Bill Maher Continues Attacks On Comics and Stan Lee, Doesn’t Bother to Check His Facts
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Bill Maher doubled-down on his criticism of Stan Lee and his life’s work as childish things meant to be discarded. It’s likely it was done to inspire another round of articles and responses, like this one. Most of the segment just saw him quoting his critics and calling them fat nerds who don’t get laid. Not found in this editorial, unlike the few that make decent arguments, is any kind of real argument. He thinks comics are for kids and fuck you if you think otherwise. He does make one attempt to cite some kind of evidence to support his claim, but it’s just factually incorrect. He also doesn’t realize that rather than kids’ stuff, comic books are the best thing on the market to compete with the thing he hates most: religion.
In the segment (video embedded below), Maher reads the response to his original comments from Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment. In the polite missive, the writers point out that Maher did, in fact, insult Stan Lee. They also make the case that comic books are literature. Then they wrote:
“…[Y]ou have a right to your opinion that comics are childish and unsophisticated. Many said the same about Dickens, Steinbeck, Melville and even Shakespeare.”
Maher’s response to this was to mock them for being so hilariously wrong, which they would know if they “ever read a book without pictures.” Of course, Maher is the one who couldn’t be more wrong. Melville faced heavy criticism throughout his career. His contemporary critics called his work “hodgepodge,” “monstrous,” “bizarre,” “fanciful,” and all other era-appropriate terms for both “childish” and “unsophisticated.” Dickens also faced such criticisms. Some of his peers, like Thackeray, loved his work. Many others hated it. They suggested his themes were simplistic, his style was clunky, and that he was a sellout. Shakespeare also caught some of this heat from his fellows and even after. He wasn’t even really appreciated until about the 17th Century. (There’s also a fringe collection of academics who think Shakespeare didn’t write his plays.) He caught flak both from his contemporaries, like Robert Green, and from objectively great writers throughout the subsequent centuries.
