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Hacks, hacks, and additional hacks   
06:48pm 04/06/2005
  The sheer, towering levels of hackery in what appears to pass for journalism today is starting to make me physically sick. It's getting to the point where one of my prime motivations for wanting to work in journalism is to try to improve the mean level of quality to somewhere above 0.

Take this offering. It clearly didn't take Kevin Maher longer than a couple of minutes of squatting and straining to dump this all over the Times. I can quite clearly see the intellectual process leading up to this. Maher has a deadline looming and is lost for something to write. Catching sight of a poster for Sin City, he thinks "I know! Comic books! That's something none of my readers care about!". Sitting down to write his article, the thought of perhaps doing some research crosses his mind, but he decides that would detract from valuable masturbation time.

This same rationale would seem to apply to Sin City, too, since he certainly hasn't seen the film. Nothing else could explain bizarre statements like this:

(paedophilia and slut-killing are big in Sin City)

For those of you who haven't yet seen it, one of the villains, Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl), is a paedophile. I can't think of a single movie character off the top of my head who is portrayed less sympathetically than Yellow Bastard, who is so nauseatingly evil that his skin and blood are a bright and unpleasant yellow. I have no idea how this equates to paedophilia being "big" in Sin City, but far be it for me to suggest that Maher's mind is addled by drink, eh?

I'm going to digress briefly in this paragraph - if this news unsettles you, please, skip to the next one. I'll not blame you. Sin City was misogynistic, yes. I agree. What separates informed critique from the quarter-assed hackery in Maher's article is that people who are actually familiar with what they're writing about know firstly that Frank Miller's books were satirical (excuse the use of bolding, but it's a concept that seems alien to many detractors) and secondly that misogyny is a staple of the entire noir genre. Sin City was misogynistic? So are at least half of the great works of the Western canons. Get over it.
I mean, who could look at this poster and think that Sin City was a movie taking itself seriously?

Having managed only to fill a paragraph with uninformed nonsense about Sin City, Maher churns out several more paragraphs of uninformed nonsense about comic books in general. He claims that women only appear in comic books as ridiculously disproportioned sex objects in need of rescuing (and, doubtless, subsequent pleasuring) by the rugged male leads. I'm not sure what's most obvious about Maher's complete lack of anything resembling understanding of this particular art form. Is it the fact that he quotes that stupid fucker Harry Knowles as representative of all lovers of comics? For those unfamiliar with Knowles, this is like taking the views of a barely-pubescent teenybopper as representative of everybody who likes music.

But I think it's just that he's never read a comic book, nor does he know anybody else who has. He wants better female characters? I am going to spend a few moments looking at my collection of comics and tell you how many I find.

Boy, Lord Fanny (The Invisibles)
Elaine Belloc, Mazikeen (Lucifer)
Mina Murray (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
Channon, Yelena (Transmetropolitan)
Kat (John Constantine, Hellblazer)
Tulip O'Hare, Amy, Featherstone (Preacher)
Death, Despair, Delirium, Rose (Sandman - plus innumerable female characters who only featured for a volume each and whose names I can't remember right now)

I count fifteen. I'm not sure there are any of the grotesqueries Maher describes in my collection. How odd.

It's the sheer arrogance of this article that infuriates me. The fact that this fucking pseudo-intellectual has the absolutely fucking conceit to think that he can write about comics without knowing anything about it, because, hey, they're just comics, right? They're on some kind of lower metaphysical level from "real" art, of course we can just pull worthless conclusions about them out of our asses, vaguely generalise about an entire diverse art form, because they don't matter, right? This lazy elitism about comics has been hurting us for most of a century now, and it needs to stop.		  
   

(6 enemys | Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?)
 
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