Holy tendentious comics, Batman!

Cafe Society
21

Dredd is the legitimate authority figure, and beats the shit out of costumed vigilantes. One constant theme in the strip is what constitutes his legitimate authority, and whether or not he is a protector or an oppressor: the writers seem to come down pretty firmly on the side of oppressor: Dredd is supposed to be a fascist bastard and the system he represents is a regime which, despite it’s well-intentioned beginnings of restoring order and safety in an era of anarchy, has become a tyranny which exists only to perpetuate itself.

There are numerous storylines in which any attempts at reconstituting a representative democacy are brutally - and often illegally; Dredd’s system is adept at flouting its own laws “for the greater good” - suppressed. The graphic novel America is an excellent example, mourming for a lost America of individual freedoms: it opens with an image of the giant Statue Of Justice towering over the Statue Of Liberty.

I would further like to point out that “liberality” does not mean the same thing as “liberalism”, or indeed “liberty”: it’s synonymous with a bountiful excess, which is presumably not what the writers had in mind.

22

Real original :rolleyes:

23

Considering the content of that post, which laid out a strong argument with lots of support, and contained no insults or even snark, what makes you think it was a deliberate swipe, and not an honest misread or typo of your user name?

24

Bingo. A simple slip of the keyboard. I find it interesting, however, that rather than responding to my arguments, Cisco chose to focus on what you thought was an insult- in other words, reducing the tone of the debate yet again to the ad hominem that you first posted in this thread. If you do have an argument, please state it without further mindless attacks on me (if there is one thing I will not stand, it is aspersions being cast on my comics-geekiness! :stuck_out_tongue: ).

Besides, isn’t Crisco a kind of lubricant? We don’t have it in the UK, but why would calling someone that be offensive?

25

Er, “you” being Cisco, not Miller.

26

Crisco is a brand of vegetable shortening (it’s solid and comes in a can.) I guess you could use it as a lubricant…Anyway, among other things, it could be used as a nickname for an overweight kid.

This is not to be confused with Christo, which is used to make it difficult to get into the Reichstag and as fodder for Dave Letterman jokes.

27

Oh my god, this is hilarious. I love it. I’d buy copies, only I worry the money would be used for nefarious conservative purposes…

28

Ah. My one exposure to the word was in a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin puts the stuff in his hair. Now I’m wondering if Cisco was overweight in school, and whether he assumes that since he clearly thinks of himself as the kind of person who reads a lot of comics, I might have thought he was fat, and so used the word as an insult…

And now I’m wondering what the hell Christo is, because it’s clearly an injoke…

And now I’m hungry.

29

Christo is a conceptual artist who specialises in monumental projects like wrapping buildings in pink plastic, hanging shower curtains in Central Park, and making giant umbrellas that fall on the heads of Japanese tourists. He’s a loon, basically.

30

This is staying remarkably civil so the rant factor rather fizzled. Nice chewy discussion, though, so off to Cafe Society it goes.

31

Dredd may be a fascist, but he’s not an unsympathetic character- look at the presentation of Mega-City 1, or the hideous threats Dredd faces (Judge Death et al, the Apocalypse War, and so forth). The Judges are clearly necessary to bring order, and while Dredd may be brutal and anti-democratic (not such a bad thing, given the way that mass movements in JD always seem to take the form of cults) he is at least not corrupt- indeed, he is the very representation of inflexible, unrelenting justice, the superhero idea taken to one logical extreme (I suppose this is why its so important he never removes his helment).

Of course, the idea of justice is also questioned- as you pointed out, Dredd views attempts at democratic rule as illegal, just as Judge Death views life as illegal. There are interesting parallels between the characters.

32

Aw, shucks!

I guess some things are way too ridiculous to get mad at them.

33

Because I’ve been using this screen name for over a decade and he’s at least the 500th person to call me that. If it was unintentional, then my mistake.

I didn’t comment on his post for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because I thought he was insulting me.

Secondly, because I’m not really qualified to comment on a lot of what he said.

I disagree that “most comic book creators have a left-wing bias”, but I don’t have any proof or cites. Some creators let their leftness shine (Brian K. Vaughn) and some, their rightness (arguably Garth Ennis), but I find that most comics these days conspicuously toe the line.

I can’t comment on the Authority because I never read it. I’ve tried very hard to like Ellis’s work, due to his critical acclaim, but after reading Global Frequency, Transmetropolitan, Orbiter, Ultimate Nightmare, Secret, Extinction, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and Ministry of Space, I can say with great confidence that I am not a fan.

His second paragraph seems to be mostly agreeing with me, and the rest are just his opinions that I don’t happen to agree with.

It’s not that I was scared to debate with him, I just happen to disagree, neither one of us have cites, and I don’t care enough to dig them up.

I’m as heavy as I’ve ever been now, at 6’4", 192lbs.

34

Yes; Dredd’s simultaneously presented as heroic and a repressive bully. I always liked the lead-up to the Necropolis storyline, where a weary and disillusioned Dredd chucks in the whole system he no longer believes in and goes into exile - only to be replaced by the clone that he’s trained, who is then given his name and badge.

I always liked Judge Death: he had more of a sense of humour than Dredd, and wasn’t above cracking the odd joke as he dispensed justice. But again, yeah, he mirrors Dredd in his blind adherence to a warped system. And, of course, Dredd displayed the sine qua non of the ambiguous hero in continually having to fight distorted versions of himself: Rico, Judge Cal’s robot Dredd, future zombie Dredd, that loony in the Cursed Earth who’d read too many Dredd comics, the Judda, Kraken…and no doubt there are others I’ve missed.

35

My husband manages a comic book shop here in Houston, and he consistently sells out of the book. It’s not conservatives buying the book, mind you – those who come in asking for it are all liberals who heard about the book and just **had ** to buy an issue as a gag gift for a friend. When you’ve already given joke toilet paper and fake vomit, Liberality for All will have to do. :wink:

36

Hey, the target audience is conservatives – it has to be oversimplified to the point of nonsense, or it’d all fly over their heads. :wink:

37

I love how usama (I reject my slave vowel!), after proving that a few brazen acts of murderous terrorism really will work, and turn your opponents into cowards and quislings, dares to show his face in public anymore.

I mean, think about it…by that logic, if, like, thirty guys got together and suicide bombed him, all of the Muslim world might collapse. :smiley:

I dunno…maybe the whole thing is what Marvel’s “Civil War” looks like in Bizarro world.

38

A day of judgment befalls both Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, as terrorists hatch their plot to simultaneously assassinate many vocal conservatives across America.

So, if there are “Coulter Laws” outlawing conservative speech, and the whole country has fallen into touchy-feely liberal dicatorship (with President Chelsea Clinton—love it!), why do terrorists need to assassinate conservatives at all?

This should serve as a nice time capsule of the (I hope) brief era in which American politics went completely off the rails. Hopefully I will live to see the time when Americans will shake their heads at the notion that such a comic could be taken seriously by anyone.

39

No one person has stated this specifically, but the topic is lurking in the corners of several posts, so this may be appropriate here.

In a lot of comic threads we talk about why the big mainstream comics (DC and Marvel superheroes) are what everything thinks of when they hear the word comics, even though so many good smaller comics do different things with the medium.

I just want to throw out the theory that it all comes down to the dangers of fascist superheroes. The DC and Marvel superheroes go to utterly ridiculous lengths not to kill, not to take over the world, not to impose. They all borrow in greater or lesser degree from the Superman as boy scout archetype that’s worked for 60 years.

Lots of other comics have tried to vary from this. Watchmen and Authority are two prominent examples, but many can be found. The one thing they have in common is that they implode. You cannot have your superbeings kill or run the world for your benefit and still maintain a monthly continuing comic strip. It’s the difference between a movie or miniseries and a several season television show. The former is about the event; the latter is about the characters. (I never read Dredd, but I think it lasted only because it wasn’t set in our world; the implosion of our world into something bad was a premise to the series.)

The worst thing that has happened to comics over the decades is the attempts to make them realistic in their effects on the ordinary human beings who have to live in a world where buildings, cities, and countries can be destroyed by superbaddies, while at the same time having to up the action every issue. We saw after 9/11, an event whose magnitude takes place in the comics world monthly, that the entire society changed. In comics, the superheroes have to change for us (remember when Green Lantern went nuts after Coast City was destroyed?) but that just leads to greater and larger destruction.

Comics work by playing in a fantasy world with unwritten rules as strict as any role playing game. No fascism is one of those rules. Fascist superheroes are scary in one sense, but they are also unintentionally hilarious in another: they’re little kids’ wish fulfillment fantasies of beating up the bigger kids. Better we should all grow up to be boy scouts.

40

:dubious: Can’t have them kill without imploding ? Ever hear of Wolverine ? Punisher ?