Art Spiegelman continues his far-left act

The UK Guardian interviewed far-left cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who says America's in need of a "counter-revolution", which sounds very appalling coming from his perspective. And when he began drawing comics again after a hiatus in the post-911 years, this is what he did:

He produced a series about 9/11 for the German magazine Die Zeit, which was later run by other European magazines and American Jewish weekly the Forward. On one page he describes himself as “equally terrorised by al-Qaida and by my own government”. He felt that other American publications were too quiescent in the aftermath of the attacks, and not yet receptive to his fear that the US government was using 9/11 as cover for a massive crackdown on civil liberties and to launch xenophobic wars. “Sigh! It’s hard to be an artist who is consistently Seconds Ahead of His Time,” he writes in the foreword to In the Shadow of No Towers, a book that compiled these comics and is being reissued to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. (Although, he says, it may come out late – a shipment has been held up in the strait of Hormuz.)

Why was he so alert to the implications for US civil liberties? “Well, my tendency is not to trust the government, so that came easily,” he says. “But it also seems so obvious, like all of a sudden there were police cars and military trucks on Canal Street. We were being told where we could walk, where we couldn’t walk, what we could say, what we couldn’t say. It’s visceral. It’s not like: ‘OK, I’ve read this book on propaganda and here’s how it works.’” Spiegelman notes the direct link between the post-9/11 security crackdowns and some of the excesses of the Trump administration: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ice, was created in the aftermath of the terror attacks.

Sounds like he doesn't respect special rules set in place for security reasons. And he seemed less offended by al Qaeda's behavior than by his government's. Very troubling. Let's be clear. The Bush administration did do some bad things. But to say it was inherently wrong to deploy security measures in the USA meant to prevent further jihadist attacks at the time is very disturbing, and takes away from the more serious issues involved. Though if Spiegelman doesn't trust the government, is that only when a right-wing government's in office? Does a left-wing government count?

Also note how he's indicated he's anti-ICE, and that too says something, considering how many sex offenders infiltrated the USA, and some of al Qaeda's terrorists also got into the country through lax immigration policies, and, with the spread of Islam in the USA, things could chillingly get worse. Is that what Spiegelman wants? I don't know, but the following is very chilling:

When it comes to 9/11, however, Spiegelman’s perspective has shifted. He no longer views the day as an “end of the world moment”. “It was a big deal. But it was a small big deal compared to the big deals that are going on now,” he tells me. “I’d much rather be in New York than in Iran, for example.”

This is disgusting, because it minimizes the tragedies and losses of 911 Families, many of whom recently launched a petition to have NYC mayoral incumbent Zohran Mamdani barred from the 911 Memorial, based on some of the most offensive things he's said and done that also minimize the repulsive incident from a quarter century ago, along with the memory of the actual victims. And Spiegelman's comment on Iran is fishy. Does he believe it wrong for the Trump administration to take down a barbaric dictatorship? I don't know what Spiegelman believes in fighting for at all.

Around 50 minutes after Spiegelman fires up his Nespresso machine, he finishes making two coffees, and we carry them up to his sunny roof terrace, which as he promised has beautiful views of downtown Manhattan. Spiegelman muses that the US’s volatile politics might reflect humankind’s natural tendency to self-destruction. “I guess, after a while, you get restless, so if you get too comfortable you create problems for yourself, even in more mundane, small-time life, never mind as a nation. At this point, we just had the bad luck of having a megalomaniac walking onto the scene,” he says, of the Trump presidency. American politics is, after all, “entertaining if you don’t give a shit, if you’re nihilistic”.

Spiegelman’s mood is sombre as he discusses how Trump has “very effectively dismantled” the country’s democratic ideals: “Whatever the ideals were, we never lived up to them, but at least we had them. Now it’s all so cynical and sordid and stupid.” The president “is cutting off civil liberties and using his powers to squelch dissent and enrich himself in such thoroughly illegal ways, it’s kind of mindblowing”, Spiegelman says, and he finds himself watching in alarm as the “plutocrat in chief” and his “few dozen toadies” get ever richer while ordinary Americans struggle and suffer a “new indignity every day”. He has no hesitation in describing the Trump administration as fascist. “It’s fascism,” he says. “It’s not nazism, per se, but it has a template that it’s following. And it does have to do with othering, which is the basis of what Maus is about, it’s: ‘OK, you guys are mice, we’re cats.’” Maus is among the many books to be banned by various Republican school boards in recent years, but Spiegelman says he has a “predilection” for producing the kind of art people will seek to ban. Sales of Maus spiked in response to the bans.

“I tend to be pessimistic, but this is worse than most things I know,” he says of American politics. “I just don’t see how we get out of this.” The media are struggling with how to convey the stakes in this post-truth era, he explains, the courts are packed with Trump appointees, democratic norms have been destroyed, and there is no effective opposition. The Republicans are “at this point the equivalent of made men in the mafia,” Spiegelman says, “they’ve committed a murder, they’re complicit in something and they have to keep moving as a complicit unit, so it’s very hard to get someone to blow the whistle and say ‘This is crazy.’” The US needs a “counter-revolution”, Spiegelman says. “But I don’t know where to look for it because the Democrats are so timid.”

*Shudder*. That sounds like he wants riots, as if there weren't enough already 6 years ago. And no concrete evidence is given for the claim the Republicans "committed a murder", nor whether the courts are literally packed with Trump appointees, but not Biden's appointees. This is very troubling, and Spiegelman's hatred for right-wingers is very noticeable, making this much sadder.

The Daily Cartoonist notes there's a flaw in their claim Spiegelman was the first cartoonist to win a Pulitizer for Maus:

As we all know the Pulitzers had been handing out Prizes to cartoonists for 70 years before Spiegelman got his. Some quantify Spiegelman’s Pulitzer by explaining that he was the cartoonist to get a Pulitzer outside that Editorial Cartooning category as his Pulitzer was a Special Citation. But even that must be further narrowed down to the first cartoonist to receive a Pulitzer prize for a specific graphic novel since Dr. Seuss had earlier been awarded a Special Pulitzer for his body of work.

And I can't recall Spiegelman ever speaking in Theodor Geisel's defense after a number of the latter's children's books were withdrawn from publication because of alleged stereotypes. The Guardian's errors shouldn't be surprising though; they're a horrible newspaper of poor quality as it is.

Spiegelman's given signs he has a despicable, narrow viewpoint that totally absolves leftists of any mistakes they make, even as he says the Democrats are too timid to carry out his ideas of how to manage business. I have no interest in buying his products, and seriously, I don't find his artwork appealing anyway. The worst part is how guys like him never seem to speak of groups like 911 Families, and don't consider how actual victims of serious crimes feel about anything. His political views are insufferable, and if Trump is what he cares about, it's all he's going to care about. One more reason there's no point in wasting time on any comics and cartoons he illustrates.

Joe Simon's pro-Israel publication in the 1960s

The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the history of a comics-style project the late artist Joe Simon of Capt. America fame worked on following the 6-Day War in 1967 that was favorable to Israel:

After the 1967 Six Day War, the originator of the comic book hero Captain America produced a spoof on the war and its political aftermath. A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to Tel Aviv was a 66-page satirical magazine created and edited by Joe Simon that sold for 50 cents.

Its pages contain photographs of Egyptian and Jordanian leaders with comic-style word balloons and corny jokes. For example: “The height of Israeli gall: while waiting for negotiations at the UN to begin, one of them opened a kosher restaurant in Damascus.” The magazine reflected the swagger across the Jewish world following Israel’s miraculous military victory.

Simon was no stranger to controversial humour. He edited Sick magazine throughout the 1960s which in its first issue described itself as “a grim collection of revolting humour.” It contained tasteless, politically incorrect humour much like the standup routines of controversial comics such as Lenny Bruce, who apparently purchased 100 copies of each issue that included excerpts from his routines. [...]

Simon used his pen and his sense of humour to stand up for the Jewish people. In his Funny Thing magazine, he includes this legal disclaimer:

“The captions in this publication are entirely fictitious. As for the characters, they should live and be well. Except, maybe, for one or two…”

Now that's amazing. The application of word balloons to live action photography is something the satirists at MAD magazine did too at times. Let's also recall Simon was a conservative in his time, and after September 11, 2001, he'd drawn an illustration similar to the cover of the premiere issue of Captain America Comics where, much like Simon and Kirby drew Steve Rogers punching Hitler, Simon drew Cap punching Osama bin Laden. The question now is whether that illustration was ever made public, or if we'll ever see it on display today? If his estate or anybody else responsible for retaining his artwork is withholding that Simon item, that's wrong.

For now, this is a pretty interesting bit of history of what Cap's co-creator did in the years afterwards, and from what I know, Simon did work in comics and other similar forms of entertainment at least until the mid-70s. His support for Israel, along with supporting the USA, is something important to appreciate.

A superficial article about Doonesbury history, and a sloppy one

Earlier this year in May, The Forward wrote about how cartoonist Garry Trudeau dealt with Jewish-related issues in Doonesbury, mainly spotlighting Mark Slackmeyer, possibly the 3rd regular cast member who debuted shortly after Mike and B.D in 1970:

Trudeau’s “Megaphone Mark” — who sported long hair and a bushy beard —was modeled on Mark Zanger, the leader of the Yale chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Mark’s first act in the strip is to take over the office of President King, the WASPy president of Walden College, who was based on the actual Yale president, Kingman Brewster. Over the next few months, Trudeau increasingly used Mark’s clashes with his father Phil, a New Jersey stockbroker desperate for his son to “succeed,” to dramatize tensions within postwar Jewish life.

Phil represents a generation of upwardly mobile Jews who believed acceptance in corporate and suburban America required conformity, restraint and the concealing of ethnicity. Mark, by contrast, is openly confrontational, culturally self-aware, and seems uninterested in assimilationist respectability.

Mark’s Jewish identity was not made explicit until the middle of 1971, when he and his college buddy Mike Doonesbury attend a talk by a famous religious crusader. Asked why he has not yet chosen to join the fold and lead a proper Christian life, Mark deadpans, “I’m Jewish.”

At Yale, Trudeau hardly knew Zanger and had much less in common with him than he had with Kingman Brewster, whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower. Trudeau was descended from three generations of Ivy-League-educated physicians. Like his father, the hardworking family doctor Frank Trudeau, the cartoonist attended St. Paul’s — one of the most blueblood of all New England prep schools. And though the young Yalie, like the genteel Brewster, opposed the war in Vietnam, he wanted nothing to do with radical politics.

But Trudeau identified closely with some of the personal struggles of Megaphone Mark. After all, he was also bucking family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a doctor. As Trudeau told me, some of Mark’s quarrels with his father hit close to home. Consider the line that Phil tells Mark in the fall of 1973: “Life is not to be enjoyed, it’s to be gotten on with!” Those words came verbatim from the mouth of Frank Trudeau, though, the younger Trudeau said, “my father and I ended up getting along pretty well and later came to laugh about such harsh comments.”

A key reason why Trudeau saw a part of himself in his Jewish cartoon character is that this ultimate insider also knew what it felt like to be an outsider. For many American Jews of the postwar era, especially those attending elite institutions historically dominated by WASP norms and values, Jewishness came with a sense of conditional acceptance, of not fully belonging. Trudeau had an emotionally similar experience at St. Paul’s, where he felt deeply estranged from the school’s rigid social hierarchy and its obsessive emphasis on athletic status. As the cartoonist later stressed, his four years there were “a tortured time for me.” He hated the school’s culture and never felt fully at home within it.

While this is interesting history, Trudeau diminished whatever impact it had when in the mid-90s, around January 18, 1994, he wrote Mark telling he was homosexual (with Zonker Harris providing a narrative), which is odd, since, while there was a strip around February 10, 1976 where Joanie Caucus was talking to Andy Lippincott, who told her he was homosexual (Trudeau later wrote him passing away from AIDS in 1990), Mark may not have been established as such at the time. What that would suggest is that Trudeau basically retconned one of his strip's established cast members for the sake of an oh-so vital agenda. It adds nothing to the character, and only makes previously established points moot.

Interestingly, if it matters, I'm not sure there were ever any notable lesbian characters highlighted in the strip, unless we consider a cameo by the real life Rachel Maddow, though that's hardly an achievement if it's not a fictional character who could make a more plausible regular. And if there weren't any recurring lesbian cast members in Doonesbury, it beggars the query - why do only homosexual men matter here? And why, if gay men did matter, Trudeau had to turn an established regular cast member into such, but couldn't create a new one like he did with Lippincott back in 1976? Sometimes, I wonder if comics writers like William Messner-Loebs have to shoulder some blame, since he turned the Pied Piper in Flash gay around 1990, rather than introduce a new character who could fill that role. Arguably, Messner-Loebs was one of the earlier examples of a writer who went "woke" in his approach, and it's certainly led to a lot of damage by this point, with Obsidian from Infinity Inc. being one of the biggest victims, since Gerard Jones, who retconned Todd Rice in 1995, turned out to be a criminal, and a lot of the stories Jones wrote were very bad.

Next up, in the past month, the Los Angeles Review of Books discussed the new history book about the now 56-years-old comic strip, and there's at least a few errors here, such as:

Doonesbury’s Slackmeyer came out as gay in 1976. It seems almost quaint now (and then again, not) that Slackmeyer paralleled rock stars like Lou Reed and Elton John, who felt comfortable enough in their own professional spaces to proclaim their queerness with pride. But this was the very first gay character in comics, and dozens of newspapers simply dropped the strip. Their editorial boards deemed it inappropriate for family reading, as if sexual orientation were inherently salacious. Trudeau refused to apologize or put his character back in the closet. He accepted the economic cost of moral clarity. Not content to be absorbed into the system, Trudeau gladly risked loss of distribution for the sake of truth-telling.

Oops, that's incorrect. It was Lippincott, not Slackmeyer, who was the first gay male character in the strip, perhaps also in all comic strips of the times. Most mystifying, I couldn't find any mention of Lippincott in the article. What gives on that? The glaring historical error aside, where do they get off lecturing everybody homosexuality's literally appropriate for children? Have they by any chance noticed what turned up in school libraries in past years? Do tell us about it. And then, there's another potential error here:

In Peanuts, the adult world feels incomprehensible, their speech reduced to onomatopoeia. In Doonesbury, the adult world tilts hypocritical and borderline psychotic, the source of colossal betrayal and moral rot. When Trudeau deployed abstract visual cues to depict presidents—Reagan as an empty brain, Bush Sr. as a “point of light,” Trump as a sentient toupee—he pointed Schulz’s abstractions at a new target: that power is often visually represented by its absence, by the void where thought should live.

I know Trudeau developed a gimmick where he'd depict some politicians as "invisible men", with certain symbols to replace them (Dan Quayle was depicted as a feather, meant to allude to what Trudeau thought of his personality), but I don't think it included Trump, and certainly not of recent, if the panel from last month says anything. But how disturbing that Trudeau's depicting Trump conversing chummily with a character named Trff Bmzklfrpz, a dictator from a fictional country called Berzerkistan, who's supposed to be murderous and antisemitic. Would he have written a leftist politician maintaining such friendships? Something tells me that, despite this, Trudeau doesn't have anything concrete to say about Trump's administration making a deal with Syria's current dictator, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was a terrorist before, and there's bleak signs he hasn't changed. All that aside, the "joke" Trudeau made about Trump believing something's been named in his honor is one of the cheapest I've ever seen in the newspaper strip to date. What's that about "incomprehensible" again?

If Mike represented the political sell-out, Mark Slackmeyer represented something more urgent: the moral witness to governmental impunity. Originally a campus radical and DJ at Walden College’s radio station, Mark came out in 1976, a move that became a watershed moment for the funny pages. But the 1980s deepened the crisis. As the Reagan administration ignored the burgeoning threat of AIDS—the president refused to even speak the word in public, and homophobic legislatures debated whether infected people deserved treatment—Trudeau used Mark to bear witness. While Bible-thumpers attacked the “morality” of the afflicted, treating AIDS patients as deserving of their fate, Trudeau faced the grim realities of suffering and death. One 1985 panel still grates: Mark stands at a closed-casket funeral for a lover, his face a hollow, blank mask of exhaustion. The caption: “I’m just so tired of being brave.”

When they repeat the error with Mark's history twice, it starts becoming funny enough to fall off the couch laughing. Why wasn't the establishment of Lippincott as gay considered a "watershed moment", according to their poorly researched effort? That aside, what proof do they have that "bible-thumpers" took such a denigrating position? According to Religion Dispatches, that was far from the case. And why no provision of the 1985 strip in question, so we can ascertain the given year is accurate? The following isn't very accurate either:

When B. D.—the strip’s resident conservative and permanent helmet-wearer—lost his leg in Iraq, 35 years of character history freighted the injury. This wasn’t a policy abstraction; it was a friend’s tragedy. Trudeau became a fixture on Ward 57 of Walter Reed hospital, interviewing veterans and their families, detailing their trials and the government’s responses. Following B. D.’s journey through PTSD, Trudeau earned the title “archangel of Walter Reed” from the military establishment itself.

But here’s the paradox Kendall fails to articulate: Trudeau opposed the Iraq War vehemently, yet his humane treatment of its victims earned him establishment gratitude. When you become a “humanist,” you often lose your “teeth.” The military appreciated Trudeau’s compassion for wounded soldiers even as they pursued policies that kept wounding them. They could separate the caricaturist of their commanders from the chronicler of their suffering. They used his moral clarity about individual pain as cover for endless wars.

Regarding B.D, we once again have an error at hand, or at least a lack of historical clarity: in April 21, 2004, after 34 years, Trudeau drew the guy's helmet being removed after he lost a leg in the Iraq war. On the other hand, I don't think Duke and Ching Huan have been seen without their glasses in all the time they've been recurring cast members. Whatever, it's disturbing how the reviewer turns to claiming wars are "endless" because of the USA's conduct, not because of the foreign autocrat tyrants and ideologies that begin them. Such propaganda only lets savages off the hook, and proves the journal's not altruistic. Also, was Trudeau's reason for opposing the war in Iraq because he didn't think they were as dangerous as Iran's turned out to be? If so, I have yet to find him actually saying so. His turn to victim-blaming in the past decade after the Charlie Hebdo massacre certainly didn't help matters.

In 2014, Trudeau stepped away from his daily grind to work on HBO’s Alpha House, and most papers carried reruns of his greatest hits. He still writes a Sunday strip. Mike’s daughter Alex entered the cast, while the Duke (a play on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson) lived long past his writerly role model to serve as as the proconsul of an Iraqi city. Like Donald Trump, the Duke acts like a monument to the Great American Grift. By the time Trudeau reached the Trump era, satire entered a predicament that made exaggeration almost impotent. Even late-night comics weary of ridiculing Trump, and logic simply vaporizes in the face of his daily harangues. Trudeau’s solution treated Trump as monstrous subtext—an unstable virus distorting his characters’ daily lives rather than a target for direct parody. It was a graceful retreat, but it also admitted defeat.

Sounds like somebody wishes the strip continued daily for longer, if that's what it took to ram Trump for ambiguous reasons. I sometimes wonder if Trudeau stopped drawing daily strips because he had little else to tell in this day and age, and his resort to cheap jokes at this point with Trump certainly proves he's way past his prime.

Doonesbury may have run for a longer time than strips like Peanuts, but has since proven overrated and pretentious, as the swipe at Trump makes clear. Even long before that, from what I could tell, it had long hit bottom. So what good does it do to write up a history book about it when the chances are it won't take an objective viewpoint?

A review of Frank Miller's new biography

Open Letters Review looked at Miller's new biography, Push the Wall, which may not be that long a book, and in the beginning paragraph, and the editor reviewing it appears to be disappointed, and certainly makes clear what they think of one project that years ago, I wanted to think was Miller's way of telling he'd found a valid subject to write about, until he sadly went the defeatist route several years after:

Writer/artist Frank Miller is legitimately legendary in the field of comic books, firmly stationed in a company of three dozen or so men and women who did landmark work. Miller was the creative genius behind black, nihilistic oddities like Ronin or Sin City, the genius behind signpost superhero stories like Batman: Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, and the genius behind black, nihilistic masterpieces like 300 or the “Elektra saga” run in Daredevil. Any one or two of these would guarantee a creator immortality in the comic book field, so Miller’s status is secure no matter what sloppy, downright cracked work he might add to that body of work, incomprehensible things like Dark Knight Strikes Again or, God forbid, Holy Terror.

Sounds like the reviewer believes Miller should never have tackled the issue of Islamic terrorism, ever. And that's the problem, past, present or future. With the biggest one being that the reviewer doesn't even have the courage to make himself clear about that.

But with that said, is Miller really that "legendary"? Hardly. His obsession with the darkness - which today apparently stops at the most challenging of issues like the aforementioned - is honestly dispiriting, and if he didn't succeed in screenwriting in the long run, why must we believe he's that much of a legend? Lest we forget, he acted as apologist for somebody who definitely won't be one now, and the way he noticably remains fixated on a certain president for cheap reasons is dismaying and divisive.

This kind of status imbues his new memoir, Push the Wall, with inherent interest. The many thousands of comics readers who’ve enjoyed their work would very much like to see similar memoirs from all the other greats of the comics world. How fascinating and valuable it would be, for instance, if we had honest, grappling, detailed memoirs from figures like Bill Everett or Gil Kane or Jack Kirby.

Finishing Push the Wall, some readers will be thinking about how fascinating and valuable it would be if we had an honest, grappling, detailed memoir from Frank Miller. This sure isn’t that.

If the book's a disappointment, I can't say I'm surprised. When a guy turns as defeatist of recent as Miller has, you probably can't expect him to deliver the best of biographical material either, nor for that matter a good instruction in how to illustrate. And his art style's been so mediocre for years, whereas even Kane's art style was more comprehensive just years before he passed on at the turn of the century. But the reviewer's right about one thing: if we had serious biographies about Everett, Kane and Kirby, that could be a lot more interesting than what Miller has to offer at this point.

Miller organizes the book around 18 “lessons” about both life and working in the comics industry, and he fills in the inevitable pabulum of old-man-imparting-lessons with glimpses from his own autobiography: boyhood in Vermont, formative exposure to gritty New York and specifically the Greenwich Village of bygone decades, the initial scrambling in the comics industry, the burgeoning success after Elektra and Dark Knight Returns. And sometimes some of these memories, though decked out in the hack-purple prose that’s characterized Miller’s writing for fifty years, are interesting, particularly the Horatio Alger bits before he hit it big, when he was wandering around a pre-Bloomberg New York that would be all but unrecognizable to the city’s current wall-to-wall 1% inhabitants. “I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline,” he writes in one such passage, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.”

Miller might not be the most eloquent of writers, but he’s articulate and sure as hell prolific; instead of tarping over the subject with something like “the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all,” he could have written that feeling. His book is barely 200 pages; Saga Press would certainly have sprung for another 100.

Gee, that's not much of a page count. Whether this is a biography or an "educational" book, one would think a lengthier book would serve the goal better. Perhaps this does say something about Miller's otherwise overrated talents indeed. Interesting the reviewer alludes to NYC's current residents as "one percent", since based on where they're going lately under Zohran Mamdani, and reelected the disastrous district attorney Alvin Bragg by a comfortable margin, some could make a reasonable argument something is definitely wrong with the Big Apple today, though wealth surely is the least of the problems.

So what’s left are the lessons, and the bits about Miller’s professional life. But the lessons are mostly things Miller himself has very publicly, very repeatedly not followed. “Sometimes you have to work with others to grow,” he writes, for example. “You have to put yourself back into learning, back into wonder, back into some spooky action.” And the anecdotes from the professional comics world are so bland and sanded-down as to be virtually press releases. About his decision to kill off his massively popular character Elektra, he writes:

Exit Elektra. When it came to my decision to end her life, I have to say, it just felt like the right thing to do. Bringing this storyline to a conclusion was the most dramatic thing I could do for the story: the narrative demanded an exclamation point, so I gave it one, in the most lapel-grabbing way possible.

Not mentioned here, however, is that he actually revived her the following year, perhaps because some readers took issue with this, though afterwards, she was mostly in limbo for at least another decade before being put to serious use again, in Daredevil or other comics. By which time, she was depicted as having fully reformed, more or less. And Miller, to my knowledge, was unhappy about the new use for Elektra by that time. But considering how overrated he is in the long run, that's why his complaint is decidedly not worth listening to. And his favoratism for Batman over Superman has long become a cliche among some writers:

Or this, about his decision in Dark Knight Returns to turn Superman into a fascist lapdog:

At the time, Batman suited my creative vision for a superhero much more than Superman. I grew up reading and idolizing Superman. He was my first favorite superhero. But, truth be told, I had gotten pretty sick of the guy. He was just so ridiculously powerful, and his invulnerability reached the point of limiting him as a character for me.

Obviously, “it just felt like the right thing to do” and “I had gotten pretty sick of the guy” are serious disappointments, especially coming from an author who’s gotten a good deal of profitable mileage out of the crafted public image of a straight-talking maverick. There’s precious little maverick straight-talking in Push the Wall, and we’re unlikely to get a more satisfying follow-up. Although it’s at least theoretically possible that Frank Miller could strike again.

So long as he remains as absurdly biased as he's been for goodness knows how long, he won't deliver anything satisfactory, and probably hasn't for longer than we think anyway. I do recall Ronin had a decidedly mediocre ending where the demon called "Agat" turned out to be a robot who was possibly crafted subconsciously by the main protagonist?!? Seriously, that was pretty underwhelming, and defeated whatever fantasy-based premise the miniseries was supposedly built on. And in the end, Ronin was little more than an empty shell.

But what's really disappointing is Miller's superficial view of Superman, one that completely obscures the weaknesses to Kryptonite and magical energies that were established decades ago, if we go by what's quoted from the manuscript. If Miller wanted to, he could've written up a Superman script building on stuff like that for real, and in the end, all he does is insult plenty of hard-working writers and artists who came before him by practically depicting the Man of Steel as minion for fascism. He did something like that with Wonder Woman too in the All-Star imprint title spotlighting Batman & Robin from the late 2000s that only lasted a few years. Miller's inability to acknowledge that the writers are at fault for Superman being "ridiculously powerful" is telling, and if that's how he approaches the whole matter, he's made clear he comes from a generation that didn't make any proper distinctions between reality and fiction.

Another problem with Miller is that he sounds like the kind of scribe who only cares about his own work, and doesn't give a damn what happens with others' work, or how. That's another reason why comicdom fell into such dire straits; nobody respects the past efforts of previous writers and artists with better resumes from up to the turn of the century, and now we have a whole shambles devoid of consistent continuity and characterization in the mainstream for starters. Of course, even those creators have faults, like not showing the guts to take issue with their former workplaces if they feel something wrong was done, or worse, they practically enabled it by participating in degradation of their own creations, as Kane sadly did when he drew 5 of 6 parts of the first, very repellent Green Lantern story in Action Comics Weekly from 1988, where Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire slaughtered Katma Tui, whose death to date was never fully reversed. I don't think Miller's ever complained about whether his own work on Daredevil was disrespected by successive scribes, and so, even though he may be the kind of artist/writer who only cares about his own stories, there's plenty to suggest he still doesn't put much value on what writings he has that did matter. And those writings are decidedly way too few.

As for this new "biography", I think it's worth passing on. It sounds too short, and like Miller hasn't provided enough to think about. Which has got to be another problem with modern creators in the long run.

Dark Horse infected with antisemitism

It's sad to discover that Dark Horse's name is taking on a whole new meaning, as the Algemeiner reports one of their editors refused to enable publishing a comic by Jewish scholar Rafael Medoff, the director of the Wyman Institute, because he wouldn't take an anti-Israel and anti-American stance:

Dark Horse Comics, the third-largest comic book publisher in the United States behind Marvel and DC, has canceled the publication of a book by a Holocaust scholar after he refused to include an introduction accusing Israel of “genocide,” according to the Jewish advocacy organization StandWithUs, which condemned the move in a statement on Sunday.

Dark Horse had scheduled Dr. Rafael Medoff’s Cartoonists Against the Holocaust — a collection of 150 editorial cartoons from American newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s, accompanied by Medoff’s commentary on what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it unfolded — for publication this summer. According to StandWithUs, then-Dark Horse imprint editor Craig Yoe told Medoff, the founding director of the Washington, DC-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, that he would block publication unless the book’s introduction stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yoe later followed up in writing, the group said, demanding that the book include text accusing Israel of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” and claiming that the US operates “concentration camp-style prisons.”

Medoff refused, arguing that the claims are false, and Dark Horse subsequently canceled the project.

“Accusing Israel of genocide is a lie, and requiring a Holocaust scholar to denounce Israel to see his book published is antisemitic bullying,” Medoff said in the statement. “It’s troubling to see McCarthyism rearing its ugly head in 21st century America. Historians should be free to write about history, without being subjected to political litmus tests.”

Dark Horse had previously published two of Medoff’s books, Whistleblowers and Cartoonists Against Racism, without incident. It was only after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, StandWithUs said, that Yoe began demanding that Medoff denounce Israel as a condition of publication.

Dark Horse has disputed that account. In a June 3 email to StandWithUs cited by the Israeli news outlet Ynet, the publisher’s legal counsel said the decision was based on the company’s financial needs and repeated scheduling delays, and that Dark Horse “does not plan to publish” the book. [...]

“When a comic book publisher pressures a Holocaust scholar to denounce the Jewish state before his own book on the Holocaust can see print, the irony is hard to miss,” Carly Gammill, director of legal policy and litigation at StandWithUs Saidoff Law, said in Sunday’s statement. “We are seeing an alarming trend in which Jewish professionals are expected to pass ideological tests before they can fully participate in public life.”

She continued, “Whether in academia, the arts, or publishing, Jewish authors should be evaluated on the quality of their work — not on whether they are willing to denounce a core part of their Jewish identity.”

I seem to remember this Yoe as having been a far-leftist who published anti-war comics, and that Dark Horse, whether owned now by a video game corporation, would be willing to hire this disgraceful man and practically enable him to determine what's okay to publish speaks volumes. It was already horrific they employed the disgraced Scott Allie and ignored the sexual abuse accusations against him for some time. Now, they're tainting their image even further by allowing an antisemitic dictation to remain in place. That says quite a bit about what they must think of comicdom's past Jewish contributors like Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby and Gil Kane. Also note how Mr. Yoe apparently wanted anti-American propaganda injected into the narrative, and it says a lot more about where the company could be going too. On which note, at Times Now, it says that:

Medoff alleges that editor Craig Yoe later sought to add a separate statement addressing contemporary politics. In an email dated 1 September 2025, Yoe reportedly proposed retaining the book’s existing introduction while placing an editor’s note elsewhere in the volume.

Writing in a personal capacity, Yoe accused the Trump administration of attempting to create detention centres comparable to concentration camps and of sending US residents to prisons abroad without constitutionally guaranteed trials. He also referred to the International Criminal Court warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and criticised US military assistance to Israel.

Medoff rejected the proposed wording, arguing that it would turn a historical project into a platform for present-day political commentary. He also objected to comparisons between contemporary American detention policies and Nazi concentration camps.

The historian said such language risked diminishing the suffering of Jewish victims imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps during the 1930s and 1940s. He further argued that connecting Israel with allegations of crimes against humanity within a Holocaust publication could be interpreted as accusing the country of genocide.

Medoff described the alleged pressure to criticise Israel as antisemitic bullying and insisted that a Holocaust scholar should not be required to denounce the Jewish state as a condition for publication.

The planned book was expected to feature approximately 150 editorial cartoons. Nine of them had originally appeared during the 1940s and were intended to demonstrate how much information about the Holocaust was already available to the American public while the atrocities were taking place.

Medoff said he proposed several compromises to prevent the book from being cancelled. Among them were publishing the manuscript without changes or moving the project to another Dark Horse imprint without Yoe’s name attached, while allowing the editor to retain his four per cent royalty interest.

According to Medoff, those proposals were rejected. Yoe subsequently ended his association with Dark Horse, while the publisher formally withdrew from the project.

Interesting that despite Yoe leaving their employ, they still wouldn't publish the project. But considering they just might practically be closing down one day as a book publisher, perhaps that's one more reason why realists should stay away from them. If this is the path Yoe took, and DH is okay with, you cannot possibly expect them to publish any history books about the Danish Muhammed cartoons of the past 2 decades either, nor could you expect them to approve a project focused on survivors of September 11, 2001. This also reminds me of the time when Mike Baron was publishing Private American: if he wanted to arrange with DH to be the host publisher, they clearly rejected it. The New York Post gives one more eyebrow raising detail about Yoe:

Yoe, a former creative director for the Muppets and a longtime cartoonist, was an editor with Dark Horse as he worked on Medoff’s book. He has since severed his relationship with the publishing house.

According to On Scouting, he was hired by the late Jim Henson himself. So it looks like the Muppet franchise is now tarnished by him along with the scandal from nearly 15 years ago involving the Muppeteer Kevin Clash, who was accused of sexual misconduct. How do these entertainers end up making such poor choices for recruits?

What's interesting about this scandal is that in the past decade, if the following articles from the Jerusalem Post and Arizona Jewish News indicate, Medoff and Yoe were once on positive terms with each other. That means Yoe turned against Medoff in later years. However, Medoff should've considered earlier that somebody with a disturbing left-wing record like Yoe's was a bad lot and a poor choice for a publishing partner. And as this NPR affiliate indicates, Lee once knew Yoe (or rather, didn't), and was willing to write an introduction to a book he'd published about Joe Shuster's "fetish art". I think it'd be wise to look for another author who could cover the same ground of research.

I hope Mr. Medoff's looking for a better publisher now. Although Dark Horse may be suffering financial difficulties now, that's still no excuse for refusing to publish the latest version of Medoff's history items. Seriously, Medoff should sue both them and Yoe for interference (and he shouldn't have approved of letting Yoe retain any profit percentages), and perhaps look for an editor of Israeli descent (and conservative) who can work freelance on the projects instead. This is not going to look good on Dark Horse's record, for as long as they're still around, nor will it help former chairman Mike Richardson's image in hindsight.

Frank Miller makes the mistake of defending Neil Gaiman

Veteran leftist artist Miller was interviewed by the UK Telegraph at the Fastnet Film Festival in Ireland, and he still can't keep himself from pushing all the wrong buttons. First:

It’s hard to overstate Frank Miller’s cultural impact over the past four decades. It was Miller, the artist and writer behind The Dark Knight Returns, 300 and Sin City, who redefined comics from kids’ stuff into something darker and more adult – noirish, dystopian and morally ambiguous. Without Miller, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films wouldn’t exist; without Miller, the whole movie superhero phenomenon might never have happened at all.

And I guess Denny O'Neil, Steve Englehart and Chuck Dixon don't matter, huh? Only Miller; how nice to know only so many other decent Batman writers don't count the tiniest bit. Predictably, no objective view of "something darker" and "morally ambiguous", as though that's totally above criticism. As for Miller himself, what matters to him? Left-wing "causes":

Still, he’d take that New York, “for all its despair and menace and its degradation”, he tells me, over the one that exists now. The city “in those dark Seventies”, he says, had a spirit of defiance, “a sense of shared safety and, well, there’s no other word for it, love. I don’t believe it does now. We have a militarised police, those horrific ICE agents are nothing less than a Gestapo, and the city itself has been so mismanaged for so long. As scary and grim as things were in the Seventies, there was not the overall stink of totalitarianism that there is throughout America today.”

Is the incumbent president an archetypally corrupt, money-grabbing Frank Miller political villain? “He’s grotesque,” Miller spits, comparing Donald Trump to Darth Vader without his mask. He invokes the characters that the co-creator of Captain America, Jack Kirby, conjured when the Nazis were rampaging across Europe. “Kirby several times recreated Adolf Hitler as a comic-book character. One of them was named Hate-Monger, and that one certainly applies to Trump, because he spews hatred, and he calls on that part of the human spirit in his rhetoric, and you see it on the faces of his followers – the naked racism, the naked sexism, the belligerence.”

It's so sad Miller continues to spew hatred at Trump for all the wrong reasons, and all without clearly backing up his complaints with concrete evidence. And all the while, Miller turns a deaf ear and blind eye to the Iranian ayatollahs, who preached what he speaks of, and Miller's ignorance only dampens whatever impact he must want his GNs to have. That Miller also attacks ICE and refuses, much like his other leftist colleagues he doesn't have the courage to distance himself from, to consider what heinous crimes any illegal immigrants have committed within the USA's borders. The really sad thing is that, if we take Mark Levin's criticisms as an example, there are valid issues one can make when it comes to Trump's managements, yet Miller acts oblivious to all of that. So again, if Miller believes Sin City's a masterpiece, why does he make it look like a joke as a result of his far-left stances? There's also quite a goof in this Telegraph article:

Those early days were exciting. New influences were flowing into Manhattan via the first Forbidden Planet comic-book store, where Miller mainlined the work of Japanese and European masters. His first creator-owned work, Ronin (1983-1984), was a sci-fi samurai mash-up set in contemporary New York that incorporated a wild mix of influences, with manga writ large. Some complain of cultural appropriation in borrowing from other traditions. Miller says, “I welcome any such activity. America is an amalgam of cultures… If we could, I’d love us to learn from Martians.”

Umm, doesn't contemporary mean "modern"? I read Ronin years ago, and putting aside for now that it was overrated, I seem to recall it was set in a future time. Maybe not that far into the future, but it was set years ahead all the same. Gee, what a stupid typo they put to use there. Surprising though, that Miller upheld drawing from foreign cultures, considering how limp his positions are on any subjects involving serious issues like what Sin City may be about. Unfortunately, that's about as far as he may go by now in defense of anything creative and challenging.

There’s a humorous, upbeat quality to Miller that belies the sometimes Stygian darkness of his work. His physical trials – his neck is bent by an undisclosed condition into a position that is visibly limiting – do not daunt him; he declares himself “reborn” as an artist, rather than compromised by his posture. He draws with dramatic vigour, using techniques that embrace the unpredictable. Blood spatters across his pages. Miller achieves the effect by dipping a toothbrush into ink and pulling back the bristles with his thumb to send droplets flying across his creations.

And we're supposed to be utterly impressed and thrilled by his use of bloodletting? What's so "unpredictable" about that? It's actually been quite a cliche for goodness knows how long. That aside, here's what they say about certain other parts of the content:

In Sin City (1991), the men are staggeringly brutal and the women are almost all sex workers. “As far as misogyny goes,” Miller says, “I laugh about it because all you have to do is just read my work. [The accusations] might be because I draw the women as attractive, but in Daredevil, for instance, who’s the most powerful character you remember? It’s Elektra… When it comes to Sin City, yes, I draw the women to be as sexy as possible, but they have their own neighbourhood that they police by themselves. They’re a pack of Amazons.” He is, he insists, not the least bit misogynistic himself.

He’s been accused of Islamophobia, too, after penning Holy Terror in 2011, a graphic novel that he writes “was created in a bloodthirsty rage” after the attacks on New York City on September 11. He had originally conceived it as a story in which Batman simply “kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass”, but instead it “sparked a fire of criticism, some of it warranted”. “It was a howl of pain and rage, and an inarticulate one. I’ll just leave it at that,” he tells me.

On the subject of how he draws women, yes, it's quite possible PC advocates over the years attacked him just for that, but apparently not for the violent content he's decidedly notorious for drawing in the Sin City series. As for the Holy Terror GN, again, it's regrettable he first decided to say 8 years ago that he regrets it, because for somebody who claims he's not a misogynist, he's letting a religious ideology wallowing in just that off the hook. It may have been "inarticulate", but that's surely because he never studied anything about Islam and didn't defend his work based on that. Making matters worse, the same guy who says he's not a misogynist then goes on to defend another writer who was accused of just that:

Generally, Miller is not interested in slanging matches. He says that it would please the media if “I spent half an interview” talking about the embattled writer Neil Gaiman – accused in 2024 of sexual assault by multiple women, which Gaiman denies – “saying, ‘He’s not just a terrible writer, he’s a bad person.’ You know, something crazy like that, when he’s a lovely person, he’s a terrific writer.”

Oh good grief, does he realize he's giving serious detractors a statement to use against him? The same artist and writer who said earlier he's not a misogynist destroys his defense by acting as an apologist for a man who turned out to be scummy. Is Miller doing this because he's worried his recent documentary, American Genius, will suffer in sales due to Gaiman's contributions to it? Well that's partly Miller's fault, as he probably didn't think to vet most of the people who chipped in while preparing the production.

Now the memoir is done, he’s writing a story for the 1,000th issue of Spider-Man in September. Does he still feel affection for those old characters? “Oh God, yes,” he says. “That’s the stuff I grew up on. I’m so fond of it.” And does he think the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been bad for print comics? “I don’t know how good it’s been for movies,” he says with a sly laugh.

What of the prospect of a real “superman” in the near future, as robots and AI continue to advance? “It’s not gonna be that,” he says. “AI is a false god… [and] it’s making for some bad writing.” Meanwhile, this thoroughly human creative engine is still thinking about what he wants to do next – Beowulf, perhaps. Or Der Ring des Nibelungen. “There are an awful lot of stories,” he says.

Well Miller's offering up some very bad commentary ensuring he won't be the most famous creator to come about in the late 20th/early 21st centuries. One of the worst things about modern comics movies is that they did come at the expense of the zygotes, and while Miller may claim to have affection for even Spidey, his failure to address the erasure of the Spider-marriage can speak volumes. It won't be shocking if the 1000th Spidey issue spoken of turns out to be heavily mandated, with C.B. Cebulski prohibiting a reinstatement of the marriage with Mary Jane Watson. So why tell us about the upcoming "anniversary" or even about his new memoir, Push the Wall? After this insult to the intellect from a guy who doesn't seem to understand the importance of consistency, I'd rather not waste my time on either. Miller's problem is that he simply won't keep his mouth shut, and recognize that obsessions like his with figures like Trump doesn't make him a realist. Miller's only proving he's one of the most disappointing artists in comicdom today, and then, if his recent projects were failures, we shouldn't be surprised why. With a few exceptions like Daredevil and maybe Batman: Year One, he is pretty overrated as an artist and writer. And his defense of Gaiman is very troubling.

Ohio Maltz Museum's exhibition for Jewish comics contributions

NPR-WOSU covers an exhibition of Jewish comics contributions at the Maltz Museum in Ohio. It was also organized by a historian who was involved in getting a NYC street named after Jack Kirby:

“Icons in Ink, The Jewish Comics Experience,” on view at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood through Aug. 23, is a revelation and a celebration, albeit with some limitations and questionable aspects.

The show’s core material is conveyed through colorful, large-scale graphic layouts resembling magazine pages that reach from the height of one’s knee to above one’s head. The layouts are filled with text and reproductions of pages from comic books. It’s an eye-grabbing approach that produces visual overload at times. Also, transitions from one section of the show to another occasionally lack continuity and flow.

But when it comes to the core goal of highlighting Jewish contributions to comic book history, the show delivers fascinating and sometimes surprising insights.

Organized by Roy Schwartz, a New York-based pop culture historian, the exhibition opened in 2023 at the Center for Jewish History in New York and is now in the middle of a five-year national tour.

It brims with Schwartz’s zeal to highlight the Jewish roots of what he described in an interview as “a unique American art form,’’ and “the bastard child of literature and art.’’ His expertise includes having written the 2021 book, “Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero.’’

For Cleveland, Schwartz and the Maltz expanded the show to highlight the city’s role in the evolution of comic books, in collaboration with Samantha Baskind, the Cleveland State University professor of art history known for her extensive scholarship on Jewish contributions to the visual arts.

Hidden meanings of Superman

Naturally, Superman, the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish high school students in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood who invented the “Man of Steel’’ in the 1930s, is a major focus.

Superman’s birth on the doomed planet Krypton and his parents’ effort to save him by launching him to Earth is a familiar tale. It may not be widely appreciated, however, that the story echoes that of the finding of Moses, and that Superman’s name at birth, Kal-El, is a Hebrew phrase often interpreted as “voice of God’’ or “vessel of God.”

Superman’s powers evoke the myth of the Golem, a massive, Samson-like humanoid purportedly molded in clay by a 16th-century rabbi Prague to defend Jews from pogroms.

As the show points out, Jewish fans have certainly understood such signals.

Somehow, I'm not so sure they do, seeing how some of those who stick with leftism are so hostile to Israel, their country of origin, that it's hard to believe at this point they care about any "signals". Speaking of which, this exhibit features at least 2 comic creators who decidedly aren't worth seeing there:

Also featured in the Cleveland section of the show are printed works and original drawings from Harvey Pekar’s ironic and self-deprecating “American Splendor” series, Peter Kuper’s hilarious “Spy vs. Spy” episodes in Mad Magazine and Terri Libenson’s Jewish-centered narratives in series, including “The Pajama Diaries.”

Cleveland Heights native Brian Michael Bendis is represented by outstanding works including a spectacular 2006 ink drawing for an Avengers episode depicting an explosion on a crowded street in what could be Downtown Cleveland.

When somebody as awful as Bendis is included, despite how overrated and atrocious his writings were on - but not limited to - series like the Avengers, something is terribly wrong. What's so "outstanding" about his cheap approach to science fiction? It's also troubling that somebody like the late Pekar was included, despite his negativity to Israel that he practically wove into a GN titled "Not the Israel my Parents promised me". These are the kind of "creators" whose works we need to see? Nope.

Conspiracists and paranoiacs might see the show as piling on more evidence for the hate-filled fantasy that Jews supposedly control everything from Wall Street to Hollywood.

On this, it's bizarre said conspiracists would want anything to do with Jewish creations, if that's how they feel, and have no interest in producing their own entertainment products that hopefully aren't laced with prejudicial visions. And then, in a very sad hint at where this NPR affiliate really stands, they say it needs an "update":

It’s also striking, given its attention to the social and political context of comic books in prior decades that “Icons in Ink’’ doesn't bring its story fully into the present.

The show’s generally triumphal tone feels oddly off-key amid the recent uptick in anti-Semitism on the left and right, and the post Oct. 7 backlash against Israel.

Debate over Israel’s military conduct in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon, or settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, has inspired authors and pundits of all political persuasions.

“Icons in Ink’’ hasn’t been updated to reflect the turmoil. It could be said that because the show was organized in 2023, there hasn’t been enough time for a significant response to current events from Jewish creators of comic books or graphic novels to warrant attention.

But it seems to be a missed opportunity that the show doesn't mention the conflicted feelings about Israel that Pekar explored in “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,’’ published in 2012 as one of his last books.

There’s also no mention of the three-page spread criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza published in The New York Review of Books in February 2025 by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the Holocaust-related graphic novel “Maus,’’ whose work is otherwise lauded in the show at Maltz.

Such publications and others like them represent an intriguing opportunity to revise “Icons in Ink’’ as it continues to travel. The exhibition argues successfully that the Jewish experience in comics needs to be understood more deeply.

Given that goal, some freshening could make the show even more relevant and up-to-the-minute. After all, as the exhibition demonstrates, Jewish comic book creators and graphic novelists have been pulling no punches for decades in messages both overt and subtly coded.

When they insist Sacco's a recommendation, and no right-wing creators like the late Joe Simon are mentioned at all, or even Will Eisner, that speaks volumes as to where they really stand on this. It's actually amazing Pekar's screed didn't turn up at the exhibit, but even so, he's hardly somebody I'd consider a perfect choice any more than Spiegelman. Also note how the news site omits issues like Jews being murdered by the Religion of Peace, and all they care about is making Jews look like the sole ones responsible for anything bad happening post-October 7, 2023, while obscuring the more serious issues caused by said religion.

I'll give Schwartz and company this: they may have deliberately avoided some of these issues because they realized Pekar's POV was divisive, and it wouldn't do any good post-10.7.2023 to bring something like that into the mix. Even so, if they didn't bring in something that could provide a more positive viewpoint on Israeli issues like a Japanese mangaka's publication, then it's otherwise a defeat, though not in the way NPR wants to frame it. What they say about the exhibit in that context is shameful, and if that's their position, why'd they even bother to cover the project?

Marjane Satrapi, artist of Persepolis, passes away at 56

The UK Guardian reported that Iranian-born artist Marjane Satrapi, who created the GN Persepolis, died at just 56:

Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian artist, film-maker and graphic novelist whose acclaimed memoir Persepolis helped reshape international perceptions of Iran, has died at the age of 56.

In a statement provided to French news agency AFP, relatives said she had “died of sadness” after the death of her husband, the Swedish producer Mattias Ripa.

Ripa died on 8 April last year. Later that month, a series of messages posted on Satrapi’s Instagram account revealed the phrase: “For I lost the love of my life.”

Tributes have been paid to Satrapi from across French politics and culture following news of her death. President Emmanuel Macron said Satrapi was “a great artist who turned her Iranian childhood into a universal tale,” adding: “With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, her inner demons, the author created a moving world with which readers identified.”

Writing on X, Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the French National Assembly, said: “Marjane Satrapi had turned her work into an act of freedom. With Persepolis, she had given a face and a voice to the Iranian revolution, proudly carrying the fight for women’s freedom and dignity. France loses an immense artist. To her family, to her loved ones, I offer my most sincere thoughts.”

Born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, near the Caspian Sea, Satrapi was raised in Tehran by her father, an engineer, and her mother, a dress designer. As a teenager, she left Iran after her parents sent her to Europe to continue her education, hoping to spare her from the restrictions imposed under the Islamic Republic. She eventually settled in France, arriving in 1994 and later becoming a French citizen in 2006.

Throughout her life, Satrapi was a vocal opponent of Iran’s clerical establishment.

In 2000 she published Persepolis, a comic book memoir that became an international publishing phenomenon. It told the story of a rebellious and outspoken young girl navigating the upheaval in Iran after the shah is overthrown in 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The story follows the protagonist’s attempts to understand the country’s violence and ideological control before she is sent alone to Europe at the age of 14.

Satrapi told the Guardian in 2024 that Persepolis was about making western readers reflect on the humanity of Iranian people, that, “Oh, they’re actually human beings like us”.

The memoir sold millions of copies, established Satrapi as one of the most widely read Iranian authors in the world, and its success challenged many western assumptions about Iranian society and culture.

She was clearly one of the few who showed the courage to speak out against an Islamofascist regime like what Iran's been for 47 years, and it's rather hypocritical for somebody like Macron to suddenly offer her praise for her GN, considering he didn't do enough to oppose Islamofascism himself, and wouldn't help in the recent war against Iran.

It's sad she's died too young, because here, the Islamic regime and terrorist machine in Iran is hopefully falling apart, and will ensure future generations of women who don't want to be forced to follow sharia dictations like having to wear niqabs won't have to. That's what makes Persepolis so valuable as a comics biography, and it remains to be seen how many more around the world who actually believe in civilized values will agree on that. Including the Guardian themselves, considering their leftist stance doesn't exactly speak the positions of Satrapi.

Tony Isabella villifies ICE in a letter to a newspaper

The leftist veteran comics writer who decided to take up LGBT identity politics at least a year ago, and has to date shown no signs of quitting that insanity, recently wrote a letter to the newspaper of an Ohio city, where he attacked ICE for trying to clear dangerous illegal immigrants out of the country and try to make the USA safe again. First, here's one of his sad forays into transsexuality he's recounting:

April 11: I had an amazing night out with LGBTQ+ friends. Though circumstances made it necessary for me to present in boy mode, I was correctly gendered everywhere we went. That means the world to someone like me.

Naturally, it's regrettable he's still sticking tight with these bizarre identity politics, over a year since he first declared this is how he wants to be known/remembered. Now, here's the letter he wrote to a local paper:

April 19: The (Medina) Gazette ran my letter on immigration and ICE. As I do with all my current work, I signed it “Jenny Blake Isabella.” Here’s that letter:

I’m 74 years old and have lived in Medina for over forty years. I love our charming city, especially because it has shown it can move forward without losing that charm. That is a rare precious quality.

There are two things Medina doesn’t need. It doesn’t need to be a sanctuary city and it most definitely doesn’t need to have an ICE presence, much less welcome that presence.

If Medina has any immigrant problem, it’s that we clearly don’t have enough immigrants to fill all those jobs we see advertised on street signs and elsewhere. Our country was built on willing immigrants to our nation and slaves kidnapped and brought here against their will. Both of these groups have made innumerable contributions to the United States and our lives would be poorer without their genius and hard work. Sadly, the historical truth of those who came here, willingly or unwilling, are downplayed by too many. Indeed, some seek to erase that history.

As for ICE, why would anyone who has witnessed its brutal, cruel and lawless conduct elsewhere want to bring that madness to our city? In its present form, ICE should not be welcome anywhere in the United States.

If our council needs to enact any legislation concerning ICE, it should be to require them to follow the same high standards as our terrific Medina police force. No masks. Wearing name tags. No seizures without real judicial authorization. No absurd shows of force to intimidate people. Being held accountable when they break the law. What is proper for our police force should be the standard for any law enforcement that comes to our city.

And what proof does he have that ICE is nothing but evil and sadistic, yet no illegal migrant could ever be the same? Does he even realize some of the illegal immigrants are ISIS agents? It's very sad but perhaps predictable he'd want to go as far as lionizing illegal immigration too, and one can only wonder if Isabella still believes in any lessons he'd written in past comics that crime doesn't pay. What next, will it turn out he believes Armenians who were persecuted by Azerbaijan should be turned away from the USA and ignored by contrast? There's only so much violent crime committed by illegal immigrants in the past few years alone, and Isabella turns a deaf ear and blind to all of that.

On the subject of masks, Isabella seems unaware there's police anti-terror squads in Europe whose operatives wear ski masks to protect their identities, not because they're some sort of totalitarian enforcement minions. And where does he get the notion ICE's whole purpose is to intimidate people? Certainly not innocents who uphold the law. He also turns his back to ICE officials who were attacked by illegal immigrants and other lawbreakers, and then has the gall to tell us ICE breaks the law? Utterly shameful.

It's head-shaking how somebody like Isabella would even want to work in comicdom's mainstream years before if this is what he believes now, which has the effect of making his past work look like a joke. And now, he even has the gall to do it under an identity politics.

Jack Kirby gets a street named after him

Much like Stan Lee received a street named in his memory a few years ago, JNS reports the late Jack Kirby has now received a street named after him, part of a project the law firm agent Roy Schwartz and the American Jewish Historical Society worked on getting approval for:

It is no small thing to get a street in Manhattan named after you, but the creator of such timeless superheroes as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man received that honor on Monday, when the Lower East Side block where he was born was named “Jack Kirby Way.” [...]

“Widely recognized as the most prolific and arguably most important creator in the history of the comic book medium, Jack Kirby is also one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century,” according to a new exhibit on his life and work at Manhattan’s American Jewish Historical Society.

The exhibition, “The Jack Kirby Way: How a boy from the Lower East Side became the King of Comics,” is co-produced by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. It will be on view through Nov. 30.

One of the artifacts on display in the show is the original “Captain America” comic books, issues 1 through 10. Joe Simon, who co-created the character and many more with Kirby, owned the issues on display.

The iconic first issue of “Captain America,” published in March 1941, shows the superhero punching Hitler in the face, before the United States entered the war. Many Americans had not yet come to support the idea that the Nazis needed to be vanquished.

Based on this report from Breitbart from last year, some could reasonably argue the same sadly holds true for today when it comes to the Islamic Iranian regime, in example. If Kirby and Joe Simon were alive today and created Cap in modern times, the sad but possible reality is that the Star Spangled Avenger wouldn't get the same kind of positive regard seen in the Golden Age any more than any other Marvel/DC heroes created since.

Its publication led to death threats to both men by the German-American Bund, Roy Schwartz, a board member of AJHS and the person who drove the effort to get the street co-named in Kirby’s honor, told JNS.

The police, when contacted by Kirby and Simon, refused to do anything to help, according to Schwartz.

Then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia contacted the comic book artists and promised them personally that they would be kept safe. LaGuardia’s mother, Irene Luzzatto-Coen, was a Sephardic Jew.

And on this, it's vital to note that even today, that's not always the case in NYC, where this stuff has become a particularly sad staple ever since Zohran Mamdani was elected the 1st Muslim mayor in the Big Apple, and what he's been doing now would be hurtful to Kirby. Do the organizers of the campaign to have Jack Kirby's birthplace named after him realize that, if they don't have any concerns over what came about even before October 7, 2023 and Mamdani's election, then this whole campaign's otherwise meaningless?

As a little boy growing up in Tel Aviv, Schwartz was obsessed with comics, including Kirby’s, he told JNS.

American relatives would mail him new releases, and he learned English by reading them.

Now employed by day as “a mild-mannered chief marketing agency for a large law firm,” as he told JNS, he is the author of “Was Superman Circumcised?” and other books and essays exploring Jewish aspects of comic book history.

Schwartz was the driving force behind the labyrinthine bureaucratic process by which city agencies approved a co-named New York City street.

“There was enough red tape to circle Galactus several times,” Schwartz told JNS.

Captain America was and remains his favorite superhero, Schwartz told JNS, a few feet away from the newly-renamed street sign.

But predictably, they won't get into how, less than a decade after Kirby's passing, Marvel under Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas spared no expense taking apart much of what made Cap work in the first place, lacing the series published under the Knights imprint with anti-American propaganda, something that's continued until even recently. Equally bad is how they repeatedly tried to "replace" Steve Rogers with PC tokens. So what good does it do for Schwartz to just make the statement without bringing up how sad it is that Cap, along with tons of other Marvel/DC properties, major and minor, were effectively destroyed for the sake of woke leftist propaganda? Why, what if Mamdani had anything to do with the red tape encountered? In that case, Schwartz would be wallowing in the exact cowardice that all but victimized Kirby in his time by not showing the courage to discuss anything.

Golin, executive director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, is a long-time, major Kirby fan.

“I love all of his work. It continues to blow me away, and he was so prolific,” he told JNS. “He is so Jewish, so if you take pride in the accomplishment of fellow Jews, then he’s someone you should know about.”

But does this guy appreciate where Marvel/DC went with Kirby's creations post-2000, including the New Gods? I seem to recall Jim Starlin wrote a miniseries called The Death of the New Gods 2 decades ago, and that wasn't exactly what Kirby got into the business to do. Such a story was a slap in the face to his legacy, just as much as what became of Cap, because if memory serves, Big Barda was meant as a tribute to Kirby's wife. I recently bought an archive of Kirby's work on the New Gods from the early 70s, and that's the kind of work that counts. I will not waste time and money on the post-2000 stories that did a terrible disservice to Kirby's efforts. Also, look who turned up as guests at the event:

Less elaborately dressed but honored with seats on the dais were Schwartz, Tom Brevoort, executive editor and senior vice president of publishing at Marvel Comics; Marvel artist and writer Jim Steranko; and former DC Comics president and publisher Paul Levitz.

While Steranko's a decent visitor, that a leftist like Brevoort, who actively defended Marvel's deconstruction of Kirby and Lee's work, would attend is disgraceful and embarrassing. Even Levitz, who fulfilled quite a bit of the same when he was a leading executive at DC (and was an apologist for Planned Parenthood), isn't exactly somebody I'd consider welcome there. Yes, I do recall he was willing to sign a petition in defense of victims of October 7, 2023, but there's still no telling if he's fully reevaluated his past mistakes, and so far, he's never publicly said so. Worse, both Marvel and DC continue to employ people throughly unsuited for the jobs, and that certainly doesn't reflect well on Brevoort, considering he still works for Marvel.

Kirby certainly is worthy of a street named after him. But not all the people involved are worthy of backing his legacy.

What Alan Moore says about Frank Miller and the industry

Alan Moore, having long had little to do with the comics medium for years already, was interviewed by the UK Observer, and has rather unsurprisingly unflattering words to say about Frank Miller. But first:

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.

They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen?

Well if he realizes why, more importantly, apocalyptic stories only built upon pessimism can be discouraging when you hammer away at them with no brighter side to balance, at least that's something. Though it doesn't excuse that he's such a leftist, and unfortunately, as the following suggests, he hasn't risen above this in real life:

With the [Guy Fawkes] mask from V for Vendetta, you created a symbol for resistance.

It’s one of the works that I’ve disowned, although I am very glad if that mask has been useful to a global protest movement. I was glad that Occupy could find a use for it. I was optimistic when I saw Tunisian school kids wearing it at the start of the Arab Spring, but that replaced the old governments with worse ones and led inexorably to [war in] Syria. If the old world refuses to die, the new world cannot be born.

What do you mean by ‘the old world’?

The ferocity of the rightwing push that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. I can’t really attribute that to anything other than a desperate sense that they and their politics have no part in the future.

What a groaner. He just won't let go of the whole notion on right-wingers could be a problem, but not left-wingers. And does he turn a blind eye to the dangers of Islam, which is consuming the UK even now as we speak? If he believes the "Arab Spring" really had any positive impact in Egypt, reality contradicts that. And how come he denies Watchmen and V for Vendetta were meant to be predictive? Is it because he feels that part alludes to more recent world issues he never actually meant to write a metaphor for? Also appalling is his continued favorability to the Occupy movement, years after the fact, and if that's how he's going to opine, there's no chance he sees anything wrong with how things are really going in Syria now, and the disaster its current autocrat is inflicting upon anybody considered a "kuffar".

How did you get from learning in the library to writing Future Shocks, a sci-fi cartoon strip in 2000 AD?

I asked my friend Steve Moore, who had been working as a comic script writer. He taught me the basics, and I started submitting stories to Doctor Who weekly and 2000 AD. The 2000 AD editor rejected them but liked my style, so gave me Future Shocks. They were a great way to learn how to tell a story. I don’t acknowledge them [now]. The companies have lawyers and will fight you in court until you are destitute. I don’t want to be associated with the comics industry, which is poisonous.

OK… a couple of questions about that poison. The Dark Knight’s Frank Miller, who I think you fell out with…

He’s one of the reasons I’m embarrassed to be connected with the comics industry.

There is one year, 1986, when he releases Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, you release Watchmen, and it changes comics for ever. He’s now worth $45m.

I’m aware of this. Comics are a wonderful medium but the industry is corrupt. One of the reasons I disowned that work is because it is owned by DC Comics. They can give it to any writer. There was a TV series called Watchmen and my only connection with that was receiving a parcel with a powder blue barbecue apron bearing the hydrogen symbol and a letter that began, “Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen…” I wrote back a brief letter, saying that this work has been stolen from me so, as far as I’m concerned, it is unauthorised.

Okay, so he's seriously discouraged based on his experiences with a company that came to rip off its contributors more than once, recalling how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were at one point being short-changed by DC on Superman until they went public about it in the mid-70s. A big difference is that, as the creators of the first prominent superhero, they had some backing in their time, including the late artist Neil Adams IIRC (but who knows if they'd find it now?), while Moore, by contrast, didn't find anything of the sort, if at all. And I guess he resents that, but again, his leftism is making it difficult to care.

As for his beef with Miller, I assume it's because Miller by contrast went on to work in films to some extent, even though in the end, Miller didn't have much more success than any adaptations of Moore's work did, recalling the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen films were disasters, and so too was V for Vendetta, IIRC.

Screen Rant addressed this in turn, and they unshockingly take Moore's side regardless of where Miller's been going lately, telling that:

However, that friendship was already seemingly over by 2011, when Moore was harshly critical of Miller's public comments about the Occupy protest movement in an interview. Both before and after that, Moore has criticized what he considers the "misogynistic," "homophobic," and "fascist" overtones of Miller's work. Alan Moore clearly came to dislike Miller's later comics, like Sin City and 300, but the root of the issue, on and off the page, is political.

[...] Frank Miller is frequently described as a conservative, though he disavows that label himself. Meanwhile, Alan Moore is a self-avowed anarchist and magician. But one thing they share is how much their personalities, and their ideologies, drive what they do on the page. Which makes their creative and political differences indistinguishable. Then add a professional layer to that: Miller embraced the comics industry, while Moore forsaked it.

Yes, for nearly a decade, Miller's been doing everything he can to back away from any such labeling, even going so far in his recent documentary to say he's sorry for attacking the Occupy movement. Assuming Moore knows this, it just shows that the whole notion he's going to forgive and forget so easily is exaggerated. For if the Observer interview is any suggestion, he won't change his mind anytime soon.

Anyway, now that DC owner Warner Brothers has come under the same ownership as Paramount, one could wonder, will they provide Moore with compensation, if he really deserves it? And given that the mogul who owns both is pro-Donald Trump, one can validly wonder if Moore will even accept any offered? If not, what was his whole rant about in the first place? All I know is that it's just too bad Moore has to be such a far-leftist, and it makes it hard to credit much of his resume outside of a handful of items.

Star Wars' leading actor continues to taint the franchise with his far-left rants

John Nolte at Breitbart addressed the recent anguish Star Wars veteran Mark Hamill caused by writing a social media post wishing ill to Donald Trump:

The Disney Grooming Syndicate’s Star Wars star Mark Hamill has not only lost his humanity, but he’s also been exposed as a bald-faced liar.

Earlier this week, and just a few days after hanging out with former President Barry Obama, Hamill took to his stupid Bluesky account to publish a photo of a dead President Trump with the caption “If Only.”

On the tombstone, the date of death is 2024, with the obvious implication being “if only” he had died before being reelected in a landslide in 2024. You can also assume quite reasonably that Hamill wishes that the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2024 had been successful.

Grim stuff. But when you allow your politics to strip away your humanity, this is how your mind warps.

Naturally, Democrats ignored Hamill’s assassination porn, and the far-left entertainment media downplayed it, but Hamill eventually deleted the post.

Then, on Thursday, he only kind of apologized, but did so by lying about his original post: “Accurate Edit for Clarity: ‘He should live long enough to… be held accountable for his… crimes.’ Actually, I was wishing him the opposite of dead, but apologize if you found the image inappropriate.”

Liar. Hamill was not “wishing him the opposite of dead.”

There was no contradiction in the original post. Hamill expressed his disappointment that Trump was not dead (“If Only”) and then went on to basically say that, since he is sadly still living, I wish all these horrors upon him.

Let's also recall Hamill did voice acting for the Joker during the mid-90s in the Batman Animated Series franchise. Seriously, he is such a sorry case, and it'll be very hard watching the SW franchise at this point when you realize how awful its original star is in his world view. It's also why some people might not be too disappointed Kathleen Kennedy turned the franchise to wokeness, because what good is something where the star of the show makes such heinous statements about real life politicians?

Hamill really crossed the line this time, and while I'd like to think maybe it'd be better reading the comics adapted from SW at this point, even that's not going to be easy.