It sounds like Alan Moore has had enough of the media and journalists. Well meaning that they may be individually they are collectively like a passive-aggressive narcissist eager to latch on to the slightest thing to bring the man down. It sounds to me that he just wants to get out of this abusive relationship and get on with his life.
The point of the article - that there is something weird about grown adults and their willingness to live in the comicbook rather than real world - is a fair point.
At some stage we crossed over from only seeing 'comic' based movies as kids where adults would only go to escort their children to what we have now. Now grown ups with no children of their own or signs of learning disabilities can go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art that they had seen.
There have been too many occasions over the last few years where it has been much too easy to hide away and watch these comic super-hero movies than endure what has been going on in the world. Times like when Iraq was being bombed to pieces, why engage with that when you can spend all week thinking about some make-believe movie?
This is not to dismiss the craft, dedication, skill and effort that goes into these movies or to deny the pleasure that they do bring to people. However, how did it happen that movies for kids became movies for grown ups?
Could it be because the kids who these stories were initially aimed at, grew up and became adults, DC/Marvel realised they could “adultify” the plots and appeal to the same audience now 20-30 years older to expand their demographic leveraging nostalgia and thus make more money?
I'd argue that the vast majority of superhero movies are engineered through focus-group testing to be as palatable to as many people as possible that they become bland.
Logan was the only genre movie in recent memory that eschewed this formula and confronted the messy topic of the senescence of the age of the superhero.
Which is an interesting counter-point to Alan Moore: just because a (sizable) portion of superhero movies aren't thrusting culture forward, doesn't mean that they have to be.
Having familiar characters in a known environment can certainly help pick the audience up to get them to a point where more complex topics become palatable. The fact that these characters are "superheroes" is incidental, and not terribly important to the overall plot of the movie.
That's a fair analysis. They are blockbusters first, and superhero movies second. I do hope that the genre will evolve towards more interesting topics beyond Good vs. Evil. The Dark Knight showed a nuanced view of how one cannot exist without the other, even within one hero's mythos itself. Unfortunately movies like The Dark Knight and Logan that are willing and capable of tackling nuance and complexity in a feature film aren't common for the genre.
"Now grown ups ... can go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art that they had seen."
How is this any different from e.g. Kyrgyz nomads listening to a bard recite the Manas, in which the eponymous hero shows veritably superheroic strength in battle? Indeed, if you are an ordinary man barely making ends meet and the politics of the world are rough, the make-believe of an epic tale where your people are depicted as great and once capable of great deeds, can be a great consolation.
Now, the reason that the Manas and similar folk epics have been acclaimed as masterpieces of intangible culture is that the bard is expected to improvise much of it, and Western superhero stories might not show that particular kind of skill. But in terms of the subject matter, the contemporary superhero obsession isn’t all that different from previous genres worldwide.
I agree with your points. Our modern society is so complex that for a lot of people it is easier to use escapism as a form of relief.
While I agree that all people should be learning and growing I would have to argue that if someone is truly motivated by hiding away I say let them.
The people who do this do not have the capacity to expose themselves to reality IMO. Being forced to do it is just like when you were forced to do something you didn't want to as a child (fitting that we're talking about super heroes).
Later on they might look up and decide to change. I know I did. Until then you just have to let them make their own decisions.
Bang on. I think technology (not just the internet kind) has advanced so quickly that none of our social conventions have been able to keep up to help people.
I believe both the democrats and republicans have lost their way a bit - they'll both be spending their time playing big-data social media games to get in power rather than actually trying to give things people want and need.
> scam jobs
While I do believe that this is true, I wonder how much of this is caused because after college is the first time these kids are exposed to the "real world". They've been so insulated their entire life that the older adults see that they can easily manipulate them.
It's a plausible factor. I know I'm not adjusted to the mess of the real world. But the documentary I watched talked about actively toying on elders fears and limits to sell them anything; with malevolent manager pressure.
And sometimes also because it can cut away reality, help people see the crux of a situation or debate and take that perspective back into the real world.
I think you're overselling Luke Cage, but I guess most of the dramas cranked out these days are pretty cheesy. Luke Cage did have its moments and good aspects, but the second half of the season was a huge mess.
> Now grown ups with no children of their own or signs of learning disabilities can go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art that they had seen.
As opposed to any given non-comic-derived action, comedy, romance, or horror movie? I didn't know that something has to be "serious art" to comment about the acting or the story. Moreover, given box office results, it's rare that any movie considered to be art is all that popular.
It's pretty easy to identify serious vs. non-serious art, and we'd been doing it for thousands of years. Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious. What's happened now is that if you level the critique the parent did, we get your reaction - a subtle insistence that we must consider all art serious, no matter how lazy it is.
> Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious.
That is a difficult claim to back up if you look at the literature from Greece and Rome that was thought worth preserving over the centuries. A lot of plays by Plautus, for example, are pretty low comedy comparable to our low comedy today, but they nonetheless entered the canon of “great art”.
I think he's overstating Marvel/DC's cultural significance. The new generation of viewers have a very different moral sensibility. The evil is much more shockingly evil, but the good is less cartoonish and more relatable, and therefore more vulnerable.
I just finished watching the new Stranger Things season. One of the things I love about that show is that it juxtaposes the 1980s kids' sci-fi genre with a storyline that would have been totally intolerable to the consumers of that genre back then. The tone that results is kind of this weird combination of nostalgia and tragedy.
Don't sell 80's viewers short. Many of us put up with, and sometimes even enjoyed, the pap that was fed to us by the TV networks back then, but that doesn't mean that's what we preferred. That's just all we had, created by people who grew up on media from the 50's and 60's.
The media of today is often created by the very people who were dissatisfied with what was available to us back in the 80's. It'll be interesting to see what people dissatisfied with the media of today come up with in another 30 years.
> The media of today is often created by the very people who were dissatisfied with what was available to us back in the 80's. It'll be interesting to see what people dissatisfied with the media of today come up with in another 30 years.
This is a good observation, and seems to be true to me throughout literary/artistic history. You can look back through time, and many eras are obviously predominated by a particular creative movement, and each movement can be seen as a reaction of the previous dominant movement: postmodernism as a reaction of creators who were dissatisfied with modernism, modernism as a reaction of those who were dissatisfied with realism, itself a reaction to romanticism, etc. Hegelian dialectics come to mind.
Of course, the avant-garde of any era didn't necessarily dislike the former movement (or otherwise be entirely unappreciative of it) to be dissatisfied with it; the only needed to recognize the shortcomings therein. The ebb-and-flow of these movements makes me wonder if the arts are inherently unable to characterize and embody the human experience. I don't see any reason why that must be true, but the notion that people have been identifying and responding to the shortcomings of their broader artistic environments since the dawn of art itself makes me contemplative. Perhaps it's simply that the human experience itself is in a constant state of flux.
His lament seems to be the cartoonish worlds were for kids to indulge in, while they formed ideals of good and bad, etc. However, today's comics audience is a mature audience seeking escapism rather than one forming its moral compass.
I dunno. I don't think it's such a clear-cut situation. I definitely just read comics because it is something to do and I like contemplating the stories.
But as a kid I suffered long term child abuse and it was about escapism for me from day one growing up. I seriously talked myself out of suicide more than once on the premise that I would get to find out what happened in the next episode of ______.
But now I'm older, away from those horrible people and have much less to escape from... It's more about the intellectual curiosity, and yes, the dilemma of good vs evil.
Upon reflection, my experience is literally the opposite from what you and Moore are claiming.
I have sometimes looked at old cinema and wondered, "Why did they make so many Westerns?" I figure that in some decades people will be looking at our time and asking, "Why did they make so many superhero movies?"
I read recently that studios are making more movies aimed at the 50s+ female crowd. The movies are about being single woman and the dating scene at that age.
The reason they made these films is because the 60+ woman demographic is the highest spending right now. People want to see their own experiences reflected in cinema.
I can't join in my head how westerns were a reflection of young and middle aged males. Possibly it depends on the demographic?
ie: middle aged men stuck in a boring job and providing for a family makes them feel powerless. Seeing a strong male on his path gives him the feeling he desires.
So maybe it's not about reflection of experiences but rather an expression of the feelings the demographic wants to feel.
I think Westerns were relatively cheap to produce, at the time. Lots of open spaces to film in not far from Hollywood, lots of horses still easily obtainable, cheap costumes, not much in the way of special effects.
That's overlooking the plague of zombie stories since the turn of the century. They were pretty rare, and then, boom, you can't move without bumping into one of the things.
My pet theory is that we're reduced to beating up the dead because they can't complain.
The thing is we didn't. Hollywood did. A gigantic industry devoted to churning out movies designed in some Hollywood exec's mind to make the most money possible. That's why we have so much crap.
Why is today's crap superhero crap and yesterday's Western crap? Probably because people just got bored of Westerns. Some day Westerns will be back in style. What's old will be new again.
Good point. I would say it is not surprising that people remain interested in the genres they loved as kids. The whole idea that certain genres corresponds to certain ages might be a misunderstanding of demographics - it is more likely that genres follow generations. Like how punk rock was considered only for teenagers, but when those teenagers grew older they continued to like punk rock, while new generations of teenagers like other genres.
Superheros might be dumb (with the odd flashes of brilliance), but they are not really dumber than James Bond or westerns or Agatha Christie or whatever escapistic genres have been popular.
I also think Moore understands this pretty deeply (considering his deep dives into historical popular culture in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but he just have some personal bitterness towards the superhero business, so he likes to disparage its fans.
Perhaps comics are beginning to fill the void left by retreating religion.
It is comforting to imagine a world in which things make sense, where good triumphs over evil, where you have an opportunity to be a part of something larger than yourself; especially when you're working a dead end job and you feel like your nation is falling apart.
Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are lacking in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing from society.
It is ironic, I think, that the waning of religion in the first world may be very much double sided. Perhaps we as a society are not prepared for secularism, and this may manifest as a moral crisis wherin people on average still require external guidance for morality and ethics.
"Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are lacking in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing from society."
Rejection of society and worldly things, and withdrawal from them both has been a rather common practice in religions for millennia. Religious hermits and ascetics, and moralists escaping or otherwise rejecting corrupt society are a pretty regular staple of religions the world over.
Superheroes could be a seen to be a kind of echo of that, in so far as they are usually pretty moralistic and extreme in their world-rejection and escapism, if you prefer to view it that way.
Something of that speaks to their fans, who are also greatly dissatisfied with the world, yet usually don't have what it takes to escape, so they escape vicariously -- through their movies, comics, and books where live heroes that can.
I dont think the people who withdraw into the world of comics do it for quite the same reasons as " Religious hermits and ascetics, and moralists".
This seems to be a newer phenomenon, possibly because we now live in a time where it is possible to contribute little and still survive for the majority of a population.
On the plus side, the vast majority of comic book fans understand that the stuff is fiction. And it seems to me that there’s plenty of community and self improvement to be had in that group too.
I don't see how this is news. Alan Moore has been decrying and hating on superheroes for the entirety of his career, for largely the same reasons throughout. This is great when it's communicated through his work - showing what comics could be without superheroes, or critiquing the genre from within (Watchmen and Marvelman/Miracleman reboot come to mind), but his personal disdain for the consumers of his products is odd to me.
This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is wicked cool.
Is this a retreat from reality? Sure, but we need that. Moore is wrong here to suppose that adults need to be doing Adult Things at all times. The world is hard enough as it is - taking a few hours respite from it is hardly a crime.
Rather that an entire country or group of people getting angry because people in power are morally corrupt they're just watching the latest Iron Man and discussing pointless things like Art Direction and the Actresses Performance.
Counter-point: our traditional role models and real life heroes have proven to be so fallible that we are returning to folklore for models of what to aspire to.
At least the distraction now isn’t blood on the sands of the arena, or burning witches. Most people want to be distracted most of the time, with sports, sex, drugs, music, movies, tv, books, learning new things, family... it’s called living. We can’t all be joyless pricks like Moore, who haven’t learned even the simplest lessons or history.
I think some of it is just a change in the terms we use.
Take Guardians of the Galaxy for example. A fun superhero movie! Except it’s really just a science fiction movie that avoids the “SF” term. It’s pretty similar to something like Star Wars in terms of the characters and technologies shown... but for some reason, Luke Skywalker isn’t a “superhero.”
Or consider the Greek myths. Instead of superheroes, they had “gods” and “demigods” and such. What’s the difference? None, really.
Humans have always enjoyed morally unambiguous tales of heroes beyond the ordinary. There’s a place for complex entertainment too, but it’s unreasonable to expect it to dominate.
I agree with the Greek mythology point, I just made the same one in anther comment.
But I wouldn't consider Guardians or Star Wars to be science fiction since "what if" is not a huge element of either. I'd consider each to be "space operas" and have more in common with adventures (Indiana Jones, The Mummy), fantasy (magicians and monsters), or Westerns than science fiction proper.
Star Wars is almost pure fantasy. Lightsabers block blasters because they are Bow vs sword analogs. The big evil is a guy in a robe who shoots lightning from his fingers etc. Hell the armor even seems to be purely asthetic.
Replace 'spaceships' with boats and 'planets' with islands and the entire story works just fine.
Star Wars is science fantasy in the style of old 1930's pulp serials and stories like the Lensman series or Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books... which still makes it a subset of science fiction, if not necessarily by modern standards.
I have only ever watched two thirds of a Starwars movie. That was some 35 years ago on television, and it struck me as utterly stupid and pointless. Bad science, bad space, bad soundwaves in space, silly costume party in a bar, idiotic storyline, and ill-conceived characters.
Didn't ever come back for more.
It was obvious to me then that this was simply a concoction of fairytales and tall stories with a new coat of Hollywood paint sprayed on. Fine by me, as long as I don't have to watch, but offensive seeing it touted as science fiction, when so clearly it is fiction with no trace of science.
Mind you, I am difficult and probably annoying. Even as a child, I never liked fairytales and fables, which would usually lose my attention about thirty seconds in. Like "Okay, someone has magic/holy/super-powers. No need to wade through a tedious story, then. Resolve the damn thing with your powers, and move on". Magic was cheating, it undermined any kind of predictable ruleset for me.
That's right. I'm on HN, and I never read a word of Tolkien, nor ventured anywhere near the films.
There needs to be rules, there needs to be consistency. Which more or less means my kind of story has to masquerade as some kind of realism. So ... science fiction of the reasonably hardboiled kind, certain kinds of mainstream literature - doesn't need much of a plot if it's worth reading for the humour and the language. I do read some stuff considered de rigueur in nerdy circles. Neal Stephenson yes, as in Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle (but - you guessed it - disliked Snow Crash enough never to finish it, and found REAMDE tacky and movie scriptish). Heinlein, Gregs Bear and Benford, that kind of stuff. Quite a few British writers, as long as they're not Tolkien og Lewis.
I should probably escort myself out of here. I never did get into computer games either...
Except most comic book stories are about heroes that are morally compromised in various ways: their pasts, their methods, the unintended consequences of their actions, etc. What's more, outside of issue films, I have a hard time thinking of much popular film these days that is black and white.
It doesn't quite fit into the black and white mold, but most modern action heroes are 100% righteous, which is a similar thing.
Take the incredible scene in Iron Man 1 where Tony Stark flies halfway around the word, kills a bunch of men (probably for good reason) and then almost kills an allied pilot. These events weigh so heavily on him that he cracks wise with his buddy on the phone while they are happening.
> ...most modern action heroes are 100% righteous, which is a similar thing...
That's too postmodern for my taste, but it's a perspective I hadn't considered yet. Thanks for the elaboration.
In my mind, this should be contrasted with Superman battling a scenery-chewing mad scientist who unleashes Destruct-o-bot to enslave Metropolis. All of golden-age Superman villains were clearly in the wrong and Superman invariably did an admirable job of cleaning things up. The narrative wasn't about how hard it is to do the right thing, how cleaning up messes made more messes, or the tension between vigilantism and justice.
A lot of the stuff early Superman did also wouldn't fly today. In many of those 30's and 40's comics, he has a habit of simplistic "might makes right" behaviors like clobbering low-level villains or simply threatening to kill or endanger them(e.g. "I'll drop you out this window -- now TALK!") in order to extract a confession in the next panel and move along the plot, and the narrative does nothing to critique his application of violence or suggest it's anything less than heroic and justified.
I don't know about that. On the surface, it would seem comics are a display of clear differences of right and wrong, but actually more often than not these storylines specifically revolve around the ambiguity between right and wrong, and how fine the line between a hero and a villain can be.
They challenge our notions of clarity and discreteness, and replace them with a continuous function of circumstance, emotion, and personal morality.
>This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is wicked cool.
Now, I always think this, but I think we also need some amount of moralizing mythology to remind us that, at the end of the day, when the time comes to act, there really are such things as good and evil. My favorite superhero movies tend to be the ones that show it, rather than trying to add "complexity" by actually removing the mythic content by invoking gray-vs-black morality and calling it "complexity".
Captain America: the First Avenger did it well, though I'd have liked them to have kept the Red Skull as a loyal Nazi. Let Hydra genuinely be portrayed as a Nazi cult, carried from its origins in WW2 to the modern day. It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.
It's mythically utterly unimportant that one manic-psychopath and another brooding, resentful psychopath "can do this forever" (The Dark Knight).
It's moral complexity when a fortunate kid from Queens tries to find some responsible way to deal with a working-class villain just trying to make it good in a world dominated by the Tony Starks and Thors (Spiderman Homecoming). White versus mid-light gray (with a good reason to be gray) offers us a compelling conflict, in a way that "two pieces of shit fight each-other" does not.
(Yeah, Marvel > DC, and holy war upon anyone who says otherwise.)
>> It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face
by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.
But is it as mythically important that a sandal-wearing goatsherd from Helmand
province (AK-47-totting or not) gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from
Brooklyn?
What about Captain America punching civilians in Sarajevo, as the Sarajevo TV
building is being bombed in the background?
Iraqi soldiers confronting the invasion of their country by the US army, being
punched in the face by Cap?
Cap punching little Vietnamese women and children in My Lai?
What I mean is that the world itself has changed quite a bit since the time of
the Nazis. In terms of dramatic evil, no modern "bad guys" can do unambiguous,
demented evil as well as the Nazis used to. And the good guys don't look that
unambiguously, selflessly good themselves anymore, either. In fact, if you ask
me (and I'm a westerner) they look more and more like the bad guys themselves.
Maybe comics can't just go on pretending the world is all black and white,
when most of us can see around us that this is not the case.
> no modern "bad guys" can do unambiguous, demented evil as well as the Nazis used to
The Nazis were complete shits on an unprecedented scale, but there was quite a bit of "demented evil" done by Americans too in WWII, like carpet-bombing European cities and interning citizens of Japanese ancestry.
The world has never been simple. "Black & white" is always a result of hegemonic propaganda more than actual conditions. It so just happens that certain strains of propaganda seem particularly ineffective on the most creative personalities of our age; but it takes very little for things to change. A lot of stuff produced in all media between 2011-09-11 and 2013-03-14 was very black & white, and without that senseless invasion we'd probably have many more monodimensional "Arab baddies" around today.
This would seem to be a fundamental disagreement over the cultural responsibility of creators. The simple Batman=cool paradigm is outdated for the modern world and attempts to update it such as Nolan's shoe-horned and instantly forgotten wall street raid have fallen flat. Amazingly, the most "escapy" version of Batman recently, Lego Batman, has most capably addressed this when the new police commissioner advocates an expansion of community involvement instead of, quote, "punching poor people". Batman punching criminals in alleyways doesn't make sense in today's world and if media is facilitating a retreat from this reality, then criticism on these grounds is just.
> I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
And Tolkien said:
> There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish [mythology] (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.
I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology, complete with monsters, heroes, and gods. So I would disagree with Moore about the merits of comic book stories. They may be "squatting" on the cultural stage, but maybe the same way that King Arthur and Ulysses do.
I expect, in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the public domain, the parallels between them and Beowulf and (non-Marvel) Odin will be even more clear.
Yea, that's how I've seen it for a long time. Comic books, superheros, villains, all of it is just massively intertwined mythology. There's nothing wrong with it. Many of these characters will be around for our grandchildren's children to enjoy.
But, as they already have been, and as nascent mythology tends to do, the stories and characters will be updated to fit the modern times. I kind of like watching that.
For example, how after the golden age of comics, a lot of Marvel stories started dealing with the perils of modern technology, and the shrinking need for heros as well as increasing perceived need for controlling these heros. The Avengers story in the MCU is a great example of this, pulling on decades-old storylines about the relationship between a society and its heroes. I mean comics aren't even 100 years old yet, complaining that they are bad for culture is kind of silly because we have no empirical data to compare it to.
What I don't like about Superman is his powers: they lack imagination. He's just strong (like a tractor or a crane), fast (like an airplane or rocket), has laser eyes (like... lasers), extremely sensitive hearing (like spy microphones) and X-ray vision (like microwave cameras). So he's not transcendent at all - we already have all his powers with the help of banal devices.
Superman = just a regular man + devices = Tony Stark - the creativity. When I understood this, I kind of cooled off from superman.
First off, they lack imagination only because he's almost 100 years old by now. That's like saying Zeus is an unimaginative god because controlling lighting is so overdone now.
Also, it means you haven't really read any great Superman stories. In the last 10-15 years, there have been many amazing stories centering around Superman. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is probably top of the list.
Also, look at the Injustice 2 video game for a new take on Superman, my jaw dropped at how they took Superman off the edge.
He's a demigod though, the stuff I've read all makes it clear enough he could shred Batman (who isn't meaningfully different than Stark for this discussion), he just won't do it.
Or there is some kryptonite around. But he never throws a big thing at Batman to kill him in those situations (where he is given the power elsewhere to throw whatever the hell he wants).
I do agree it makes for kind of a boring character though.
I feel like you're missing his whole point, which is the use of superheroes as a kind of escapism from the complexities of life. Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures is just a way of sidestepping his actual arguments.
Yes, but when you look at the ratio of escapist material to material that was used to directly make sense of the world around the audience, older material seems to have a smaller amount of fluff. However, this is probably just a function of historical preservation; we only know of the masterpieces that were passed down because of them being key to philosophical research, while tons of "lighter" material has simply been lost (and keeps being lost every day).
A lot of those epics weren't to "make sense of the world". They were to transmit cultural values, and let the audience feel they were part of something bigger. For example, if you're an ordinary Roman hearing the Aeneid, what you're hearing is not a story to explain why there's thunder or how the world got made -- what you're hearing is a story that says, no matter how low you may be in the system of Roman civilization, you and all Romans share in a greater destiny.
I wonder if how completely we have attempted to understand our world has led only to greater cynicism, and there followed increased escapism.
When there is no low hanging fruit left to ponder the pondering gets done by specialists. Likewise there is less need for light practical advice books because industrialization has made the individual crafstman less common, and again specialists take center stage in their silos of information. It's also unlikely to be in a book.
It's interesting the way films like the original superman had a very clear hero "doing good". And now we have superheroes with clear flaws, wresting with their conscience and shades of gray. This mirrors the USA fall from hegemony.
> Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures...
I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues, etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic way.
You can call that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It had to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual terrorism/spy thriller or something.
Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since nearly all content is borrowed in a global market.
I get the idea of having some sort of shared cultural touchstones. But there are plenty of candidates for that role.
Not to belabor the point, but why the guys in tights and not, say, the characters from the Abrahamic faiths? Well, you say, it's dangerous to mix faith with fantasy. But that's exactly what the old myths did and what Tolkien could do by implicitly associating his stories with Christianity, and exactly what Batman will never be. So much for the structural similarities between the Superman and Hercules.
But, again, this is all beside the point. The devil is in the details. There might be nothing inherently wrong with making superheroes the source of a shared cultural vocabulary about "spiritual" questions: what is right, what is wrong, what is bravery, etc. But how has it actually unfolded, in the world, right now? Again, Moore argues that, in the concrete, it has led to a kind of infantilism.
You bring up the Dark Knight. I don't personally like what I took away as the message of the Dark Knight, but I understand if you do. But can you name a single other example with actual critical value? Or do the vast majority just serve to make unhappy people, sleepwalking through life, continue unhappily sleepwalking?
Whats wrong with escapism? I'm an adult, I can grok the world the way it is. I can also sit and enjoy a comic book movie or just a comicbook. That has no baring on my ability to take the world seriously. In fact everyone needs an escape from time to time.
Moore is just being a dullard trying to poo poo on peoples fun.
Condescending and unnecessary. How do you know he's a poor contract reader? Compared to whom, you? Do you know exactly what position he was in at that time? Have you ever been in such a position? Do you make art independently for a living, or even try?
it's clear you've decided to chime in on the conversation despite having no familliarity with Moore, which is why you have nothing more to offer than a lame sequence of pointless jabs
DC comics bought the rights to Watchmen fair and square but Moore will never let it go, he made many early claims to want to be the greatest comics writer in history...but he just ended up making someone else money
you could have learned most of this from Google in the time it took you to paste your canned response
Reading this again, I cannot miss the irony that Alan is accusing our culture of the very thing he has done - retreat from the complexities of conflicts in our modern culture. Racism and sexual violence are at the top of that list. FWIW, discussing either of those topics as a white, middle-class, middle-aged male doesn't come with a lot of natural/implied moral authority. For the philosophically inclined among that group, in which I'll include myself, we are used to starting these kinds of discussions with the premise of our natural-born right to contribute (as he argues for - i.e. otherwise all identity politics excludes those without the identity, effectively killing the concept of political discourse). For my part, I've come to the conclusion that the greatest good we can do is support the voice of those who clearly have a natural right to speak about those issues by virtue of experience. One way to do that is to be the listener as they take the pulpit. Not because what they have to say is inherently the correct view, or ours is inherently not, but because they do deserve the forum to figure out an answer to these problems that can work for them and society- a forum they have been denied. I share Thomas Jefferson's view that the principles we cherish, that were developed over millennia, were formed through vigorous debate amongst those with a natural-born right to the outcome. I'm more curious to learn what is invented when we support the forum vs. position ourselves as a group being victimized by the vehement demand for our silence. While the vehemence is off-putting, it may also be a signal of how great a wrong has been done. We cannot exclude the later if we are unwilling to be patient with the former. I'm reminded of my gratitude for how many second chances society has given me. It seems common decency to pay it forward.
Even if you agree that it’s preferable that certain topics be addressed by particular groups are are most affected by them — at the time Alan Moore was writing originally, that wasn’t an option. Either a white male wrote about it or it didn’t get written about, for the most part. He (and the rest of the British Invasion) opened a lot of doors for various topics to get addressed in mainstream comics for the first time.
Since then, the doors have opened wider for a more diverse group of writers in comics, and that’s a good thing, but I don’t think you should be too angry at Alan Moore for at least trying to address complex issues in an intelligent way.
Good point, he was a pioneer in bringing those topics to the art form. His response didn't anger me, it just struck me as less than consistent with his justification for withdrawing from the public debate.
He is NOT withdrawing from public debate. His works are a part of and a contribution to this debate, and as far as I know he have no intention of stopping working. He is just wants to withdraw from the journalistic social media shitstorms based on limited readings and misunderstandings of his works.
Definitely not. Your previous comment (he still publishes vs participates in journalistic debates) makes a lot of sense. I'm saying that, personally, I haven't found a way to bring my values to these conversations in the public space that doesn't feel awkward, so I focus on sharing the talks/posts of those I agree with who do share that identity. Not to put words in your mouth, but perhaps you feel as I sometimes do that our right as people to participate in this public debate is being challenged or questioned on our identity alone. As much as I'd like to argue that isn't a basis for exclusion, there is something to consider in it. It's a hypothetical for me, a reality for others. That gives me pause. It doesn't mean the other person's interpretation is one I must or should adopt, but it seems unwise to form opinions that exclude their experience when talking about the rules that should govern society. The poster above pointed out that in Alan's case, those points of view weren't really even in the market without him and the British invasion. That's context I hadn't considered here. I was curious to see what the holes in my viewpoint were and that's certainly one.
I wholeheartedly agree. More than the simplistic worldview they offer, what I I find distressing in superheroes culture (that contaminated other genres as well) is that it promotes a narrative of the providential individual, set to save the day. Teams are 4 or 5 persons max, bigger organizations are seen as either evil or incompetent.
We are losing the taste for collaborative work. We are promoting the idea that only a single individual can make things better. The idea that the humble contribution of the masses can amount to a powerful wave are totally lost.
S.H.E.I.L.D. is a ton of people, normal and super, and they're not all on the same side all of the time. And it's not just that franchise, there's way more gray in modern movies and shows then there used to be. And I don't think most people, including kids, are as dumb as we think they are, they notice when things are pure fantasy and when things are calling into question what is actually good and bad.
Exceptional individuals making a difference has been the stock and trade of almost all fiction, of religious and mythical literature, and even a lot of non-fiction like biography and history, for thousands of years.
You have a tough road ahead of you if you want to convince most creators that this is the wrong direction.
That said, there have been some literary periods when writing about ordinary, completely unexceptional individuals was fashionable, and I suppose it still is in some circles.
Fiction has always focused on heroes, but organizations used to play a bigger part, especially for the generation that remembered WWII.
Take the Star Wars franchise. Most of the original trilogy is about a bunch of heroes helping a huge resistance movement against a bigger empire. In the end, the heroes are the drops that tip the scale in the rebellion's favor, but the rebellion had to push all their might to make that possible.
Look The Force Awakens: a bunch of clueless heroes, dismissing the while rebellion, manage to make a big thing go boom with almost no external help.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThe point of the article - that there is something weird about grown adults and their willingness to live in the comicbook rather than real world - is a fair point.
At some stage we crossed over from only seeing 'comic' based movies as kids where adults would only go to escort their children to what we have now. Now grown ups with no children of their own or signs of learning disabilities can go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art that they had seen.
There have been too many occasions over the last few years where it has been much too easy to hide away and watch these comic super-hero movies than endure what has been going on in the world. Times like when Iraq was being bombed to pieces, why engage with that when you can spend all week thinking about some make-believe movie?
This is not to dismiss the craft, dedication, skill and effort that goes into these movies or to deny the pleasure that they do bring to people. However, how did it happen that movies for kids became movies for grown ups?
Logan was the only genre movie in recent memory that eschewed this formula and confronted the messy topic of the senescence of the age of the superhero.
Having familiar characters in a known environment can certainly help pick the audience up to get them to a point where more complex topics become palatable. The fact that these characters are "superheroes" is incidental, and not terribly important to the overall plot of the movie.
Think about who can partake in Fandom. What an elevated position they're in, globally. What a luxury such indulgence is.
How is this any different from e.g. Kyrgyz nomads listening to a bard recite the Manas, in which the eponymous hero shows veritably superheroic strength in battle? Indeed, if you are an ordinary man barely making ends meet and the politics of the world are rough, the make-believe of an epic tale where your people are depicted as great and once capable of great deeds, can be a great consolation.
Now, the reason that the Manas and similar folk epics have been acclaimed as masterpieces of intangible culture is that the bard is expected to improvise much of it, and Western superhero stories might not show that particular kind of skill. But in terms of the subject matter, the contemporary superhero obsession isn’t all that different from previous genres worldwide.
While I agree that all people should be learning and growing I would have to argue that if someone is truly motivated by hiding away I say let them.
The people who do this do not have the capacity to expose themselves to reality IMO. Being forced to do it is just like when you were forced to do something you didn't want to as a child (fitting that we're talking about super heroes).
Later on they might look up and decide to change. I know I did. Until then you just have to let them make their own decisions.
It's a bit a cancerous era IMO. Too many uncertainties, too many technical possibilities, not enough social tissue.
Bang on. I think technology (not just the internet kind) has advanced so quickly that none of our social conventions have been able to keep up to help people.
I believe both the democrats and republicans have lost their way a bit - they'll both be spending their time playing big-data social media games to get in power rather than actually trying to give things people want and need.
> scam jobs
While I do believe that this is true, I wonder how much of this is caused because after college is the first time these kids are exposed to the "real world". They've been so insulated their entire life that the older adults see that they can easily manipulate them.
The same could be said of literally any fantasy fiction. We love it precisely because it is an escape from reality.
IMHO Luke Cage and Jessica Jones by Marvel on Netflix are very well done on every level and compare well to other high quality drama series.
As opposed to any given non-comic-derived action, comedy, romance, or horror movie? I didn't know that something has to be "serious art" to comment about the acting or the story. Moreover, given box office results, it's rare that any movie considered to be art is all that popular.
When you start talking about whether things are "serious" or "real" art or not, you've lost sight of what art really is.
It's pretty easy to identify serious vs. non-serious art, and we'd been doing it for thousands of years. Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious. What's happened now is that if you level the critique the parent did, we get your reaction - a subtle insistence that we must consider all art serious, no matter how lazy it is.
That is a difficult claim to back up if you look at the literature from Greece and Rome that was thought worth preserving over the centuries. A lot of plays by Plautus, for example, are pretty low comedy comparable to our low comedy today, but they nonetheless entered the canon of “great art”.
I just finished watching the new Stranger Things season. One of the things I love about that show is that it juxtaposes the 1980s kids' sci-fi genre with a storyline that would have been totally intolerable to the consumers of that genre back then. The tone that results is kind of this weird combination of nostalgia and tragedy.
The media of today is often created by the very people who were dissatisfied with what was available to us back in the 80's. It'll be interesting to see what people dissatisfied with the media of today come up with in another 30 years.
This is a good observation, and seems to be true to me throughout literary/artistic history. You can look back through time, and many eras are obviously predominated by a particular creative movement, and each movement can be seen as a reaction of the previous dominant movement: postmodernism as a reaction of creators who were dissatisfied with modernism, modernism as a reaction of those who were dissatisfied with realism, itself a reaction to romanticism, etc. Hegelian dialectics come to mind.
Of course, the avant-garde of any era didn't necessarily dislike the former movement (or otherwise be entirely unappreciative of it) to be dissatisfied with it; the only needed to recognize the shortcomings therein. The ebb-and-flow of these movements makes me wonder if the arts are inherently unable to characterize and embody the human experience. I don't see any reason why that must be true, but the notion that people have been identifying and responding to the shortcomings of their broader artistic environments since the dawn of art itself makes me contemplative. Perhaps it's simply that the human experience itself is in a constant state of flux.
But as a kid I suffered long term child abuse and it was about escapism for me from day one growing up. I seriously talked myself out of suicide more than once on the premise that I would get to find out what happened in the next episode of ______.
But now I'm older, away from those horrible people and have much less to escape from... It's more about the intellectual curiosity, and yes, the dilemma of good vs evil.
Upon reflection, my experience is literally the opposite from what you and Moore are claiming.
The reason they made these films is because the 60+ woman demographic is the highest spending right now. People want to see their own experiences reflected in cinema.
I can't join in my head how westerns were a reflection of young and middle aged males. Possibly it depends on the demographic?
ie: middle aged men stuck in a boring job and providing for a family makes them feel powerless. Seeing a strong male on his path gives him the feeling he desires.
So maybe it's not about reflection of experiences but rather an expression of the feelings the demographic wants to feel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_shot_in_Almer%C3...
That's overlooking the plague of zombie stories since the turn of the century. They were pretty rare, and then, boom, you can't move without bumping into one of the things.
My pet theory is that we're reduced to beating up the dead because they can't complain.
I guess you can put aliens and AI robots in that theory as well. Except both of those have the potential to be understood.
Zombies can't be cured! Our only choice is to kill them! My Conscience is Free!
The thing is we didn't. Hollywood did. A gigantic industry devoted to churning out movies designed in some Hollywood exec's mind to make the most money possible. That's why we have so much crap.
Why is today's crap superhero crap and yesterday's Western crap? Probably because people just got bored of Westerns. Some day Westerns will be back in style. What's old will be new again.
Is that something we don't ask ourselves today? Why wait decades?
Superheros might be dumb (with the odd flashes of brilliance), but they are not really dumber than James Bond or westerns or Agatha Christie or whatever escapistic genres have been popular.
I also think Moore understands this pretty deeply (considering his deep dives into historical popular culture in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but he just have some personal bitterness towards the superhero business, so he likes to disparage its fans.
It is comforting to imagine a world in which things make sense, where good triumphs over evil, where you have an opportunity to be a part of something larger than yourself; especially when you're working a dead end job and you feel like your nation is falling apart.
Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are lacking in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing from society.
It is ironic, I think, that the waning of religion in the first world may be very much double sided. Perhaps we as a society are not prepared for secularism, and this may manifest as a moral crisis wherin people on average still require external guidance for morality and ethics.
Rejection of society and worldly things, and withdrawal from them both has been a rather common practice in religions for millennia. Religious hermits and ascetics, and moralists escaping or otherwise rejecting corrupt society are a pretty regular staple of religions the world over.
Superheroes could be a seen to be a kind of echo of that, in so far as they are usually pretty moralistic and extreme in their world-rejection and escapism, if you prefer to view it that way.
Something of that speaks to their fans, who are also greatly dissatisfied with the world, yet usually don't have what it takes to escape, so they escape vicariously -- through their movies, comics, and books where live heroes that can.
This seems to be a newer phenomenon, possibly because we now live in a time where it is possible to contribute little and still survive for the majority of a population.
This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is wicked cool.
Is this a retreat from reality? Sure, but we need that. Moore is wrong here to suppose that adults need to be doing Adult Things at all times. The world is hard enough as it is - taking a few hours respite from it is hardly a crime.
Rather that an entire country or group of people getting angry because people in power are morally corrupt they're just watching the latest Iron Man and discussing pointless things like Art Direction and the Actresses Performance.
“There can be no disputing matters of taste.”
Take Guardians of the Galaxy for example. A fun superhero movie! Except it’s really just a science fiction movie that avoids the “SF” term. It’s pretty similar to something like Star Wars in terms of the characters and technologies shown... but for some reason, Luke Skywalker isn’t a “superhero.”
Or consider the Greek myths. Instead of superheroes, they had “gods” and “demigods” and such. What’s the difference? None, really.
Humans have always enjoyed morally unambiguous tales of heroes beyond the ordinary. There’s a place for complex entertainment too, but it’s unreasonable to expect it to dominate.
But I wouldn't consider Guardians or Star Wars to be science fiction since "what if" is not a huge element of either. I'd consider each to be "space operas" and have more in common with adventures (Indiana Jones, The Mummy), fantasy (magicians and monsters), or Westerns than science fiction proper.
Replace 'spaceships' with boats and 'planets' with islands and the entire story works just fine.
Didn't ever come back for more.
It was obvious to me then that this was simply a concoction of fairytales and tall stories with a new coat of Hollywood paint sprayed on. Fine by me, as long as I don't have to watch, but offensive seeing it touted as science fiction, when so clearly it is fiction with no trace of science.
Mind you, I am difficult and probably annoying. Even as a child, I never liked fairytales and fables, which would usually lose my attention about thirty seconds in. Like "Okay, someone has magic/holy/super-powers. No need to wade through a tedious story, then. Resolve the damn thing with your powers, and move on". Magic was cheating, it undermined any kind of predictable ruleset for me.
That's right. I'm on HN, and I never read a word of Tolkien, nor ventured anywhere near the films.
I should probably escort myself out of here. I never did get into computer games either...
Except most comic book stories are about heroes that are morally compromised in various ways: their pasts, their methods, the unintended consequences of their actions, etc. What's more, outside of issue films, I have a hard time thinking of much popular film these days that is black and white.
Take the incredible scene in Iron Man 1 where Tony Stark flies halfway around the word, kills a bunch of men (probably for good reason) and then almost kills an allied pilot. These events weigh so heavily on him that he cracks wise with his buddy on the phone while they are happening.
That's too postmodern for my taste, but it's a perspective I hadn't considered yet. Thanks for the elaboration.
In my mind, this should be contrasted with Superman battling a scenery-chewing mad scientist who unleashes Destruct-o-bot to enslave Metropolis. All of golden-age Superman villains were clearly in the wrong and Superman invariably did an admirable job of cleaning things up. The narrative wasn't about how hard it is to do the right thing, how cleaning up messes made more messes, or the tension between vigilantism and justice.
Here's a thread with some examples:
[0] https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/superman-165/golden-ag...
They challenge our notions of clarity and discreteness, and replace them with a continuous function of circumstance, emotion, and personal morality.
Now, I always think this, but I think we also need some amount of moralizing mythology to remind us that, at the end of the day, when the time comes to act, there really are such things as good and evil. My favorite superhero movies tend to be the ones that show it, rather than trying to add "complexity" by actually removing the mythic content by invoking gray-vs-black morality and calling it "complexity".
Captain America: the First Avenger did it well, though I'd have liked them to have kept the Red Skull as a loyal Nazi. Let Hydra genuinely be portrayed as a Nazi cult, carried from its origins in WW2 to the modern day. It's mythically important that a Nazi piece of shit gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn.
It's mythically utterly unimportant that one manic-psychopath and another brooding, resentful psychopath "can do this forever" (The Dark Knight).
It's moral complexity when a fortunate kid from Queens tries to find some responsible way to deal with a working-class villain just trying to make it good in a world dominated by the Tony Starks and Thors (Spiderman Homecoming). White versus mid-light gray (with a good reason to be gray) offers us a compelling conflict, in a way that "two pieces of shit fight each-other" does not.
(Yeah, Marvel > DC, and holy war upon anyone who says otherwise.)
But is it as mythically important that a sandal-wearing goatsherd from Helmand province (AK-47-totting or not) gets punched in the face by Just a Kid from Brooklyn?
What about Captain America punching civilians in Sarajevo, as the Sarajevo TV building is being bombed in the background?
Iraqi soldiers confronting the invasion of their country by the US army, being punched in the face by Cap?
Cap punching little Vietnamese women and children in My Lai?
What I mean is that the world itself has changed quite a bit since the time of the Nazis. In terms of dramatic evil, no modern "bad guys" can do unambiguous, demented evil as well as the Nazis used to. And the good guys don't look that unambiguously, selflessly good themselves anymore, either. In fact, if you ask me (and I'm a westerner) they look more and more like the bad guys themselves.
Maybe comics can't just go on pretending the world is all black and white, when most of us can see around us that this is not the case.
The Nazis were complete shits on an unprecedented scale, but there was quite a bit of "demented evil" done by Americans too in WWII, like carpet-bombing European cities and interning citizens of Japanese ancestry.
The world has never been simple. "Black & white" is always a result of hegemonic propaganda more than actual conditions. It so just happens that certain strains of propaganda seem particularly ineffective on the most creative personalities of our age; but it takes very little for things to change. A lot of stuff produced in all media between 2011-09-11 and 2013-03-14 was very black & white, and without that senseless invasion we'd probably have many more monodimensional "Arab baddies" around today.
The film was set during WW2. If you portray Captain America punching Iraqi soldiers in 2004, well yeah your film deserves to fail.
> I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
And Tolkien said:
> There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish [mythology] (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.
I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology, complete with monsters, heroes, and gods. So I would disagree with Moore about the merits of comic book stories. They may be "squatting" on the cultural stage, but maybe the same way that King Arthur and Ulysses do.
I expect, in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the public domain, the parallels between them and Beowulf and (non-Marvel) Odin will be even more clear.
But, as they already have been, and as nascent mythology tends to do, the stories and characters will be updated to fit the modern times. I kind of like watching that.
For example, how after the golden age of comics, a lot of Marvel stories started dealing with the perils of modern technology, and the shrinking need for heros as well as increasing perceived need for controlling these heros. The Avengers story in the MCU is a great example of this, pulling on decades-old storylines about the relationship between a society and its heroes. I mean comics aren't even 100 years old yet, complaining that they are bad for culture is kind of silly because we have no empirical data to compare it to.
Born special, good at trying, wildly powerful, noble, etc.
Superman = just a regular man + devices = Tony Stark - the creativity. When I understood this, I kind of cooled off from superman.
Also, it means you haven't really read any great Superman stories. In the last 10-15 years, there have been many amazing stories centering around Superman. All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is probably top of the list.
Also, look at the Injustice 2 video game for a new take on Superman, my jaw dropped at how they took Superman off the edge.
Or there is some kryptonite around. But he never throws a big thing at Batman to kill him in those situations (where he is given the power elsewhere to throw whatever the hell he wants).
I do agree it makes for kind of a boring character though.
When there is no low hanging fruit left to ponder the pondering gets done by specialists. Likewise there is less need for light practical advice books because industrialization has made the individual crafstman less common, and again specialists take center stage in their silos of information. It's also unlikely to be in a book.
I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues, etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic way.
You can call that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It had to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual terrorism/spy thriller or something.
Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since nearly all content is borrowed in a global market.
Not to belabor the point, but why the guys in tights and not, say, the characters from the Abrahamic faiths? Well, you say, it's dangerous to mix faith with fantasy. But that's exactly what the old myths did and what Tolkien could do by implicitly associating his stories with Christianity, and exactly what Batman will never be. So much for the structural similarities between the Superman and Hercules.
But, again, this is all beside the point. The devil is in the details. There might be nothing inherently wrong with making superheroes the source of a shared cultural vocabulary about "spiritual" questions: what is right, what is wrong, what is bravery, etc. But how has it actually unfolded, in the world, right now? Again, Moore argues that, in the concrete, it has led to a kind of infantilism.
You bring up the Dark Knight. I don't personally like what I took away as the message of the Dark Knight, but I understand if you do. But can you name a single other example with actual critical value? Or do the vast majority just serve to make unhappy people, sleepwalking through life, continue unhappily sleepwalking?
Moore is just being a dullard trying to poo poo on peoples fun.
Are we sure Congress won't just keep extending the term of copyright for the next thousand years?
Or rather the other way around: you see mythology as some kind of old superhero stories.
DC is a villain to Moore because he willfully traded away the rights to his greatest creation (Watchmen) and then watched them cash in on it.
Moore is a great writer but a poor (contract) reader and he's been ranting about it ever since.
DC comics bought the rights to Watchmen fair and square but Moore will never let it go, he made many early claims to want to be the greatest comics writer in history...but he just ended up making someone else money
you could have learned most of this from Google in the time it took you to paste your canned response
[1] - https://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-...
Since then, the doors have opened wider for a more diverse group of writers in comics, and that’s a good thing, but I don’t think you should be too angry at Alan Moore for at least trying to address complex issues in an intelligent way.
So you are basically asking Alan More to shut up and stop producing literature because he is white and middle aged?
We are losing the taste for collaborative work. We are promoting the idea that only a single individual can make things better. The idea that the humble contribution of the masses can amount to a powerful wave are totally lost.
You have a tough road ahead of you if you want to convince most creators that this is the wrong direction.
That said, there have been some literary periods when writing about ordinary, completely unexceptional individuals was fashionable, and I suppose it still is in some circles.
Take the Star Wars franchise. Most of the original trilogy is about a bunch of heroes helping a huge resistance movement against a bigger empire. In the end, the heroes are the drops that tip the scale in the rebellion's favor, but the rebellion had to push all their might to make that possible.
Look The Force Awakens: a bunch of clueless heroes, dismissing the while rebellion, manage to make a big thing go boom with almost no external help.