Ben Sternbach sends me an awful lot of questions and this morning, I decided to respond to this one…
I'm sure you watched Bill Maher's show last night so you must have seen his New Rules rant about how comic books are infantile garbage. If you'd been a guest on that show and had thirty seconds to rebut him on air, what would you have said?
I would have said something like, "You're right that there are a lot of childish, stupid comic books out there. There are also a lot of childish, stupid stand-up comedians and even some childish, stupid TV shows where people sit around discussing politics. I wouldn't judge everything in a form of communication by its worst examples.
"As for your point about how people should outgrow that kind of thing, I kinda feel that way about smoking pot but since I've never smoked pot, I'm not really in the ideal position to judge those who do. Since you proudly have not seen the best of what's being done in comic books, maybe you don't understand what people get out of them."
And then I'd pretty much forget about his comments. People say lots of things on television which strike me as wrong or simply uninformed. If you get upset about every one of them, you'll be upset a lot over things that you can't do anything about…and which don't have any impact on the world except to get you upset.