Second Post: The Dark Knight (2008)

My wife often likes to say that a single shot can justify an entire film. Because of this, I have dubbed her a formalist. She is OK with this, even though I make this comment as a fairly committed historicist.

That being said, there is a shot in The Dark Knight that would justify the film, if of course the film needed it. Let the gushing and the spoilers commence:

At the end of the film, the Joker falls off the side of a building after battling with the Batman. Unlike "the poetry" of Batman (1989), Nolan's Dark Knight does not leave the clown prince of crime to fall to his death. Instead, Batman rescues Joker from his demise by pulling him up with a grappling hook. Hoisted upside down from his leg and flapping in the wind, the Joker explains his philosophy of life. However, tellingly, the image that the audience sessis not of the Joker hanging upside down. The image has been inverted so that he appears right side up, with his jacket floating up behind him and flapping eerily in the wind. For the audience, this simple trick of inverting the negative's direction produces a certain amount of estrangement. The Joker appears at once normal, but the world appears strange. More tellingly though, is that the shot is from Batman's point of view. As I discussed in my last post and over here, the real tragedy in the film comes when Batman accepts the Joker's view of society. This shot is brilliant, and again would justify the film if it needed it, because it manages to formally suggest the thematic circumstances of that part of the film.

I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight. . . .

Very Serious: Batusi vs. Bat Dance

This year is an election year and America faces a very important decision. Will we choose between something that is tried and true or something that is a flash in the pan? Will you be doing the Batusi or the Bad Dance? The choice is yours. But remember, the safety of our nation is in your hands.



THE BATUSI

THE BATDANCE



VOTE NOW!

And T. S. Eliot once had the audacity to say that art never improves. Humph.

The Dark Knight (2008)

I.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, critic David Denby states that the latest installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight (2008), is little bit more than a ponderous excuse for "thunderous violence." For Denby, watching The Dark Knight is to see the Batman franchise polluted. The new film, Denby writes, "continue[s] to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton's original conception for Batman (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle" (92).

There are a number of problems with this statement, and we would be good to point out the most blatant of these first. Batman was just as much a summer action spectacle as the current film. While time may have shrouded Denby's memory, I distinctly remember that the film came out in late June, which is very much a part of the summer. Furthermore, while The Dark Knight promises to be a commercial success and does have its fair share of crass merchandising, this latest production does not seem nearly as coarse or "un-poetic" as this nation's second wave of Bat-Mania.

More importantly, we must note that, while it is true that Tim Burton had a conception for Batman in the late 1980s, it would be false to say that he ever had the"original conception" for Gotham's protector or that his should be held up before all others. In 1989, the character was some 50 years old, and while Burton's take on the caped crusader had its own idiosyncrasies, much like director Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, Burton's Batman drew its inspiration from equal parts Bob Kane and Frank Miller.

Denby's true critical sin lies, however, elsewhere. The fact that he credits Batman with greater artistic purity and Burton as the prime Batman artiste is not the true problem of his evaluation.
Denby's ultimate fault is that his review commits the ultimate failure of criticism: he fails to see the aesthetic object for what it truly is and instead critiques it against the object that he truly desires. In doing so, Denby commits the same error that all bad fan-criticism does: he demands that the film bend to the needs of his aggressive nostalgia. Many readers of superhero texts do this because our first introduction to a character usually strikes us as the truest. For me, the original Green Lantern will always be Gerard Jones's Hal Jordan, but Showcase Presents: Green Lantern more than illustrates that this version of the character is as deviant from Jordan's 1959 first appearance as Nolan's Batman is from Burton's. However, I do recognize that Jones's interpretation is just as valid as the original and just as valid as the contemporary version of the character. The later writers have surveyed the history of GL stories and have taken those parts of the character's history that seems most useful and speaks most to them and their age.

For Denby, as far as film goes, Burton's vision of Batman is his prime model. It is the Batman that feels most genuine because it meets those expectations of what Batman should be; but of course these were established by Burton and no one else. We must be aware that Burton's Batman is not the Batman, just as it would be impossible to say that Bob Kayne's Batman is the only Batman, even though Kane was the originator of the character. By this point in time, Batman has become a piece of industrial folklore. He is not the common property of the folk, although many people may feel or think that he has become legendary. Indeed, in many ways he has. The character is a legend, but he is also a copyrighted piece of intellectual property owned by a major media corporation. Nonetheless, while there are an infinite amount of Batman's running a long the rooftops of our collective imagination, there are also many different official versions of Batman that DC Comics and its parent corporation Warner Brothers have propagated. Each of these visions are equally valid. All that defines Batman in his purest form is his origin story (a boy swears to rid the world of crime after his parents are murdered before his eyes) and certain costume elements (the cape, the cowl, and some type of bat insignia). All other elements, including Alfred, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and even Gotham City are superfluous. As a character, Batman has survived without them at various times in his publishing history and it is likely that one or more of these elements will disappear briefly in the future, although probably not for long.

Burton's Batman is, of course, a Batman that we can all recognize, and which a great many of us delighted in when it first came to theaters. It has all of the essential features of Batman, and has a great many of the secondary ones as well. Furthermore, unlike many comic movies that seem principally ashamed of their source material, Batman does not run from its comic origins or even what we might call their own internal logic. Much like those GL scribes listed above, it takes what it needs from the larger history of Batman and Burton makes it his own. It is this action, making Batman one's own, which allows the 1989 production to fit almost perfectly within Burton's larger oeuvre. Batman is principally concerned with outcasts, moodiness, and masquerade. And while, Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight are interested in these themes to a certain degree, I am more than happy to see them moved to the background than have them dominate the foreground. For Nolan's preoccupation with Batman is not with the Dark Knight's personal pain - although his mission does drive the plot - but with how cities function and how they need good people to function properly. Much as I find Burton's Batman to produce its own brand of poetry, I am less drawn to its aesthetic and its message, than I am to Nolan's more useful depiction of Bruce Wayne and his effect on Gotham. For while Burton and later Joel Schumacher were preoccupied with Wayne's pain and demons, and while this can make for interesting storytelling, not many of us are going to find ourselves avenging our parents as masked vigilantes. In contrast, Nolan's Batman series, like a heightened, more fantastic vision of David Simon's The Wire might actually teach us something about our present condition more generally.

II.

If we are going to compare The Dark Knight to a superhero film a more profitable comparison exists between The Dark Knight and the last (and hopefully final) installment of the X-Men franchise, X3: The Last Stand. At the core of the Brian Singer/Brett Ratner trilogy is a political meditation, much in the same way that Nolan's Batman films are preoccupied with the politics and corruption of a single American city. As in the latest Batman installment, X3: The Last Stand also considers what happens when the conception of politics is undermined by something more primal.

In Ratner's production, political issues are mapped along multicultural conceptions of identity. Viewing difference as sacrosanct, many of the X-Men and all of Magneto's terrorist vanguard feel that the newly manufactured mutant "cure" is tantamount to genocide. In many ways, they are right if they limit their claims to cultural genocide, but that is a more complicated matter and deserves a separate post of its own. What is important for our purposes is that amidst the hullabaloo of a mutant cure, is the resurrection of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) as a primal psychic force known as the Phoenix. Unlike sensible Jean Grey, who is dedicated to Xavier's dream of peaceable coexistence between humans and mutants, the Phoenix is overcome with desire for powerful sensations. Represented as pure and nearly omnipotent id, she wants to experience life unrestricted by societal and political constraints; nearly invulnerable, and thus living without consequence, the Phoenix wants to experience "bare life."

This desire causes her to reject the stern political doctrines of Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and in a fit of excessive rage, to tear him apart atom from atom. From the rest of the film the Phoenix travels with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his acolytes. However, she does not do this because she has had a political change of heart or because she shares Magneto's desire to exterminate the human race. She travels with him merely as a means to seek out new experiences. The central problem with X3's thematic construction is that Magneto never recognizes that Phoenix is not interested in his political machinations and that he never pays for this lack of recognition. Of course, Magento is defeated, made into a normal human being by the X-Man Beast (Kelsey Grammer), but Jean Grey plays only a little part in this. The film's identity politics are not challenged at all by the presence of the Phoenix, and this makes the whole plot point superfluous to the film's overall action.

In comparison Nolan's Dark Knight presents us with a Joker (Heath Ledger) who is a self-described "agent of chaos." Much like the Phoenix, Nolan and Ledger's Joker imagines himself as outside the bounds of political order and rule. However, it should be noted whereas Phoneix is depicted as being pure id, Joker's disorder is portrayed more as a Hobbesian in nature. It is the Joker who sees beyond the facile lies society tells itself in order to constitute itself.

It is into Gotham City that Nolan drops this vision of the Joker. Although Athenian in its conception of publicity, Nolan's Gotham is very much that vision of the city that the great Naturalist writers of the late 19th and early 20th century taught us to see. Gotham City, corrupt and dangerous, lives by pumping money in and out of its coffers. While its economy and geography are based around the virtuous model of corporate responsibility, Wayne Enterprises, for too long the city was corrupt and violent. Into this mess, the Batman (Christian Bale) came to rid the city of the mob, to clean up corruption, and most of all to inspire other people to action. Batman's ability to inspire is what makes up the action of the film. For while Batman inspires the virtuous District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to take action, he also inspires a group of unfortunate copycat vigilantes, and of course, he inspires the mob to hire the Joker to kill Batman. What the mob doesn't realize is that despite the fact that the Joker offers to work for money, his passions are not economic but sadistic in their nature. What the Joker wants is to spread chaos and fear, to show society through sadism, that underneath the thin bedrock of society is a mess of chaos and animal urges. The mob pays for this lack of recognition, but so do many Gothamites, police officers, not to mention Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent, and the Batman.

In wanting to spread fear, many commentators (Denby included) have wanted to read the Joker's action against our current political climate and declare him a terrorist. Scipio over at The Absorbascon has gone so far as to state that the film makes a real comment on terrorism. What this comment is, he does not tell us, but then again, to be fair, that is not the purpose of his post. These comments are of course not made erroneously. Although they do not elaborate much, their writer's may very well be on to something. There are at least two points in the film, when the Joker is explicitly called a terrorist. But as much as the film wants him to be one, the Joker is not really a terrorist, at least not as we understand the term conventionally to denote. Yes, the Joker spreads terror, but he does so to no political end. His murder and mayhem serve no other purpose than their own ends. Besides his point about society's delusions about itself, Joker is violent for the sake of being violent.

This extra-political activity seems to be rooted in Joker's own familial background. While in keeping with his various origin stories from the comics, Nolan's Joker has no definite origin or motivational incident. However, the one commonality in all of Joker's own given explanations for his behavior lies in a twisted family dynamic, which is essentially, outside the bounds of what we normally consider politics (although it certainly is not untouched by it). Indeed, the political world, even the political world of Batman, rests on top of this uncertain structure: the individual mind which is molded both by society and uncertain forces.

[SPOILERS!]

Where this film truly succeeds is that it concedes some of the argument to the Joker. Unlike Phoenix who is sentimentally dispatched by a tearful Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the legacy of the Joker is dubious. His mission was not only to kill Batman, but to show that both the high and the low could easily be brought down to their most bestial. At the film's climax he arranges a type of prisoner's delima between Gotham's criminals and its regular citizens. One boat is filled with criminals, the other everyday decent people; both have detonators to the others' boat. If they do not act, the Joker will blow up both ships. Both groups manage to survive the other and the Joker. They are not corrupted. On the other hand, the Joker has also attempted and succeeded in corrupting Harvey Dent, bringing down the city's "white knight" and turning him into the crazed madman Two-Face. Aware of the city's ability to produce publicity, both Gordon and Batman agree that the city cannot sustain the shock of knowing the truth of Dent's fall. It would ruin all the work that the three of them have done to inspire and unify the city against crime and corruption. After Dent's death, Gordon and Batman agree that Batman should receive the blame for Dent's crimes in order to hold the city together. Batman will continue to act for good, but he will be chased and hunted actively by the police in the memory of a Harvey Dent who never truly existed.

In the end, the Joker wins half of the argument, but one hopes not the better half. While the people on the boats never act, Gordon and Batman are persuaded that Dent's fall would undermine the city. It is only through producing an elaborate lie that the city and by extension society is able to hold itself together. Underneath all the political order, rests a falsity we tell ourselves. How we constitute a just society and a political frame work in spite of this, is the problem the film sets forth for us. For in the end, we might acknowledge that society is held together with little more than a series of linguistic acts, but this does not make the bonds, bounds, or rules of a society any less significant. Indeed, the real question of morality will always be one of action, but we ought to think back upon what linguistic acts we make which thus set the boundaries of our actions, and we might want to question the necessity of Gordon and Batman's ruse. After all, while the film implies the consequences of their actions are successful, we will never learn what would have happened if the linguistic act Gordon and Batman rebuilt Gotham society had been less duplicitous and more honest.

300 and the Poetics of Terrorism

Sparta!

Perhaps the most apt critique of Zach Snyder’s 300, apt anyway for the blogsophere, would be to list 300 problems with the film. However, given the option of reading (or writing) 300 separate complaints or reading (or writing) politically trenchant criticism, I think we can all agree that the criticism is the less painful of the two options. That being said, at this point any critique of 300 comes rather late in the game. I think most people are aware of the problematic political implications of the film so I will try to make this brief or as brief as possible. What can I say? I live the graduate student life and contrary to popular expectations this life does not include champagne wishes and caviar dreams; it does however include trips to the dollar theater where films like 300 are still being showed and are still quite well attended.

Before, I discuss what I would call the films “poetics of terrorism,” I would like for a split second to discuss the films incredibly problematic gender politics. The film manages to seem entirely homoerotic and homophobic, and here I mean phobic in its most literal sense, at the same time. Triumph of the Will move aside, there’s a new contender in town. While the film delights in the eroticism of masculine muscularity, it shows that the scariest thing that can happen is for one to “worship the divinity” of a queer giant black man (Xerxes of Persia) or that one could be a “philosopher and boy lover” like those Greeks in Athens. However, overriding these queer concerns is how the film deals with its central woman character, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey). To say that Frank Miller has had a problem hoeing the P.C. line when it comes to feminism would be more than an understatement. Indeed, Miller seems to go out of his way to present seemingly one dimensional female characters. For instance, in Richard Rodriguez’s adaptation of his Sin City, all the female characters are either strippers, prostitutes, naked, dead, or some combination of these things. In fact, the female characters that we are most supposed to sympathize with and admire are Basin City’s prostitutes, who manage to maintain their independence from the corrupt police and city officials by skillfully parlaying their wares and by being ninjas. What Miller tends to admire in his female characters is a mixture of strength and submission.

It comes as no surprise then that a similar articulation of womanhood is to be found in 300's Queen Gorgo as well. While her husband, King Leonidas (Gerald Butler) is off fighting the Persians, Gorgo attempts to persuade the Spartan city council to send him reinforcements. Unfortunately, this means trafficking with Theron (Dominic West) who is resisting helping his King, not because of his stated love of constitutionalism, but because he is in league with the Persian Empire. Theron tells his queen that he will change his vote if she will go to bed with him. Gorgo does so, justifying her decision because of her love of her husband and Sparta, and because as she puts it, “Freedom is not free.” Given the phrase, the parallels to the contemporary political situation should be fairly obvious. Ultimately, Gorgo’s prostitution proves to be a miscalculation as Theron betrays her in front of the council by telling them about their tryst and by insinuating that Gorgo has been unfaithful many times before in order to secure political power. Not willing to stand for this level of disloyalty to both herself and her country, Gorgo grabs a nearby sword (these are always around when you need them in the military state of Sparta) and runs it through Theron. As he dies, Persian gold falls from his purse, revealing his treachery. While Gorgo is righted, the principle that motivates her tryst with Theron is not refuted. Although she did not calculate for Theron’s true political loyalties, she did the right thing. She put love and country before her personal autonomy. She proves to be a good woman, and better yet a good citizen because she proves that she has the strength to be subservient and ultimately because she has the strength to kill Theron when his manipulation of democracy goes to far. Freedom is not free, after all.

Now if at this point you find yourself rolling your eyes because of the overbearing and ridiculous nature of the slogan “freedom is not free” than the film is not for you; it is a film that is purposely overbearing and it this type of overbearing-ness that enables the film to produce my so-called “poetics of terrorism.” The overbearing nature of the film can be perhaps be most centrally located in the fact that its narrator, Dilios, the Spartan warrior-rhetorician (David Wenham), has to tell you everything that is going on on the screen and just exactly how to interpret it. Indeed, the film’s narrative hand is so heavy that Dilios is forced to even tell the audience and his Greek listeners about events that he could not have witnessed. Regardless of the facts – and here the audience can question whether or not were watching the events as they happened or merely Dilios’s account of them – the story has to be kept if we’re going to fight those Persians.

What ultimately reinforces the poetics of terrorism is the film’s centerpiece, Leonidas’s resistance at the Battle of Thermopylae. Unable to raise a proper army, Leonidas goes to the edges of Greece with his 300 best soldiers and the support of some fairly wimpy Athenians (chest hair aside). Outmatched by the Persian hordes of Asia (the film’s terms, not mine), Leonidas devises a scheme wherein he will funnel the Persian forces into a narrow area between two cliffs and the sea. The superiority of the Persian army’s numbers will therefore be nullified and Leonidas’s 300 will be capable of repelling the Persian forces with their superior intelligence and fighting ability. And thus the film proceeds to treat us with a visual ballet of graphic violence as the 300 repeals and defeats successive waves of Persian oddities: slaves, Persian giants, freaks with blades for arms, Middle Eastern ninjas (I wonder if they know the prostitutes from Sin City), CGI elephants, and a fairly monstrous rhinoceros. All of these waves prove to be ineffective in the face of all those Spartan muscles. Indeed, it seems all is lost for poor Xerxes until the Greeks are betrayed by the deformed and thus rejected Spartan, Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) who shows the Persians a way around the cliff in exchange for money and sex with Persian prostitutes (again, I wonder if they know the girls of Sin City).

Ideologically, in order to produce a poetics of terrorism, these waves of Persian threats have to be both literally fantastic and full of spectacle as they have to be inevitably undefeatable. They have to be terrifying, threatening, and only temporarily defeatable. While I’m not one to often enjoy allegorical criticism, it would seem to me that the constant barrage of threats coming from Persia correlates quite nicely to the waves of threats that we have come to long endure under the Bush Administration. These villains are neutralized or defeated much like those that have supposedly threatened the Brooklyn Bridge, Fort Dix, or most recently at JFK Airport. However, much like the Bush Administration has told us for the past six years, eventually the terrorists will succeed and we will have another 9/11 failure. The failure of Leonidas is in fact the true strength of the film for those who would like us to more actively engage the Islamofascist threat with direct military violence. His loss and gloriously documented crucifixion – complete with arrows to evoke St. Sebastian – justify what the film and all the film’s loyal Spartan characters have wanted all along: full on war with Persia. And so the film ends with Dilios beating the drums of war by retelling the film’s story just before the full assemblage of Greece’s troops defeat once and for all the menace of Persia. Freedom is not free. Sometimes it takes a crucifixion to get you to fight (a crucifiction perhaps?) and sometimes it takes a movie with a runtime of 117 minutes. Next time I might just as soon take the earlier than the latter.

Superman Returns

It probably will not come as a surprise that I saw Superman Returns on opening day. While there are numerous filmic arguments that I would like to make (first among them is how the film is a literal re-scripting of the first film from 1978), none of them seem intellectually honest at the moment. For what has always brought me to Superman has been my heart.

Because of this, I will tell everyone my favorite part of the movie and why it is scenes like this that draw me to the Man of Steel and to the superhero genre in general. Early in the film, we see Superman sitting on Martha Kent's couch in Smallville watching television. He has been away for five years, exploring space and as such has lost touch with the events of Earth. Watching TV, he flicks through news report after news report. The expression on his face says it all. When Superman watches tragedy after tragedy on the news he does not see it as we see it and Brandon Routh does an excellent job of conveying this fact. For when I watch the news and hear of tragedy or hardship I either watch passively, viewing the event as something very removed from my life, or watch it sadly, knowing that there is not much that I can do to ameliorate the situation. When Superman watches the news, a flash of anger crosses his face but it is tempered with determination. For Superman knows that he is capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound, that he is faster than a speeding bullet, and that he is more powerful than a locomotive. In short, Superman knows that he can do something about it.

A scene like this is also in a film of a much lower caliber, Teenage Mutant Turtles. In that film the vigilante Casey Jones (for those of you who don’t remember (and consider yourself lucky) Jones is a cross between Travis Bickle and Jason), watches the news and decides that he will fight crime. But Jones watches the news differently than Superman. Jones watches the news like it is particularly violent pornography and it cannot help but to inspire him to commit equally violent actions. Jones wants to hurt the people he's feed up with. It's not about decency; it's all about revenge and violence. However, what makes me like Superman more than all other superheroes is that Superman stands for as Perry White says in this film, "Truth, Justice, and the rest of it." Superman fights the good fight not because he’s driven by revenge or because he wants fame or power, but because he can; and because he can, he knows that he must. What always remains inspiring to me about Superman is not that it makes you want to believe for a second that a man can fly but that he is intrinsically good. And I've never found a good reason for turning away from the intrinsically good, no matter how cornball it may seem.

Alan Moore's Punishment

Jerry Christensen is totally right.

For those few readers who are not of the UCI persuasion, right now I’m taking a class with our department chair, Jerry Christensen on Classical Hollywood Cinema. J. C.’s basic thesis is that we should not read films as works of an individual (as auteur theory would teach us) or even as a collaborative work (as common sense would teach us) but as an expression of corporate speech (as J. C. is teaching us). As such we have been looking at what elements compose a studio style. Typical questions have been: What makes this an MGM film? How would this be different if Warner Brothers were the studio? On the whole I’ve found this class to be engaging and ever since I found out about J. C.’s ideas about corporate authorship last year in the 1950s class he co-taught, I’ve been curious to see how they might apply to America’s other great corporate art, comic books.

Such an expression can be found on DC Comics recently launched website 52thecomic.com. Established to support their new weekly series 52, the website is designed to appear to be the online addition of that great, fictional, Metropolitan newspaper, The Daily Planet. As such it is replete with advertising and stock quotes from the fictitious corporations that appear in the DC Universe. As such we see ads for LexOil, The Halo Corporation, and Sivana Industries. While we might want to take note of how many of these companies are controlled by super-villains, all of these conglomerates have appeared in the pages of DC Comics before. However, besides LexOil, the most prominent “ad” on the website is for Sundoller Coffee, a company never before introduced in any of DC’s titles.

While the mock-article on the website would turn Sundoller Coffee a playful but weak joke at Starbucks expense, it nonetheless seems to be an attack on comics auteur Alan Moore. While the Sundoller logo resembles the iconographic style of Starbucks, it also bares a striking resemblance to the symbols that frequently appeared in Moore’s recently finished series, Promethea. To your right you’ll see the cover of issue thirty of the series. Note the similarity between that and the ad for Sundoller Coffee.

The reason for such an attack has a storied history. Moore has long feuded with the company over their continued ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen and has not worked with the company since V was completed in 1989. At the heart of this feud is the fact that Moore feels cheated by the company. When he published V and W he signed a contract that stated that if DC ever let the works fall out of publication, the rights would revert back to him and his collaborators. Unfortunately, twenty years after Watchmen’s initial publication it is still reprinted and continues to not only be a big seller for DC, but is the work that Moore is most associated with. The two are trapped in a symbiotic relationship. DC needs Moore’s old work to maintain some semblance of cultural legitimacy and Moore, at least at one point, was reliant on them to make his name.

However, Moore has long been an established star, and while his name is still heavily associated with his earlier DC work, he has long been able to produce his own material and work on those projects he wanted to. In the mid 1990s he founded America’s Best Comics (ABC) line for Wildstorm studios and created such books as Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It is fair to assume that when Moore began working for Wildstorm, he never expected Wildstorm to move from Image Comics and sell to DC. When such a merger occurred, all the copyrights that Moore had produced for the company (excluding Extraordinary Gentlemen) became the intellectual property of DC. While Moore begrudgingly stayed on to finish his longer storylines within the “ABC Universe” he kept his distance from DC editorial and interacted with Lee only. This feud, combined with Moore’s own erratic rates of production, meant that his work did not receive much support from DC and really only sold successfully in collections.

The feud between the creator and the company flared up most recently with the adaptation and release of V for Vendetta for Warner Bros., DC’s parent company. Feeling that the work had drifted too far a field from Moore’s original intention and politics, Moore demanded that his name be taken off the film and that his share of the royalties be given to the artist for V, David Lloyd. While Moore did not explicitly tell people to avoid the film, he did condemn the movie and referred to DC Comics in interview as the company that “cheated me out of the ownership of my work and then peddled it to another part of their parent company.” Statements like this, soured fandom’s reception of the film and fostered the creation of Anarchist anti-V websites like this one.

As such, it is easy to see why DC Comics would not be all that happy with Moore. And so it would appear that the words on the Sundoller ad seem specifically chosen to reflect DC’s hostile attitude towards Moore. Picayune is the name for a Spanish coin, but it usually infers something of little value or trivial. This may refer back not to Moore’s older work but to the book that the Sundoller logo takes its basic shape from, Promethea (not exactly a hot commodity). Milieu is clearly the hardest word to place as an insult but according to the OED it may refer to the criminal underworld of France. While there is nothing French about Moore, his work, or DC Comics, this word might be here to invoke Moore’s present outsider status. The second supposed coffee size is called “Malocchio.” While the word has a certain similarity to cappuccino, the word is Italian for the “Evil Eye.” Given Moore’s interest in the occult and particularly its role throughout Promethea this seems the most referential of all the smaller words to Moore. However more probably we can view it as DC giving Moore the Evil Eye for his most recent behavior regarding the release of V. Finally, the word “ego” in big bold print seems to be an obvious marker for Moore, who as an auteur who refuses to work for either of the two major comic book companies seems to be marking himself as somehow “bigger” than perhaps he should.

The advertisement, taken in conjunction with the brief biographical sketch that I’ve traced above, appear to be the first instance of a “genre” in comic books that J. C. has defined as “star punishment.” In classical Hollywood cinema star punishment consists of insulting or punishing characters played by actresses for having gone against the wishes of the corporation. By turning his “star property” Promethea – a clear work of religious devotion if there ever was one – into the subject of a fake advertisement, DC appears to be making a claim for the superiority of publication power and intellectual property over individual creator rights or independent innovation. It can all be replaced to parody and throwaway continuity in the crass world of superheroes.

Wasn’t this better than writing head notes for comps?