Thesis: Mark Millar is why you still feel guilty reading comic books.

I've mocked this particular panel before, but it bears repeating because I feel like death and death makes me grumpy.  Writing the following sequence of panels doesn't necessarily mean you have no talent:

Even Alan Moore nods &c.  However, patting your own back by having a character in the next issue praise you for this world-horrible line leaves no room for counterargument.

 

Scott's Rule #23 applies: the percentage of time spent lecturing other people about how awesome you are is inversely propotional to your actual awesomeness. 

Comments

[tomemos]

Hey, I'm up for another round of this. It's only been four months.

"Also, that line Scott's making fun of was supposed to indicate that the Ultimates Cap was also a jingoist schmuck in ways."

Then Mark Millar is a failure as a writer, because that simply isn't how you set up an audience to have a laugh at a character's expense. Dramatic line in the middle of a battle, followed by another character telling him how cool it was, and he modestly replies that it just came to him? No.

At best, you could say that Millar wants to have it both ways. He knows that plenty of comics readers will say "Awesome!" upon reading that line…but he also knows that other people would find Cap's line boorish, and so he leaves the door open (I guess? I still don't see this at all) to read it ironically. That would take marginally more skill, but certainly wouldn't be any more admirable.

"On the other hand, in my life, I've seen people stand in doorways while conversing, and I've stood in doorways while conversing, uncountable numbers of times."

For heaven's sake, I clarified this already—*four months ago,* let me remind you. They're not "standing" in a doorway. Cap is *walking through* a doorway—knees bent, one foot off the ground (actually, the drawing is so poor that it sort of looks like both feet are off the ground, but let that stand). As he does this, he's hearing a pal ask him a three-sentence long question. And he's giving what is supposed to be an offhand, conversational answer that takes twenty words to say. As he's *walking through a doorway.*

Now, we can go around and around about how many words you get while crossing through a doorway, but it's beside the point, which is that the entire scenario—the words being spoken, the content of the exchange, the visual setting—is just not believable. We can buy a long speech like, say, the big reveal at the end of Watchmen, because the situation is very important (plus Moore plays with the convention anyway: "I'm not a Republic super-villain"). We can also buy it when a character answers a question or expresses a thought at greater length than a real person probably would, like the heroes of Sin City or The Dark Knight Returns, who have been established as serious (and self-serious) enough to do this. This exchange, by contrast, is supposed to be a casual conversation between officemates passing in a hallway, and it clunks and clatters along for 55 words.

And below that mechanical problem lies the deeper problem: that the entire exchange does not make us laugh, make us interested, move the plot along, or do anything other than establish that Mark Millar thinks Mark Millar is a good writer and wants us all to share in admiration of Mark Millar. It is the very definition of awful writing, and the conversations any of us have had in doorways don't change that.

[dan]

"when he's genuinely funny, as in Kick-Ass"

I only remember one joke from Kick-Ass; the one that's on anyone who paid money to read it