A review of Frank Miller's new biography

Open Letters Review looked at Miller's new biography, Push the Wall, which may not be that long a book, and in the beginning paragraph, and the editor reviewing it appears to be disappointed, and certainly makes clear what they think of one project that years ago, I wanted to think was Miller's way of telling he'd found a valid subject to write about, until he sadly went the defeatist route several years after:

Writer/artist Frank Miller is legitimately legendary in the field of comic books, firmly stationed in a company of three dozen or so men and women who did landmark work. Miller was the creative genius behind black, nihilistic oddities like Ronin or Sin City, the genius behind signpost superhero stories like Batman: Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, and the genius behind black, nihilistic masterpieces like 300 or the “Elektra saga” run in Daredevil. Any one or two of these would guarantee a creator immortality in the comic book field, so Miller’s status is secure no matter what sloppy, downright cracked work he might add to that body of work, incomprehensible things like Dark Knight Strikes Again or, God forbid, Holy Terror.

Sounds like the reviewer believes Miller should never have tackled the issue of Islamic terrorism, ever. And that's the problem, past, present or future. With the biggest one being that the reviewer doesn't even have the courage to make himself clear about that.

But with that said, is Miller really that "legendary"? Hardly. His obsession with the darkness - which today apparently stops at the most challenging of issues like the aforementioned - is honestly dispiriting, and if he didn't succeed in screenwriting in the long run, why must we believe he's that much of a legend? Lest we forget, he acted as apologist for somebody who definitely won't be one now, and the way he noticably remains fixated on a certain president for cheap reasons is dismaying and divisive.

This kind of status imbues his new memoir, Push the Wall, with inherent interest. The many thousands of comics readers who’ve enjoyed their work would very much like to see similar memoirs from all the other greats of the comics world. How fascinating and valuable it would be, for instance, if we had honest, grappling, detailed memoirs from figures like Bill Everett or Gil Kane or Jack Kirby.

Finishing Push the Wall, some readers will be thinking about how fascinating and valuable it would be if we had an honest, grappling, detailed memoir from Frank Miller. This sure isn’t that.

If the book's a disappointment, I can't say I'm surprised. When a guy turns as defeatist of recent as Miller has, you probably can't expect him to deliver the best of biographical material either, nor for that matter a good instruction in how to illustrate. And his art style's been so mediocre for years, whereas even Kane's art style was more comprehensive just years before he passed on at the turn of the century. But the reviewer's right about one thing: if we had serious biographies about Everett, Kane and Kirby, that could be a lot more interesting than what Miller has to offer at this point.

Miller organizes the book around 18 “lessons” about both life and working in the comics industry, and he fills in the inevitable pabulum of old-man-imparting-lessons with glimpses from his own autobiography: boyhood in Vermont, formative exposure to gritty New York and specifically the Greenwich Village of bygone decades, the initial scrambling in the comics industry, the burgeoning success after Elektra and Dark Knight Returns. And sometimes some of these memories, though decked out in the hack-purple prose that’s characterized Miller’s writing for fifty years, are interesting, particularly the Horatio Alger bits before he hit it big, when he was wandering around a pre-Bloomberg New York that would be all but unrecognizable to the city’s current wall-to-wall 1% inhabitants. “I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline,” he writes in one such passage, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.”

Miller might not be the most eloquent of writers, but he’s articulate and sure as hell prolific; instead of tarping over the subject with something like “the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all,” he could have written that feeling. His book is barely 200 pages; Saga Press would certainly have sprung for another 100.

Gee, that's not much of a page count. Whether this is a biography or an "educational" book, one would think a lengthier book would serve the goal better. Perhaps this does say something about Miller's otherwise overrated talents indeed. Interesting the reviewer alludes to NYC's current residents as "one percent", since based on where they're going lately under Zohran Mamdani, and reelected the disastrous district attorney Alvin Bragg by a comfortable margin, some could make a reasonable argument something is definitely wrong with the Big Apple today, though wealth surely is the least of the problems.

So what’s left are the lessons, and the bits about Miller’s professional life. But the lessons are mostly things Miller himself has very publicly, very repeatedly not followed. “Sometimes you have to work with others to grow,” he writes, for example. “You have to put yourself back into learning, back into wonder, back into some spooky action.” And the anecdotes from the professional comics world are so bland and sanded-down as to be virtually press releases. About his decision to kill off his massively popular character Elektra, he writes:

Exit Elektra. When it came to my decision to end her life, I have to say, it just felt like the right thing to do. Bringing this storyline to a conclusion was the most dramatic thing I could do for the story: the narrative demanded an exclamation point, so I gave it one, in the most lapel-grabbing way possible.

Not mentioned here, however, is that he actually revived her the following year, perhaps because some readers took issue with this, though afterwards, she was mostly in limbo for at least another decade before being put to serious use again, in Daredevil or other comics. By which time, she was depicted as having fully reformed, more or less. And Miller, to my knowledge, was unhappy about the new use for Elektra by that time. But considering how overrated he is in the long run, that's why his complaint is decidedly not worth listening to. And his favoratism for Batman over Superman has long become a cliche among some writers:

Or this, about his decision in Dark Knight Returns to turn Superman into a fascist lapdog:

At the time, Batman suited my creative vision for a superhero much more than Superman. I grew up reading and idolizing Superman. He was my first favorite superhero. But, truth be told, I had gotten pretty sick of the guy. He was just so ridiculously powerful, and his invulnerability reached the point of limiting him as a character for me.

Obviously, “it just felt like the right thing to do” and “I had gotten pretty sick of the guy” are serious disappointments, especially coming from an author who’s gotten a good deal of profitable mileage out of the crafted public image of a straight-talking maverick. There’s precious little maverick straight-talking in Push the Wall, and we’re unlikely to get a more satisfying follow-up. Although it’s at least theoretically possible that Frank Miller could strike again.

So long as he remains as absurdly biased as he's been for goodness knows how long, he won't deliver anything satisfactory, and probably hasn't for longer than we think anyway. I do recall Ronin had a decidedly mediocre ending where the demon called "Agat" turned out to be a robot who was possibly crafted subconsciously by the main protagonist?!? Seriously, that was pretty underwhelming, and defeated whatever fantasy-based premise the miniseries was supposedly built on. And in the end, Ronin was little more than an empty shell.

But what's really disappointing is Miller's superficial view of Superman, one that completely obscures the weaknesses to Kryptonite and magical energies that were established decades ago, if we go by what's quoted from the manuscript. If Miller wanted to, he could've written up a Superman script building on stuff like that for real, and in the end, all he does is insult plenty of hard-working writers and artists who came before him by practically depicting the Man of Steel as minion for fascism. He did something like that with Wonder Woman too in the All-Star imprint title spotlighting Batman & Robin from the late 2000s that only lasted a few years. Miller's inability to acknowledge that the writers are at fault for Superman being "ridiculously powerful" is telling, and if that's how he approaches the whole matter, he's made clear he comes from a generation that didn't make any proper distinctions between reality and fiction.

Another problem with Miller is that he sounds like the kind of scribe who only cares about his own work, and doesn't give a damn what happens with others' work, or how. That's another reason why comicdom fell into such dire straits; nobody respects the past efforts of previous writers and artists with better resumes from up to the turn of the century, and now we have a whole shambles devoid of consistent continuity and characterization in the mainstream for starters. Of course, even those creators have faults, like not showing the guts to take issue with their former workplaces if they feel something wrong was done, or worse, they practically enabled it by participating in degradation of their own creations, as Kane sadly did when he drew 5 of 6 parts of the first, very repellent Green Lantern story in Action Comics Weekly from 1988, where Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire slaughtered Katma Tui, whose death to date was never fully reversed. I don't think Miller's ever complained about whether his own work on Daredevil was disrespected by successive scribes, and so, even though he may be the kind of artist/writer who only cares about his own stories, there's plenty to suggest he still doesn't put much value on what writings he has that did matter. And those writings are decidedly way too few.

As for this new "biography", I think it's worth passing on. It sounds too short, and like Miller hasn't provided enough to think about. Which has got to be another problem with modern creators in the long run.

Canadian filmmaker produces a comic

The Wellington Advertiser wrote about a filmmaker, David Antoniuk, who's now produced a comic book of his own:

Award-winning film director David Antoniuk has always considered himself a writer, and the Guelph/Eramosa resident has now published his first comic book.

“If I could do anything I would sit around campfires telling stories,” Antoniuk told the Advertiser. “In my bones, it’s who I am.”

Shortly after moving to Toronto from Winnipeg to go to film school in 1989, Antoniuk wrote a short story that was published in Ice magazine.

Antoniuk was a young man grappling with age-old questions: “Why are we here? And what happens to us when we die?”

The story explores the question with both comedic and serious tones.

“I never want to preach to people,” Antoniuk said. “I want them to have an enjoyable experience” that gently leads to self reflection.

[...] Nearly four decades later, that story – Time Spent – has taken on a new life in the form of a comic book.

I certainly hope he means it when he says he doesn't want to "preach" to anybody, or lecture them, because there's been too much of that in the past quarter century or more, and it's hurt the entertainment scene very badly. But there's some dismaying news in this item as well:

People can expect to see more from Antoniuk in the near future. He’s working on turning short horror stories by his wife, author Vanessa Ireson, into comic book form and is also co-writing a young adult graphic novel about a group of kids fighting monsters.

After that, he’s set to write another comic book he said will have more in common with Time Spent.

I've said before that the overabundance of horror stories has had a ruinous effect on entertainment, and this is doing nothing to prove contributors to any entertainment medium are trying to move away from that. Even the premise of fighting monsters is enough to wonder if the guy's that obsessed with horror themes. So while I wish I could appreciate a filmmaker trying comics for a change, the part about writing horror stories only dampens the impact.

National library of Florence to host Italy's biggest comics archives

The Florentine announced the national library of Florence will be host to Italy's hugest comics archives:

Florence has taken a major step towards becoming Italy’s leading centre for the study and preservation of comic books following the donation of the private archive of Gianni Bono to the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

The deed of donation, signed on June 9, transfers one of the most comprehensive and significant collections of Italian comics ever assembled into public ownership. Amassed over decades by Giovanni Attilio Bono, known as Gianni Bono, the publisher, historian, scholar and one of Italy’s foremost experts on comics, the archive is unrivalled for its size, breadth and rarity.

Known as the Fondo Bono, the collection comprises more than 800,000 items, including comic books, magazines, book series, scholarly publications, and Italian and international editions. It also contains original editorial material such as manuscripts, scripts, story outlines, sketches, archival documents, original artwork, posters, promotional material, fanzines and other rare documents charting the history of Italy’s most important comic book creators, characters and publishers. Much of the collection has already been documented in the Guida al fumetto italiano database. [...]

Through the acquisition, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze is laying the foundations for what it hopes will become the Italian Library of Comics, a national centre dedicated to the preservation, study and promotion of comic art and publishing.

That's great. I'm sure Italy's got plenty of their own comics and even animation samples that could use a good archive where everybody could take a look to see what they're like. Congratulations to the library in Florence for this achievement.

Marvel moves from NY to CA, and replaces C.B. Cebulski with Stephen Wacker as EIC

The Hollywood Reporter's announced changes are being made at Marvel, none of them anything to be optimistic about, in both location and staffing:

After calling the Big Apple home for almost 90 years, Marvel Comics is moving out of New York City. And heading to Hollywood.

The relocation was revealed to staff at a town hall Thursday at Marvel’s New York office in Midtown, where employees were informed that its publishing division will be pulling up stakes and transferring operations to Burbank, California, the current headquarters of Marvel Studios and corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company.

Just like DC, right? Considering how artistically and politically bad their owner became over the past decade, this is nothing to take pleasure at learning, unfortunately. Nor is the news of who'll replace C.B. Cebulski as EIC, after he retained the role for nearly a decade:

The development is accompanied by a changing of the guard at the top. Stephen Wacker, a respected veteran comics editor who also earned an Emmy nomination for his work in the company’s forays in animation, has been named Marvel’s new editor-in-chief, replacing outgoing chief C.B. Cebulski, who had steered the division since 2017. Cebulski will still remain part of the family, however, as he will be moving to Japan to spearhead the company’s push into manga, among others things, as editor, Asia originals.

Both changes are meant to reinvigorate the comic book side of the company, which has been overshadowed in recent years by the success of Marvel’s movies, and by a creative slump that saw it lose its position as comics market share leader for the first time this century. Marvel chief Kevin Feige’s installing of the new leadership and the relocation of its comics side to Disney’s Burbank base represents a long-term investment in what he believes underpins the source of Marvel’s storytelling. [...]

Among those joining the Burbank headquarters will be Wacker, who is making his Marvel return after leaving the company in the early 2020s to lead Jonathan Hickman’s worldbuilding project 3W3M and then co-founding the entertainment studio Stone Kite.

A beloved editor with strong talent relationships, Wacker spent over fifteen years at Marvel, overseeing Spider-Man comic runs that included the best-selling “Brand New Day” and “Superior Spider-Man” eras. He was also editor on Daredevil and Hawkeye when those titles won Eisner Awards and was involved in the introduction of Kamala Khan, also known as Ms. Marvel.

"Respected and beloved"? Wacker's the same editor who was part and parcel of the effort to run the Spider-Man franchise into the ground, and they shamelessly gloss over one of the worst editorial mandates Joe Quesada forced upon Spidey when he was EIC. It's just like them to distort and obscure the worst of what was brought about. And all these years, they kept repeatedly dangling carrots as to whether Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson would be reunited as a married couple, which they never did, and Cebulski recently allowed things to become worse by approving a story where MJ's turned into another Venom host. These kind of shock value stories don't improve a dire situation, and that's going to be part of Cebulski's "legacy" going out.

Since Wacker, of course, was party to the degradation of Spidey, he's unlikely to reverse any of Quesada's worst steps of the past quarter century, and unlikely to restore the Spider-marriage. And even if he does, that alone won't make Spidey's adventures readable again. For all we know, Wacker could ramp up the wokeness by galaxies, as though it weren't bad enough already, and he was instrumental in shoehorning Islamic propaganda into the MCU with a character whose instant solo series wasn't marketed on merit, and at least 3 projects translating the Muslim Ms. Marvel into live action films, TV and video were flops, with the Marvels movie becoming a huge dud. Of course, the MSM will doubtless not have anything critical to say about his upcoming run as EIC, and chances are that, much like the now outgoing Cebulski, Wacker won't give many press interviews, if at all. At least that'd be a comfort in a sense, since Quesada gave only so many years ago where he was unendurable. Forbes also addressed the move, and said:

In one way, it is unsurprising that Disney is uniting Marvel’s publishing and film units in Burbank. Comic-based movies, media and games supplanted comics publishing as the economic driver of the business two decades ago. Longtime rival DC decamped from New York to Burbank in 2015, a move also accompanied by a change in company leadership. An internal Marvel company survey revealed that more Mavel creators now hail from the West Coast than from the region nearby New York, and in any case, geography has become largely irrelevant to the production of comics. [...]

Cebulski’s departure was also not a surprise. Though the Marvel editor could claim a range of creative and commercial successes in his decade-long leadership of the company, Marvel’s sales have slipped in recent years, falling behind DC for the first time in a long time according to industry sales data. With longtime Marvel President Dan Buckley stepping down in May, replaced by Brad Winderbaum (head of TV, animation, comics and franchise) and David Abdo (general manager, comics and franchise), it seemed likely that Marvel would get new editorial leadership sooner rather than later.

Wacker will step into the role once held by industry legends Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter among others. Wacker has been behind some of Marvel’s most interesting and popular comics of the past few decades, including Brand New Day and Superior Spider-Man. He is well-liked within the industry and well-regarded by creative colleagues both at Marvel and on other stops in his professional career including at DC and Jonathan Hickman’s 3W3M.

As surely expected, they too sugarcoat the worst atrocities to come out of the Quesada era at Marvel, and it wouldn't be the least bit shocking if they're fully in the boat for the worst of the overabundant company wide crossovers that're doubtless coming up in Marvel's schedule now. I'm sure there's something to the claim Wacker's "well-liked" inside the industry, since he's bound to be a knee-jerk leftist who could do everything they consider acceptable. But after the Spider-marriage was thrown out so blatantly, do they really think he's popular and well-liked within Spider-fandom? Naturally, the real-life J. Jonah Jamesons at Forbes won't acknowledge that issue.

Anyway, hiring a new EIC doesn't guarantee fortures will improve, if no merit or respect for fandom and past creators isn't emphasized. Sales of mainstream comics have been declining for years, to the point where it's bewildering Marvel and DC are even still in business as publishers. I'd noticed rumors Disney might shut down Marvel as a publisher, but for all we know, they're bound to continue pointlessly for still another decade or so. And within that time, sales, along with "merit", are bound to fall ever further.

Las Vegas specialty store closes

The Las Vegas Review-Journal says a comics store run by a musician has closed after nearly a decade, though its owner will continue running a sales website:

Torpedo Comics, founded by System of a Down sticksman John Dolymayan, has ended its run of nearly a decade in a shopping center near Rainbow Avenue and Warm Springs Road.

[...] “I started selling in the early ’90s, because at 18 years old, it’s tough to go to your parents and say, ‘Can I have some money for comic books?’” Dolmayan told the Review-Journal before the store’s opening in May 2017. “Initially, I started off by losing a lot of money trying to sell books at conventions and stuff like that until I figured out how to do it. By the time System got signed (in the late ’90s), I was making $55,000-$60,000 a year. I took a huge pay cut to join System.”

While the Torpedo store has closed, the brand will continue to live online at torpedocomics.com.

Too bad, but what could've been made much clearer is that if merit's plummeted, you can't be surprised when store units lose money this way. Yet nobody in the liberal press wants to ask if poor quality has long been an issue, and probably never will.

And again, I really wish specialty retailers would make the switch from pamphlets to paperbacks.

What the film director of the Dark Knight's doing now with the Odyssey makes clear he wouldn't be a good choice for it anymore

Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker known for his Batman trilogy, Dark Knight, nearly 2 decades ago, is soon going to be releasing a movie based on The Odyssey, and it looks like he's decided to join the woke bandwagon, based on the casting choices, as the following report from Breitbart makes clear. This may not be comics-related per se, but since Batman and a few other comics characters do come up in discussion (along with the actors playing them), that's why it could be a good idea to take a look:

In an interview with the Telegraph, Nolan insists that he is not at all worried over the criticism. When asked about the hubbub, he casually replies, “Comes with the territory.”

“But look,” Nolan continued, “these conversations that happen before people see the film – they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.” And he added that he felt The Odyssey was going to stir controversy regardless.

“But remember,” Nolan said, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.”

“When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all,” the Oscar-winning director explained.

“What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can,” he exclaimed.

“In the end, fans of the property – even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done – enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” Nolan said.

“All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is,” he concluded.

Critics have pointed out several red flags in the upcoming film’s promotional materials: indications that the script leans heavily on a revisionist Odyssey translation by left-wing, feminist writer Emily Wilson; his casting of African actress Lupita Nyong’o to play the Greek character Helen of Troy, who is described as having pale skin and light blonde or reddish hair; and the casting 5-foot-one, 105-pound transvestite actor Elliot Page as Sinon, a Greek warrior who does not even appear in The Odyssey or in Homer’s other epic The Illiad. The character was created much later by Roman poet Virgil in his Trojan War epic The Aeneid.

When Nolan originally worked on the Dark Knight trilogy, I don't think he ever went out of his way to do DEI casting. So to say you "can't worry about it" doesn't work well when he's going out of his way to be so noticeable in his choices, right down to the casting of a woman who desecrated herself so badly. And if Nolan's not going to consider what Homer's Odyssey represents, then Nolan's only letting know that his leftism's come to the fore in the worst ways possible.

This subject was already brought up nearly 2 months ago by the Federalist as well, and at the time, they told that:

...the only relatively recent, large-scale adaptation for the screen was a made-for-TV film in 1997 with cheap production (just a small step above a typical episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Kevin Sorbo). Despite its shortcomings, the movie at least stayed faithful to the source material and maintained a brisk pace as well as a spirit of fun.

Nevertheless, in an era of reboots, it only made sense for Hollywood to give the Odyssey the epic treatment it deserved under the direction of a guy like Christopher Nolan. He could enlist the necessary talent and apply the necessary cinematic techniques to do to Odysseus what he did for Batman.

But every piece of news, particularly the new lengthy (4000+ words) puff piece from Time magazine, has quickly eroded any hope this movie is worth seeing. With his horrible casting, drab cinematography, and intent to explore Odysseus’ inner demons, Nolan seems committed to ruining his most ambitious film yet. Rather than save American cinema from its current death spiral, he has somehow brought all of its worst qualities together in this new project.

DEI Casting

The most obvious offense has been his choice of actors. Outside of Matt Damon playing Odysseus, nearly every other person in this movie has little reason to be there. Starting from the top, Anne Hathaway is a mediocre actress with too little depth, range, or charisma to play Odysseus’ wife Penelope. The same should be said for Tom Holland, playing Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Although both of them have risen to fame playing likable young adults, they will be difficult to believe as a grief-stricken queen desperately waiting for her husband and an adult son growing up in his father’s shadow.

Of course, what has elicited more outcry has been Nolan’s brazenly woke casting for the other characters. To play Athena, he cast Zendaya, an actress who suffers from incurable “resting bitch face,” can’t act, and is too young and unserious for the part. For Helen of Troy, the princess whose superlative beauty “launched a thousand ships,” he cast Lupita Nyong’o, a mostly forgettable actress who is known more for appearing in the Black Panther movies than being a paragon of female perfection. If one had to guess why exactly Nolan picked these actresses, it seems that being a woman of color had something to do with it.

On the subject of the BP movie, I recall some people said it had a questionable approach hinting at social justice propaganda, and now, several years later, one can ask whether it had any impact in the long run, after its contrived sequel collapsed.

As for men of color, Nolan has this covered by casting the rapper Travis Scott as a bard in order to communicate “the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” Considering that the epic poem is an art form that celebrates the ideals of an ancient culture with larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life setting while rap is a contemporary art form that glamorizes urban decay, vice, and criminality, this connection is a bit of a stretch.

Nolan also made sure to represent the elderly with the inclusion of Charlize Theron as the ageless nymph Calypso and John Leguizamo as Odysseus’ lieutenant Eumaeus. At 50 years old, Theron evidently clings to her glory days of being a bombshell/action star. Meanwhile, John Leguizamo is an unfunny 65-year-old comedian best known for spouting leftist propaganda and whining about racism.

But the most controversial decision (to put it mildly) for casting has been that of Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page. Setting aside the rumor that she might play Greece’s mightiest warrior Achilles, simply looking at Page after her transgender surgeries is highly distracting, if not outright disturbing. Here was a young attractive actress starring in big movies like Juno, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Inception now reappearing as a scrawny pubescent boy. With the transgender insanity behind us, most people would probably agree Page needs mental and emotional help more than a prominent role in a big-budget movie.

I think Nolan has a lot of explaining to do why, back in the day, he didn't go out of his way to do such forced, politicized casting, and now all of a sudden, he believes it's that big a deal, taking full precedence over merit. I guess it's because Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson's film went that route just a few years ago, so now, Nolan's decided to follow suit. Some moviegoers argued the Caped Crusader doesn't do much of anything in Reeves' film, and what Nolan's doing to the Odyssey now in his adaptation decidedly makes clear he's abandoned all qualifications for ever producing/directing films based on Batman again, ditto other comics characters. You could also ask what the whole point was of even bothering to adapt Batman back in the day if this is what Nolan thinks now. For all we know, his new path could have people one day look upon the Dark Knight film trilogy quite differently. It's pretty surprising there could be quite a few performers here whose names I recall from the live action comics films they appeared in, right down to Holland who played Spider-Man. But, they too seem to be following the woke narrative, and if that's how it's going to be, that's why, compared to actors and actresses of the past, they won't rate high in cinematic history in the future.

Dark Horse infected with antisemitism

It's sad to discover that Dark Horse's name is taking on a whole new meaning, as the Algemeiner reports one of their editors refused to enable publishing a comic by Jewish scholar Rafael Medoff, the director of the Wyman Institute, because he wouldn't take an anti-Israel and anti-American stance:

Dark Horse Comics, the third-largest comic book publisher in the United States behind Marvel and DC, has canceled the publication of a book by a Holocaust scholar after he refused to include an introduction accusing Israel of “genocide,” according to the Jewish advocacy organization StandWithUs, which condemned the move in a statement on Sunday.

Dark Horse had scheduled Dr. Rafael Medoff’s Cartoonists Against the Holocaust — a collection of 150 editorial cartoons from American newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s, accompanied by Medoff’s commentary on what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it unfolded — for publication this summer. According to StandWithUs, then-Dark Horse imprint editor Craig Yoe told Medoff, the founding director of the Washington, DC-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, that he would block publication unless the book’s introduction stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yoe later followed up in writing, the group said, demanding that the book include text accusing Israel of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” and claiming that the US operates “concentration camp-style prisons.”

Medoff refused, arguing that the claims are false, and Dark Horse subsequently canceled the project.

“Accusing Israel of genocide is a lie, and requiring a Holocaust scholar to denounce Israel to see his book published is antisemitic bullying,” Medoff said in the statement. “It’s troubling to see McCarthyism rearing its ugly head in 21st century America. Historians should be free to write about history, without being subjected to political litmus tests.”

Dark Horse had previously published two of Medoff’s books, Whistleblowers and Cartoonists Against Racism, without incident. It was only after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, StandWithUs said, that Yoe began demanding that Medoff denounce Israel as a condition of publication.

Dark Horse has disputed that account. In a June 3 email to StandWithUs cited by the Israeli news outlet Ynet, the publisher’s legal counsel said the decision was based on the company’s financial needs and repeated scheduling delays, and that Dark Horse “does not plan to publish” the book. [...]

“When a comic book publisher pressures a Holocaust scholar to denounce the Jewish state before his own book on the Holocaust can see print, the irony is hard to miss,” Carly Gammill, director of legal policy and litigation at StandWithUs Saidoff Law, said in Sunday’s statement. “We are seeing an alarming trend in which Jewish professionals are expected to pass ideological tests before they can fully participate in public life.”

She continued, “Whether in academia, the arts, or publishing, Jewish authors should be evaluated on the quality of their work — not on whether they are willing to denounce a core part of their Jewish identity.”

I seem to remember this Yoe as having been a far-leftist who published anti-war comics, and that Dark Horse, whether owned now by a video game corporation, would be willing to hire this disgraceful man and practically enable him to determine what's okay to publish speaks volumes. It was already horrific they employed the disgraced Scott Allie and ignored the sexual abuse accusations against him for some time. Now, they're tainting their image even further by allowing an antisemitic dictation to remain in place. That says quite a bit about what they must think of comicdom's past Jewish contributors like Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby and Gil Kane. Also note how Mr. Yoe apparently wanted anti-American propaganda injected into the narrative, and it says a lot more about where the company could be going too. On which note, at Times Now, it says that:

Medoff alleges that editor Craig Yoe later sought to add a separate statement addressing contemporary politics. In an email dated 1 September 2025, Yoe reportedly proposed retaining the book’s existing introduction while placing an editor’s note elsewhere in the volume.

Writing in a personal capacity, Yoe accused the Trump administration of attempting to create detention centres comparable to concentration camps and of sending US residents to prisons abroad without constitutionally guaranteed trials. He also referred to the International Criminal Court warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and criticised US military assistance to Israel.

Medoff rejected the proposed wording, arguing that it would turn a historical project into a platform for present-day political commentary. He also objected to comparisons between contemporary American detention policies and Nazi concentration camps.

The historian said such language risked diminishing the suffering of Jewish victims imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps during the 1930s and 1940s. He further argued that connecting Israel with allegations of crimes against humanity within a Holocaust publication could be interpreted as accusing the country of genocide.

Medoff described the alleged pressure to criticise Israel as antisemitic bullying and insisted that a Holocaust scholar should not be required to denounce the Jewish state as a condition for publication.

The planned book was expected to feature approximately 150 editorial cartoons. Nine of them had originally appeared during the 1940s and were intended to demonstrate how much information about the Holocaust was already available to the American public while the atrocities were taking place.

Medoff said he proposed several compromises to prevent the book from being cancelled. Among them were publishing the manuscript without changes or moving the project to another Dark Horse imprint without Yoe’s name attached, while allowing the editor to retain his four per cent royalty interest.

According to Medoff, those proposals were rejected. Yoe subsequently ended his association with Dark Horse, while the publisher formally withdrew from the project.

Interesting that despite Yoe leaving their employ, they still wouldn't publish the project. But considering they just might practically be closing down one day as a book publisher, perhaps that's one more reason why realists should stay away from them. If this is the path Yoe took, and DH is okay with, you cannot possibly expect them to publish any history books about the Danish Muhammed cartoons of the past 2 decades either, nor could you expect them to approve a project focused on survivors of September 11, 2001. This also reminds me of the time when Mike Baron was publishing Private American: if he wanted to arrange with DH to be the host publisher, they clearly rejected it. The New York Post gives one more eyebrow raising detail about Yoe:

Yoe, a former creative director for the Muppets and a longtime cartoonist, was an editor with Dark Horse as he worked on Medoff’s book. He has since severed his relationship with the publishing house.

According to On Scouting, he was hired by the late Jim Henson himself. So it looks like the Muppet franchise is now tarnished by him along with the scandal from nearly 15 years ago involving the Muppeteer Kevin Clash, who was accused of sexual misconduct. How do these entertainers end up making such poor choices for recruits?

What's interesting about this scandal is that in the past decade, if the following articles from the Jerusalem Post and Arizona Jewish News indicate, Medoff and Yoe were once on positive terms with each other. That means Yoe turned against Medoff in later years. However, Medoff should've considered earlier that somebody with a disturbing left-wing record like Yoe's was a bad lot and a poor choice for a publishing partner. And as this NPR affiliate indicates, Lee once knew Yoe (or rather, didn't), and was willing to write an introduction to a book he'd published about Joe Shuster's "fetish art". I think it'd be wise to look for another author who could cover the same ground of research.

I hope Mr. Medoff's looking for a better publisher now. Although Dark Horse may be suffering financial difficulties now, that's still no excuse for refusing to publish the latest version of Medoff's history items. Seriously, Medoff should sue both them and Yoe for interference (and he shouldn't have approved of letting Yoe retain any profit percentages), and perhaps look for an editor of Israeli descent (and conservative) who can work freelance on the projects instead. This is not going to look good on Dark Horse's record, for as long as they're still around, nor will it help former chairman Mike Richardson's image in hindsight.

What the Comics Journal says about Gerry Conway

The Comics Journal wrote about the history of the late Gerry Conway's career, and among the subjects in focus, it includes the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man during 1973, and a most interesting part that came afterwards, which hasn't always been noted clearly in history items coming in later decades:

A year into Conway’s run, that push toward adulthood took its most celebrated and controversial form with “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” in which Conway and co-conspirator John Romita killed both Peter Parker’s long-running love interest Gwen Stacy and longtime arch-nemesis Norman Osborne. The book became an immediate sensation: so shocked and distressed was the fan response that Stan Lee would briefly demand Conway bring back the character from death immediately (he did, kind of, in the form of a clone), and decades later it was still being used as a kind of critical shorthand for the moment Silver Age innocence in comics gave way to 1970s angst. But the scene that has always haunted me from that story isn’t about Gwen Stacy or the Green Goblin at all: it’s of Peter’s roommate Harry Osborne, delirious and desperate as he recovers from a drug overdose, begging his best friend not to walk away.

While TCJ may be one of the most left-wing periodicals around, it's amazing the writer would point out something most mainstream newspapers didn't: while Gwen wasn't resurrected, they did compromise with a clone. Strange why some MSM sources don't clearly acknowledge that. But the article fails to be clear about something else:

His output at DC was vast, peppered with an endless supply of new characters, from the successful (Firestorm, of TV’s Super Friends fame) to the less so (the streetwise era of the Justice League Detroit). “He was just always creative,” Harris said. “I remember in our plotting sessions, he would say, ‘Well, we could introduce a new character at this point.’ And he always had something in mind. I don't know if he had a backlog of them in his head, or if he created them on the spot. But it was fun to watch him come up with something.”

Wonder why they didn't discuss how Vibe and the Steel character created at the time were thrown under the bus by 1987 because George Perez didn't like the absurd accent applied to the former, in effect punishing the character instead of the writer? That was a very sad example of placing blame squarely on a fictional character, and it's one of the leading ways and reasons the industry's been brought down. And then, here's where, sadly enough, political bias shows up when the Punisher comes into focus:

Oddly enough, the Hollywood caste system being what it is, Conway was seldom involved with movie and TV projects based on his own comic book creations — one of whom in particular had been growing up without him. In 1974, Conway, along with artist John Romita, had created the Punisher as a vigilante antihero in the model of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels. The Punisher appeared initially as a recurring foil for Spider-Man, and in later years Conway would maintain that the character was imagined as a one-off villain, and certainly not a hero in his own right.

To be sure, this wasn’t entirely ingenuous. The Punisher as originally conceived wasn’t a moral paragon, but he wasn’t a villain either, and when the character showed enough success to warrant a spinoff stories in Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, Conway obliged by writing him with the kind of hard-bitten grittiness that had made Dirty Harry a hit at the box office.

But during the early 2000s, the Punisher took on a second life of his own, becoming a kind of mascot for the American far right: “American Sniper” Chris Kyle boasted of putting the Punisher’s skull logo on his unit’s gear during the Iraq War, and by the time Donald Trump was in office, the image and character had become a meme on military and police-centric kitsch. By 2025, Kash Patel was putting the logo on challenge coins handed out to agents at the FBI.

Conway, whose own politics by then skewed toward the left, wanted none of it. “It’s as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building,” he said. In 2020, amid the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd, he decided, vigilante-style, to take matters into his own hands, selling a line of shirts bearing the logo with all proceeds donated to Black Lives Matter. A few decades earlier, it might have been different. Roy Thomas recalled that in the early ‘80s, Conway was something of a “definite Reaganite, not unlike myself.” In a field not always known for the capacity of its creators to grow and change with the times, Conway was a model of graceful evolution.

It is surprising if Conway supported Reagan back in the day, but sad then that he changed considerably, and sadder still that the writer's gushing over all that, and sugarcoating the whole Floyd affair. But of course, not surprising.

As for what's said about how Conway approached the use of the Punisher - both character and symbol - in later years, that's nothing new by now, but that the magazine would gush all over his pivot to the far-left is appalling. As I've said before, there were positive and decent moments in Conway's writings up to the early 90s, prior to the time he shifted to TV scriptwriting, and that's why it's a shame he had to go out of his way to follow an increasingly far-left narrative that did more harm than good for comicdom, and also Hollywood. At least now that he's gone, it's easier to separate art from artist, and perhaps to attribute the Punisher's creation more to Romita than Conway. In any case, it's a shame that even years before Conway disowned Frank Castle, writers and artists like Frank Miller and Bill Mantlo weren't doing any favors with the questionable way they approached the character, no doubt with Conway's approval. Yet all the while, Wolverine gets a free pass on what the Punisher didn't. Come to think of it, even Jason Todd, the 2nd Robin in the Batman books, didn't get a free pass on supposedly killing a sexually violent criminal in 1988. Todd, IIRC, was also created by Conway, and his apparent acceptance of what DC and Jim Starlin did to that character could easily say something about whether he really cared about his creations too. Even if certain fictional characters are created for corporate ownership, does that mean a creator should remain quiet? Of course not.

So it's regrettable Conway had to follow a position even Stan Lee did, and not speak negatively about the places he worked for. Now, we're long seeing the terrible results of all that silence.