Quis custodet ipsos custodes?

I always did like Juvenal way too much. I should have put more effort into the class, though.

First off, apropos of the book (oh, excuse me, Alan, graphic novel) I'm about to discuss below, this interview with The Comics Curmudgeon in The New Yorker's Cartoon Lounge is about as brilliant as the Curmudgeon is himself. "Metatextual detached irony" is indeed our generation's terrible contribution to Western civilization. Unless you believe that it's on the rocks like Jacques Barzun or Katherine. The Curmudgeon's posts get at a lot of what I can't stand about American comics--the best comic strips I've read were, unequivocally, Calvin & Hobbes, Fox Trot, and Zits. And Fox Trot and Zits got shticky after a while.

Of course, I'm not too thrilled with American comics, either. After spending a year in Japan reading manga, which is rapturously black and white, trying to read Watchmen was like voluntarily submitting myself to ocular abuse. Seriously, what the crap is with those colors? They're all so garish! And the line work is pretty, well, uninspired, and I always felt like I was having trouble tealling what to read next. Plus the art is pretty much just ugly (as opposed to deliberately unappealing aesthetically, which is a different strategy used in comics on both sides of the Pacific). American alternative comics don't have these problems, I swear. Of course, Watchmen is brilliant, so I basically read it in almost one sitting, and since the Museum has Absolute Watchmen, I read the back matter in that too. (Though why they printed Absolute Watchmen, when so many of the panels were pixelated at that resolution, is another good question.)

I'm twenty years late to this party, of course, so while I'll just say that it's a brilliant exploration (and explosion) of superhero tropes I found myself having the problems I've known other people to have with other Alan Moore comics, namely the weird gender issues. Why are his women so freaking passive? Why are they almost all drawn to sex work (in V For Vendetta Evey is going out to sell herself for kicks, not to meet the television producer, in the beginning)? What was with the whole ambivalence on the part of Laurie's mother about rape? What? No thank you. And the lesbian who says she wants to be straight right before she starts beating her ex-girlfriend? Sure! Also, I'm shocked that anyone thought this thing could ever be a movie. It's toxic, and I don't know how anyone could put it up on a screen without giving in to the impulse to make it at least a bit more optimistic about the world, and humanity. Which of course would make Alan Moore, who is probably crazy, hate you even more. Watchmen is a work of genius, of course, but it's excessive--every single person in the entire piece is a really screwed-up individual, to the point where I began to resent his dragging his "super" characters through the mud to score points on other famous superhero characters, and though Moore ends his afterword in the back matter with saying that he's done with superheroes, being more drawn to the ordinary people, his ordinary people are absolutely horrible too. Ugh. I will not be going to see the movie--assuming anyone has the option, as Fox won its suit saying that the guy with the rights never paid them off, so the entire movie's future is up in the air.

Speaking of comics, movies, and superheroes, I let other people's opinions convince me, against my better judgment and my own half-remembered impressions from seeing it on TV, to watch Tim Burton's "Batman" again. Um, I really tried to watch it, I swear, but it's impossible. No one in the entire cast can act--what the hell is Kim Basinger wearing--why is Michael Keaton a dope--the set is so obviously a soundstage it's painful--why can't they make their fake Time magazine look anything but fake--Tim Burton wouldn't know an action sequence if it came up and shanked him with a shiv--the pathetic dialogue and script are so over the top it's cringe-inducing. I say all this, mind you, as someone who loves Tim Burton movies. But god is it horrible. The music is about the only thing worthwhile, but even the music can't save the film. (Sidenote: Is this the only other movie Billy Dee Williams ever did besides "Star Wars"?) It doesn't help that it was filmed on that old kind of filmstock that looks really cheap these days. I mean, I know that they were going for the fake-dark comic-Gothic sort of aesthetic that most of the DC universe has (there's a reason I can't stand most DC properties), but sheesh. And Jack Nicholson is good, but he's not being the Joker, he's being himself with bad makeup and a fixation on bad jokes. Augh. God, it was terrible. In retrospect, though, "Batman" makes "Batman & Robin" seem like the inevitable end of a film series that began so badly, and so comic book-y. "Batman Forever" was a brief lift--I recognized some of the design elements in Burton's Gotham as having been carried over to the Gotham of the later films--but that was pretty comic-ish too, really. At least Val Kilmer had stage presence. I can't believe I just typed that.

I'm going to tag this post as manga. Take that, Western comics snobs!