Forum Overview :: Garth Ennis's The Punisher :: Seeing the forest for the trees

[quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"][quote name="Bananadine"]I guess so, if the context is comics? But I think words would be a better alternative than superhero imagery, here--maybe like a few about what happened with that enormous plague. You know, the greatest event in human history--the one whose first two months this comic skips over so as to make room for some pictures of a guy trying to unlock things. Also the part where the President of the US learns that there is still a man alive and humanity might not end after all, and thereafter acts a little bit surprised. A description of that part would be nice! Maybe instead of some of those pictures of a guy hanging upside-down.[/quote] It really sounds like you were expecting a different story than the one that was told. From my viewpoint, Y isn't about the Earth in the aftermath of mass male extinction as much as it is about Yorick's maturation, and to a lesser extent, what it means to become a man in a world where the role of women in every level of human society has changed so dramatically so quickly. The plague provides a backdrop, but it's not the point of the story any more than the cause of the apocalyptic event is the point of <i>The Road</i>, or the exact judicial and legislative policies that led to rampant crime in Gotham City are the point of any given Batman story. Vaughn was conscious of the reader's interest in the background of the plague and intentionally provided a variety of explanations for what happened without settling on a definitive choice. There's nothing wrong with being unhappy with the fact that the story you got wasn't the story you felt you were promised, and there's nothing wrong with disliking Y on its own merits, but from your complaints here it really sounds like you expected a book that would more closely examine the various societal effects of the sudden death of every male on Earth. In the same vein, I realized after reading the latest issue of Crossed that it's not a zombie/Reaver book at all. At its heart, Crossed is a recontextualized road trip story: the journey is the destination, as they say. Crossed is about a group of people on a external physical journey that parallels their internal spiritual journey, unlike Walking Dead which really is a long-form zombie survival horror story or Marvel Zombies, which is just pure pulp what-if. The Crossed are nothing more than a story hook; functionally identical to zombies or aliens. Hell, make the survivors escaped convicts and the Crossed cops, and the same basic framework survives intact. Arguments that Ennis's depictions of that internal journey are hackneyed and predictable are certainly appropriate, but again, Crossed is a specific type of story being told using the props and sets of a completely different type of story. FABIO: a repeated complaint I see in your never-ending hatred of popular culture is "[people] doing dumb things." I don't really understand this, because as I'm sure you've noticed, people act against their own best interests on every conceivable level on a constant basis. I understand distaste and irritation for people acting in a way that no sane human being ever would (your "bad horror film" analogy), but you psh and dismiss actions that I find if not likely, at least plausible. It is here that I ask you two questions: firstly, what are you drawing upon for your frame of reference when it comes to believable human behavior? Because I'm stumped, to be honest. Either you possess an astonishing lack of in-depth experience with real live human beings -- something I find highly unlikely, seeing as how you live in NYC -- or you completely lack the ability to suspend the tiniest iota of disbelief in the name of artistic license and simplification. Secondly, what popular culture do you enjoy? What movies, television shows, music, etc do you think are good? I'm genuinely curious. From your posts, you don't seem like the type of <strike>hipster</strike> person who just hates anything and everything simply for the sake of hating. So you have to like something that's relatively popular, right? I'm really interested in what that might be.[/quote]