I mean I hated the movie before I read the comic.
Be warned, League the comic is a collection of Alan Moore’s worst impulses as a creator, and it slowly goes from ‘that is pretty fucked up’ to ‘OH NO ALAN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU DECIDE TO PUT THE GOLLYWOG IN THIS”.
pure chaos this man. I’ve read Lost Girls, so I know how things can sometimes get in an Alan Moore book.
absolutely amazing that despite all of this stuff moore is still like the least ethically compromised comic book celebrity
jack kirby? grant morrison?
oh yeah. i should have said ‘living’ comic books celebrity.
I don’t know anything about them actually! I just assume everyone in comics is a fascist or a creep
Definitely not a fascist, thus far no evidence of creep.
They did recently come out as Nonbinary in fact, not that it necessarily precludes them from creepiness. I just thought that was cool.
Did not even know that! I think I am constantly conflating Morrison with the person who made Kick Ass, which is probably very unfair
Oh yeah that’s Mark Millar who’s super fashy and a creep and an all-around- piece of shit otherwise even then and a bad writer.
Mark Millar?? Prepare to be shocked: that guy is a colossal douche
Grant Morrison has spent decades carrying water for every mega-corporation they’ve worked for while shitting on other cartoonists. Including the ones who created the characters that made them a millionaire. Many of those artists spent their lives broke and sick and disrespected! But it’s all ok, cuz they created Superheroes, who are all Real Now, and also coincidentally made Grant Morrison very rich.
Morrison playing dumb when asked about the gross mistreatment of Superman’s creators:
This is fucking vile, cowardly shit. If you are at all familiar with the lives of Siegel and Shuster – and Morrison definitely is, they are such a fuckin’ rat – this should disgust you.
I like quite a few of their books but they are a total carny bootlicker. Many of their peers used their platform to help other artists and push for creators rights but Morrison sure didn’t. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t frequently call out other (better) artists, often on totally baseless grounds, while praising shit like fuckin’ Identity Crisis. That’s the comic where a supervillain rapes a super-wife! And that causes many super-troubles. That is definitely a better work than anything Jaime Hernandez did, yes.
Morrison was also friends with Millar, as far as I know. They collaborated a bunch. I think his first non-corporate comics work in decades was Happy, which was maybe the most cynical High Concept Movie Pitch comic I’ve ever read and, of course, very Millar-esque. It got a TV show! I’m sure Morrison got paid well enough for it.
This post is good except morrison definitely loathes millar. Morrison helped millar get started but they had a falling out and public beef.
Anyway Moore’s a huge racist who shoves rape into every he comic he makes(though he has written good comics) and grant morrison is a total sellout and fake rebellious narcissist (who also wrote good comics)
i don’t think i ever really liked a grant morrison comic, something about the mixture of 2000AD gross-out with proselytising new age stuff rubs me the wrong way - whenever i read one i get the sense that the universe in those books is fundamentally divided between the ‘smart’ and the stupid, the elect and the fallen, and the role of the smart is to become ecstatic psychic explorers while the role of the stupid is to be the nameless rubes tortured and killed in the background of the panels to add a sense of excitement to that journey. for comics about escaping the prison of the ego they feel strangely petty and hemmed-in, not as far from the sensibility of a mark millar or scott snyder as you might expect.
anyway on the subject of psychic death i’ve been reading a bunch of 1960s Dell comics. a while back i got one of John Stanley’s Nancy collections on a whim and was really delighted by it, and then read one of his Little Lulu books, and was more delighted by it, and then read a biography of him that had just came out.
the biography mentioned a bunch of later books i’d never heard of and i finally found some online copies of those - Kookie, Around The Block With Dunc & Loo and Thirteen Going On Eighteen (which has the creepiest possible title, but is probably the best of the lot). the Little Lulu / Nancy books are great for the way they write little kids - with a kind of moment to moment scheming intensity constantly being irritated and bounced off in weird directions as it’s interrupted by the outside world. part of the appeal of the later comics is seeing a similar approach adapted to different contexts - a pastiche beatnik bar in Kookie, teenage boys in Dunc & Loo, teenage girls in Thirteen. in Kookie all the characters are deliberate grotesques, in Dunc & Loo they’re indefatigable and depthless horndogs. i think Thirteen works best because the characters are not necessarily themselves grotesque but constantly slip in and out of grotesquery as they triangulate between accepted behavior and a deep yearning for melodrama. i think most of the stories were drawn by Stanley too so there’s a lovely sense of the drawing and writing playing off each other in their sense of timing.
i do think a funny example of the exact limits of all those Vertigo guys is that both Invisibles and Sandman have this nominally anti-establishment sensibility but then show a version of the french revolution that’s straight out of Thomas Carlyle.
what to heck is going on with Wilbur there
i guess snoring? my favourite thing about wilbur is that everyone else despises him for wearing that little hat all the time, proof that the “hat guy” archetype extends further back into the 60s than popular myth tends to allow
I liked it when I saw it but I wasn’t familiar with the source material and was 13. I read the comics later and can see why people are mad about it but it was just dumb fun at the turn of the century for me.
Yeah, exactly!
