@20, do you think women at slutwalk or feminists who support sex workers are misogynists? Miller wasn't out to denigrate women as a bloc in Sin City, which is where most people seem to get the idea from.

As to DD, I don't think there's a character in Miller's runs that doesn't end up emotionally or physically destroyed at some point. No one in that book is pure, perfect, or impervious to grievous harm. A running theme in Miller's work is suffering, and how people deal with it; particularly how heroes (or those who become heroes) deal with it. How someone comes out of their worst ordeals stronger, more determined, or otherwise better for it fascinates Miller. It seems to me he has his idea of the best characters descend into hopelessness, in part so they may yet rise higher. This is a literal matter for Daredevil and Casey McKenna, both of whom fall into dark pits filled with hungry, naked people, pits symbolic of hell.

If, at its worst, suffering is hell, Sin City represents a sort of purgatory. With the exception of Family Values, I think the larger message there is that this town of violence, corruption, and largely passionless sex is only fit for escaping from. It isn't a happy place, and it isn't meant to be. If some of the characters are horrible people (and many of them are, regardless of sex) that's largely taken to be thanks to their circumstances (mainly, being in Sin City). The town's women are just as likely to be powerful, powerless, rich, poor, evil, or less evil as the men.

That he himself is a Randian, right wing, reactionary with foolish ideas and ideals doesn't negate Ronin, Martha Washington, or his various martially skilled female characters in worlds where that's most of what matters.

Let me add, when I say Miller often offers strong female characters, I am speaking relatively to the tradition of American comics by and for males, and particularly about mainstream action material.

@23, if you're complaining about lesser works trying to be 'adult' by simply adding more graphic violence, you're right--although most decent indie and adult oriented mainstream stuff before the late eighties had an impact there. If you're complaining about its impact on narrative devices, layout, colour, paper-stock, binding, distribution, book critics, or the viability of graphic novels, I'd say you're silly. And if you ignore those things to focus on the people who didn't get Miller's point about superheroes being largely silly and outdated, then you're overlooking some pretty big stuff in terms of art and industry. Pithy response, though.

@24, to equate them may be wrong, but I'm not doing that. Feminist moves to free themselves by owning things with previous negative connotations (and, in the case of prostitution, to try to at least make it safer by bringing it out in the open) have shown that portrayals of women as prostitutes or skimpily dressed are not necessarily denigrating or bad, and may be freeing. In Sin City, the most reliably decent group (relative to the town) is the hookers. They also feature some of the strongest muscle in a place where that is most of what counts. They have a code of honour, and look out for their own. They don't look for trouble, but they do press for their own ideas of justice. They are not portrayed as evil, foolish, or worse than others in the town. Rather, they are stand-up citizens of their own district. If they dress down, that's the job and the culture, not a comment on their worth.

You ask where Miller is lobbying for women's rights, but is that really a necessary act for a pop author and artist to avoid the label of misogynist? If a good deal of the women he portrays are at least as strong, upright, and empowered as their male counterparts (and, likewise, just as often hurt, challenged, and powerless) is that grounds for claims of misogyny?

Sure, the characters he writes are by and for men in an obvious, but general sense. That's the market he has worked in, and the person he's always been. Does he have to write something like Margaret Atwood to avoid being in favour of women's oppression?

IMHO, he doesn't have to be 'enlightened' or a feminist to not push or dole out misogyny. If a typically mobile writer doesn't spend time writing about the woes of and solutions for paraplegics, but treats them as pretty much similar to his other characters--in Miller's case, that would make them almost all either heroes or villains, like the paralyzed Bullseye--that doesn't mean he disdains folks in wheelchairs. --Obviously, an imperfect analogy, but you get the point, I hope.--

As to American comics in general, it is true that they have typically been written by and for men (or, worse in the case of mid century romances, by men and for girls). The track record has been abysmal, especially in the time before Miller started writing. In that universe, his break from this tradition may deserve a little praise, especially in comparison to someone like, say, Robert Crumb. But just a little. More importantly, it doesn't deserve scorn, which is my point.

As to fan-boyism, whatever. I don't think he's a great writer. His best dialogue is about on par with Stan Lee's (though clearly of a different style). His best ideas are the vague and implicit ones, especially in the last twenty years. His personal views about anything beyond the composition and industry of comics are almost all wrongheaded. But he helped revolutionize the field, and a few of his works are among its best (largely because the language of comics is not in its prose but its compositions). This extends out at least as far as his final Sin City book, the under-appreciated Hell and Back. If thinking so makes me a fan-boy in your eyes, I can live with that.

@25, I don't know who came up with the more memorable lines of dialogue in 300 (including insults to Athenians, which would seem to go with the speakers being Spartans), but it wasn't Miller. Years before the comic was written, someone told me about the movie which inspired Miller (The 300 Spartans, 1962) and related a bunch of those lines to me. He wanted to make his tale simple and palatable to his audience, as a vehicle for his notions of a heroic ideal. If fictionalizing bits of the battle served the tale itself, it was in following the old maxim of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

It's not like he expected anyone to take it as a serious account of actual, easily obtained history. Everyone who cares knows the Spartans were a bizarre and exceedingly harsh tribe--they're famous for it. Even my state approved middle school history books said as much.

But this doesn't mean he wasn't serious in his misguided and strange railings against OWS. That Miller did earnest and fairly extensive research for his quasi-historical book doesn't mean he knows anything about protests happening more than a decade after its writing. I don't know how you got such an idea from what I've said so far. So far as I can tell, there is no meaningful or close tie between 300 and this blog entry Paul and Brin are rightly angry at (but wrongly tying to intentionally and obviously fictionalized tangents).

The most charitable reading possible of Miller's screed might offer that he was at least right that OWS has been clumsy and poorly expressed, and that anarchist ideals have had some sway in its function or 'process'. But that's three words, taken out of context, out of hundreds. The rest are hate filled and, at best, mistaken. There's nothing right or likeable in it. As I've written elsewhere, he should stick to the one area he is capable in, and politics ain't it.

TKC, you've never read any of his interviews, I suppose. If evidence exists in the work--which it does--and is explicitly supported not just by the creator, but a number of comics writers (and the publisher of Fantagraphics) who understand his clear intent--which is also true--then it is specious at best to call arguments formed around this evidence 'making up stories'. But whatever helps you keep your ideas intact is cool, I guess.

300 obviously has themes which are easily understood as an 'agenda', though there really is no plan of action of behind them. It's main theme, which IMO dovetails nicely with the story because it is what the story is about, is heroism and heroic sacrifice. Subsidiary themes include anti-religious sentiment, vague support for a bland rationality, general pro-westernism, and still more general anti-orientalism (in the antiquated sense). I don't agree with any of these views, and I would have preferred a slightly less stylized/simplified approach to the Spartans. However, even wishing things were different, I don't think any of that shows intent to deceive (for reasons explained previously) or willful ignorance (also already covered). None of it gets in the way of the story, and the simplistic parts fit in well.

BTW, you can't honestly mean you didn't intend "to Godwin", when you immediately did it twice. That just shows you know you're intentionally stretching things. Besides, Miller didn't come up with the idea for the story. Not only is it loosely based in history, it was (as I said) inspired by a 1962 movie, which also greatly simplified its presentation in service to a tale of heroism. That, by the way, is a fairly standard move. I mean, do you think Arthur (a real historical figure) really had a scabbard which, when worn, would allow him to bleed from grievous wounds without dying or losing his strength? Do you think the addition of impossible feats sullies The Iliad or steps upon the memory of those who died in the actual Trojan war? Do you hate Homer? Is he like Hitler and Stalin?

Come on, man.

@31 Ha.

Remember Godwin is more a guideline than a law.

I'll stop the comparisons to Hitler and Stalin if you stop the comparisons to Homer and... er... Gloria Steinem or what ever feminist base-line your holding in your mind over there.

Okay. Misogynist is a very strong word. Does he hate women? I don't have any direct evidence Miller *hates* women. Does he have a rather stunted view of them. My god. Yes he does. His work is typically sexist for the genre with occasionally early attempts at something better. Will you accept that? Because that's as far as coming over to your side.

Again in 300 he didn't NEED to service the tale of heroism by gelding it so much in favor of a overtly homophobic, racist, ideologically distorted agenda. He didn't NEED to do that to tell a great story. He insists that he did. Which is ridiculous. Thermopylae itself is naturally infused with heroism, pathos, the whole package of human possibility. Why stunt it deliberately? He chose to do that to serve an modern agenda, not a story. It has nothing to do with not having accurate details. That;s fine. It has everything to do with inventing non-existant details in their place to serve as propaganda for a vile contemporary ideology. And that became even WORSE in the movie after Miller lost his mind thinking 9/11 was about him.

Anyway. This seems like a simple but important distinction to me.

And yes, had I been from ancient Ilium I might not appreciate Homer. But the of course we have Virgil and the Aeneid.

I think your working really hard to make Miller into something much larger and much more important than he is.

Now, I'm not one of these people who requires ideological purity in my art. I'm really not.

But Miller is injecting himself into the political sphere overtly and using the themes of his art to justify his totally deluded views. At that point I can no longer be fan or consume his art with out total suspicion of his motives and feeling slimy for funding his brand of hate.

"Godwin's law" is a joke which is funny because it tends to be true. Roughly, the rule is: in every discussion on the Internet, given enough time as an active conversation, someone will use Hitler or the Nazis as a means of comparison and denigration to something else. The method of argumentation it refers to (that Hitler or the Nazis did something or seemed some way, thus doing that thing or seeming that way is wrong) is a widely recognized fallacy. After all, Hitler also painted, made screwball home movies, and breathed air; this clearly does not entail moral wrongdoing on the part of any who also engage in breathing, painting, making home-movies, or the like.

But even if it were not a fallacy, your argument involving Godwinning would still fail. For mythologizing real people and events is a standard authorial move, not peculiar to Miller, Hitler, and Stalin. You claimed otherwise, and wrote this was grounds for putting down 300. I showed how your argument would require you to decry Sir Thomas Mallory and Homer, among many others.

As to 300, I'm not clear how it's overtly homophobic. The Spartans are plainly anti-Athenian, and one Spartan characterizes men from Athens as nothing more than pedophiles (which fits, given how little the two cities liked eachother, and that many ancient Greek societies, including the Athenians, were known to engage in man-boy sex--sex that, for numerous reasons, is not quite comparable to modern homosexual sex acts between consenting adults). Outside of that, I'm not sure what you might be referring to.

And it isn't overtly racist. It's against a long dead empire, characterized as Persian or 'the east', but (if it is for what its Spartans express) it's also against most of ancient Greece. The Spartans disdain everyone. They even look down on eachother (and the majority of Sparta) at times. In the book, the most reasonable and (according to Leonidas) impressive character is the brown skinned emperor of Persia. We don't really meet too many characters outside of that who aren't either reasonably carrying out their jobs or fighting hard and dying (as the Spartans aspire to). The movie is another beast, but the film wasn't written or directed by Frank Miller.

The 300 which Miller did write was broadly pro-western (in a vague and ill-defined sense of the west as a beacon of reason, despite its people clearly being influenced by religious leaders even in the comic) and just as vaguely anti-eastern. The comic never really elaborates on these ill formed thoughts. They are just there. People can take them how they want to, I guess. I see them as a slovenly, poorly formed, and relatively mild sort of ethnocentrism--which I find distasteful, but hardly remarkable or risible. Taking more recent comments and work from Miller into account, I guess you could look at 300 as the beginning of his anti-Muslim views, but I see it as more of an opening for such thought (which blossomed post 9/11) than a step towards it. Particularly so because it never mentions Islam, and has nothing but unkind words for any sort of spirituality--a thing so broad as to be leveled at most humans living almost anywhere at any time.

I don't think Miller would say homophobia and racism were necessary themes to 300. But, then, they weren't really in the work. People read them into it. Adding the rather muddleheaded go-west/boo-east, yay-reason/bah-superstition bit was just another way for Miller to offer motivation for the conflict. It was lazy and unnecessary. You are right about that. 300 is an imperfect book written by an imperfect man. But that has little to do with his leaving out or changing around historical matters, which, again, was done largely to simplify and sweeten the story (thus allowing him to tell it in a relatively small space, with broad and beautiful pages, and without too much in the way of prose).

I'll say again that I don't think Miller's art (and particularly his better known work, from before the current millennium) has much of anything to do with his. No one has explained how it does. Miller never mentioned it in his stupid, hate-filled blog entry. Brin just brought it up because he's mad at 300 for reasons totally unrelated to OWS and Miller's ignorant views on it.

If you stop buying new work written or drawn by Frank Miller, that's not going to stop him from writing in blogs. Blogs are free, and accessible from free connections, like the library. Whether or not you and I go out and buy copies of the Martha Washington omnibus isn't going to influence Frank's blogging one way or another. But I understand if you don't want to support him. That's fine, but it doesn't have a lot to do with what we've been talking about.