"Holy Terror" is probably the worst comic I've ever read.

Like many fans of the medium, some of my favorite comics are by Frank Miller - a giant in the industry if there ever was one.  Here's a guy who had created - mostly on his own - entertaining, sprawling, seminal epics like 300 and Sin City.  Heck, Batman has been around for 70 years and I don't think I've ever read a better story featuring the character than Batman: Year One.  When The Dark Knight Returns is second on a list of favorite Batman stories by one author, you know that there's some serious, prodigious, even, talent going around.

Because of this, and even though Miller has had a few flops to go along with his big hits, I was excited when I heard that DC Comics was publishing Batman: Holy Terror!, an original graphic novel by Miller.  My interest turned into curiosity once I learned that DC rejected Miller's proposal, at which point he took the concept to Legendary Comics (which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of publishing the book), removed the references to Batman from the story and truncated the title to, simply, Holy Terror.

My curiosity, in turn, became more of the morbid variety when the book was finally released and the reviews started to trickle in.  It seemed to me that, despite the interest surrounding the book, most of the reviews were overwhelmingly negative.  I saw the book stocked in a few local comic book shops, but didn't bother to flip through to check it out.

I probably would have forgotten all about the book if it hadn't been for my spring semester English classes.  The theme for the course centered around arguments - understanding them, making them effectively - and since I'm, well, a comic book fan, I started thinking about this book, the firestorm of criticism it caused for a while, and how something so apparently opinionated might work in a class that is set up to evaluate such forms of literature.  When I started putting my syllabus for the class together, I decided to take a chance and I ordered a copy of Holy Terror to read.

AND I HATED IT.  Seriously, every negative review of this book that I read was spot on.  It was, in a word, frightening to see how far Miller had slipped from "crime noir with its harsh view of reality" to "blatant, unrepentant racism", how a man so obviously talented could find himself so overcome by apparent hate as to put out a book such as Holy Terror.

The main characters are simply placeholders for Batman, Catwoman, Jim Gordon and other Gotham mainstays; some have even said that Miller took finished pages from his DC pitch and changed only a few details, presumably to avoid any legal issues with DC.  When I first heard that DC rejected Miller's pitch, I was surprised and thought that perhaps the company was overreacting.  Now that I've read the finished product, it's obvious that DC did the only thing it could have done, because allowing Miller to publish this as a Batman story would have, in my opinion, caused irreparable harm to the character and the overall concept.

The book, which simply deals with one night of violence, torture, ethnic stereotyping and misogyny to the worst degree, comes off as vapid in its content and disturbing in its message.  It can be difficult, sometimes, to separate an artist from his or her works, but in this case you almost have to to justify keeping anything of Miller's in your library.  It really is that shameful a piece of work.

I wrote a short review of the excellent anthology set 9/11: Artists Respond a while ago.  In one of the two volumes released, Miller had a short, simple story that read something like "I'm sick of flags; I'm sick of God; I've seen the power of faith" with an image of wreckage from the Trade Center attacks.  Miller seems to be playing again on this feeling of outrage, of indignation, but while the 9/11 short showcased the raw emotion that many felt that day, Holy Terror seems more venomous, more cruel and more bigoted.

I think that freedoms of speech and expression should be inalienable human rights, and thus I think that Miller should be able to print something like this, inflammatory as it is.  But I also can't strongly enough recommend that we all use a bit of common sense, don't get caught up in Miller's understandable level of fame, and put this book back on the shelf instead of buying it.

My wish for the 9/11 anniversary

If you haven't picked up the double set graphic novels 9/11: Artists Respond published by DC Comics with some assistance from Dark Horse Comics, you owe it to yourself to do so.  Nearly ten years after their original publication, they remain as raw and powerful as ever.  I wrote a small review of the series a little while back and you can read it here.

It's difficult to write about this particular day because it seems like the world is putting a capstone on this event - for the last ten years, America as a country has moved from collective shock to mourning to national unity that has, every day since, slipped away a little further.  It's tragic and shameful that we've gotten to this point, but what worries me even more is that it seems like once we pause today, momentarily, to note the events of September 11th, 2001, we will move on with our lives and push away the lessons to be learned and remembered one last time, and like taking a shoebox full of photographs and shoving them into the back of a closet already stuffed to the point of overflowing, we'll relegate the collective identity and the genuine compassion we showed to a time we generically remember as "the past".

It is my hope that as the memory of September 11th fades into history and a new era slowly takes over, the legacy of this horrible event, this national terror, is one that spurs us as a nation and a planet to consider others with the same basic human charity we showed without cynicism or ulterior motive in the days that followed the attacks.  I truly hope that we can think beyond ourselves and who we are and respect the needs of all around us.  I don't want our potential to be wasted.  I don't want the phrase "9/11" to be appropriated for political posturing or for financial gain.

I live in Southwestern Pennsylvania, close to Somerset Country and the infamous "Flight 93" crash.  I was in college in 2001 and can remember the day's events in vivid detail.  But I didn't know anyone, didn't lose anyone, as a result of the terror attacks that Tuesday morning.  I can't imagine how someone more directly affected must feel on this anniversary.  I only hope that we can learn from that day, that we can move forward and be more considerate, more understanding, more forgiving, more loving.

instant reactions, nine years later

I remember picking up DC Comics' "9-11: Artists Respond" paperback soon after it was published in early 2002 (the turnaround time, looking back, was pretty amazing).  It featured short stories portraying many creators' reactions to the New York terrorist attacks, some of which were told using DC's popular super heroes.  One such story stands out in my mind, though it's been almost nine years since I read it, where Superman laments that he's just a fictional character and thus can't do anything to stop the suffering in the real world.

Regardless of the story, what really sticks with me was how raw the book was from an emotional standpoint.  Whereas comics, especially from the likes of Marvel and DC, usually have a very "safe", calculated message to portray ("don't do drugs, kids!"), a lot of the stories included in DC's 9-11 book were the comic book equivalent of an instantaneous reaction.  Not all of it was hopeful and positive, either - you could feel the anger, the despair that others felt by reading their stories.

DC's paperback was listed as volume two, and while there was a big ad for the first volume on the back cover of the book, I never took the time to seek it out.  A few months ago, though, I found it on sale at nearby Fanboy Comics for only five bucks, so I jumped at the chance to pick it up.

I'm sure that one of the reasons I bought the DC version, complete with Superman and Krypto on the cover, each in awe over "real life" heroes such as doctors, police officers, etc., and not the first volume was the fact that I wasn't nearly as willing to read independent comics in 2002 as I am today.  That's not saying the majority of the comics I buy aren't Marvel and DC, but my reading stack's much more diverse now than it's ever been before.  Volume one was published jointly by Dark Horse, Chaos!, and Image, and featured mostly independent creators, many of them still not familiar to me.

I just finished reading this particular volume, and I'm as astounded as I was in 2002 when I read the second volume of short stories - not just by the impeccable quality, but again by the raw, unfettered emotion that obviously stemmed from witnessing such a horrific event.  Reading these stories took me back to that unseasonably warm fall day in September, and there were a few times that I had to put the book down and clear the lump in my throat before continuing.

It's difficult to reconcile that so much time has passed since the event, and it's distressing to realize how cynicism and distrustfulness have taken over so much of our social and political landscape; it's disheartening to realize how we've pushed the immediate aftermath, one of such good will and hope, to the back of our minds once more.  I was in college in 2001, and now I teach college; most of my students this past semester were all of nine years old on the date in question.  How long before the students I'm teaching, legally capable of making major decisions such as joining the military, have no recollection of the 9-11 attacks?  As I said, it's all hard to reconcile.

There are dozens of stories and pinups in this collection, and each of them tells a unique story.  Most of them, I'd imagine, would look much different if DC or Dark Horse or Image were to put the book together today - I think it would lose some of the immediacy that makes it great.  Frank Miller's "I'm sick of flags, I'm sick of God" might be the angriest comic I've ever read, and it's all of three panels.  Dave Cooper's "9/12" puts the shock of the events into perspective.  Anthony Johnston and Mike Norton's "Sunday Mourning" is heartbreaking.  Marc Rosenthal's "If", when looked at through the lens of 2010, makes me think of what could have been.

It may seem counterproductive to bemoan the September, 2001 attacks nearly nine years after the fact.  The world has, in many cases, moved on and new tragedies have arisen to take our attentions.  Reading this book, however, brought the immediacy of all the emotions I felt as I wandered around campus (hopelessness, fear, despair, uncertainty) flooding back.  In an few more years, when we all have just a little more perspective, these two comic book collections would be tremendous as texts in a history or English class that focused on the subject.  If someone wanted to recreate or remember the atmosphere of the days just following September 11th, all they'd have to do is read a few stories from these collections.  It's brilliant, chilling material that deserves to be recognized for it's significance.