It always bugs me when I see people shamelessly supporting and defending a favorite creator, actor, or other celebrated personality no matter what they do. For example, if an author writes an excellent book, does that mean that all of his or her other books or works are automatically good, as well? Of course not, yet far too many people subscribe to this dangerous belief. (This blind devotion completely explains the popularity of Joss Whedon.)

This is not to be confused with being excited for future projects by a favorite creator; the difference is recognizing loss of quality when it applies. No creator has a perfect track record; everybody’s human, after all.

I’m a fan of writer J. Michael Straczynski, especially his work on Babylon 5 and Rising Stars, so I was eager to check out his take on Spider-Man in the early 2000s. Well, it started out good…but then it went straight into the shitter. Some JMS fans still praised it as the best thing to the happen to the book; I wonder what was going through their heads, because diehard Spidey fans certainly didn’t agree.

Furthering the comic book example, let’s look at novelist Charlie Huston. He’s written quite a few popular novels; I read one of them (Already Dead), and while I didn’t find it to be awful, I didn’t find it to be great, either. It was just an average urban vampire novel. (And we know how that whole genre has been beaten to death.) Like many other comic book readers, however, I first discovered his work through the relaunch of Moon Knight a few years back. Well, Huston’s novels may be decent…but his comic book work was atrocious. The Moon Knight relaunch read like a crappy Grand Theft Auto clone, focusing on excessive violence and shock value rather than character development or adherence to the source material. Yet, fans of his Moon Knight work automatically praised his novels, and vice versa!

This kind of fanboy loyalism just doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re not bound by law to automatically defend your favorite properties, nor are you required to like the entire breadth of a creator’s work. If they go sour, so what? You gotta take the good with the bad. It happens to everyone and everything. Just ask any Star Wars fan.

Jeez, I even see people defending things they haven’t even seen yet!