musick

the whole irony of it all is his follow up comments sound exactly like something Trump would have come out of his mouth

I actually enjoy Maher but maybe he should go back to getting stoned and listening to his Streisand records

melasnus

Like mine, his experience reading comic books dates from the 60s.
In which case, yeah, they weren't high art.
And as far as I can tell, those quality of comics are still around.

Marvel, DC, etc. didn't produce comics for adults...the target market was boys.
If a grown man was caught reading them, he would never be able to live down the ridicule (trust me here).

musick

tell that to the "boys" that were old enough to fight for their country in wars and were just fine with the medium

stingermck

And all the college kids who were reading Marvel in the 70s, which made them a power house.

rw2516

Also there were characters in movies and tv shows who read comics and portrayed as dimwits or geeks.
For example Goober Pyle on Andy Griffith Show. There was a stereotype associated with adults who read comics. We see the same thing with Eric and Star Wars on That 70's Show.

To a lot of people comics are on the maturity level of Garbage Pail Kids cards or Wacky Packages.

Around 1976 a buddy took me to his pot dealer's house for introduction. He was an older guy, Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider type.
Guy had Marvel comics scattered around on the floor and tables. He seemed embarrassed about it. He came out and said, "You're probably wondering about the comics".
I told him I read them too.

brayzie

It's obvious he has a disdain for superhero comics and superhero movies.
But, regardless of his dismissal of the medium, it's stupid to complain about the media reacting to Stan Lee's death.
Stan Lee was like the Walt Disney of superhero comics, or even comics in general, since Marvel has dominated the American comic industry since the 1960s and become this big movie studio empire.
The articles bout Lee's death pretty much just seem to go over his life, his career, and his accomplishments. Standard stuff.
Nothing about this creative genius who changed the way we thought of the human condition.
I mean, a blog post critiquing the publics fascination with superhero movies...that could be interesting, but not really catch too much attention.
But do it when Stan Lee dies and tying it to that, that makes noise, stirs things up.
If you weren't paying attention to Bill Maher before, you do now.

No, he said that only in a country where adults think comic books are important (and I'm assuming he means Marvel/DC superhero comics) that Donald Trump could get elected president.

I don't know why everyone is up in arms about this.
The way people react, it's like there's no sense of proportionality anymore.

Donald Trump calls NFL players who kneel in protest of police brutality, sons of bitches.
Response is "FUCK YOU, Trump!!!!"
Yeah, right on!

Bill Maher says comic books are dumb.
Response is "FUCK YOU, Bill Maher!!!!"
Yeah, right on...wait, what?

People in our country generalize their fellow Americans all the time, "we're a dumb country," "Americans are stupid."
This isn't the first time he called the United States and Americans stupid.
But holy shit, he slanders superhero comics and the MCU...that's crossing the line.


Which is weird because he said in his original blog post that he read them "now and then" when he was a kid.

But aren't you feeding into his argument if you're saying a majority of them are dumb? Isn't that like shitting on the writers and artists involved in creating the majority of comic books out there? Do you read the majority of comic books being put out?

What has that got to do with anything?
The stigma that melasnus was talking about was true.
Just because GI's stationed overseas were reading Superman and Playboy, doesn't mean that was considered respectable reading material for adults.

brayzie

When it came to racism, the pen was Stan Lee's superpower

Stan Lee used his platform to call out racism in the 1960s — and he never stopped

Stan Lee’s Radical Fight Against Racists: ‘The Only Way to Destroy Them Is to Expose Them

Stan Lee spent a lifetime condemning racism, most prominently through the heroes in his comic books

This kind of aggrandizing of Stan Lee from news organizations is pretty careless.

No mention of stuff likes this from early in Stan Lee’s career:







These comics were written by Stan Lee, who was also Editor-In-Chief at a time, when Marvel Comics-then known as Timely Comics-were regularly portraying African-Americans as minstrel stereotypes, and the Japanese as fanged, subhuman monsters.

Trevor

Wtf is all this nonsense of comics being for kids? Maybe it was partially true in the 1940s, but the majority of readers have been adults for decades. Currently, I think the average reader is in their 30s, and 90% of readers are 18+.

Mike86

Not that it excuses anything, but a lot of that can be chalked up to different times and people having different views on racism in my opinion. He was born in an era where racism was basically everywhere and no one thought differently. Point is he changed his ways and became more of a proponent of equality in an era where that still wasn’t exactly normal for everyone (basically at the height of when more equal rights were being fought for), and continued in that path the remainder of his career. So yeah, he’s got skeletons in his closet, but that’s hardly what most will remember him for.

melasnus

I didn't grow up or lived in every single burg in this country.
I only know what I have experienced in this world and can't speak for everyone nor every environment.

FWIW, as a "college kid" in the 70s, I never saw someone reading a comic book in the dorm (or later in a fraternity).
Back then, we were too busy getting drunk and/or stoned, chasing girlies, and trying not to get kicked out of school.

brayzie

Not true. While racism was everywhere back then, I can assure you there were people then who thought differently.
The 100,000+ Americans who were put into internment camps simply for having Japanese ancestry, for example.
The racist stuff Stan Lee was putting out helped feed into the anti-Japanese sentiment, and was propaganda that helped justify stuff like the internment camps.
While most of the media and politicians at the time supported the internment camps, there were some who didn't.
The Governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr was against it, as well as Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

With regard to racist caricatures, in 1926 George Schulyer criticized them, writing:

Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

By 1963 you had celebrities like Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Sammie Davis Jr, Marlon Brando, and Bob Dylan supporting civil rights.
In 1968, Stan Lee saying racism is bad, in a small column in the back of his comics isn't quite this huge risk that "might have cost him" like some people are claiming.

I don't have a problem with someone writing a piece on his passing, and mentioning what he's remembered for. That's par for the course.

But when you have journalists and respected news organizations acting like PR people for Stan Lee/Marvel Comics/Disney, and even fans implying he's above criticism because "he championed things like civil rights through his art," while ignoring that he also spread racist propaganda through his art...I think that's a problem.

Mike86

I guess I’m just going by my knowledge of the time period. I’m sure not everyone was a racist prior to the civil rights movement in the sixties, but I feel like it was definitely more common. If you weren’t a racist chances are you weren’t very outspoken. It’s not right, but again that’s taking the time period out of the equation. We were in a different place in how we treated other races (and women) during that period.

It’s always easier to look back and say something was wrong then, but fact of the matter is that’s how a lot of people of the period were. The fact that Stan Lee has that in his past isn’t that surprising to me. I feel like the fact that he did change later on at least shows that he eventually grew as a person and put aside his bigoted views. He obviously wasn’t perfect, but no one really is and the fact that later in his career he was able to play up diversity and equality in his work is still something to be proud of.

I feel like also that unless you truly are a piece of shit person most people aren’t going to dig out the skeletons from your past if you overall put them behind you and change your views like he did. It’s not really surprising that people aren’t speaking out about that aspect of him at least in my opinion.

brayzie

Are you consistent with arguing, "that's just how people were at the time." Because that can apply to anyone who grew up in an environment where bigotry is prevalent.
Yea, it's easy to look back and say something was wrong.
But it's just as easy to exploit racist sentiment for profit when you can get away with it.

Again, I have no problem with stories that eulogize the guy and talk about his accomplishments.
But to play him up as this lifelong opponent of racism is dishonest.

It has more to do with Marvel movies being so insanely popular with the general public, and so much of the populace grew up with the comics and cartoons.
People are reluctant to criticize or be objective about things they like, or even about things/people that are popular.

Mike86

I never claimed he was a lifelong civil rights activist. I just said that he championed that, which he did later in his career when he was at the height of his fame with Marvel and when he had created a lot of the more famous characters he’s known for.

Also you keep referring to that blurb he wrote. It’s not like that’s all he did. A lot of the actual stories in the comics themselves dealt with different social issues. He wrote that column, but it’s not the only way he acknowledged issues. Look at the X-Men. They pretty much are the poster group for equal rights as far as comic characters.

I don’t really think acknowledging how people thought and acted at certain points in time is a cop out. It’s how it was by and large if you look at history. You're acting as though I'm making some absurd generalization when history tells it that way. Of course that doesn't make it right, but if that's what you grew up around it isn't that hard for me to believe that he was influenced that way.

Not exactly. While that may be the case with some I've been a comic reader long before the films came along. I'm not criticizing him for having what we now view as racist views when racism in this country was running rampant. For the larger majority of his career and his life he wasn't that way. Again people change over time and he did for the better. Do I agree with everything he was a part of? No, but at the same time I view those works as products of their time and look at where society was.

brayzie

I was referring to the article I linked, and how the news media isn't really doing it's job. Like I said previously, they're acting like Marvel/Disney's PR department. I expect puff pieces on Stan Lee's later stance on bigotry from comic and movie sites, but not from The Washington Post.

I kept bringing that up because most of these articles seem to center around that.

I haven't read all of Stan Lee's work, so I'll concede that.

Good point.
But lets not forget, the X-Men became the poster group for equal rights, due to additional contributions from people like Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum. Prior to them, the X-Men was an all-white group.
I think it was Claremont who made Magneto a Holocaust survivor and added the MLK/Malcolm X dimension.

That was harsh of me to say it was a cop out. I edited my previous post.

Gunde

Jesus, with everything going on and the stuff Bill also says, it's a comment about comic books that set this thread on fire? Who cares what he thinks about them? Just read and enjoy if that's your thing.

slop101

That's a really shallow and reductive way of looking at people's issue about what he said. It isn't really about comics, not directly anyways. It's about him laying the blame of something like trump at the foot of a large cultural zeitgeist. In this instance it's comics, but it could just as well be rock & roll or something. The issue is that he's increasingly becoming an old, out to touch man, and like old out of touch people, he's placing the blame of societal ills on something he doesn't understand. That's what we're taking issue with, not "comics".

melasnus

I haven't read anything from anyone else taking this line.
Are you sure it's not just you?

Why So Blu?

I agree with Bill.

dex14

JeffTheAlpaca

I bet Marshawn Lynch will be in the panel offering his political thoughts.

I assume Maher will ask him why he sits down for the anthem since he never gave a reason why he does that.

mwbmis

I find that Barney Frank has a tendency to dominate the panel to the detriment of the show.

Paff

Bill didn't seem to understand the NPC thing in the defaced billboard

Gunde

I'd love to know why it matters even one bit...

Crocker Jarmen

Really enjoy the show, glad it's back, but it's gotten to the point I'm cringing whenever the mid-show guest comes out and no matter who it is, Bill can't seem to keep his hands off them. I lost count of how many times during his talk with Lynch that Bill grabbed his arm, or put his hand on his shoulder. At the end of the segment, when Lynch started talking about how he doesn't like take pictures with men because he doesn't like people touching him and invading his personal space, I wonder if Bill made a connection.