A fall from grace can be rapid, but it can still sting hard when you've put so much faith in comic creators and they turn out to be terrible dickheads.
It's always just a bit shattering when somebody whose work has spoken to you on some really fundamental levels is revealed to be just another arsehole. You have to bite back the urge to instantly jump to their defense, whole also holding off on any rush to judgement until the real facts come in (many, many people can't help leaping straight in on either side).
I was never a Harry Potter kid, but if that was my foundational reading experience, I'm sure I would be gutted when the author turned into a rabidly transphobic fuckstick. But I do have my own struggles, and I feel them every time I walk past the bookshelf and see my Sandman comics still sitting there, or find my Authority issues lurking beneath a pile of innocent Hellblazer issues.
I still have a lot of comics written by Warren Ellis, even when it was made obvious that his facade of being a monstrous tyrant hid the real truth that he was actually a monstrous tyrant. While I do agree with the disdain for his recent attempts to salvage a career without really making the proper moral reparations, I also still think Supreme Blue Rose was one of the best superhero comics of the 21st century, and that the kicker on the last page of Ministry of Space is still sublime, especially in the clear light of Chris Weston's artwork.
It was easy enough to shed the lesser Ellis works - I was never really a Transmetropolitan guy, and the comics he did for Avatar were incredibly disposable. But I held onto a handful, even with all the facts about the author's behaviour became clear, because they are still fucking good comics. Planetary does have something to say about the way 20th centuries icons have been perverted in a new millennia, and those first Authority pack a real punch.
When Ellis' grievous misdoings were publicised, there was a comic critic who I greatly admire who made a point that they were ditching all their Ellis comics - like, not even selling them, just chucking them in the recycling - and I felt genuinely bad that I couldn't match that kind of moral certitude and then the other week they posted a picture of one of their bookcases online and there was a big old fuck-off Planetary edition still sitting there.
I know he's just keeping it for the Cassady art, we're all keeping it for the Cassady art. But we share that moral taint, no matter how performatively clean some hands may be.
I tell myself I'm keeping a lot of Neil Gaiman's work for the art, but it's more than that - Dave McKean's work on his graphic novels he did with Gaiman changed my whole idea of how comics could work, and still sing with enormous ambition. Signal To Noise blew my little teenage brain and Mr Punch came out the same month I left home into my first dingy flat. These things still matter to me.
The light touch and heavy themes of Sandman spoke to me like few other comics of its era, and Miracleman at its best felt like another step up from that. His Mircaleman story remains, as ever, painfully unfinished, and hell, maybe it should just sit there. Maybe Buckingham will do it, he was given a full co-writer credit in the comics that wasn't really explained - if Bucky just did it all, is it all right? He'll presumably still be following the long-term plot, and ending on that fucking beach at the end of the world, is that still okay?
And what if these dudes do come back with a new attitude, with fulsome apologies, and actually try to make it right? And what about the artists in this situation, who put years of their lives into their artwork? Are they being punished for something they had nothing to do with, and were likely totally unaware of? What's all about?
I don't know. I really don't know.
So many questions and I don't know any of the answers, but I'm trying, man. I'm trying. There's so many other good writers and artists who aren't total shitbuckets out there - thank god for the general nicecess of, says, Los Bros Hernandez, that I can move on from my problematic faves without much of a backwards glance, but there's a glance, all the same.
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