re: #7 Chrysicat

Can I just say, “Fuck Alan Moore, and I don’t mean in the way that Ghastly drew 17 years ago”?

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I honestly feel like he’s giving the entire genre a bum rap, which is somewhat ironic considering how seminal his contributions to it were.

The genre has issues, but both superheroes and the kind of mythology fueling “Birth of a Nation” is less about the latter inspiring the former and about both having a common inspiration in things like Greek and Roman myth, and ancient epics, where the idea of superhuman figures and demi-deities were rife. I mean, that opens up a whole different kettle of fish considering what was considered ‘heroic’ in those myths, but still.

And he seems to discount the idea of the genre ever transcending its roots, whatever you consider those roots to be. Again, an irony considering what he’s done for superheroes and comics in general. Just the idea of treating it as a static and forever stagnant thing seems to dismiss the possibilities of doing something more with superheoes as a framing device. If that were true, we might never have gotten the kinds of messages from X-Men as a civil rights allegory because comics would never have transcended the hardboiled Dick Tracy serials or flights of fancy that the golden age of comics provided.