50 Shades of Superman - про БДСМ-ные картинки, которыми некоторое время зарабатывал на жизнь создатель Супермена. Да.

The detail is at times lovingly and so disturbingly precise—reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s own obsessively rendered female figures of the following decades. The best here easily exceeds the rawer material he rushed off for Action Comics. Joe was getting more out of Nights of Horror than a paycheck.


Так, ну а теперь не столь (или более. кому как) скандальное, но гораздо более близкое моему сердцу: плевки в сторону Before Watchmen.
Потому что слишком жёсткой критики Before Watchmen существовать не может по определению.

Who Whitewashes the Watchmen? Part 1 - нелюбви к Дарвину Куку пост.
Чем Дарвин Кук заслужил нелюбовь? Ещё раз: Before Watchmen.

Whereas Moore was interested in demolishing heroic stereotypes in order to explore the humanity beneath, Cooke is more interested in reinforcing stereotypes in order to prescribe for humanity what is and isn’t heroic. Under Cooke’s revision, a critique of heroic constructs has reverted to a defence of heroic constructs. This makes Minutemen and Silk Spectre, in my opinion, a diverting misappropriation at best and a grotesque travesty at worst.
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Who Whitewashes the Watchmen? Part 2 - и ещё пост нелюбви, теперь и про Аманду Коннер. Особенно мне нравится та часть, где первая воодушевляющая читателя победа Лори над преступником визуально является переделанным пересказом попытки изнасилования Салли Комедиантом! Серьёзно, я ненавижу Before Watchmen.

Cooke’s decision to frame Laurie’s story as a rebellion against Sally is especially worthy of comment. In the original, Sally’s and Laurie’s relationship gives a rare and important focus to women and rebuts the criticism that the female characters are only relevant in terms of how they relate to the male characters... In Cooke’s revisionist take on Laurie’s story, this sensitive, observant, psychologically believable focus on a mother and daughter working through their difficult relationship gives way to a chest-thumping, pedantic valorization of men and fathers.
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Homosexuality Will Make Your Comic Real - некоторое... возможно не оправдание, но пояснение, которое заодно затрагивает использование гомосексуальности в литературе реализма (знаю, знаю. но "реалистической литературе" было бы хуже, честно)

The hints of homophobia in Moore/Gibbons, then, seem like they’re tied not (or not only) to unexamined stereotype, as my brother Eric suggests. Rather, they’re a function of the book’s realist genre tropes.
Which perhaps explains why Darwyn Cooke, infinitely dumber than Moore and Gibbons, ended up, in his Before Watchmen work, with such a virulent homophobia. William Leung in that linked article suggests that the homophobia is part of Cooke’s retrograde nostalgic conservatissm — which is probably true to some extent. But it’s probably more directly tied to Cooke’s effort to match or exceed Moore/Gibbons’ realism. Portraying gay characters as seamy and despicable is a means of showing ones’ unflinching grasp of truth. In this case, again, realism does not allow for the portrayal of homosexuals so much as (homophobic) portrayals of homosexuals creates realism.