It’s all kicking off again on Threads! Yep, old fashioned tit for rat-a-tat-tat is back. If you need a distraction from the world blowing up, here’s your guide to the latest Discourses. There are two, one involving Rob Liefeld and Brian Michael Bendis, and one involving Alan Moore. Yep, the old familiar fights, makes you feel all warm and cozy.
Liefeld/Bendis started innocently enough when one threads user chose to praise the Bendis run on Spider-Man. And then Rob Liefeld chose to respond and
Here is the inciting incident:
While Liefeld was clearly branding the post a “terrible take” not the Bendis run, many people didn’t see it that way and everyone got in on the fun and got to say “fuck you” to various sides.
A few things emerged (all this IMHO, to go back to the roots of online discourse.)
- Rob does not hold back with his opinions and kept on responding to commenters – he’s written in the past about not letting the haters get to you, and I think when you’ve had as many ad hominem attacks as he has….you need to develop a pretty thick skin, but he was enjoying all the excitement and attention.
- Maybe it was not cool to draw attention to a random fan’s opinion in quite that way, however. That guy was just enjoying his day and didn’t expect to kick off a brouhaha. It’s not like he was throwing high and tight to Jorge Soler. But, ya know, it’s the internet, Threads love to promote the strongest takes to farm engagement and we all fell for it.
- Bendis wrote some really good Spider-Man stories and (to my knowledge) wisely hasn’t waded into the mess.
- Stan and Steve’s Spidey run was great.
- Rob Liefeld can be very nice in person, but some people saw him being rude in the past. Most humans are a mix of bad and good, and Rob Liefeld is certainly a human. I will say that I ran into him at WonderCon and we had a great interaction and he told me about hanging out at Jack Kirby’s house as a kid. I’m quite friendly with Rob, and I’m sure he’s reading this very post, and I don’t need to point out that he’s had astounding success, deeply down days, and now he’s (let’s be frank) an industry legend who people feel entitled to be very rude to online. He doesn’t need me to defend him but if you need engagement farming, just say “Liefeld” and your wish will come true.
Finally, Gail Simone had her own take which wasn’t directly related but which takes us back to the dark dungeons of the Crisis Era and the height of Marvel vs DC factionalism and…oh that was a time. It’s quite a long story but the point is that Brian Bendis is a good guy. I’ve never seen Bendis be anything but a nice guy, too. Gail Simone is also very nice. Maybe people behave different on the internet and in person. I dunno…
Next up…ALAN MOORE! Alan Moore gave an interview, and despite him saying he doesn’t want to talk about comic books, someone asked him about comic books and….it kicked off! Popverse had the headline version: V for Vendetta co-creator Alan Moore believes comics is still “astonishing” and full of potential… but the comics business is a different story
Can’t really disagree there, Alan.
The full version can be found here at RetroFuturista:
Q: If comics had never become so popular, and/or if they had evolved without the dominance of superheroes, what forms do you think the medium might have explored more deeply? What do you think the medium would look like today?
A: While the comics medium is an astonishing art-form, the full potential of which has been barely scratched, I fear that my personal experiences in the comics industry during a not especially enjoyable career, have led to me disowning all of the work that I do not own – around 95% of it – and not wishing to be associated with comics any longer. I don’t have copies of those books around the house, I don’t wish to discuss them, sign them, see them or, if I can manage it, even think about them or about that strip-mined and brutalised field ever again. With regard to your question, what first attracted me to the comics field was that it was ignored by culture and regarded as a trash medium suitable only for children or the working classes. It was cheaply mass produced, with tens or hundreds of thousands of copies distributed each month or week, and it seemed to me that in the right hands, comics could become a field where useful, powerful, potentially liberating ideas, represented in an attractive and engaging form, could be transmitted to young or poor people throughout society, quickly and captivatingly, to the people in society who most need those ideas.
Moore went on to criticize comics pricing, saying it had “priced itself beyond the reach of children or the poor, and which seems to be, even in its more worthy examples, a field that is generating product largely by, for and about middle-class people.”
He concludes “That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere.”
I’ve been fortunate enough to interview Alan Moore a few times, and it’s always an amazing experience, (his voice telling me about a misprint on the back of a V for Vendetta reprint still echoes in my brain) but I also think he kind of just doesn’t want to see the comics industry as it exists today. I would argue that comics of some kind are pretty available to everyone, whether via free webcomics or in libraries. The $10 format for “compact editions” has been a huge success and whether $10 is within the reach of children or poor people is open to debate.
All that said, some parts of the comics industry definitely have treated Alan Moore in a pretty shitty way. He’s a genius visionary who is entitled to his cranky takes.
More importantly, what is Alan Moore doing now? Well, he’s writing novels, long, difficult, amazing novels. Most recently he’s been working on The London Quintet, five interconnected fantasy novels. The first one, The Great When, came out two years ago. The RetroFuturista interview has lot more about this novel series but THAT didn’t make as many headlines, so you can also understand why Moore gets miffed when he’s asked about comics over and over again. And also why he’s asked because it gets lots and lots of attention.
Steve Bissette, a former Moore collaborator, had his own take on things in a FB post:
I think it might be more accurate to say that Moore tried to negotiate but people at BOTH Marvel and DC just kept messing things up. Maybe magic is real, because both Marvel and DC had silly typos on their Alan Moore reprint projects that just….shouldn’t have happened!
Anyway, that’s where we stand now. I hope you were entertained. What with so many platforms, it’s hard to keep track of all the kerfuffles, but that’s what I’m here for.
I’ll leave the last word on all this for Moore, who, honestly, has one of the most incredible brains of any human alive.
Of course art can still change the collective consciousness. That is art’s only true function, and it is the thing that art, humanity’s most glorious technology, has been steadily improving and developing itself to do, almost since our inception as a species. And, speaking as an anarchist, then for me there is at least one political ideology that art can serve without needing to accept a master or leader. Other people, of course, may have their own ideas.
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