The Four Color Media Monitor

Rolling Stone interviewed overrated Grant Morrison, who's brought up several things pertaining mostly to his new self-indulgence, Supergods, and what he says about Identity Crisis is self-nullifying:

You were very kind to Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in Supergods.
I was trying to be kind because I like Brad Meltzer. He's a nice guy. I have a lot of interesting conversations with him so I tried to focus on what I thought was good about it and there was actually quite a lot when I read it again. The first time I read it I was kind of outraged. I thought this was just… why? What the fuck is this, really? It wasn't even normal. It was outrageous. It was preposterous because of the Elongated Man with his arms wrapped several times around the corpse of his wife. I thought something is broken here. Something has gone so wrong in this image.

Gee, isn't that a bit rich coming from a writer who's already been doing bizarre allusions to drugs, and whose take on X-Men was alienating, particularly when Xorn turns out to be Magneto, who soon after sets about to instigating vicious mayhem once more? And a writer who blatantly kills off Jean Grey as though she were literally worthless?

But it's his announcement that he found quite a lot of stuff he liked on his second read of Meltzer's vulgar little screed that's telling, and indicative that he doesn't have very strong beliefs in common sense if he's going to change his mind the next instant. One can only wonder just what he found so great the second time around. Was it the contrived, atrocious fight with Deathstroke - written as it was like a bad fanfic - that he liked? Was it the weak "mystery" elements he liked? Or did he just not see Elongated Man and Sue Dibny as good enough to care about, and figured they ultimately made for great sacrificial lambs? Who knows? If anything, he sure can't seem to decide where he stands, and if he was going to do a 360 soon after his first read where he was allegedly bothered, he clearly doesn't have much affection for any of the cast.

That plotline faced a lot of criticism, in part because people saw it as misogynistic.
It's hard to tell because most men try to avoid misogyny, really they do, in this world we live in today. It's hard for me to believe that a shy bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic. But unfortunately when you're looking at this beloved character who's obviously been ass-raped on the Justice League satellite, even saying it kind of takes you to that dot dot dot where you don't know what else to say.

Why should it be? Or at least, why should it be hard to believe a man like Meltzer could be complicit in an insult to women's/human rights? More problematic is his naive notion that most men really do try to avoid misogyny today, which ignores a lot of common street crimes particularly in his own native UK - or even the horror Lara Logan went through in Egypt. Does he realize how foolish that is to make such a naive assumption about the state of the world?

Furthermore, it's rather obvious he isn't going to go full out against the upper management if he wants to keep his jobs with them, one more reason why he's not the most reliable source to turn to about the state of today's comicdom.

Labels: dc comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda