Pointy-Headed Racist

This is super-obvious, but it bears repeating that one week ago, Scott Adams was an unhinged dingus that no publication with any of the values or principles they claimed to have THIS weekend should have been supporting in the first place  

You can be plenty awful in today’s society and still keep your core career and livelihood. You can, in fact, be MORE awful now and get away with it than you could have been at any point in the last 30 years, and the constant vilification and complaining about cancel culture (FKA political correctness) exists for the sole purpose of letting awful people get away with being awful to a degree that was formerly unacceptable.

Now, in order to suffer consequences, you have to be VERY racist in a way that gets publicly noticed to a degree that a few big players feel compelled to take public action, which creates the environment in which other, more timid big players realize that the disadvantages of not replacing Dilbert with some other bullshit the people who still read the funny pages will glance over out of habit outweigh the brief onslaught of right-wing How Dare You’s who swarm when one of Their Own is threatened.

The degree to which you have to fuck up is roughly proportional to how much money you make for other people. You make a LOT of money for other people, and you have to publicly say you like Hitler in order for capitalism to jettison you. Scott Adams makes SOME money for other people, but it’s mostly out of habit at this point, so he only had to be very, very racist on a podcast whose contents got widely publicized for him to finally be cast off.

I assume, as is traditional, that Martyr Syndrome will kick in shortly and offers to speak at a plethora of low-standard wingnut gatherings will pour in for a couple of years, since nothing Adams said falls that far outside the boundaries of mainstream conservative thought. But if this finally removes Dilbert from the public consciousness two decades after it stopped being even remotely relevant, , I’ll take it.

Spastic Mucus Monkey Friday

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Even A Stopped Fanboy Is Right Twice A Day

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

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

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.