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Monday, October 02, 2017 

Frank Miller must be planning to brew up metaphors for Trump in his upcoming work

Miller was interviewed by ultra-leftist Salon, and wouldn't you know it, his boomerang back to leftism is still there:
Given the political themes in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," what are your thoughts on the rise of Donald Trump and the fascist movement he represents?

All I can say is that this president is an opportunity for cartoonists. The buffoons usually are. But this one has a particular range of exceptionally cartoony characteristics.

With Trump's obvious deficiencies, I can also see a great amount of hack work coming out of this too.

But you could see also that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were both easier cartoon presidents. There’s everything from that cheap work to some rather exquisite cartooning done. It depends on the talent.
Maybe Nixon was cartoony, but Reagan? I just don't see his logic there, and not with Trump either. How come Miller doesn't bring up Jimmy Carter, who'd make a better example? Even George Bush Senior would make for a better argument on cartoonish personalities. I've got a sad hunch this is a strong hint where Miller could be planning to go next with his comics career. Presumably, to conceive a villain in a Batman tale who could serve as a stand-in for Trump, or even in a Superman story, as he states he'd like to work on one in the future. Oddly enough, this also comes up:
Many people fail when given the opportunity to work on a project they have always dreamed of. They are crippled with anxiety or their egos take over, which means they can't tell the best story possible.

The biggest one is the last one you mentioned, letting your ego get in the way. I’ve done it. It leads to disaster. But being afraid is just part of the job. That will creep into the job and it’ll be part of the character or the work you do. But you work your way through it. You work your way through everything. But the biggest thing to watch out for is arrogance.

How do you attain a healthy balance between arrogance and confidence? Because you can’t write from a position of fear, and you can’t write from a position of worry about what readers will think.

The answer to that is, No. 1, have a good editor. A good editor isn’t just somebody who worries about the company’s needs and fixes the spelling. A good editor is also a good audience. They are enthusiastic when it’s good and tell you when something bugs them. They've told me what didn’t work, and I’ve rewritten it. The other thing is to have the right people in your life.

How do you separate out the sycophants or just the folks who are not going to tell you the truth, maybe because they want you to succeed for their own narrow purposes? How have you kept the good folks who are honest and weeded out the others?

My own experience is the sad fact is that you don't until you pay the price for it, and then you learn inch by inch to do it. If someone is around you telling you that you’re wonderful all the time, that is not the kind of person you should be hanging out with.
Straight from somebody who shouldn't be hanging out with a whole bunch of exploitative leftists. And if his editors are as leftist as he is again, and maybe more, and allow their politics to get the better of them, how can he expect them to be good? They certainly don't have the right people in their lives, and aren't proving the best in anybody else's. I've always thought about how it'd be ill-advised to think DC couldn't make the same errors as Marvel, and sadly, if the recent Superman story by Dan Jurgens is any evidence, they are.

It's a shame Miller, after spending a decade as a guy woken to reality post-911, leading to his writing the Holy Terror graphic novel (which the interviewer didn't bring up), has fallen back on a poor path. And if he's planning to do negative metaphors for Trump now, he'll be obscuring more serious issues at hand, which doesn't improve the situation at all. The irony is that, despite his turnaround, there's little chance at this point Marvel will ever give him assignments again, recalling what Tom Brevoort said about him. Not even Captain America.

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Sometimes you just have to recognize that the emperor has no clothes. And that he has really tiny hands. Miller hasn't necessarily changed his political convictions. He is just being honest.

Miller did a right turn after 9-11, only because he thought the country would be in an anti-jihad mood, and he expected that there would be an audience for something like Holy Terror.

But the comic book industry itself remained as relentlessly leftist as before, so he could not get published at DC or Marvel.

Now he is trying to get back in their good graces by bashing Trump.

And, can Salon or any other SJWs define the word "fascist"?

Fascists believe in an economic system half way between capitalism and communism - a managed economy controlled and dictated by the state, but for the benefit and with the cooperation of major groups such as business and the Church and, theoretically, for the benefit of all, not just the workers. They revere charismatic authoritarian leaders and have contempt for democracy and individual freedoms, putting the group ahead of the individual. They believe in a xenophobic ethnic nationalism, which carries a corollary of racism and bigotry, and believe that the end justifies the means.
Contemporary American fascists, the alt-white and Charlottesville types, share with the fascists of old a reverence for authoritarian dictators - their descriptions of Putin and for that matter Trump before they somewhat soured on him after the election verge on the homoerotic - but they don't have any clear economic theories. They share racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, but have a conception of the white race that Hitler lacked. Hitler thought Germans were a superior race and wanted to kill off Slavs to make more room for them; contemporary neo-fascists see Slavs and Germans as all part of a superior white race. Hitler thought Jews were white and inferior; neo-nazis try to argue they are not white.

Miller is one of those comic writers, like Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Ta-nehisi Coates, who are known outside comics and whose name on the masthead draws media and reader attention; he can get work from DC and Marvel any time he likes. He had planned for Holy Terror to be a Batman book, and apparently got an advance for it, but ultimately followed editor bob schreck to a different publisher.

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