I said the Gentlemen Ghost in relation to STARMAN. I meant the Shade. GG was in the Hawkman series. Excuse please.

Mostly new character? Yep. Absolutely. Started out with the trappings of the old character and letting Gaiman write what he wanted essentially taking the character away from the core concept and subverting the history of the character to his story needs? Yep. Absolutely. Good thing. Yep. Absolutely.

Y'know, the only Moore work that actually pissed me off (besides "Killing Joke") was "Promethea". Here was an interesting idea about a character who's a "living story" (simplified definition, I know). So I started buying it because I was intrigued by the concept and because I figured the story possibilities were endless.

But what did it morph into by the end of the series? A dense, tedious tour of the Kaballah (or whatever), because that's what Alan's into this year. Self indulgent in the extreme and a major disappointment, but most of all~  a cheat. Thanks anyway, but a comic book shouldn't be something I find myself plowing through because I want to like it.

(And now, back to burning my post-Beatles Beatles album...)

"We did have to face the idea of Sandy being a powered(powedered) hero though."

Didn't have a real problem with it. You can either have Sandy become the "Golden Age" Sandman with a gas gun and some hand t- hand skills, and be largely ineffective against other super-powered individuals (and since he isn't BATMAN, he can't kick the collective ass of the JLA all by himself, sans super-powers, as every writer likes to envision), he needed something to prevent his becoming a "cheerleader". I mean, it's not too original to make him literally a SAND man, but what the hell. It's not like somebody decided to hand Speedy super powers after Ollie Queen "died", something along the line of being able to shoot bone arrows out of his crotch. I mean, THAT would be ridiculous.

Chad I never said Moore was the antichrist and also didn't accuse him of being the beginning of douchebaggery in the comics industry.

So why even bother pretending that I somehow did? I have been very clear in my posts of what I hold him responsible for and have already dealt with this "point" you are trying to "reinsert" in apologetics for Mr. Moore in my responses to Dave.

I think the rest of your observations about flawed American culture, a necessity for change being inherent expressed in negative discussions of it, and such are less that persuasive. Sure there is aping in comics like in literature. Sure there are artistic movements. Sure it can be bad or good. So what? How is this a defacto absolution for Mr. Moore's deconstructive approach to super heroes?

Speilberg IS somewhat to blame for having effects Blockbusters becoming almost their own genre. He deeply participated in this along with Cameron. Lucas, and Carpentor and many others. This is not to say that he is solely repsonsible nor is it to portray him as the anti-christ or any other silly hyperbolic and valueless distortion of what I've said.

Nontheless Moore IS guilty of messing some crap up.(as Spielberg is).

That's all I've said and I've supported it well enough that I now think that you are more interested of blunting ANY criticism of Moore's deconstructive super hero work than you are in saving him from being unfairly labeled a one man down fall of comics.(which was never my claim). I merely said that he played a role in that downfall. Apparently even THIS is to be portrayed as a controversial point even though it is self evident.

I never said that Moore was solely responsible for the downfall of super hero comics. Yet you and Dave keep repeating, as though it is the topic of discussion, that Moore isn't soley responsible.I say well buh but he does have some responsibility and poof! We are right back to "Moore isn't soley responsible" again. Then what follows is an effort to somehow parley THAT small victory(which I even agree with) into him having NO responsibility for it whatsoever. He pioneered a massive genre change that followed his model but it isn't in any way even partially his fault! Not at all! Not even what he did is his fault! Then when I confront this version of events to show that he does have some responsibility(partial) I am once again told that he is not solely responsible as though I had previously suggested that he was soley responsible.

Dave even took it to the length of suggesting that there hasn't even BEEN a downfall or any damage or harm after ealier stipulating that there HAD been damage by comparing super hero comics to a local arson and then suggesting that happy positive super hero comics are still "abundant".

The theme here seems to be that anyone who criticizes Moore's role in formulating the current balance of super hero comics MUST believe that he is somehow soley responsible and must be unfairly singling him out. Even if the person discusses other things such as the fans and editorial and imitators and does not try to claim that Moore is totally responsible it doesn't matter. The actual content of the ciriticism is unimportant.

The whole thing must be immediately snapped back to the absolutist "Moore is fully and totally responsible" red herring and indeed ANY responsibility must be reflexively denied and attributed SOLELY to Moore's imitators or even a pervasive market environment than enabled them. Moore must NOT be touched or implicated!

Mostly new character? Yep. Absolutely. Started out with the trappings of the old character and letting Gaiman write what he wanted essentially taking the character away from the core concept and subverting the history of the character to his story needs? Yep. Absolutely. Good thing. Yep. Absolutely.

Original character(Dodds) left alone to be used by others and not awkwardly transformed into new character? Yep. See the difference? The change was non-consumptive. It had no real cost to the Sandman legacy.

I'm not arguing against change. I'm arguing against a certain species of it. A careless and destructive subset of it.

From an interview with the "Onion", OCT 2001

O: Is it true that you regret in some ways the effect that Watchmen had on the comics industry?

AM: To a degree. That is partly because there seems to be a kind of allure that is... Perhaps it happens in any medium, where anything of any kind of great proportion, no matter how good it is, will have an adverse effect upon the medium itself. I think that what a lot of people saw when they read Watchmen was a high degree of violence, a bleaker and more pessimistic political perspective, perhaps a bit more sex, more swearing. And to some degree there has been, in the 15 years since Watchmen, an awful lot of the comics field devoted to these very grim, pessimistic, nasty, violent stories which kind of use Watchmen to validate what are, in effect, often just some very nasty stories that don't have a lot to recommend them. And some of them are very pretentious, where they'll try and grab some sort of intellectual gloss for what they're doing by referring to a few song titles, or the odd book. They'll name-drop William Burroughs here or there. Just like MAD comics, which was a unique standalone thing, it's almost become a genre. The gritty, deconstructivist postmodern superhero comic, as exemplified by Watchmen, also became a genre. It was never meant to. It was meant to be one work on its own. I think, to that degree, it may have had a deleterious effect upon the medium since then. I'd have liked to have seen more people trying to do something that was as technically complex as Watchmen, or as ambitious, but which wasn't strumming the same chords that Watchmen had strummed so repetitively. This is not to say that the entire industry became like this, but at least a big enough chunk of it did that it is a noticeable thing. The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn't say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it's probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the '80s. This is a different century.

Yeah Chad. That's one of the interviews I was referring to when I mentioned that Moore himself acknowledeges and regret his influence somewhat earlier in the discussion when I was talking to Dave. I'm quite aware of it.

I'm growing to love Moore more by the second. And I still love my Kirby, Colan, Buscema, 1970s comics, "Silver Age", Infantino Flash, EC Comics, Goon, ect. Doesn't affect me one BIT that Moore is a long-haired Wicca freak, or that I think he's completely got his head up his ass about the V FOR VENDETTA movie. I also acknowledge he's a hell of lot smarter and more talented, even if that talent is slanted. He's still correct in his assessment of his impact, he accepts the responsibility. Sounds like a stand-up guy to me. The only way he could feel worse is if he'd given birth to his clones straight out of his colon.

How much you like Moore doesn't seem to have been the issue we were talking about nor is a testimonial on whether he's a stand up guy or not particularly relevant to his influence on comics. Neither is dramatic denial of a non existent speculation regarding his status as a comic book anti-christ.

Where is this stuff even coming from? What exactly is it designed to do here?

I mean HE even accepts some responsibility and acknowledges having harmed the super hero comic market and yet a  litttle while ago you were assuring me that he had no responsibilty and Dave was saying that there had been no harm.

???