Just a dick

At first I thought he was a complete cock, because 18 months after slagging off X-books with undisguised glee in multiple British magazines about comics, the writer was crafting bog-standard mutant mayhem in Excalibur, sucking up that Marvel money with even more relish. 

Then I thought that the cynical Stalin thing and the tough-talking, hard-drinking, chain-smoking shit was just a stupid act, and he was actually a big softie at heart, because I'd read those bits in Planetary where the next generation of Batman uses tactical compassion, or the bit where the Doc Savage dude appeals to the humanity of the Fu Manchu dude, and that seemed more truthful than the public persona.

Than, it the past year or so, it turns out he really was just a cock after all. 

I still fucking love Planetary, and the Authority and NextWave and that Supreme thing he did, and still find the traces of optimism in those works endlessly rewarding, but it's always going to be hard to separate the works from the cock who wrote them.