The Four Color Media Monitor

Almost 3 years ago, Comic Book Herald interviewed the overrated novelist Brad Meltzer about his views on the medium, without asking any challenging queries, and wouldn't you know it, Meltzer not only continued to make clear he has no regrets over how poorly he made use of the theme of sexual assault in Identity Crisis, he and the interviewer even had the gall to distort what reader complaints were all about at the time:

CBH: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. What’s your–so, we’re talking about these I Am Batman, I Am Superman books, and of course we’ll include links in the show notes for everybody to check these out, again they’re really nice and I love Chris Eliopoulos’s stuff and I love your writing here with these–what’s your proudest comic work? Because you’ve had a few really interesting short stories recently, you’ve got these books, you’ve obviously had Identity Crisis, Justice League of America, what’s the one where you feel you hit it? Like, you’re just thrilled with the way it came out?

Meltzer: Yeah, I still love Identity Crisis because I’ve just never seen people react and I know there are people who will be critical of it and people who are like “this book changed everything about how I read comics and why I read comics.” And of course neither of them are right, you know? But I just love the fact that it caught something in peoples’ imagination. It just did and I love that story. It’s me pouring everything. Once they gave me “here’s everything,” I was like “I’m taking everything” like when they give me Green Arrow, I put Superman in there because I was like “never know if they’re going to invite me back again,” so page one I wrote Superman. Like I didn’t know if I would be back at this dinner table, I’m taking all the food I can grab. And when they gave me Identity Crisis, I just was like “I’m putting everything in there.” There’s Titans references, this stuff, and everything I can do to make that universe real and matter the way it mattered to me.

I will say that if you ask me the best work we’ve done, I do think that Justice League #11 that I did with Gene Ha with Red Arrow and Vixen being trapped under the rubble. You know, we won an Eisner Award for it and it’s not because we won the Eisner for it. When I did the story, I was like “this might be one of my favorite things I’ve ever written” and I knew it then and we went with a different artist purposefully, like it was just bad timing. Bendis needed a break and when I saw what Gene did, I was like “this is even better than it was in my mind” and, you know, I had that with Rags too when the art came in, I was like “this is better than it was in my head” and when that happens, it’s just magical. The truth is, I Am Superman. It may be my favorite. It’s just like everything that I want to do as a writer, but more importantly, it’s everything I want to be as a person is born into that book. My core beliefs are etched in those pages.

Well that's a telling sign he had no qualms about offending people, suggesting he thought it amusing people would find it repugnant that the story played sexual violence for cheap shock value and minimized the very issue. And it wouldn't be surprising if his "core beliefs" are quite leftist by modern standards. That he alludes to "realism" is another most irritating part of this whole travesty. Also note how he alludes to equally bad writers of the times like Brian Bendis, who penned the equally awful Avengers: Disassembled, and you know what else is wrong. As is the following, which is head-shaking:

CBH: Yeah, yeah. That’s really interesting. And they’re beautiful beliefs, I mean, you can get that out of Superman. Like, people can be cynical, talk like it’s hooky, but like, yeah, I kind of love that ideal. I always do and it’s why Superman works. With Identity Crisis–I mean, obviously it’s a huge book, it’s immensely popular–did you intend for that to be like a gateway book into the DC universe? Like, did you see it being that for new readers, or were you surprised it took on that life?

Meltzer: I had no idea it was going to do anything. When I worked on that, Dan DiDio came up to me and said “I would love to do a small, emotional story.” It was right after 9/11, and 9/11 had obviously just devastated us as a country, but devastated our heroes. We used to–if you remember after 9/11, and that dates us now because now we feel old, but after 9/11 happens, what was so incredible about it was people were going up to police officers and going up to people in the fire department and just saying “thank you. Thank you for serving.” You see anyone on a plane in a uniform, “thank you.” And you think about where we are with the police right now, whatever your politics are, the controversies that are up there, we were thanking anyone that put on a uniform. I remember Dan DiDio came up to me and said, “you know, everyday those cops and those fire people put on their uniforms, they’re risking their lives. And we forgot that. And it took 9/11 to give us that feeling back again.” and he said “I want that feeling for the DC universe. That every time our heroes put on their capes and their utility belts, that we feel like they’re risking their lives, because we don’t feel that anymore. We just assume that they’re going to go out and fight another bad guy. Like, help make it feel real.”

And so, I remember he used “small, emotional story” so I just thought of some little, tiny thing that was never meant to be a big event. There were no big events back then. There was no crisis. They never used the word. Anything. I wrote the entire story, it had no title. And then Dan read it and said–I handed him all the issues, like I basically wrote it all at once because I wasn’t monthly, I was just doing my thing as a novelist, and like a novelist, I wrote the whole thing–and then every month I had a calendar reminder like “okay, hand it in the new issue so it looks like you’re working” and just every month I handed in but they until were all done and he read the first issue and said “oh, we’re going to make this an event” and then Mike Carlin said “we should put the word ‘crisis’ on it so people know we’re going to do another event.” And suddenly it was a thing and I was like “you do what you want. As long as you don’t change the story, I’m okay.” And that changed my life.

The more I read statements like these coming from him in reference to heroes, the more I get the feeling he either made it up, or is taking things out of context of what they really spoke of, which was quite likely. No mention of how poorly the story treated the superheroes appearing in it, not even that contrived clash with Deathstroke, where Kyle Rayner didn't even use his power ring to subdue the mercenary, who was depicted more or less out of character in the tale. Also no mention of how the rape of Sue Dibny by an equally out-of-character Dr. Light was minimized by basically abandoning it quickly after it was done, nor how, when Elongated Man hugged Sue after stopping the villain, she was shown with her back entirely to the reader, before she was vanished out of the story and it was never shown how she felt about being violated. Worst is that all involved would doubtless resort to a shoddy excuse that it was never about her, only about the man who violated her in the first place, Dr. Light, along with the leftist political metaphors the story built upon. What's atrocious is that that's exactly the problem: actual victims are being marginalized as though they don't matter, and criminals made to look like they're the victims instead. One of the saddest things about the modern world.

CBH: Yeah. No, it makes sense. I’ve seen you talk about this before. Obviously, there’s controversy with the book and some of the themes and some of the harder things to deal with. You know, the sexual violence in the book. I have to imagine that if you wrote it today, you’d write it differently. I imagine that’s true of a lot of your stories. Is there anything you look back on with regret, or is it purely like “I did what I set out to and, you know, people have their reactions to it.”

Meltzer: Yeah, interestingly, and again, here we are now. It’s almost coming up on twenty years. Twenty years and people are still talking about this book I made up twenty years ago, and I never thought that. Like, whatever, a few comics are still in print that you can go buy at your Barnes and Nobles or your local comic book store today that were around twenty years ago, and that always kind of blew me away. And to anyone, but oddly in twenty years passing, I feel the same about one thing, which is I wish that rape and sexual violence did not exist. But anyone who says that our industry cannot deal with that issue or cannot take on that issue is just absolutely thinking too little of our industry, too little of our stories and it’s sadly a reality and our stories will always reflect reality. And that’s how we tackle these things and that’s how we deal with them.

I mean, obviously times change and how we do things change and all those things will shift and our own values shift. You know, whether it’s about the police or anything else in between. But that was always a goal of mine, is to draw attention to that issue and say “this is a real problem” and this is how we look at it. We always do whether it was people dealing with racism in the 60s in comic books or white supremacy in the 70s or dealing with sexual violence. And listen, admittedly, of course some of deal with it like it’s nothing and they throw it aside and some deal with it like it’s a little plot point and who cares, but I felt like we were always trying to give it the attention it deserved in terms of a really horrible, terrible thing and it had just devastating consequences for everyone that was associated near them. Just like it does in real life. So, I wish it didn’t exist, but I don’t think you can ever limit any genre and say “you can’t deal with that issue.”

So here too, it's apparent he, and the interviewer, are distorting and obscuring exactly why anybody took offense. Or even why some people who might've originally supported the comic changed their minds later, like a SJW working for Book Riot, who surprisingly enough acknowledged the story was a metaphor for Blame America propaganda. The reason, as noted time and again, was because Identity Crisis minimized the issue of sexual violence for the sake of a left-wing metaphor for September 11, played the scene with Dr. Light assaulting Sue Dibny for vulgar shock value, and made practically all heroes involved look bad, or just plain stupid. And at the end, it compounded its minimization of sexual violence with a tabloid headline implying Jean Loring was assaulted in prison, where the story forcibly put her, without even so much as a trial or investigation (and if memory serves, Animal Man acts as though it's all just tabloid nonsense). And CB Herald's writer, along with Meltzer himself, had the gall to obscure all that? Regrettably, that's pretty much the case here. Nobody's saying you can't deal with the issue of sexual violence, but if you do, it's vital to recognize why it can't be trivialized, and it's also bad to make the story sympathetic to the villains. Also obscured in this embarrassment is how badly the women came off in the story, and so did the men on the good side. Also notice how they make no mention of Robin 3 Tim Drake's father Jack, who was wiped out in IC by Capt. Boomerang (also in an out-of-character rendition), all for the sake of fulfilling a petty issue editors had with the 3rd Teen Wonder actually having a father, in contrast to the previous 2. This is something Chuck Dixon spoke about at least 16 years ago, and a grave error that till this day, to my knowledge, hasn't been reversed. Let's be clear. Jack Drake is no more a sacrificial lamb than Stephanie Brown/Spoiler. Yet neither Meltzer nor interviewer ever bring that up.

In addition to the nasty depictions of violence in IC, along with the disturbing way the female cast was depicted so negatively, what really made it so offensive was that it was very contrived and forced. But again, all that's bizarrely obscured in this very poor, unchallenging excuse for an interview. Which continues:

CBH: Okay. But you feel like you’re there? You feel like you’ve got it?

Meltzer: Oh, yeah yeah yeah. I wouldn’t have written the book. I literally would have been like “we’re not going to do it.” And I don’t want to do a crappy story. I always tell DC they say “hey, do this story” and even Identity Crisis, I said to them “I don’t want to do it.” And even Green Arrow! The very first thing they offered me! And I wanted to do it so badly! I said to Bob Shirk at the time, “I so want it. I love it but only if I can come with a good story. If not, I don’t want to do a story for you.” And I think it’s the one thing that’s made me very proud of my comic book, is that I don’t just take the work. I only do the work when I feel I have a story to tell. Tom Breavor asked me about Spider-Man and I said, “I’ll do it if I have a good story.” And it took me a month and I called him back and I was like “I think I’ve got one.” And he was like “okay, what’ve you got?”

If he really didn't want to do IC, he'd never have had even the remotest story credit. This whole insult to the intellect falls flat on its face. Also note how he resorts to a form of victimology, acting like he didn't turn out a crappy story. He might want to consider there are leftists at this point who'll admit he did just that. And who'll also admit that in the post-Harvey Weinstein era, it's even more repellent than ever. This interview, of course, was written at least 2 years before Neil Gaiman was unmasked as an abuser. A man whom Meltzer was chummy with, and one can only wonder what he thinks of that now. Near the end of the interview:

CBH: He had an incredible life.

Meltzer: And obviously I’m such a huge fan of Nate’s art. We worked together on the I Am Gandhi graphic novel that we did together and even though I love seeing it all…I’m always biased to the ones that Nate draws it all.

So he still stands by a GN he wrote, based on a history figure who, as noted years ago, just so happened to be a very bad man. That also says quite a bit what's wrong with his politics. And speaking of Gaiman, I notice the same website ran an absurd review a few years ago of his Eternals miniseries, where the reviewer seemingly admits there's only so much wrong with it, and despite that, she praises it anyway. And they even fawned over Gaiman's Sandman series, which plenty of people now are beginning to see as something more like a whole Mary Sue mishmash. Wonder what even Meltzer thinks of that? Some could argue that Gaiman preceded Meltzer in leading to the poor treatment of mainstream superhero characters and their co-stars that became more common in the 2000s. And if so, then we have Gaiman to blame for leading to this sad state of affairs we're at now, including the non-stop crossovers Meltzer seems quite okay with.

After the aforementioned Weinstein flap, it's a lot harder to concoct crude stories like Identity Crisis now. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, and for now, it's disgraceful how Meltzer makes it all sound like he respects heroes, yet anybody who gets a closer look at the miniseries will see it doesn't actually respect heroes at all, and just makes it look like they're the ones who did wrong, while villains receive more sympathy than the heroes and their co-stars do. And look how even the part in the 3rd issue where Deathstroke caused Zatanna to vomit with a martial arts technique goes unmentioned. How much more mendacious will left-wing Meltzer remain?

Labels: bad editors, crossoverloading, dc comics, golden calf of death, golden calf of villainy, history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, politics, violence, women of dc