which wasn’t even on Stan Lee himself, then you got other problems.
When someone says something offensive, it is the people that are offended that is the problem?
“I’ve been crying all morning.” “I’m in tears.” “I wept when I heard the news”. :rolleyes: The only celebrity deaths I felt a little teary about were Jim Henson and Shel Silverstein, because I was a mother of a young child at the time. She and I were both saddened at the passing of those two… Many celebrity deaths seem to be self-induced, so I’m never really surprised or distraught.
That’s a cool perspective. Mine is that if you can’t understand why folks grieve the deaths of the elderly, you may not want to tell us about what problems we have.
If it’s Bill Maher, just don’t pay attention. He’s not relevant in your life unless you want.
Bill Maher’s thing is saying stupid things.
Agreed.
If Stan Lee was a big part of your life, I think you have problems. Not big ones, but problems.
Maher is pretty hard on the self-righteous, “I know better than you” side of things and not the “to each their own” side.
It’s like threadshitting, why bother being so critical of people being sad?
I got 99 problems, but [Stan Lee’s 4-color] pictures ain’t one.
“We are the master race.” Yeah, everyone ought to be offended by that. That’s not only offensive, it’s dangerous. It’s antithetical to the values we share as a nation. The guy who said that is the problem.
“But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature.” That’s just an opinion. If someone is offended by that then, yeah, they’re the problem.
Just so I can understand where you’re coming from: you’ve never expressed a negative reaction to someone’s opinion unless it directly involved overt racism?
When there was a water leak that caused significant damage, the most valuable thing I saved was my comic books, all of about 20 boxes containing individually bagged comics with a cardboard sleeve. I have a lot of fond memories reading, collecting, and spending time with the characters that Stan created. I was sad to hear of his passing.
Oh, sure I have, all the time. But I don’t go around crying about how they “offended” me.
Racism was only an example. There is “offensive to humanity” offensive, then there is “I don’t like what you said” offensive. Getting pissed off at Maher is “I don’t like what you said.” So “it is the people that are offended that is the problem” (from Czarcasm’s post that I was responding to).
Quite simply, stories of people trying to figure out who they are, stories of epic challenges, stories of violent conflict, stories of good verses evil, stories of super powers, stories of quests, and stories of mutants – be they monsters or humans or gods, are important parts of our literary culture.
Go back 2700 years to the Iliad and the Odyssey. These works told of heroes and monsters and epic battles and epic journeys, while chewing on who are we as individuals, as communities, and as nations. Only they didn’t have the technology for mass production of comics or movies. People simply recited the tales, an eventually wrote them down. Now we read them and watch them played out on the big screen. The Homer Multitext: Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext
Forget about reading the Bible as the true word of God. Try reading it as mythology (and note that as technology improved, it has been illustrated, and more recently has had parts of it made into movies). Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. By Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson. | Literature and Theology | Oxford Academic
Trajen’s Column is the 1st century equivalent of Classics Illustrated (a comic book that re-tells popular literary works), telling the story of, et alia, the fractious integration Dacian women into the uber-male Roman world. http://hiperboreeajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Pogacias.pdf
In the French and later English romance tradition (particularly King Arthur related stories), tales of valour, adventure, courtesy, questing, and monsters ranging from dragons to bunnies, were passed orally and then passed in manuscripts, including illustrated manuscripts, comic, and movies. The British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
Folks who diss comics books or recitations or plays, or movies, or live tellings because of the means of transmission, or who diss myths and legends and stories, simply because they are those things, are missing a lot.
What term could have been used instead of “offended” to avoid “being a problem”?
Okay, so let’s say Bill Maher made a mistake. Unlike certain Presidents I could name, Bill Maher never said he never makes mistakes. He’s human. Any of his critics care to list dumb things THEY’VE said on here so we can all chime in? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
But never mind just Bill Maher: It is pretty worrying when Hollywood is having so much trouble attracting attention to its products - and has become so unimaginative - that mining comic books is now its biggest money maker. Admittedly comic books have grown up some since the 1960s, but if CGI Rock-em Sock-em Robots is the best they can do, they’re in serious trouble, more than Bill Maher. What’s next when this superhero stuff runs out of steam? “You knocked my box office off!”
I’ve been saying for a while now that movie companies reached the point, in the 1990s, where movies had to have female nudity, explosions, and automatic weapons fire to succeed. It’s just getting more shameless about it now.
GuyTanzer
“I’ve been saying for a while now that movie companies reached the point, in the 1990s, where movies had to have female nudity, explosions, and automatic weapons fire to succeed. It’s just getting more shameless about it now.”
The Marvel and DC related movies have shown you do not need female nudity to tell a story or to keep the viewers attention. Many people would consider that an improvement over ‘serious’ movies that seem to think is a necessary element of the plot.
\Explosions and weapons fire; yea, the child in us still enjoys that.
If someone says something offensive in the woods, and nobody is there to hear them, is what they said really offensive?
Sorry. Apropos of nothing, your quote reminded me of this one.