You Are Dumb - Comics

One Glorious Error

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:39:07 -0500

Politics, 24 July 2008

Memo to Shane Suiters: YOU'RE DUMB TOO.

I have a correction to yesterday's column. In the sixteen pages of horror that make up Brent Rinehart's psychotic campaign comic book, I failed to notice one small space, on the last page, that puts the lie to the ABC News article I relied upon for certain basic factual assumptions. That section says "Art by: Shane Suiters".

Ergo, I have to admit that Rinehart did not use his own lack of drawing talent, inability to spell, and incomprehensible grasp of anatomy to painstakingly produce, over the course of two months, his work of ineffable horror. He hired it out to someone else who couldn't draw or spell. Personally, I think that makes it WORSE.

But it's good that I got it wrong, because it gives me a chance to further showcase the work of Rinehart and Suiters. It's like a scab. I can't leave it alone, even though I know I should, even though it'll just keep getting uglier. Enjoy these specially-selected examples.

	These, I shit you not, are the two ordinary Oklahoma citizens who support Mark Rinehart throughout all sixteen pages of the comic. This means one of three things. Shane Suiters watched too much Beavis and Butthead as a child while also sniffing too much glue; Brent Rinehart thinks his constituents are mutated, giant-headed freaks, or this is what Oklahomans are actually like. The latter is, I'll admit, the only one of the three that explains the continued re-election of James Inhofe.
	Ladies and gentlemen, the single most, and I say this knowing full well the implications of the superlative, the single most ridiculous portrayal of a homosexual in the entire comic. Note the traditional gay accoutrements: The short-sleeved waistcoat. The exposed navel. The elbow-length gloves, which nicely set off the sort of short Fu Manchu goatee. And, topping it all off, what is either a miniature cowboy hat or a tricorn
	This celestial messenger fulfills a vital role in the narrative of the comic book, opposing Half-Size Satan in his attempt to thwart Mark Rinehart's goals for Oklahoma and America. She's constantly giving useful advice like "Voters understand why he is attacked so much... for speaking out!" and "Hey Satan, not with Brent around you won't!". So why she is given the proportions of a Bratz doll? The world may never know.
	These are the Zombie Children. They are the demonic spawn of the Big-Haired Everyday Oklahoman Mom above, and they are almost always drawn arms outstretched, hungering for brains. Because they are Oklahoma children, they look for these brains in soccer balls, Satan's pitchfork, an enormous speech bubble, and their mother's legs, but don't take them lightly. One false move on your part and you'll join their undead legion and start voting Republican.

Now, these individual images are disturbing and hilarious, but I'd like to finish with a bit of a collage I made myself (thanks, fair use!) assembling the most unintentionally (well, mostly unintentionally) homoerotic images with the grammatically-impaired sign that ties it all together. Thanks, Brent and Shane, for letting us laugh at Oklahoma. Again.

The Rinehart Wigout Corporation

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:36:37 -0500

Politics, 23 July 2008

Memo to Brent Rinehart: YOU! ARE! DUMB!

I will admit, sometimes, chronicling the omnipresent stupidity of the human race loses its shine. There are only so many times John McCain can talk about nonexistent borders, or Debbie Schlussel can fire off her latest hate salvo against Muslims, before I start to wonder if the stupid have lost the will to truly innovate.

This is why Brent Rinehart is my new best friend. You see, Rinehart is fighting a tough reelection battle to remain an Oklahoma County commissioner. A battle made all the more difficult by his upcoming trial for allegedly breaking campaign finance laws in 2004. And that's why Rinehart spent two months making a 16-page comic book that looks for all the world like a Chick Tract whose mom was given an extra Thalidomide shot "just in case".

I shit you not. I've seen a lot of gutsy campaign moves in my time, but sixteen pages of crude drawings portraying the candidate as a fearless crusader for Christian values, not to mention a freakish, macrocephalic Airplane Man, while depicting his enemies as Satan-loving homosexuals? That's genius-level stupid. That should get him some kind of award.

Philistines and art critics have, understandably, complained that the comic is homophobic, not to mention the lengthy paranoid ravings of a madman who couldn't draw Tippy the Turtle on the back of the matchbook to save his life. But Rinehart is having none of it, and is preparing to mail all sixteen pages to his constituents. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I'm proud of it. It's a novel way to tell a story about the last three and a half years. It's informative, entertaining, and a good read." - Rinehart, who is, I must remind you, an INCUMBENT county commissioner.

And, to be fair, the comic is all those things. It's definitely informative. For years, I've thought homosexuality was inherent at birth. Thanks to Rinehart, I now know homosexuality is caused by a half-sized bat-eared Satan, who points his pitchtrident at small children. Any child that welcomes Oompa Lucifer with open arms becomes gay.

It's definitely entertaining. I was on the edge of my seat when Rinehart illustrated the conspiracy between the homosexuals, represented by a man in a trenchcoat, fedora, and blackface; and the "liberal good ol' boy politicians", represented by, um, a man in a trenchcoat, fedora, and blackface. The pitchfork, in case you were wondering, is a bit of Satanic overlap. Strict panel layouts are the tool of the homosexual agenda.

And it's a good read! Well, if by "good read" you mean "spends two pages calling gay people pedophiles, while somehow never managing to spell 'pedophiles' correctly. Or the same way twice. Which is certainly a literary achievement, though probably not the kind of thing that will get your name mentioned alongside Stan Lee, Todd McFarlane, and Rob Liefeld.

It's a work of art that, like all great art, raises many questions. Like, when Rinehart constantly refers to "liberal good ol' boys", is he talking about Bo and Luke Duke joining the Sierra Club, or does he actually mean "old boys' network"? And if he does, the possibility of a liberal old boys' network in rural Oklahoma is even more ridiculous than Rinehart's grasp of anatomy.

The whole thing reads like an eight-grade revenge notebook. Opponents are caricatured, to the extent that you can tell the difference between an honest, upstanding Oklahoma citizen and a freakish-headed monstrosity done up that way on purpose. Enemies hold signs saying "Gay Rights Now!" An allegedly brutal prison guard, nicknamed "The Gladiator", is portrayed as an eight foot tall, muscled man wearing nothing but a helmet, shield, and banana hammock. Let's not even contemplate the psychological issues THAT reveals, shall we?

So thank you, Brent Rinehart, for the strange combination of idiocy, insanity, and eclecticism that spurred you to move campaign literature into an entirely new medium. When Election Day comes, you may win. You may lose. Or you may be in jail. But you can rest assured that no matter what happens, your place in stupid political history is assured.

No Cheers Today

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:12:39 -0500

Comics, 10 April 2007

Today, I'd like to take a moment to discuss B.C. creator Johnny Hart, who passed away over the weekend. I think this may mark an important moment in this column - the first person to pass away after being "featured" in You Are Dumb.

Oh, sure, lots of dead people have appeared in these pages, but it's usually the circumstance of their deaths that causes them to appear here. Which leads to a fun fact you can share at dinner parties - it's at least one thing that John Paul II and Kenneth Pinyan have in common. Let's hope it was just that one thing.

But Johnny Hart... Johnny Hart was one of the very first targets of the column, back in the days when columns didn't even have snappy titles, just the subject up top in bold. He got in not for being a born-again, which he was, or being a dick about it, which he frequently was, but for being Old White Guy Racist and thinking it was funny.

And now he's dead. Had a stroke right before Easter. Which is strangely ironic, because for years I've had to take pains not to read B.C. right before Easter, because I know it'd give me a fucking stroke.

But that's all in the past now. Each death diminishes us, as they say. Oh, sure, thirty seconds later they're backpedaling on Hitler and Pol Pot, but still, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Each death diminishes us, and it would be unseemly to cheer Johnny Hart's death just because he produced two comic strips (Wizard of Id {shudder}) of heart-rending inanity and filled at least one of those strips with frequent exhortations about how his invisible sky daddy was the bestest invisible sky daddy of them all.

We will not cheer Johnny Hart's death. Because it would be wrong. Because it would be unseemly. And most importantly of all, because of this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Richard Newcombe, founder and president of Creators Syndicate said 'B.C.' and 'Wizard of Id' would continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of Hart’s drawings to work with, he said." - Associated Press

SWEET FUCKING ZOMBIE JESUS CAVEMEN. The comics page is like some kind of horrific feudal landscape, and the Hart family will not give up its eighteen square inches so long as one single member of the bloodline remains to cut and paste digitized Fat Broads under awful puns.

And so, what little meaning or solace we all could take from Hart's death is snatched from our grasp. Who knows? Maybe newspapers, bereft of two standards they put on their comic pages pretty much by default since the 1960s might have used that space for a couple of new strips. Maybe ones that contained jokes from either of the past two centuries. But no. The Hart family has PhotoShop, and if Newcomb's tacit admission was to be believed, have been writing most of the retarded fake dictionary entries for years anyway.

Life is fleeting. Comedy is hard. But even though Johnny Hart was wrong about the nature of the universe and the role of a deity in it, he's still managed to assure himself an afterlife. Because franchises are eternal, blessed be thy copyright.

There Are, In Fact, Stupid Questions

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:50:47 -0500

Racism, 12 September 2006

Memo to Mark Millar And Crew: YOU ARE DUMB.

Aphorism for the Information Age:

Better to assume you're a fool and Google the fuck out of it already than post to your message board and remove all doubt that you're an asshat. What it loses in poetry it gains in applicability. Especially when it comes to Mark Millar.

Mark Millar is a comic book writer. It's actually his career, he's not just a TV guy slumming between cancelled series. He's even British, which in the comics writing world usually gives you ten to fifteen bonus points. And like many comics writers before him and since, he has a message board for his fans to hang out on. And for him to hang out on. Trust me, it's all very Web Two Point Oh.

So anyway, the guy was just going about his business when he decided to discuss a recent observation, and subsequent revelation, with his many fans. ACTUAL POST TIME!

I JUST SAW A BLACK DOWN'S SYNDROME GUY, FIRST TIME EVER

OK, that's not the post. That's the thread title. If you need to put your face in your hands for a while, I understand. It's like he was finally able to check off the last item on page three of the WORST LIFE TO-DO LIST EVER. Here's what followed:

"Tweaking the dialogue on Ultimates 12 before it leaves for the printer tomorrow (38 whopping pages), but nipped out for a much-needed haircut and a break. While down at the shops, I saw a black guy with DS. Amazing, as this is something my friends and I had queried for years. Is DS genetically localized to Caucasians. Yes, I'm now about to waste 20 mins phoning a couple of my pals to say so, but now me appetite has been whet and I'm curious if there are any Chinese or Indian Downs Syndrome people out there. Given that Scotland is almost entirely white my chances of seeing one here are slim, but I'm certainly on the look out now.

Sweet merciful fuckmonkey, where to start? Let's start with "Amazing." I can understand, barely, the peculiar shock when confronted with evidence that a long-held, albeit idiotic, belief is not in fact the case. But that doesn't make the evidence "amazing". I'm sure the guy would be thrilled to find out that Scottish comic book writers find his partcular genetic cocktail fascinating, though.

Second, GOOGLE. Millar and his friends have wondered for YEARS if only Caucasians got Down's Syndrome? I'll grant that, not having given it any thought either way myself, it's a question I might not have been able to answer if put to me unexpectedly. But a half-second Google search gave me the answer, which is, obviously, NO.

And now he's "on the look out" for other ethnicities with Down's Syndrome? I didn't think it was that easy to script a few dozen pages worth of comic book a month, honestly. Between that and his message board and his haircuts, I would have thought he'd have no time to hide in the bushes of medical facilities with a telephoto lens. I'd have apparently been wrong.

Being a message board, of course, it degenerated from there. I will pause only briefly to alight on one blighted soul, defending Millar from the inevitable charges of "what the FUCK is wrong with you?" ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Seriously, what's so tasteless about this thread? Upon first reading I went "Jesus Christ, the man really has no internal filter, does he?" but then I re-read it, and what's the harm? Have we gotten to the point where even acknowledging other races by name is politically incorrect?"

Even by Internet message board standards, that's obnoxiously thick. Millar treats a black guy with Down's Syndrome like a fucking LEPRECHAUN, breathlessly telling all and sundry that he saw one and they're really for reals, and "Ricardo_C" thinks the problem is he said the word "black". Yeah. Keep telling yourself that's the offensive part.

Toon In, Turn Out, Shut Up

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 20:20:01 -0600

Main Column, 10 February 2006

Let me begin by stating the obvious. Rioting and burning shit down over an editorial cartoon is fucking dumb. Editorial cartoons are a stagnant, nearly-worthless art form so entrenched in their stylistic rut, antiquated form factor, and caricatures of elephants and donkeys that they should be ignored.

And I don't give a damn whether the Danes were going out of their way to be insulting, or if the Syrians are going out of their way to act pissed off. That's a topic best left for complete dickheads to argue about. I'm much busier with my own personal conundrum right now. Two established principles of You Are Dumb Dot Net are at loggerheads here.

The first is the Guilt By Association Principle, which states that if you are willingly affiliated with a group (nerds, Southerners, game geeks, Catholics, etc.) that you don't get to bitch too loudly when you get lumped in with the majority of the group that engages in less-than-optimal behavior.

The second is the Edina Principle, named after a whitey-white suburb of Minneapolis, but applies universally - people who write letters to the editor bitching about Muslims are fuckin' idiots.

You see the problem here? What the letterfucks are doing are essentially applying the GBAP to Muslims, anytime any number of Muslims do something stupid or violent. But they're doing it to such a degree, in such an obnoxious and, frankly, racist way, that they still deserve the kick to the nutsack.

Case in point: Rev. Michael Stelmach, a Catholic Priest in Minneapolis: ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"We are told by the adherents of Islam that it is a religion of peace. But in the past few days, Muslims have shown the West that Islam is a religion of intolerance and hatred. It seems that many Muslims have betrayed the very faith that they are standing up for."

OK, first of all, could we agree to hold Islam to the same standard of living up to its PR that we offer to presidents and toothpaste? Is that too fucking much to ask? Every time an incident happens, some smug motherfucker has to break out "I thought Islam was a religion of PEACE". Yeah. Jews never shoot people, Christians never get in bar fights, and Buddhists don't get cranky on Mondays. There haven't been any outright "religions of war" since the pantheons went out of fashion.

These are not religious riots. You notice any American Muslims burning shit down? No, you do not. Hell, in Denmark, where the cartoons were published, it hasn't been that bad. These are not religious riots. They are geopolitical riots. They are cultural riots. The fact of the matter is, for good or ill, it's a lot tougher to get ANYONE to riot in the West, no matter what the religion or provocation. So you can take your "oh ho ho I've caught Islam in a contradiction, guess they'll have to all convert to contradiction-free Midwestern Catholicism" bullshit and shove it up your mitre.

Same day, next letter, SAME FUCKING MISTAKE:

"It is about time we expose Muslims across the world for who they are -- oppressive and against any freedoms or democracy." - Leslie Fitzgerald Doll, of Burnsville. Muslims ACROSS THE WORLD. All of 'em oppressive, all of 'em against freedoms and democracy, even the ones here that just go to work and vote. I might as well extend Leslie the same courtesy and assume that, based on her last name, she lacks genitalia and goes around giving young girls body-image complexes.

And since we've got people on their high horse, we can't possibly escape without a taste of the old "We're victims too, but we handle it with grace and dignity" canard from the horribly persecuted majority, here represented by Bruce Montgomery of St. Paul:

"And, since we're talking about insults, look at the cover of the current Rolling Stone with rapper Kanye West dressed to look like Jesus Christ and see what Christians have to put up with."

In other words, implying that your religion's prophet is a black rapper is just as bad as implying that another religion's prophet is smuggling bombs in his hat. That tells me a bit more about Mr. Montgomery than I really wanted to know.

Hm. I seem to have resolved my dilemma. Thank goodness for my guiding truth - even if they may try to wield the same rhetorical weapons I employ daily, stupid people still piss me off.

Scatological Botany and YOU

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 13:17:57 -0500

Culture War, 29 July 2005

Memo to blue-noses and your enablers: YOU ARE DUMB.

I swear to fuck, the war against sex, violence, and bad language is like our entire nation is pulling the band-aid off slowly. The foot-draggers, neo-Victorians and latter-day prudes in this country think that somehow, they can keep titties and foul language from pervading the culture if they just protest loudly enough, for long enough. But it's just delaying the inevitable.

They're slowing it down, forcing us to wrench every millimeter out slowly, painfully, each hair a nova of individualized agony. And we're all suffering. The prudes who have their decorum repeatedly affronted, and the rest of us who get a hole where an entertaining comic strip goes.

I'm talking, of course, about Doonesbury, which has seen its fair share of controversy over its many decades of political and social commentary. So it's gotta be a bit disheartening for Garry Trudeau, really. He's gotten yelled at, edited, and pulled out of newspapers for so many things. And he reaches this point in his long, storied career, but once again, he gets some papers pissed off... for saying "Turd Blossom". I feel for the guy..

Trudeau, you see, has been making fun of Karl Rove all week, because Karl Rove is a filthy little crook, and Trudeau was making fun of filthy little crooks when Rove was just a skidmark on the underpants of local politics. So he had Rove being called on the carpet, as it were, by President Bush. And Bush referred to Rove as "Turd Blossom".

The nerve of that hippie! Implying that our moral, upright president would use such a term for his trusted advisor and close friend! Calling Karl Rove a "turd" is the kind of lowering of the political discourse that shows the true colors of the Left!

Of course, Trudeau didn't invent "Turd Blossom". Nor is it the highly unpleasant backup weapon on The Last Starfighter. Nope, this one was all Dubya. The charming little coke-addled reprobate. You know, it's like how he calls Putin "pooty-poot". He's a fucking frat-boy moron, dressed up in a suit and propped in front of a podium, and he thinks "Turd Blossom" is hilarious. It's a flower, you see, that grows out of poop. I'll grant him this - poop is funny, but poop can't just be funny on its own. Scat needs context.

Twelve newspapers objected to the word "turd" and either pulled the column, or put the plastic bag of prudishness on the editorial hand and scooped the "turd" out manually. This bothers me, because until now, I didn't think there was a problem with "turd". I mean, TURD. You can't say TURD?

I thought "turd" was what you were supposed to say when you couldn't say "shit". I mean, it's not precisely equivalent usage, since the latter is the substance and the former is the object made of the substance, but still. What kind of world do we live in where you can't say "turd" in a crowded theater? But no. That honor apparently falls on "poo", which passes muster just fine, if you're scrawling some Mallard Fillmore ripoff wannabe and spending a week on variations of the same shitty "Howard Dean" joke.*

And what kind of world do we live in where the people editing comic strips can say something like this? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I didn't think (taking out the word) hurt it. I would prefer to run the strip and if we can edit it, that's fine." - Joel Rawson, Executive Editor, Providence Journal, whose atrophied sense of humor from years of "Buckles" and "Dennis The Menace" is worse than anybody thought.

He doesn't think taking the word "Turd" out of "Turd Blossom" hurt it. Now, I'm no mathematician, but it seems to me that if you subtract "Turd" from "Turd Blossom", what you are left with is "Blossom". Which means Rhode Island readers this week were utterly mystified at why Garry Trudeau would make a reference to a CRAPPY NINETIES SITCOM. Is this Karl Rove, or Joey Lawrence? Nobody knows. Why? No turd. Just a huge comedy corpse on the slab, victim of a botched turdectomy.

The bitter irony of all this, of course, is that the people who'd get dismayed by the potentially offensive phrase are the people who blindly stand behind the man who coined it. Probably while fervently believing that the man who coined it couldn't, and wouldn't have coined it, because he loves Geezus SO MUCH. If he did say the T-B word, it must have been one of those "youthful indiscretions", before he opened his heart** to the Lord.

It's enough to make you want to leave a big, flaming paper bag full of flowers on these people's doorsteps.

*Prickly City, a comic strip I'd never heard of before. After a bit of research, it's unspeakably awful.

**Specialists in human anatomy refer to this organ by its scientific name, the "campaign fund".

Spastic Mucus Monkey Friday

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:44:37 -0500

Main Column, 19 November 2004

It's Friday, and since Bob Jones didn't write any other long letters that I know about, that means it's time for Spastic Mucus Monkey Friday, in which my normal, video-game induced inability to focus on anything that isn't a videogame for more than five minutes starts seeming like a far-off ideal. With my body concentrating on manufacturing as many vile fluids as it can manage, and delivering them to any orifice it can find or make, my brain is left adrift, touching down briefly at various points on the Retardomagnetic Spectrum.

In the movie world, today marks the openings of both "Finding Neverland" and "National Treasure". You know how they say when you clone something, and then clone a clone of that clone, and then you clone a clone of the clone that's a clone of that clone, and so on and so forth until you've typed clone about two hundred times and the word's lost all its meaning... anyway, they say that when you do that, the result is this freakish, degraded, drooling pathetic parody of the original.

OK, technically, I suspect genetic engineers would not use the phrase "pathetic parody", unless they were watching Scary Movie 2, but you know what I mean. "Neverland" and "Treasure" are perfect examples of cloning taken too far. The only difference is, one was cloned from "A Room With A View" through a hundred other costumed, British intermediaries, and the other from the mutated descendants of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Just stay the hell home this weekend, people. And don't go see the Spongebob movie, either. That porous yellow fuck and his handlers do not need any more encouragement.

This week, we've talked a lot about science, and thrown around fancy, ten-dollar science words like "clone". So it is with a heavy heart that, once again, I must report on scientists pursuing goals I simply cannot agree with. A report from the Baltimore Sun today describs a clinic at Johns Hopkins where people go to treat their addiction to caffeine.

I can understand wanting to help people. Really I can. But we've GOT to have a few things left we can work through on our own, without even a Dr. Phil book to guide us. Treat the cocaine people. Treat the heroin people. Put the people responsible for making "Apprentice" clones* in a support group and help THEM to stop. We'll get through the caffeine thing just fine on our own, thanks.

Some psychologists want to categorize caffeine withdrawal as an official Capital M Capital I Mental Illness. And while many of the caffeine addicts I know are also not right in the head, I don't think it's the caffeine's fault. Look, the effects of caffeine withdrawal are headaches, fatigue, and irritability. If your "mental illness" can be cured by an aspirin, a nap, and a blowjob, then it's not much of a mental illness, is it? But people are making caffeine logs** and discussing caffeine with a therapist. Stop wasting therapists' time, dammit. There are actual fucked up people out there who'd find that hour a week really useful, you know. Stay out of Starbucks, ride out the headaches, drink water for a week, and get over yourselves.

Mallard Fillmore is in my newspaper now. Sympathy e-mails can be addressed to the link in the upper left. You see, there was a hole on the comics page that needed filling, and they're trying out different stuff for a while to see what people like. And they're trying out "Mallard Fillmore", which, as far as I can tell, is what you would get if Ann Coulter wrote "Mother Goose and Grimm". It's not a pretty fucking sight, I'll tell you that much. Today's wacky hijinx involve a highbrow, elitist member of the "mainstream media" calling stock car races "NASCAR maches" like he's Thurston Fucking Howell the Third. just in from a brisk walk around the polo field.

Even discountin my obvious biases and hatreds, from a purely comedic standpoint, that shit is Hagar The Horrible horrible. The right wing really needs to abandon comedy, and leave it to the left. How many more Dennis Millers do we need before that simple fact is accepted? Much like the Democrats need to give up on "courting bigots" or "personality". When Republicans try to do comedy, you end up with Larry the Cable Guy, and we all suffer.

* I thought, briefly, about misspelling the word "clones" a bit more egregiously each time I typed it, but that's the kind of elaborate, subtle comedy that requires me to be at peak form to not completely screw up.

** This is a reference to actually writing down and tracking one's caffeine intake, not the notorious effects caffeine has on the lower gastrointestinal tract. On the other hand, poop is funny.

Even A Stopped Fanboy Is Right Twice A Day

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:10:02 -0500

Main Column, 4 October 2004

Memo to J. Michael Straczynski: YOU ARE DUMB.

I hate saying that, because I can explain B5 season 5 as the result of overwork and lack of sleep, I can blame Crusade on network interference and studio heads, and I can blame Legend of the Rangers on... on... well, I'm sure I can think of something.

But JMS has now committed an unforgivable sin: he has incurred the wrath of Comic Fanboydom, and more importantly, he has come damn close to EARNING it.

First, the required precis for those of you who, quite wisely, don't follow this kind of thing. In addition to whatever TV stuff he's doing these days, Straczynski is writing comic books. Like Supreme Power, which is a very good series marred only by about two full issues worth of embarassingly gratuitous nakedchick over the course of a dozen actual issues. And for a while now, he's been writing Spider-Man.

For those of you who have only seen the movies, there is one character involved in this precis who you don't know. Gwen Stacy, the blond, innocent, girl-next-door*, other love interest during the Spider-Formative-Years. Gwen Stacy was killed by the Green Goblin, Norman Osborne Version, in the 70's. And for the most part, occasional clone aside, she's stayed dead.

Anyway, in the last few issues of Spidey, JMS had the great idea of having two super-powered twins attack Spider-Man, and then revealed that these twins are actually Gwen Stacy's kids, and that back in the day, sweet, innocent Gwen got pregnant due to a pity fuck with Norman "The Green Goblin Who Would Eventually Throw Her Off A Bridge" Osborne, a creepy middle-aged businessman. This, of course, has the fans in an uproar. And normally, this is the point at which I would argue with them.

Because most of the fan outrage is about how it "ruins" the "character" of Gwen Stacy forever, as if this were something new, that mattered, in the world of comic characters with histories between 20 and 70 years in length. Pretty much everything has been done to, or changed about, pretty much everybody, ever since there were comics. Don't like it? Wait a few months. It'll be undone. And on the off chance it's not, there's still all that stuff beforehand you can read over and over again.

But in this case, I empathize with the fans, for two main reasons. The first is that even by modern comic standards, the whole thing is pretty fucking stupid, and obviously comes from the atrophied conjoined-twin brain in JMS skull that also came up with Byron and the VR Kung Fu Weapons System.

But the most important reason, by far, is that JMS must have put into the comic script words to this effect: "NEXT PANEL: NORMAN OSBORNE HAS ORGASM." And the artist, Mike Deodato, graciously obliged, giving us a full-on shot of a middle-aged, improbably-stripey-haired businessman slash supervillain experiencing le petit mort. And then the inker (Jose Pimentel, for purposes of future Google searches) lovingly darkened the lines that make up ol' Norm's spurt-grimace. And then colorist Matt Milla gave a greyish-pink pallor to the whole sordid mess. And then the other people in the credits, Warren Simone, Axel Alonzo, Joe Quesada, and Dan Buckley, all to varying degrees, said, "Yeah, let's go with that", and as a result, the following image made it into the cultural pictolexicon:

And nobody, and I mean NOBODY, ever really needed to see THIS. I don't care what dramatic resonance you think it creates in the Spider-history, Straczynski. If you must show middle-aged men engaged in coitus (and you really don't), ask for some shadow or something. Do not give us THIS. Do not force me to share the misery of the Green GAH-blin blowing his pumpkin bomb with my vast and growing audience. Their suffering, and subsequent therapy bills, are on your hands.

And if, as a result of this, you are forced into a position of fanboy anathema over sullying the shorts of their beloved Gwen Stacy, well, I'm sorry, but it's nobody's fault but your own. Between this and Thirdspace, you're going to have a lot to answer for in the final judging, boyo.

*As opposed to the red-head who ACTUALLY lived next door to him, and the blonde who lived across the hall from him in the second movie.

Pluggers

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 12:25:34 -0500

Main Column, 14 May 2004

Memo to "Pluggers": YOU ARE THE WORST COMIC STRIP IN ALL OF EXISTENCE.

A bold assessment, I know. In a world where Christian cavemen, drunk British husbands, and Garfield are still going strong, declaring anything to be the "worst comic strip in all of existence" would seem folly. Luckily, thanks to "Pluggers", the risk to my reputation is actually quite small.

When you think about a comic strip named "Pluggers", you immediately wonder what a Plugger is. Possibilities run through your mind. People with lots of power strips? People who love to advertise their stuff in compeletely inappropriate spaces, such as Smackstar One Wallpapers? Some vaguely awful sex act?

But that is where you hit a snag. Because apparently, the entire purpose of "Pluggers" is to define and hone the essential "Plugger" experience, in much the same way "Love Is..." attempts to define love. Except with bears instead of creepy naked children. And complete incomprehensible nonsense instead of sappy aphorisms.

Today's "Pluggers", for example, features a bear in a bed. Did I mention that "Pluggers" is single-panel? Kind of like "The Far Side", only replacing all the genius with mounds of festering bear shit. Anyway, the caption explains to us that Pluggers still sleep on mattresses bought with S&H Green Stamps. Good to know. An important piece of the Plugger mindset has been revealed, thanks to, and I am not making this up, Gladys Crowl of Liltitz, Pennsylvania.

Yes, "Pluggers" is one of those awful strips that rely on the readers to supply the content. Readers all the way from Liltitz, PA to Smallboobs, OR send their Plugger ideas to Chicago, where they are turned into bears on beds for the amusement of, well, nobody at all.

As best as I can figure, Pluggers are midwestern old Luddite old white assholes who are old. A "plugger backhoe" is a shovel. Pluggers wear plaid and old t-shirts and don't know how to work computers and... um.. are old. But why take my word for it after skimming through a month of online reprints about pickup trucks and advanced age? Let's turn to the official definition from the Pluggers website.

Pluggers are the hard-working people the world depends on. They represent the 80 percent of humanity who unceremoniously keep plugging along, balancing work, play and family life. Pluggers encounter and conquer obstacles in their lives, but they always have a positive attitude and a good sense of humor. They're the people who work hard for what they get. Even if they're struggling, they are optimistic about life.

Yes, according to this website, EIGHTY PERCENT OF HUMANITY are plaid-shirt wearing, pickup-truck driving, Wal-Mart shopping, clueless halfwits who can't program a VCR. This is what I hate most about the goddamned Midwest. The Midwest is the South, only with delusions of grandeur.

The South just blindly goes about its business of being racist redneck pigfuckers. The closest they come to having any kind of coherent "movement" is when they get together to celebrate the Confederacy. But in the Midwest, they're not just moronic, xenophobic assholes. They gotta celebrate it. There's always a name for the local branch of the fuckoid brigade. Cheeseheads. Pluggers. "Minnesota Nice". "Missouri Synod". Iowa.

They have a message board on the Pluggers website, you know. Let that shit sink in for a while. In two years, they've amassed 162 messages. Total. The only thing funnier than the idea of a Pluggers fan posting to a message board is someone deciding to TROLL the Pluggers message board. And the only thing funnier than a Pluggers troll is an indignant Pluggers fan defending his or her favorite comic. It's priceless. It's magic. It's ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"the fact that a comic isnt funny isnt how you should judge a comic. thats it plain and simple.you could, however, follow it up with a speach on how comic means to be funny, like stand up comics. but if you look at the Political comics, hardly are they funny, and have very much a serious tone to them to state what they have to say. with that said, Pluggers is a very ingenius comic where the artist has to depict what the readers send into him, that has to do with everyday life. not an easy thing, i assure you. in short, Pluggers isnt funnier than pissing out a kidney stone, but i still love to read it."

Now, I have been accused of being negative. Cynical, even. But as I sit here, looking at the pristine specimen of Plugger quoted above, I can't help but think that if this is 80% of humanity, we're nearlly five times as DUMB as I would have thought.

Johnny Hart

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:17:10 -0500

Main Column, 16 January 2004

Memo to Johnny Hart: YOU ARE DUMB.

Just go away. Take your prosletyzing cavemen and your 1953 sensibilities and just walk, OK? Please? Think of the children.

It's bad enough that you're part of the insidious cabal that's become this entrenched, comics-page oligarchy. You and the Hagar guy and the Blondie guy and the Beetle Bailey guy who've been writing the same joke for 40+ years. They're even passing the strips on to their descendants! Hereditary unfunniness! If any of these strips were submitted to editors as new strips, they'd be shown the door. But they stick around.

And why do they stick around? Old people. Old, scared people. Old, scared people who watch PAX-TV, and who would watch the Good Life network except that the newfangled digital cable box doesn't make any danged sense anyway and back in the day if you wanted to watch good wholesome Dragnet reruns all you had to do was turn the dial, not enter missile launch codes into some digital contraption.

These are the newspaper diehards. Since the dawn of time, they have received their news the old-fashioned way: on dead trees, hurled through the air by child labor. "B.C." and its ilk are there to appease these people, to give them an island of nostalgia in a cruel, uncaring world where people say "nipple" on television and nobody has a coronary in sheer outrage.

But "B.C." is the worst of the lot, because as bad as the rest are, they have the good sense to stay stupid and bland and keep their heads down. Hart, on the other hand, loves making points. He likes to have menorahs snuffed out to reveal crosses. He has cavemen talk about how great Jesus was at every opportunity. Depending on interpretation, he may, a couple of months ago, have compared Islam with an outhouse.

And then there's the latest uproar. Monday's strip will apparently feature the cavemen discussing failed Asian attempts to build an airplane, with the punchline "Two Wongs don't make a Wright."

Drink that in for a moment. Enjoy the rich complexity of how stupid and offensive the whole thing is. This would be AFTER Abercrombie and Fitch got in trouble for a similar joke, mind you. Not to mention trying to figure out from what moral high ground these cavemen, whose sole transportation innovation to date has been the Foot-Axle Unicycle, get to mock Chinese prehistoric aviation experiments. But Hart marches on, apparently blithly unaware of progress, his own storied past, and the fact that a major corporation got slapped down for doing something similar last year.

For this, and, come to think of it, for your entire body of work, Johnny Hart... YOU ARE DUMB.