It's funny because it's sad.
Я не считаю, что я так уж склонна к негативу.
Ну да, я испытываю прилив энергии, когда нахожу в очередном читаемом комиксе повод преисполниться ненависти к его автору. И да, мало что радует меня так, как отличная разгромная рецензия. И возможность поиздеваться над чем-то несимпатичным доставляет мне невероятное количество положительных эмоций.
Но склонна к негативу? Нет, ну что вы.
Я всего лишь люблю вещи, приносящие в мою жизнь немного счастья. И ненависть – одна из них.
К чему это всё?
К тому, что один из самых лично мне интересных околокомиксных сайтов решил отметить своё пятилетие Круглым Столом Ненависти, посвященным ненависти к самым разным комиксам.
Надо ли говорить, что я в восторге от этой идеи?
Круглый стол благополучно завершился несколько дней назад, общий список того, что (с разной степенью удачности) ненавидели его участники, можно посмотреть тут или тут, но давайте-ка я выделюто из этого, что я прочитала несколько особенно запомнившихся и/или понравившихся мне постов:
Начнём с Мило Манары и сексизма в эротике - Il Dolce Libro:
ЦитатыThis, fundamentally, is the feminine disposition under Manara’s pen and brush. He is a great lover of the female form, it is said, but his devotions are such that even the most Roman of Catholics comes to understand some nauseous puritan appetite for denunciation of idolatry. His women can be chipped into particular shapes for the purposes of dramaturgy, yes, but you cannot imagine them as itchy beings any more than you might expect the Pietà to fart.
They are, in a word, perfect, and therefore a most fitting vehicle for the perfection of rape, as you have urged me to detail.
...
There! There it is, brother! The face! The Manara face, in the final panel! Ooh, the lady doth protest too much! Another one:
...
In all of these beautiful images, there is not a hint of the ugly male anatomy: the leering prick; the dangling, imbecilic pouch. I am not the sort of man who is so insecure that he cannot stand the sight of a woman being goodly fucked, brother, but need I be perpetually confronted with the wan issue of coughing rods at the conclusion of every episode on the erotic midlist? Goddamn it, this is better. There is no emanation from Valeria. She does not drool or sweat. Her eyes do not water. We are spared the potential of her scent. She is the quintessence of the Manara woman. She is perfect, perfect, flaxen glow perfect, tawny sunbake perfect, ceramic milk white perfect, every color of perfect, perfect, perfect.
...
Yet non-consensual scenarios are not a purely male space, alas. You need only look to kink.com, or yaoi manga, or any number of places to know that the certainty presumed of these ideas are increasingly, viscerally feminized, beyond the old romance novel and soap opera tropes. God, it is confusing. Can’t anything be exclusive? What, pray tell, is the gossamer boundary between a fantasy of male domination and a fantasy of female submission?
It is, I argue, the subtle presence of the feminine perspective. The suggestion of exchange – of secret, implied consent. Of knowing.
And a Milo Manara woman can never know you. And you can never know her. It is the metaphysics of his line. The locked sameness of his luscious designs. The alien poise of his beauty, god. Always, there is potential with him, and here, with Ursus standing on the beach, castrated, summarizing the plot to a disbelieving Valeria, we finally, totally know praxis, so that the rape of a woman can inevitably be no less than the furied trauma of an ultimate man.
Алекс Росс вообще и Kingdom Come в частности - A Piercing Glimpse of Pants:
Много цитатCertainly Alex Ross displays strong craft, of a certain type.
That type is realist copying to the point of dogmatism. Copying, you ask? Copying, I say. For those who do not paint or draw a great deal, the ability to put an image on paper (or canvas, etc) and have it look exactly like a photograph or still life can seem a skill that is difficult to the point of miraculous. It’s not, actually. As an old teacher explained grumpily to us, the surly art class, if you have the hand-eye coordination to sign your name, you too could produce realistic drawings (or paintings).
...
If the purpose of craft is to portray an artistic vision (in this case a comic story about the importance of superheroes), then we can say art is good when it adds to the story and bad if it takes away from the story.
And by that metric Alex Ross is very, very bad.
...
Looking at any given page in Kingdom Come, I can tell that considerable energy was expended to create the images. I could tell, even before reading the end pages of my graphic novel release, that Ross had used props, models, and costumes. To my friends, this was supposed to be impressive.
...
The problem, dear Reader, is that Ross chooses to remove every bit of whimsy from the mythos of superhero and replaces it with earnestness in the service of a kind of ugly realism that shatters the edges of the created world until heroism crumbles like a balsa wood model in an earthquake.
...
What Alex Ross does in Kingdom Come is take the mythic story of superheroes and paint them hyper-realistically.
The effect is obviously intended to be Serious. Superheros are Needed, because Humanity needs to Battle Evil and the Forces of Good Must Triumph.
Except that by using this hyper-realistic style, by shoving a mythic story, with only slapdash revision and poor grasp of art, into a realistic world, Ross shatters the border of that story, again and again, until the frame cracks and every ugly border of the page is shown, every fourth wall is broken, and the superheros don’t project gravitas, but a kind of secondhand embarrassment so strong that I have to keep the damn comic face down on the table.
...
Now I actually wouldn’t mind having a middle-aged superhero, caped or not, portrayed as realistically aging, but what Ross has done here is not portray Superman as a middle-aged farmer, but as, well. Look.
There’s one group of people who over-develop their chest muscles and neglect their legs. They have long hair in ponytails and frankly, more tattoos, but otherwise, Clark is kind of a dead ringer for a guy who’s lived in prison for years.
Farmers and outdoorsmen have built calves and smaller chests, different body types.
The spandex outfits are also a mistake. What self-respecting Kansas farmer would be caught dead in bright red and blue lycra? None, that’s who.
Instead of creating imagery that conjures strength and the tenacity of age or using the crayon-colors to create instant pizazz and focus, or hell, even silliness, Ross’s tromp l’oel conjures unpleasant petty realities.
Anyone who wears polyester underpants that tight during a workout is just asking for a yeast infection. Not to mention the chafing once he starts to sweat. I hope there’s a good portion of CoolMax in that fabric. Did he at least put on some runner’s nipple guards for men? Maybe he’s getting free samples of Body Glide? I hope so, because otherwise, ow.
...
And if everybody else packed on a paunch so that their underoos are tight, why the hell does Diana have a teeny waist as if she’s got on an invisible corset?
Oh, because she’s a reward for the guy with the big red S on his chest, how silly of me to forget. *rolls eyes*
You know what? A woman who’s a warrior would not have a teensy waist. (Nor do most middle aged ladies, but I digress.) Nope. If you look at practicing swordsmen of either gender, such as those who practice kendo, they have a broad belly, not one that is super-sucked in. That’s because they have a low center of gravity.
...
If you want cheesecake, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with the occasional cheesecake. But don’t pretend it’s real. Don’t expect the cheesecake to add to the feel of reality if you’re mixing sixteen year old photoshopped bellies willy nilly with older-woman bad hair day. Let Diana have a deep belly and and middle aged face and still be cheesecake.
...
It looks strange. Sad.
In more abstract or symbolically painted comics, we’re not obsessively shown the seams of the spandex costumes. We’re not shown the exact way a piece of green armor fits unpleasantly against a human body and then be expected as readers to believe it’s functional as a warrior’s uniform.
...
The craft, the talent, the skill, does Ross have that? He can make images that have distinct features, sure, but according to Vom’s Theory of Art, he has failed. Failed because each of these effortful, carefully crafted images betrays instead of supports. The tone, the story, the essence, the theme, all of them are subverted instead of supported by the art. I have no worry for the characters on their quest or joy in the characters’ triumph.
I just want them to put on some normal pants.
Увернуться не удалось даже Алану Муру, но тут дискуссия в комментариях, пожалуй, интереснее основного текста - V For Vile:
ЦитатыEverything moves forward with the inexorability of a Greek Tragedy, but one that takes the gods’ point of view instead of the mortals. This sabotages any potential thrill the story might have as a story. Narrative tension generally relies on some mix between questions the audience needs answered and answers the audience has that the characters don’t. Neither is present in this book. The mystery as to V’s origin—really, the only even mildly compelling question in the text—is resolved before the first third is over.
The political content, such as it is, is no great shakes either. Yes, radical anarchy is preferable to jackbooted fascism. And in a world in which sanity means conformity to a genocidal, hyper-consumerist, corrupt authoritarian society, maybe we all need to go a little mad. V, however, ends just before fascist England actually falls. Moore gets to have it both ways, making a case that a radical anarchist state would be a really great thing without ever having to imagine for the reader what that world would look like. He even has V go to great lengths to explain that the riots, looting and murder taking place in England’s streets as the government collapses aren’t anarchy at all, but rather chaos. I suppose anarchy, like Communism, can never fail; it can only be failed.
The problem with shoddy political allegories like V For Vendetta (or The Dark Knight) is that the alternative realities they rely on to make their experiments work are so preposterous and rigged that they end up disproving themselves. True, were England to be taken over by Nazis, terrorism would likely be justified. But making a book arguing this case is a waste of time and energy. You might as well write a book making the in depth argument that if your Aunt had bollocks, she’d be your Uncle.
...
V for Vendetta is the kind of book that proceeds from the assumption that the reader is a moron, and if only we were properly enlightened, we would agree with its creator. We are the gutless conformists, who just need a good stern talking to (and a little bit of torturing) to convince us of our errors.
...
All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny to the stentorian, hectoring tone of the text whenever its eponymous hero shows up to its frantic, desperate need to impress us with its creator’s brilliance.
...
That V For Vendetta—with its nihilistic embrace of violence, it’s distrust of the institutions that will be required to enact any lefty agenda, its hatred of women and its love of coercion— has caught on amongst lefties, that in particular Guy Fawkes has been taken as a symbol of anything other than far-right religious terrorism is something I find particularly galling. I worry that at heart some of my fellow travelers on the Left feel reified by this work’s subtextual assertion that anyone who disagrees with them must be blinkered, an uninformed idiot who simply needs to be enlightened or blown up.
Дискуссия, вывернувшая (э... я почти случайно) на значение убеждений автора при оценке художественной ценности произведения - Open Thread: Is Cerebus the Worst Comic Ever?
Свержение идолов - EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 1 of 2) и EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 2 of 2)
И, наконец, вишенкой на торте статья о том, что же такое плохие комиксы - Could there be a worst comic of all time?. Примеры там собранны ссылками и по принципу "никто не уйдёт обиженным", состоящий из них начинающийся со слов "It can have clumsy figurework.." абзац - одна из самых прекрасных вещей, прочитанных мною о комиксах. Но и кроме этого там много хорошего:
Большие цитатыAlready several questions arise:
1) What counts as a comic?
2) Does everyone agree on what badness is when it comes to comics?
3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?
I will now address these questions in turn.
1) What counts as a comic?
Who cares?
2) Does everyone agree on what badness is?
No, really, who cares?
3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?
No, really, I’m not kidding, who cares?
In short, I can’t think of anything more boring than arguing about (1)-(3). Well, maybe re-reading The Black Dossier, but that’s a fate you shouldn’t wish on anyone, not even Jess Nevins.
...
What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).
Before I discuss this in more detail just what this means, however, it’s first worth considering whether badness is indeed irreducibly plural. The list I rattled off above is some evidence, but perhaps not conclusive; the fact that there are a whole bunch of different phrases in the vicinity doesn’t mean that they don’t all point to, in one way or another, the same property. In much the same way, I could use a whole bunch of different descriptions to refer to the same person, for instance, “former He-Man scripter”, “loathsome“, “hack”, or sociopath” — all of which describe the one man, J. Michael Straczynski.
...
To which I say: J. Michael Straczynski deserves every cheap shot you can throw at him. J. Michael Straczynski is so ugly that, when he was born, the doctor slapped his mother. J. Michael Straczynski is so fat that, when he sits around the house, he sits around the house. J. Michael Straczynski is writing some of the prequels to Watchmen.
Actually, that last one is a low blow. I apologise.
...
Anyway, to chide someone for mentioning J. Michael Straczynski’s early career as He-Man scripter is like chiding someone for mentioning Hitler’s early career as Mein Kampf writer: it’s not that they’re being unkind, it’s that they’re not being unkind enough.
YES INTERNET I JUST COMPARED J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI TO HITLER.
YES I AM SAYING THAT WRITING MANY SHITTY COMICS AND BEING A PLAGIARIST AND A SCAB IS EXACTLY AS BAD AS BEING CHIEF ARCHITECT OF GENOCIDE
YES EXACTLY
PLUS I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THAT HE DOESN’T LIKE KITTENS
I know that, by the Official Rules of the Internet, invoking a comparison with Hitler means that I’ve “lost the argument“.
But, on the other hand, I want you to consider this:
Go fuck yourself
...
Part 5: In Which I Run Out Of Jokes And Resort To Straight-Out Philosophy Instead, Or, If You Prefer, “Philosophy”, And, Let’s Be Honest, “Jokes”, Too
...
A first thought might be that what makes an artwork bad is that it fails to do whatever the artist wanted it to do. For instance, Alan Moore wanted the metaphysical discussions in Promethea to be gobbledegood, not gobbledegook, but, well, you know how that turned out (personally, whenever I hear the word “quantum” from anyone but a physicist, I reach for my revolver).
...
One last point in passing: to rest our assessment of an artwork on the creator’s intentions is to commit the Intentional Fallacy, which is totally a fallacy for very good reasons and not just because I read on the internet that a couple of literary critics said so in the 40s, but I’m not going to go into the very good reasons here because hey look behind you is that a three-headed monkey?
...
For a start, for all of the terrible, horrible, no good comics we have individually read, there are another hundred comics that are even worse, and another hundred that are even worse than that, and then there’s Paradise X. But, except for lunatics and sex perverts, most people don’t go out of their way to read comics that they think are going to be terrible, so there’s an inbuilt problem with trying to find the most disliked comic of all time: it may well not be the most dislikeable comic of all time.
...
Now imagine aesthetic space as a massively multi-dimensional space, with as many axes as there are different types of aesthetic badness. For instance, we might have one axis representing lack of spatial clarity, another representing implausible characterisation, another representing being written by Brian Michael Bendis, and so on.
...
Asking what is the worst comic of all time is like asking what is the worst sentence of all time, or the worst sandwich of all time. Is it a sandwich made from moldy bread and expired meat product? Is a rock the worst sandwich of all time? Is it a sandwich that gives you AIDS? Is it a poop sandwich? Is it a sandwich made by Hitler? Is it a poop sandwich made by Hitler? There is no worst sandwich of all time, because there are too many ways for a sandwich to be bad, and there is no worst comic of all time.
But if there was, J. Michael Straczynski would have written it.
Вот это, выше?
Это приносит в мою жизнь радость.
А я люблю радость. Потому что я очень позитивный человек
Ну да, я испытываю прилив энергии, когда нахожу в очередном читаемом комиксе повод преисполниться ненависти к его автору. И да, мало что радует меня так, как отличная разгромная рецензия. И возможность поиздеваться над чем-то несимпатичным доставляет мне невероятное количество положительных эмоций.
Но склонна к негативу? Нет, ну что вы.
Я всего лишь люблю вещи, приносящие в мою жизнь немного счастья. И ненависть – одна из них.
К чему это всё?
К тому, что один из самых лично мне интересных околокомиксных сайтов решил отметить своё пятилетие Круглым Столом Ненависти, посвященным ненависти к самым разным комиксам.
Надо ли говорить, что я в восторге от этой идеи?
Круглый стол благополучно завершился несколько дней назад, общий список того, что (с разной степенью удачности) ненавидели его участники, можно посмотреть тут или тут, но давайте-ка я выделю
Начнём с Мило Манары и сексизма в эротике - Il Dolce Libro:
ЦитатыThis, fundamentally, is the feminine disposition under Manara’s pen and brush. He is a great lover of the female form, it is said, but his devotions are such that even the most Roman of Catholics comes to understand some nauseous puritan appetite for denunciation of idolatry. His women can be chipped into particular shapes for the purposes of dramaturgy, yes, but you cannot imagine them as itchy beings any more than you might expect the Pietà to fart.
They are, in a word, perfect, and therefore a most fitting vehicle for the perfection of rape, as you have urged me to detail.
...
There! There it is, brother! The face! The Manara face, in the final panel! Ooh, the lady doth protest too much! Another one:
...
In all of these beautiful images, there is not a hint of the ugly male anatomy: the leering prick; the dangling, imbecilic pouch. I am not the sort of man who is so insecure that he cannot stand the sight of a woman being goodly fucked, brother, but need I be perpetually confronted with the wan issue of coughing rods at the conclusion of every episode on the erotic midlist? Goddamn it, this is better. There is no emanation from Valeria. She does not drool or sweat. Her eyes do not water. We are spared the potential of her scent. She is the quintessence of the Manara woman. She is perfect, perfect, flaxen glow perfect, tawny sunbake perfect, ceramic milk white perfect, every color of perfect, perfect, perfect.
...
Yet non-consensual scenarios are not a purely male space, alas. You need only look to kink.com, or yaoi manga, or any number of places to know that the certainty presumed of these ideas are increasingly, viscerally feminized, beyond the old romance novel and soap opera tropes. God, it is confusing. Can’t anything be exclusive? What, pray tell, is the gossamer boundary between a fantasy of male domination and a fantasy of female submission?
It is, I argue, the subtle presence of the feminine perspective. The suggestion of exchange – of secret, implied consent. Of knowing.
And a Milo Manara woman can never know you. And you can never know her. It is the metaphysics of his line. The locked sameness of his luscious designs. The alien poise of his beauty, god. Always, there is potential with him, and here, with Ursus standing on the beach, castrated, summarizing the plot to a disbelieving Valeria, we finally, totally know praxis, so that the rape of a woman can inevitably be no less than the furied trauma of an ultimate man.
Алекс Росс вообще и Kingdom Come в частности - A Piercing Glimpse of Pants:
Много цитатCertainly Alex Ross displays strong craft, of a certain type.
That type is realist copying to the point of dogmatism. Copying, you ask? Copying, I say. For those who do not paint or draw a great deal, the ability to put an image on paper (or canvas, etc) and have it look exactly like a photograph or still life can seem a skill that is difficult to the point of miraculous. It’s not, actually. As an old teacher explained grumpily to us, the surly art class, if you have the hand-eye coordination to sign your name, you too could produce realistic drawings (or paintings).
...
If the purpose of craft is to portray an artistic vision (in this case a comic story about the importance of superheroes), then we can say art is good when it adds to the story and bad if it takes away from the story.
And by that metric Alex Ross is very, very bad.
...
Looking at any given page in Kingdom Come, I can tell that considerable energy was expended to create the images. I could tell, even before reading the end pages of my graphic novel release, that Ross had used props, models, and costumes. To my friends, this was supposed to be impressive.
...
The problem, dear Reader, is that Ross chooses to remove every bit of whimsy from the mythos of superhero and replaces it with earnestness in the service of a kind of ugly realism that shatters the edges of the created world until heroism crumbles like a balsa wood model in an earthquake.
...
What Alex Ross does in Kingdom Come is take the mythic story of superheroes and paint them hyper-realistically.
The effect is obviously intended to be Serious. Superheros are Needed, because Humanity needs to Battle Evil and the Forces of Good Must Triumph.
Except that by using this hyper-realistic style, by shoving a mythic story, with only slapdash revision and poor grasp of art, into a realistic world, Ross shatters the border of that story, again and again, until the frame cracks and every ugly border of the page is shown, every fourth wall is broken, and the superheros don’t project gravitas, but a kind of secondhand embarrassment so strong that I have to keep the damn comic face down on the table.
...
Now I actually wouldn’t mind having a middle-aged superhero, caped or not, portrayed as realistically aging, but what Ross has done here is not portray Superman as a middle-aged farmer, but as, well. Look.
There’s one group of people who over-develop their chest muscles and neglect their legs. They have long hair in ponytails and frankly, more tattoos, but otherwise, Clark is kind of a dead ringer for a guy who’s lived in prison for years.
Farmers and outdoorsmen have built calves and smaller chests, different body types.
The spandex outfits are also a mistake. What self-respecting Kansas farmer would be caught dead in bright red and blue lycra? None, that’s who.
Instead of creating imagery that conjures strength and the tenacity of age or using the crayon-colors to create instant pizazz and focus, or hell, even silliness, Ross’s tromp l’oel conjures unpleasant petty realities.
Anyone who wears polyester underpants that tight during a workout is just asking for a yeast infection. Not to mention the chafing once he starts to sweat. I hope there’s a good portion of CoolMax in that fabric. Did he at least put on some runner’s nipple guards for men? Maybe he’s getting free samples of Body Glide? I hope so, because otherwise, ow.
...
And if everybody else packed on a paunch so that their underoos are tight, why the hell does Diana have a teeny waist as if she’s got on an invisible corset?
Oh, because she’s a reward for the guy with the big red S on his chest, how silly of me to forget. *rolls eyes*
You know what? A woman who’s a warrior would not have a teensy waist. (Nor do most middle aged ladies, but I digress.) Nope. If you look at practicing swordsmen of either gender, such as those who practice kendo, they have a broad belly, not one that is super-sucked in. That’s because they have a low center of gravity.
...
If you want cheesecake, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with the occasional cheesecake. But don’t pretend it’s real. Don’t expect the cheesecake to add to the feel of reality if you’re mixing sixteen year old photoshopped bellies willy nilly with older-woman bad hair day. Let Diana have a deep belly and and middle aged face and still be cheesecake.
...
It looks strange. Sad.
In more abstract or symbolically painted comics, we’re not obsessively shown the seams of the spandex costumes. We’re not shown the exact way a piece of green armor fits unpleasantly against a human body and then be expected as readers to believe it’s functional as a warrior’s uniform.
...
The craft, the talent, the skill, does Ross have that? He can make images that have distinct features, sure, but according to Vom’s Theory of Art, he has failed. Failed because each of these effortful, carefully crafted images betrays instead of supports. The tone, the story, the essence, the theme, all of them are subverted instead of supported by the art. I have no worry for the characters on their quest or joy in the characters’ triumph.
I just want them to put on some normal pants.
Увернуться не удалось даже Алану Муру, но тут дискуссия в комментариях, пожалуй, интереснее основного текста - V For Vile:
ЦитатыEverything moves forward with the inexorability of a Greek Tragedy, but one that takes the gods’ point of view instead of the mortals. This sabotages any potential thrill the story might have as a story. Narrative tension generally relies on some mix between questions the audience needs answered and answers the audience has that the characters don’t. Neither is present in this book. The mystery as to V’s origin—really, the only even mildly compelling question in the text—is resolved before the first third is over.
The political content, such as it is, is no great shakes either. Yes, radical anarchy is preferable to jackbooted fascism. And in a world in which sanity means conformity to a genocidal, hyper-consumerist, corrupt authoritarian society, maybe we all need to go a little mad. V, however, ends just before fascist England actually falls. Moore gets to have it both ways, making a case that a radical anarchist state would be a really great thing without ever having to imagine for the reader what that world would look like. He even has V go to great lengths to explain that the riots, looting and murder taking place in England’s streets as the government collapses aren’t anarchy at all, but rather chaos. I suppose anarchy, like Communism, can never fail; it can only be failed.
The problem with shoddy political allegories like V For Vendetta (or The Dark Knight) is that the alternative realities they rely on to make their experiments work are so preposterous and rigged that they end up disproving themselves. True, were England to be taken over by Nazis, terrorism would likely be justified. But making a book arguing this case is a waste of time and energy. You might as well write a book making the in depth argument that if your Aunt had bollocks, she’d be your Uncle.
...
V for Vendetta is the kind of book that proceeds from the assumption that the reader is a moron, and if only we were properly enlightened, we would agree with its creator. We are the gutless conformists, who just need a good stern talking to (and a little bit of torturing) to convince us of our errors.
...
All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny to the stentorian, hectoring tone of the text whenever its eponymous hero shows up to its frantic, desperate need to impress us with its creator’s brilliance.
...
That V For Vendetta—with its nihilistic embrace of violence, it’s distrust of the institutions that will be required to enact any lefty agenda, its hatred of women and its love of coercion— has caught on amongst lefties, that in particular Guy Fawkes has been taken as a symbol of anything other than far-right religious terrorism is something I find particularly galling. I worry that at heart some of my fellow travelers on the Left feel reified by this work’s subtextual assertion that anyone who disagrees with them must be blinkered, an uninformed idiot who simply needs to be enlightened or blown up.
Дискуссия, вывернувшая (э... я почти случайно) на значение убеждений автора при оценке художественной ценности произведения - Open Thread: Is Cerebus the Worst Comic Ever?
Свержение идолов - EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 1 of 2) и EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 2 of 2)
И, наконец, вишенкой на торте статья о том, что же такое плохие комиксы - Could there be a worst comic of all time?. Примеры там собранны ссылками и по принципу "никто не уйдёт обиженным", состоящий из них начинающийся со слов "It can have clumsy figurework.." абзац - одна из самых прекрасных вещей, прочитанных мною о комиксах. Но и кроме этого там много хорошего:
Большие цитатыAlready several questions arise:
1) What counts as a comic?
2) Does everyone agree on what badness is when it comes to comics?
3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?
I will now address these questions in turn.
1) What counts as a comic?
Who cares?
2) Does everyone agree on what badness is?
No, really, who cares?
3) How do we make comparisons of badness between different works?
No, really, I’m not kidding, who cares?
In short, I can’t think of anything more boring than arguing about (1)-(3). Well, maybe re-reading The Black Dossier, but that’s a fate you shouldn’t wish on anyone, not even Jess Nevins.
...
What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).
Before I discuss this in more detail just what this means, however, it’s first worth considering whether badness is indeed irreducibly plural. The list I rattled off above is some evidence, but perhaps not conclusive; the fact that there are a whole bunch of different phrases in the vicinity doesn’t mean that they don’t all point to, in one way or another, the same property. In much the same way, I could use a whole bunch of different descriptions to refer to the same person, for instance, “former He-Man scripter”, “loathsome“, “hack”, or sociopath” — all of which describe the one man, J. Michael Straczynski.
...
To which I say: J. Michael Straczynski deserves every cheap shot you can throw at him. J. Michael Straczynski is so ugly that, when he was born, the doctor slapped his mother. J. Michael Straczynski is so fat that, when he sits around the house, he sits around the house. J. Michael Straczynski is writing some of the prequels to Watchmen.
Actually, that last one is a low blow. I apologise.
...
Anyway, to chide someone for mentioning J. Michael Straczynski’s early career as He-Man scripter is like chiding someone for mentioning Hitler’s early career as Mein Kampf writer: it’s not that they’re being unkind, it’s that they’re not being unkind enough.
YES INTERNET I JUST COMPARED J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI TO HITLER.
YES I AM SAYING THAT WRITING MANY SHITTY COMICS AND BEING A PLAGIARIST AND A SCAB IS EXACTLY AS BAD AS BEING CHIEF ARCHITECT OF GENOCIDE
YES EXACTLY
PLUS I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THAT HE DOESN’T LIKE KITTENS
I know that, by the Official Rules of the Internet, invoking a comparison with Hitler means that I’ve “lost the argument“.
But, on the other hand, I want you to consider this:
Go fuck yourself
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Part 5: In Which I Run Out Of Jokes And Resort To Straight-Out Philosophy Instead, Or, If You Prefer, “Philosophy”, And, Let’s Be Honest, “Jokes”, Too
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A first thought might be that what makes an artwork bad is that it fails to do whatever the artist wanted it to do. For instance, Alan Moore wanted the metaphysical discussions in Promethea to be gobbledegood, not gobbledegook, but, well, you know how that turned out (personally, whenever I hear the word “quantum” from anyone but a physicist, I reach for my revolver).
...
One last point in passing: to rest our assessment of an artwork on the creator’s intentions is to commit the Intentional Fallacy, which is totally a fallacy for very good reasons and not just because I read on the internet that a couple of literary critics said so in the 40s, but I’m not going to go into the very good reasons here because hey look behind you is that a three-headed monkey?
...
For a start, for all of the terrible, horrible, no good comics we have individually read, there are another hundred comics that are even worse, and another hundred that are even worse than that, and then there’s Paradise X. But, except for lunatics and sex perverts, most people don’t go out of their way to read comics that they think are going to be terrible, so there’s an inbuilt problem with trying to find the most disliked comic of all time: it may well not be the most dislikeable comic of all time.
...
Now imagine aesthetic space as a massively multi-dimensional space, with as many axes as there are different types of aesthetic badness. For instance, we might have one axis representing lack of spatial clarity, another representing implausible characterisation, another representing being written by Brian Michael Bendis, and so on.
...
Asking what is the worst comic of all time is like asking what is the worst sentence of all time, or the worst sandwich of all time. Is it a sandwich made from moldy bread and expired meat product? Is a rock the worst sandwich of all time? Is it a sandwich that gives you AIDS? Is it a poop sandwich? Is it a sandwich made by Hitler? Is it a poop sandwich made by Hitler? There is no worst sandwich of all time, because there are too many ways for a sandwich to be bad, and there is no worst comic of all time.
But if there was, J. Michael Straczynski would have written it.
Вот это, выше?
Это приносит в мою жизнь радость.
А я люблю радость. Потому что я очень позитивный человек
@темы: Alan Moore, Milo Manara, DC, EC Comics, Ссылки