Surprising no one, comics creators didn’t agree with Bill Maher when he said Trump was their fault. The Real Time host wrote in a blog post that adult comic book fans are stupid babies who are dumb to mourn the passing of Stan Lee. “[T]wenty years or so ago, something happened — adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff,” he wrote. “And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature.” Maher went on to explain somehow this reappraisal of comics as real literature (hardly an exclusively American phenomenon) led to a dumbing-down of America that led to the election of Donald Trump. And that’s terrible.
There is a valid conversation to be had about toxic and entitled comics fans, and how their online bullying mirrors that of the alt-right. But Maher’s post ain’t it. Comics creators and fans have been on Twitter all day giving Maher a talking-to, or as Iron Man once said, some solid dick. Black Bolt’s Saladin Ahmed pointed out that Maher has been spewing terrible islamophobic takes for decades. Birds of Prey and Batgirl legend Gail Simone pointed out that making someone else’s death all about him is the most Maher-like move one can make. But Neil Gaiman’s take is straight out of the Savage Land: “More people cared about Stan Lee’s death than care about Bill Maher alive.”
