Now joining the clan of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese who called Superhero movies, ‘Absurd’ is a legendary DC Comics scribe, Alan Moore. He called the ‘Superhero Culture Embarrassing’ and he’s deeply worried about its impact. This got viral on Twitter when his article was posted this Monday by Beat’s entertainment editor, Kyle Pinion.
I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen-year-old audience, today’s franchised ubermensch, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seems to be serving some kind of different function and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with a numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.
The “Watchmen” creator, 66, made the inflammatory comments during a 2017 interview with Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo — but the full details weren’t released until now, the BBC reported.
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