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Comics and Cowardice, a twine essay
- Thread starter LordOfLore
- Start date
LordOfLore
Banned
Good luck, it's a long one.
I'm out. Well that was fast.
LordOfLore
Banned
I read the first chapter about Rick and mutants. At first, I was like, "Ok, well, a character saying something stupid doesn't mean the author thinks that," but then...Rick just going on a douche spree and lying about his own obvious intentions. Oy. Good article from what I read, can't speak for the rest of it though but might continue when I have more time.
Edit: Looking at some of these comic pages, skipping through, all I can think is, "my god, these comics have waaay to much bunched together writing." Pages upon pages of speech bubbles that take up 50% of the page. These writers need to tone it down a bit.
Edit: Looking at some of these comic pages, skipping through, all I can think is, "my god, these comics have waaay to much bunched together writing." Pages upon pages of speech bubbles that take up 50% of the page. These writers need to tone it down a bit.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Is the Rick part about the whole mutant debacle.
Sigh.
Sigh.
Baron von Loathsome
Member
Yeah, it's about Uncanny Avengers.
LordOfLore
Banned
Yeeep
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
I can forgive Remender as I saw what he was trying to say but it came out wrong. It's not much to get worked up about, imo.
MaximumSpider
Banned
As someone who wants to break into the comic field and tell my own stories, I will be giving this a read when I get home. Went ahead and downloaded it.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Did he conclude his Remender rant by saying he's a pos?
:/
:/
My dude had a scene where Mags gets derided for killing Red Skull.
Like I liked Remender's Venom and all but goddamn.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
I'll put that blame on editorial.
I won't, Alex is very much a "both sides" character as well Remender's self insert. Rick clearly believes that kind of stuff.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Not if you read his current indie stuff. None of his new stuff has any "both sides" rhetoric.
RoninChaos
Member
Is there a mobile link?
charlequin
Banned
This thing is taking forever to read. He could've said this a lot more succinctly, though his point is noble and well-placed about people in industries that cater to nerds trying desperately to act like they're not being political when they are.
Spencer comes off more sympathetically until you get to the part where he and/or editorial works to aggressively whitewash the actual Nazis out of Nazism and World War II. That shit's like Japanese-style WWII revisionism where you try to pretend that WWII was just a thing that happened and wasn't steeped in the significance of the beliefs that caused it to happen.
Spencer comes off more sympathetically until you get to the part where he and/or editorial works to aggressively whitewash the actual Nazis out of Nazism and World War II. That shit's like Japanese-style WWII revisionism where you try to pretend that WWII was just a thing that happened and wasn't steeped in the significance of the beliefs that caused it to happen.
MaximumSpider
Banned
Jesus christ
(plus a really creepy level of fascination with nazi imagery)
Froyo Love
Banned
Download the HTML file and open it in your mobile browser.
I'm reading through this, have made it through the Sam Wilson section and have plenty more to go. The section on Rick Remender deserves to be read on its own even if you don't have the patience for the whole analysis of Spencer's work, it's pretty damningly convincing that Remender trotted out some white moderate bullshit and didn't have the guts to defend his own position. I like Remender's work on Fear Agent and Black Science so it's sad to see.
Palette Swap
Member
Yeah, I always feel like the annoying nerd that cant let go of a single story misstep, but this soured me on Remender honestly. In retrospect, he can be really tone deaf pretty often.
I havent followed him at all, but I remember how 10-12 years ago he was dog whistling a lot on the jinx World forums. So its entirely unsurprising that hed feel more comfortable exposing his repugnant views now.
(plus a really creepy level of fascination with nazi imagery)
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
Whatever soured shit he felt or whatever I guarantee you it's long gone. Alonso is just poison.
Yeah, I've never seen his indie stuff have that and neither does his Twitter. Now and then he complains about some of his followers bitching at him because he's too political and anti-Trump.
What's the word count on your book, friend?
charlequin
Banned
I'm confident that you said this because you read a meaningful portion of it and can speak to its rhetorical and logical flaws... right?
Sibersk Esto
Banned
What did Alonso have to do with him telling people to drown in hobo piss?
I was just about to post about his tweet telling people who don't agree with Havok to drink hobo piss.
Cymbal Head
Banned
I hope this is more compact than the author's previous comics essays. I loved them, but they really could have done with an editor.
ElBoxyBrown
Banned
That's on Remender. But I understood his frustration.
deadscreensky
Member
It's not, and it definitely could have used editing and (heavier?) revision of some sort.
I made it about halfway through. It starts reasonably strong, but as I neared the end of the Sam Wilson stuff I felt it had long since descended into unreasonable nitpicking, unfair purity tests, "Well I would have written it like this," and a possibly deliberate misreading of much of the material it's criticizing. Colin Spacetwinks has now gone on for pages about how the militarized police villains aren't depicted as militarized enough, how a black character being seriously screwed by the justice system isn't being screwed accurately enough, and how fundamentally dishonest all of this is -- this isn't capital C Criticism anymore, it's just endless internet forum nitpicking and it's only weakening whatever argument he's trying to make. (Something about cowardice, but it's probably been 20+ pages since he last really got into that theme.)
It's an extremely weak form of meandering argument, and the nitpicky nature of it only inspires me to similarly nitpick its own points. (At that one part did Spacetwinks seriously suggest that police never treat white men poorly?) Right now he's arguing that Spencer is a liberal but not a progressive, and I think I'm done with it.
I now believe that Spencer isn't a particularly great writer and his 22 page floppies about characters from 1940s comic books for children might be overly simple, but I remain unconvinced he could have solved racism if he just more blatantly told his readers to riot and that this would fix everything. Yeah, this is maybe a slightly unfair reading of the essay, but after sitting through however many pages of this I'm not feeling like reading anything fairly. That part of my brain might be temporarily broken.
TL;DR: you can pretty safely skip this, there's very little insight trapped in its maze of endless niggling. (And I liked Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel.)
LordOfLore
Banned
Used to the system from making games and collaborations IIRC.
I hope they get used to their used to their stuff getting abridged.
I also remember a point being made about traditional blog posts/text pages getting skimmed, "shouting in the wind", etc. being another motivating factor. It's real hazy. Then again, putting your book inside of a text-adventure game isn't doing much better on the accessibility angle.
EDIT: Just re-read the explanation you linked to in the previous thread, and it looks like it's mostly $ related. I can respect that, even if I'm not interested in reading something that way.
I'm currently reading through Spencer's Sam Wilson run and it's not bad so far. What are the criticisms of Spencer?
Baron von Loathsome
Member
Lots of both sides-ism, Sam's inability to take action, and general inability to engage with the subject matter in more than a superficial way.
I haven't run into any both sides-ism but I did see a conflict that was resolved through a devil's bargain (acknowledged as such in the comic) that would fail any purity test.
Yeah, I'm still pretty early in Spencer's run but I can see people being upset at the imperfect solutions and justice. However, (at least as far as the Sam Wilson run is concerned) the harsh impossibility of perfection is a central theme.
Santerestil
Banned
It is a very, very long and very specific essay on why Secret Wars and the Marvel series before it failed on speaking about bigotry and nazism, followed by a pair of chapter about how generally the comic world is full of racist assholes covering themselves. "Order before justice" and the old, omnipresent white privilege.
Also has a lot of divagations regarding the actual cultural situation - he even uses Bioshock Infinite as an example of "both sides".
And it doesn't say that cops don't kill white people, but that minorites are disproportionally targeted.
charlequin
Banned
You don't say.
Like it's possible to get into it in more depth (given the subject of the thread, a lot more depth) but the short version is that Spencer is basically a law-and-order "moderate" Republican which makes him an astonishingly poor choice to tell a story about Captain America in the current climate and means that his handling of race in particular is full of respectability-politics nonsense and straw leftist beatdowns.
Why would Secret Wars speak about nazism?
Unless that was a typo, and you meant Secret Empire
deadscreensky
Member
This is even obvious from the excerpts Spacetwinks uses in his essay, but because around a third of the way in it becomes Look at this Bitch Eating Crackers, the Novel he mainly deliberately ignores that. He also likes to randomly switch between Sam Wilson being an author stand-in and not, so excerpts that are blatantly about Spencer's own mixed feelings can magically become bad characterization with zero subtext when it's convenient.
I know I'm coming across as harsh. There's some good stuff in here! (I also liked his earlier novels!) But there's also a lot of tedious, obviously unfair cherry-picking because Spacetwinks has an admitted personal axe to grind and somehow doesn't understand why brevity makes for a stronger argument.
I wish it wasn't a Twine so I could actually search the damn thing properly, but I was referencing a longish paragraph where he talks about cops abusing a whole host of non-white groups, the probably unintended implication being that cops don't abuse tons of poor whites, etc. Like I said, it was a nitpick on my part, but that's the problem with Spacetwinks going nuts with his word counts: he mixes in strong points with a lot of weaker arguments which only take away from the power of his message. I wonder if his "take breaks" strategy is a subtle bit of trickery, like how we have a villain talking about Broken Windows policing but he only mentions maybe 30+ pages (again, screw Twine) later that Spencer himself ran for government on that platform more than a decade previously. If you're forgotten that little detail, that small splash in a sea of mostly insignificant details, it makes his later argument that Spencer hasn't repudiated his youthful viewpoints a little easier to buy into.
But it's probably just lousy argument on his part.
For the record I read most of the stuff you're mentioning. I gave this thing a chance, believe me. I understand what you mean by your choice of 'very specific', but I'd argue that's a little misleading and it's closer to 'absurdly broad'. You don't need to go in detail through the entire storyline of multiple comic series to get across your point about an author. In his obsessive focus on the little details he also consistently ignores the big picture, in that these are deeply managed corporate products yet somehow he's continually blaming their authors like Spencer is some indie guy writing webcomics and everything falls on him. Even if Spencer did agree with Spacetwinks that riots are the only thing that will change the status quo, are we seriously considering the idea that Marvel/Disney is going to tell him yeah, go for that, sounds great?
We're talking about superhero pap here, and while that doesn't absolve creators it's also ridiculous to pretend they're independent artists doing whatever they want. Spacetwinks himself seems to recognize this later on, in the Secret Empire sections about how Captain America can't be a Nazi, but because he's decided to write a badly structured novel this wildly contradicts his earlier criticisms about Spencer being a coward for the Sam Wilson stuff.
I might still end up skipping ahead to read that last part about the broader industry, because that is a more interesting subject to me (I have no strong feelings on Spencer or his apparently bad stories one way or another) and I assume he's going to have to use some brevity. But this novel is mainly a weak argument, and badly structured.
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