Holy Terror, Part 1 - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara celebrates his 300th episode by looking at Frank Miller's Holy Terror!

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Originally uploaded June 30th, 2014.

ORIGINAL INFO: The 300th episode is here! What is so horrible to deserve the spot? Well, it’s Miller Time…

RUMINATIONS: And so begins the 300th episode spectacular! I had originally thought that Holy Terror would be a regular episode that I’d do some time after I finished All-Star Batman and Robin, but the more reviews I read and just how much I skimmed through it, I realized this was going to be something that needed to be big.

The reaction, for the most part, has been pretty civil, as I had hoped at the beginning. There are still people arguing in the comments every now and then about religion in general being wrong or that Islam is evil or crap like that, but it’s usually pretty isolated incidents and even then they’re not shouting racial slurs or the like. My parents are the kinds of people who would probably rather I not review the book, not because they liked it, but rather they think I don’t know what I’m talking about. And I of course am the first to admit that I only did the bare minimum of research necessary for this book… but then again, that’s also more effort than Frank Miller put into it. We live in an age where it’s so easy to look this stuff up… but Frank is the kind of person who doesn’t WANT to research it. He’s already made up his mind about it and would prefer to embrace his ignorance and hatred.

One thing I really liked about this one is how long the intro goes for. Some people would just want me to get to the comic and get it over with, but there’s soooo much history for something like that I love to dive deep into it if I have something interesting to share with people. One of SF Debris’ best qualities in his videos is putting forth background information about what went into things – process stories that explain creative choices and I love learning about something like that. As I said in the movie, I love learning about how creators came to the decisions they did – why one thing instead of another. Holy Terror’s history as a Batman book is fascinating to me. And as I said, I was actually in favor of a book like this… as long as it was made in a certain way. At the time of this writing, I recently released a retrospective on the first Blue Beetle. There’s a story where he goes to Germany during World War II and spots Hitler literally transforming into the devil. THAT is the kind of propaganda we want to see – something so utterly ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. We don’t need propaganda that paints exchange students as potential terrorists – that’s just breeding bigotry. We need something like how I described in the video – terrorists defeated by Hostess Fruit Pies and a movie called “They Saved Osama Bin Laden’s Brain!” We need goofiness, not hatred. In some respects, it’s the way political cartoons work – make the subject into something of laughable ridicule.