I can usually accept Lucius T. Shepard’s opinions, because I think they’re often considered and well thought out, but I don’t think there’s any possibility that I could ever agree with him on anything. From his pretty negative take on Watchmen:
Despite the insistence made by some that pop culture be taken seriously as high art, =Watchmen= remains a superhero comic (if it were something else, it would not serve its author’s purpose), and as such its vision of history and its take on human relationships are adolescent and simplistic, and its profundities are merely quasi-profound; its themes, variously interpreted as everything from political satire to the death of the hero, are essentially a juvenile nihilism embroidered with masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas. It seems the work of an precocious sophomore whose reading of philosophy ended with Nietzsche and whose literary obsessions (Jack Kirby, Raymond Chandler, and so on) have produced an absurdly pretentious style of noir, a style that has since proliferated and that I’ve come to call the It’s-Always-Raining-Where-I’m-Drinking (high) school of creativity, usually defined by rundown urban settings rife with graffiti and rainy streets awash with obsessed loners and women in tight and/or revealing clothing. Labeling it one of the great novels of our era doesn’t change the fact that you could probably make a list of a hundred better novels written by authors whose surnames start with the letter Z. It’s a seminal work in the comic book field, a genre-expanding work, but the genre it expands, superhero comics, targets a demographic composed mainly of adolescents and adults clinging to their adolescence (I make no implicit judgment here—I’m clinging like all get-out to mine), a vast percentage of whom are prevented by an R rating from seeing the movie.
Which is just so arrogantly dismissive that it pisses me off. It doesn’t matter if you think Watchmen was a great or terrible movie; Shepard is saying that it can’t be great, because it’s based on a comic, and those things — as anybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell you — are by their nature shallow and immature.
It’s not that Shepard levels these charges against Zach Snyder’s movie, or against Alan Moore’s book. Nobody says that he, or anybody else, has to like either of them, or that they should escape all criticism. It’s that he comes in with all sorts of assumptions and prejudices and applies them across the board.
I’m reminded again why, although I can accept Shepard’s opinions, I tend to avoid reading them. And why, although I don’t always agree with her opinions, I think Abigail Nussbaum was completely right about the man.