Unless you’re living in a cave, you just can’t avoid reports of the OccupyWallStreet (OWS) movement. It’s also inflamed two major graphic novels superstars: Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen), and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, 300, Sin City).
As recounted in The Hollywood Reporter, Miller drew first blood on his blog, sounding more like Archie Bunker than a graphic novel mastermind, calling the Occupy people nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists – an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness.
”These clowns can do nothing but harm America,” he claimed. “In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas basements and play with your Lords of Warcraft. Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape.”
In contrast, Moore joined a group known as Occupy Comics, which features comic writers and artists interested in helping rapidly growing movement.
Moore is writing a piece that will analyze the goals of Occupy alongside those of the comic business, and reportedly compares OWS to superheroes.
There will also be a series of digital comics from Occupy sometime next year, with limited print editions, as as the Reporter confirms, there are over thirty five major comic creators who have come aboard already.
So what does Moore have to say about Miller’s remarks?
“It’s about what I’d expect from him,” Moore retorted. “It’s always seemed to me that the majority of the comics field, if you had to place them politically, you’d have to say center-right… So yes I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views on all sorts of things, but certainly upon the Occupy movement.”
As a parting shot, Moore also called Miller’s work “unreconstructed misogyny,” “wildly a-historic,” and “homophobic.”
