Frank Miller cancelled by convention.

This may not seem like anything interesting to a non-comic book nerd, but bear with me. It gets interesting fast.

Comic book artist Frank Miller, whose credits include Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, was all set to appear at the Thought Bubble Yorkshire Comic Art Festival this November in England; in fact, he was listed first among the luminaries who were set to attend. But now he has been dropped and the great minds behind Thought Bubble have apologized for ever inviting him, because, you see, he has committed an unpardonable sin: fifteen years ago, he wrote something that some people have taken as negative toward the Left's favored religion, Islam.

Well now. This is familiar! I recall a multitude of similar actions taken by comic conventions and SciFi conventions over the past few years. Remember when John Ringo, Larry Correia and even Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books got cancelled?

The difference between Frank Miller and Correia, Ringo and Weisskopf, for the purposes of this discussion, is political. Miller is a New York Lefty and a Hollywood guy. Previously conventions were cancelling Conservatives like Ringo and Correia, and people like Ms. Weisskopf who did not actively espouse a particular politics but didn't vocally despise the Conservatives.

But now we are on to the next thing, cancelling those who once dared to put a foot wrong. In Miller's case he produced a comic called Holy Terror.

Miller was dropped after Zainab Akhtar, whom The Mix describes as an "award-winning cartoonist and small press publisher ShortBox founder," said that she would "no longer be attending Thought Bubble festival this November" because Miller was set to be there. Akhtar explained: "As a proud Muslim woman, I cannot in good conscience attend a festival that deems it appropriate to invite and platform Frank Miller, a person who is responsible for the propagation of abhorrent anti-Muslim hate, particularly via his work."

Ms. Akhtar goes on to label Miller as all sorts of bad, but never really offers anything concrete.

All this sounds so heinous, it is remarkable that, as The Mix notes, "Akhtar does not cite any specific instances of anti-Muslim bigotry from Miller." However, "it is assumed that she is referring to his creation of Holy Terror, a graphic novel in which an original character known as The Fixer sets out to battle Al-Qaeda."

Yes, that's right. The Fixer fights al-Qaeda, and that's "abhorrent anti-Muslim hate." When the "War on Terror" was young, we were constantly assured by the political and media elites that al-Qaeda had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Islam, and that the war against terrorism was not and must not be construed as a war against Islam or Muslims.

As usual, there is one (1) complainant. The Thought Bubble Yorkshire Comic Art Festival immediately bent over and grabbed it's collective ankles, cancelling Miller. Probably didn't want to get stabbed.

Miller has been feeding the alligator since the 1990s, by my estimation. In the 1980s he made a big impression in Marvel and then DC comics. I have to give him respect for those, they were brilliant and I bought all of them. Miller's work and pretty much the rest of the comic book universe went to shit around 1992/93, and I stopped buying them. It wasn't a subtle change, the story lines became hard Left with sex and violence taking the place of everything else. So here we are today, 2021, and Miller is being attacked for doing a sex-and-violence comic back in 2011 against Al Qaeda. Miller himself backed off Holy Terror according to wikipedia, saying it was done at a "dark time" for him.

Oops. Sorry Frank. New Rules, you know. What was "edgy" in 2011 is "PURGE HIM!!!" in 2021.