Comicbook Vacation.
Do this week has been pretty gosh darn lazy. I have work off until the second of January, but everyone is either out of town or otherwise occupied, so I have been spending it by myself during the day & with Jenny at night. The daytime solo has mostly been made up of me playing video games: the Transformers & Spider-man Three games-- the former is fun but has horrible camera angles, the latter is fun but has way too many controls. I've also been going to the gym & having pretty successful workouts, other than the fact that I'm skimping on cardio since there hasn't been anything to watch on television while I elliptical or whatever. During the night, Jenny & I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the extended editions. Other than that, I've been all on my lonesome with no one to pay any attention to me-- misery!

Last night (& this morning) Jenny has been fighting off a cold, so I've been double whammied. To make up for it I watched The Incredible Hulk. Which was pretty awful, actually. The Hulk roaring at the thunderstorm was the only good part of it. Well, & roaring after beating up the Abomination. I guess the Hulk roaring was okay. Still-- vacant, utterly absent. Plus-- correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the movie took place in a Mountain Dew factory? What the...hell? It was doubly ruined, because before I turned it on I watched an episode of The Brave & the Bold which had super-smart gorillas riding pterodactyls. So sorry, Hulkikins. Today of course there is no game, what with everyone still out of town. James was going to run some kind of pick-up, but no luck. I made some eggs in a basket (with Jenny's bread cut into heart shapes) & now I've left her to watch television in the other room.

Oh & I wanted to talk about Frank Miller. A lot of people are glad that The Spirit tanked. No big surprises there. The thing that really has been getting under my skin-- for no particular reason-- is that Neil Gaiman likes Frank Miller. I am not one of those who put Gaiman up on a pedestal, but I like him & generally his opinions are reasonable. I just-- ugh. In particular, the image below. Mister Gaiman posted it to his blog, & it bothered me enough to post about it in the feed comments. Mostly-- here is the thing. There are two things-- two things that bother me. One is that Frank Miller isn't any good. Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil-- they both seemed good. They seemed like a melding of comics with pulp noir; & for its moment, they seemed genuinely brilliant. Heck, I think Sin City is a natural follow through-- I liked it, & the movie. It has become clear though that actually, Frank Miller wasn't merging noir with superheroes. Nope! He was only just trying to figure out new ways of demeaning women. Man, he hates women. Which is what makes the picture annoying-- it is a disguise. It seems like it is making a statement about censorship. Really though, it is just another excuse for Frank Miller to present women as sexy victims. Eff that.



The other thing that really bothers me is when people scream "censorship!" when you say you don't like a piece of offensive art. Listen-- no. I'm not saying it should be illegal for Frank Miller to call women prostitutes & draw them with bukkake faces & dress them in lingerie & then have them get beaten up. Fine. What I am saying is that I sure as hell won't buy it. & I'll tell people not to buy it. & so forth. Not putting out crap is also legal. Saying "this is demeaning garbage" is the right way to handle it. I'm not saying it should be illegal for Frank Miller to...well, be Frank Miller. What I am saying is that people should stop buying his comics, seeing his movies. Stop publishing his comics, letting him direct movies. He isn't any good-- he isn't even telling good stories with this stuff in them anymore. Really. He just writes comics where Batman calls kids retarded. Frank Miller is the Old Yeller of comics.