Knut wrote: And now you're ragging on Baker and Chaykin worse than we've been criticizing Bosch's views. What?  Because you agree with him? Fine.

QUOTE: And how am I misrepresenting his project? The superhero one of the brothers writes about runs around fighting moslem terrorists in a suit made of pigskin. How is that not accurate? As for the amazing subtlety of the story of the two brothers? I'm thinking probably Steve Ditko's Hawk and Dove with a pro/anti Islam stance and guess who wins? That's based on what I've seen and what he's written.

Knut, you summed up the project as being about nothing more than some cat putting on a costume.  Clearly, you were in error, as the premise I quoted from Bosch's site is not the simple, straightforward summation you tried to foist to support your argument for a lack of subtlety.  Look, why not just fucking admit that you did a disservice to the cat when you tried to simplify his project to buttress your own attacks on that project?

"Clearly, you were in error, as the premise I quoted from Bosch's site is not the simple, straightforward summation you tried to foist to support your argument for a lack of subtlety.  Look, why not just fucking admit that you did a disservice to the cat when you tried to simplify his project to buttress your own attacks on that project?"

In error? Because I only referred to a portion of it? Was the portion that I referred to wrong? A disservice? Because I didn't refer to his project  in detail? We were discussing war comics. the war comics portion of his project is Pigman. We were all discussing his views in the context of Pigman. Were you even paying attention?

And why would I need to buttress any "attack" on his project? We were criticizing his simplistic political views and suggesting that they might make for a bad story and bad comics. A political disagreement.  It's not like we're laying in wait ready to beat his comic to a pulp with baseball bats.

"Why don't we see more characters espousing Bosch's viewpoint?"

To be honest? I don't see any Marvel or DC Superheroes with low enough standards to espouse it. Not as he has presented his viewpoints here. Hell, you'd have problems getting villains that crude. Even if Garth Ennis scripts them.

This is not a right/left thing either. His views are cartoony and overly generalized and his Pigman is crude, unheroic and vile. Oh, I know people who share his views. People I know and work with daily. And I think they'd love his character.  But I don't.  And I would criticize a work for being simplistic and crude if it was a "leftist" comic of the same caliber. Haven't really got any good examples, though.

Well, it's certainly clear where Chaykin and Baker stand on most issues. As for the quality of their writing we'll have to continue to disagree.

I personally don't see the "other" side to where Chaykin stands as being under-represented in comics or elsewhere, but that might be because your (US) political center lies farther to the right than ours. 

My point, as I was trying to get across in early posts is that where a comic book hero like Sgt Rock could fight great comic book battles against the nazis because with perfect hindsight we see the moral clarity of stopping the Nazis, ending the Holocaust etc. In this ongoing war, which is unpopular, controversial and lacking in a consensus to any moral clarity, a comic book (i.e. Superhero) approach is difficult.

Osama Bin Laden is easy. Bad guy, let's kick his ass. But that's issue one.  

The meat and potatoes of a war comic is the soldiers vs soldiers with equipment thrown in. And that's not the war on Terror. Well, Afghanistan is still under that banner, but Iraq is something else. To a lot of people Iraq is another Viet-nam and that's not something that lends itself to jingoism or four colour adventures of superheroes.  

Just look at John Wayne's Green Beret movie (or Kubert's run on the Green Beret strip). Decent Rah! Rah! war stories damned by the unpopularity of the war.

The war on terror is about ideologies and a relatively few dedicated fanatics.  And ideological debates rarely work well in comics.

Besides, I find the idea of superheroes (big guns like Superman) a bit tacky in real war settings. Superman shows up in 1938, one of the first things he does is pick up Stalin and Hitler and throw their asses in a stockade. End of story. End of WWII. In the real world, tens of millions of real people, regular people, die heroic deaths or live heroic lives until the war ends 7 years later. Captain America is okay. He's not such a "Glory Hound" (I say that with a smile) and he doesn't cause the same kind of ripples of unreality that a Superman does.

War comics should be a place for real stories about real soldiers, and with the controversies surrounding the war the question can often be, do you show everything, warts and all,  and be accused of being too negative or anti-troops or do you show only the positive view from "your" side and be accused of whitewashing?

There is no consensus yet, as we now have about most past wars, as to what the "story" is. The Civil War was about Slavery, WWI was a mad, pointless  war triggered by fears and suspicions and rival ambitions, the war to end all wars. WWII was about stopping the Nazis' genocidal campaign for world domination, Viet-Nam was to some about the Domino effect and to some another pointless war.  After that the consensus sort of disappeared.

War stories are generally best when the war is over. It gives you the distance to reflect over what it all meant. It's also easier to tell the real stories.

And there are a lot of great examples in comics history of rich, complex stories that show the whole tapestry of war. As early as Harvey Kurtzman's work on two fisted tales (and of course the great newspaper strips, Milton Caniff's WWII stories in Terry and the Pirates especially.)

Maybe Bosch's story will defy my expectations. I won't know until it's finished. I can only share with you what my expectations are.

"You know, maybe what you're trying to say just serves to illustrate my point."

Oh. I hate it when that happens. What point is that, then?