Here’s an interview with Tom King on the awful leftist Salon, where they talk about making art in the era of Trump’s “absurdity”. First:

Is all art autobiographical?

Writing is so bizarre. I’m sure it’s different for every single person. For me, when I first started trying to write I was in my early 20s. I started writing vaguely, but I was obviously the main character. It was terrible. I realized my thoughts were incredibly boring to me because I was thinking them all the time. It was a repeating record. So putting it down on paper seemed very boring to me.

I started to be an interesting writer when I got away from my own thoughts. I started writing characters who weren’t me. Eventually you start to realize that as far away as you got from yourself, you were just writing about yourself the whole time. You were just disguising it. It doesn’t matter what I write, I try as hard as I can to get away from myself and then it ends up being about something inside me all along.

But that’s why I write. No matter how much you philosophize about it, you won’t get at the truth. And the only way to get there is through literature, poetry, music or other types of art that go beyond the language we use to balance ourselves in this reality.

So when you’re writing, you’re trying to create something that you can’t just express and get that out through a story. Eventually you try to make a connection between yourself and someone reading your work.

The more I read about King, the more full of himself he sounds, and doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing or where he’s going with the stories he’s written, whether it’s Heroes in Crisis or Mr. Miracle. What he told here is practically why the audience has come to find his work so awful. He exploits the creations and even writings of past writers far better than him to advance his downbeat, alienating viewpoints, all at the expense of the characters by getting rid of heroes like Wally West and Roy Harper for no good reason. And shows no shame or regrets about doing it.

Now, here’s where he brings up the POTUS:

What type of art do you think will be produced by Donald Trump’s presidency and this moment of trouble and tumult? How do we write something that’s transcendent in such horrible times?

I live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I walk my dog around the Capitol everyday. Trump’s inauguration was taking place and there were a bunch of porta-potties. The company that owned them was named “Don’s Johns.” I’m walking my dog by these toilets and someone had come by and crossed out the “Don’s.”

Apparently Trump had decided he did not want the bathrooms called “Don’s Johns.” It’s was the literal censorship of a porta-potty. I’m walking around this inauguration and I was thinking to myself, how are we going to write about this time? How are we going to make art about this absurdity we’re running into? And not just absurdity, but dangerous absurdity? This moment with Trump is like “Waiting for Godot” with guns.

There are two ways to do that. I think the first would be just to be open about it. To write about all the politics of this moment and the stupidity of it all. But somehow that just comes across as too obvious.

The second thought is just to write about the anxiety of this Trump moment. It seems like everyone is a little crazy, everyone’s a little on edge. Watching how Twitter and your family has transformed and there is so much anger in the air and so much tension in all of us now. That is what I wanted to write about with “Mister Miracle.”

I have a platform, I have illustrator Mitch Gerads, and the two of us can get together and write a story about this time. Not about the politics but about this fucking crazy moment.

Now this is bizarre. How does he know it was anybody even remotely associated with Trump crossed out the Don’s part on the johns? This sounds like a cheap shot at Trump for the sake of it. And this is why he and Gerads decided to do the needless book starring Kirby’s Bronze Age creation Scott Free? Oh, geez. All that aside, who is he to complain of censorship when even DC’s not innocent of it themselves, any more than Marvel’s been of recent, and for all the wrong reasons?

Where did your “Mister Miracle” come from? Was it an epiphany or instead an idea and a story that you had been thinking about for some time?

I had one of those nervous breakdowns, like in the TV show “The Sopranos,” where you end up in the hospital and you ask the doctor if you were dying or crazy and you hope he says “crazy.” For me it was the crazy, thank God, but then you still have to live with that forever as your life. I wanted to put that into Mister Miracle. He is the perfect character for it. I had already been assigned him. Here’s the guy who’s always trying to escape but can’t. That’s exactly what it feels like. That’s what it feels like to have a panic attack. I had to run away but I can’t run away.

How do we as a country and a people — and as individuals — escape Trump and his allies’ assault on reality?

Mister Miracle is about him being stuck in this horrible reality and can he get out of it or not? We can’t get out. We have to find our way to live with it and find a way to make it better.

Unfortunately, King’s not making anything better by exploiting other peoples’ creations for the sake of his muddled agendas. For somebody who fought in Afghanistan in the early 2000s in the US army, he sure doesn’t seem to want to make things better following that. Otherwise, why would he attack Trump and declare him the villain, rather than any and all liberals who go out of their way to make this world a miserable place in real life? And why would he terminate any and all of the superheroes he did in the pages of Heroes in Crisis?

In writing Batman, how do you inhabit that character?

The biggest and best problem with Batman is that Frank Miller wrote him already. In many ways you are always dealing with the ghosts of his “Batman: Year One” and “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.” With Mister Miracle or Vision I have a shot. And you’re never going to do a Joker better than Heath Ledger. It is never going to happen. That is the first challenge. “Batman” was hard for me. If you look back at my first six issues you see me struggling to find my voice. I hadn’t yet found a central conflict that I could relate to. But then there is this battle between this vow Batman made to stop crime and how he is madly in love with Catwoman who is also madly in love with him. Those two things clash and come apart. Once I figured that emotional dimension out, I understood who Batman was.

It sounds more like he’s jealous that Miller, for all his faults, at least wrote Batman better than he did. Besides, why does a “conflict” matter so much, instead of entertainment value? If that’s not what he’s in this business for, of course he couldn’t find a “voice” to convey. Story merit must precede all politics and other agendas, and he failed to accomplish that.

Next up, we have Chris Evans, who’s played Captain America in the solo films and in the Avengers films, who gave a politically charged interview to the Hollywood Reporter:

Ahead of ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ the progressive Captain America actor and Twitter firebrand says he’s ready to retire his Marvel hero for directing gigs, a new Apple show and the fight against the “dumb s—” president: “I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up.”

As he goes on to make clear, he may not be disappointed if he ends up angering as many Marvel moviegoers as Brie Larson did with her own political rhetoric.

When he’s not working or camping by himself, you can find Evans camped out on Twitter. He is extremely online in a way that actors who headline ultra-mainstream movie franchises tend not to be; on any given day, you can find @ChrisEvans quoting Idiocracy to mock President Trump’s McDonald’s buffet for the Clemson Tigers, signal-boosting tweets about gay purges in Chechnya, or addressing Sen. Lindsey Graham as “Smithers.”

He worries about doing too much of this sort of thing, about it seeming performative or becoming white noise — Chris Evans, back on his bullshit. He does not worry about saying something online that might inspire MAGA-minded fans to microwave their Captain America action figures. And for what it’s worth, he says, “Marvel has never said anything. On the contrary — when I bump into Kevin Feige the first thing out of his mouth is ‘Man, I love what you’re doing [on Twitter].'”

“I don’t see it as trash-talking,” says Feige, Marvel’s president. “I see it as very astute, very honorable, very noble, very Cap-like. Commentary and questioning. I’ve said to him, ‘You’re merging! You and the character are merging!'”

[…] “You don’t want to alienate half your audience,” says Evans.“But I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up. Especially for fear of some monetary repercussion or career damage — that just feels really gross to me.”

His willingness to call bullshit on anyone abetting the disintegration of our republic extends to his home state’s favorite sons. When we talk, Tom Brady is two days away from leading the New England Patriots to a sixth Super Bowl win; when I ask if the chance to play Brady in a biopic would bring him out of non-retirement retirement, he looks grim.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I really hope he’s not a Trump supporter. I’m just hoping he’s one of those guys that maybe supported him and now regrets it. Maybe he thought it was going to be different — and even that bothers me — but maybe there’s a chance now he just thinks Trump’s an absolute dumb shit, which he is. If he doesn’t, if he’s still on that Trump train, I might have to cut ties. It’s really tough.”

Wow. So he’s willing to end a friendship over politics, doesn’t care what the audience will think of the Marvel franchise any more than Samuel Jackson, and worse, producer Feige backs him up. Very disappointing indeed. It’s also eyebrow-raising how Feige himself is becoming more noticeably political in a sense, to the point where he’s exploiting Captain America as a creation for the sake of his own politics, and surely using the undeniable fact that Cap’s past stories did involve politics in some way or other as the excuse. Except that most Cap stories up to the turn of the century weren’t anywhere near as blatant as they’ve become since the time it went under the Marvel Knights imprint and became a total disaster after blame-America propaganda was injected. Those kind of monstrosities are exactly what destroyed the Star-Spangled Avenger in the long run.

Maybe the most bizarre oxymoron in all this is what such a leftist is willing to do when he speaks of conservatives, as seen above with Lindsay Graham:

For all the star’s woke posturing, he isn’t afraid to engage in a little homophobia to target his political rivals.

In January, he happily slandered Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) by insinuating he was being blackmailed, following the lead of other Hollywood stars and media figures who mocked Graham over rumors that he is a closeted gay man.

Hey Smithers, remember when you said this:
‘You know how you make America great again, tell Donald Trump to go to hell.’
What do they have on you? I can’t tell if this shameful 180 is born of fear or thirst. Either way, we will always remember you as nothing more than remora. https://t.co/2eZ2Zxqpkv

— Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) January 13, 2019

Isn’t that bewildering how the same people who complain about homophobia have no issues doing it themselves when they’re attacking conservatives? Well then they can’t be surprised when they ultimately fail to eliminate the alleged problem altogether.

It’ll remain to be seen what becomes of the Marvel movie franchise in the future as the leftism of these fools becomes more apparent. It is possible the box office intake will decline stateside, making them more dependent than ever on overseas grosses. Some people are getting increasingly fed up with how these actors and producers garble on and on about politics, and someday, it will finally have a negative effect on the moneymaking.

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Originally posted at the Four Color Media Monitor
Follow @AviGreen1 on Twitter