Hair shirts----->

True. And as, by the point of the thread when I posted that message the chat had broadened out to comics in a more generalised context I don't think it was an unfair point for me to make.

But to adress your second point briefly I don't think Moore should be blamed because other people copied what he did. If at the next comic convention all the creators had beards you could paint green and pretend they were bushes that wouldn't actually be his faulr would it? Because other people with lesser skills tried to copy him and fail doesn't make hos work any less valid in my eyes. I've seen a hundred local artists trying to use L.S.Lowrys styles and imagry and failed miserably. Doesn't make his work any less valid.

Well David your eyes and the validity of Moore's work are yours to value as you see fit. I hate to see More doing what he typically does to super heroes especially in light of what it turned out to be the vanguard of. I talk about it. That's not going to change.

I don't blame Moore for all of it so much as I recognize that he is a big part of what's happened to super hero comics and is the most often trotted out justification for it. In fact he's more or less become the patron saint of it.

I remeber when people talked about Moore's swampthign bringing respectability to comics. And years later...it hasn't happened. Now comics are just as marginal to the mainstream as they ever were except the audience keeps aging and shrinking and demanding that their comics trend towards being more and more crass, smutty, bleak, intense, cinematic, padded, late, and brutal.

The only monkey wrench in that universe is Bob Kane's Batman.  He probably would have ran out of stuff to swipe.  Hey, something just occured to me.  Bob Kane is the golden age Liefeld!  OK, that was mean, I'm sorry.  Sorta.......

Endless repeats of unfunny Peanuts strips in the newspaper, Trevor.

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Not going after you in any way, John (I love Peanuts to the point where I have no objectivity at all), but I'll take the endless, unfunny {sez you... :-)} repeats of a classic strip over the endless, unfunny new strips (at least 99.9%) that currently populate the daily comics page.There are notable exceptions, of course, but IMO the vast majority of modern strips are being created by people who haven't the vaguest idea of what makes people laugh.

IMO.