>>151184717
>>151184741
Holy Terror is great even if you think the art is rough because it's created in a mad rush of pure energy, anger, and fear. Every haggard line, every scratch in the ink from razor blades(a dying technique), its all made out of the very visceral hate and anguish Frank Miller had in the wake of 9-11. A page like this where he draws a large crowd of different faces, the kind of people he would have seen in NYC every day, and thinking of how instantly their lives would be snuffed out. These feel like real people, they aren't cookie cutter and have their own quirks, some look ugly, some weird, some bland-the horror comes from how they were wiped out. Countless individuals- Miller is considering the weight of all these people with their own lives just snuffed out and becoming this statistic. Gone in moments. As he's said, he "breathed in" the ashes of these people. That's such a visceral, repulsive concept, and Miller is using the comic as a way to deal with what he saw that day and the feelings it ignited. .
the Batman comic is nothing like that.The enemies exist as an abstract concept. DWJ hates white supremacists conceptually, but he's never been in a situation where he's personally seen them act in such a way to truly make him fucking pissed. The victims they torment are abstract ideas, the most basic sort of stereotypical victims with big eyes and sad faces. The enemies are even more abstract ideas- not that Miller is attempting much nuance with his terrorist enemies, but at least he understands they have devotion to a greater idea. The white nationalists in the annual are evil for the sake of being an enemy. They are incidental to the greater story about moralizing Batman's brutalness- which makes it even more tone deaf to attempt to take on a subject and do little with it.
