Detritus of the Mind

Right.  This is my epic declaration of war against wangst, against the Comedy Ghetto, and against the pomposity of Tom Batiuk in particular.  I'm particularly proud of it, as it sums up my complaints about everything from the fallacy of "true art is angsty" to the fetish-culture the media has built around cancer to why my favorite movie is what it is.  This was originally written on Livejournal on 9/16/2009.  Enjoy.  Oh, and for the record, let's all wait for Batiuk to try & get this blog shut down for somehow infringing on his copyrights by criticizing his work - that's his #1 tactic for dealing with negative feedback. This is a long, long piece of work. Consider its title to be the "too long, didn't read" version. Otherwise, please, press on. Let me start with a personal anecdote. My favorite movie is The Producers - the original version with Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder where Hitler was played by an overbaked hippie. I can quote whole ...

I just want to warn everyone: This will be an epic-length post.  If you don't feel like reading a lot, just scan for the stuff in bold for what each subject is. So at Major Spoilers, their newest podcast Top Five did a show about the Top Five Things They Never Should Have Cancelled.   Their answers cover everything from TV to food to the space program (thoroughly agree with that one), and they asked listeners to share what theirs would be.  I wanted to write a response to it in the comments, but as I thought about it more & more, I realized that I had waaaaaaaay more than five things.  So here's 15 things they never should have cancelled and why. Honorable Mention - Raising Hope:   This is technically not cancelled... yet.  Fox is doing their damnedest to justify doing so, however, in such a ham-fisted way that it's downright inexcusable.  The story of Jimmy Chance & his attempts to raise his daughter (whose mother was a serial killer sent...

NOTE: The following was originally written on 4/17/10 under "kakapotrainer" for my That Guy with the Glasses blog.  Since it addresses what I feel is the finest comic strip of my lifetime, I am reposting it here. As a fan of the comic medium, I'm quite fond of comic strips of all stripes. While this field is in largely sad shape (with only a few I actively read because they're good but most read just to mock them a la "The Comics Curmudgeon"), there thankfully are reprints always available from various sources. Having gotten The Complete Bloom County V.1 as a Christmas gift, I was reminded how awesome my all-time favorite comic straip was in its heyday. I was also reminded of the dangers of going back to the well. As much as some people might lament the loss of strips like Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side , their creators deserve a lot of credit. They knew when to quit, then knew not to let lesser hands handle them after their retirment, and they...

The quality new comic strip Oh Brother! has ended.   Citing lack of sales and stress-related health issues, the creator has had to bow out voluntarily. I feel really bad for Mr. Stephens; his strip was solidly enjoyable, and I still get mad thinking about how Cartoon Network screwed over The Secret Saturdays because it wasn't toyetic enough (though, to be fair, the pacing desperately needed tweaking, but that's not important now).  Oh Brother! was consistently enjoyable, not in a laugh-out-loud way but still more amusing & creative than the vast majority of popular strips. This is what's wrong with the cartoon market.  Here we have a strip that kids, adults, & families can enjoy together, that doesn't go out of its way to demonize any demographics or reek of authorial ego trips, and it dies entirely too soon.  Meanwhile, readers continue to have  Dustin tell us that unemployed twenty-somethings deserve poverty because they're not Baby Boomers and ...

(Four Color Philosophy is a tag/subtitle for discussions of traditional newspaper comic strips.  Since they have a culture & issues all their own separate from comic books, they deserve their own category.) Check out this article, in particular the sections "Future of Comic Strips" and "Online Leaders". First off, let me just say something: I fucking hate Dustin.   It takes the worst moments of Zits (when the parents wallow in Baby Boomer nostalgia like pigs in shit and hate on Jeremy for not being middle-aged), gives it its own strip & constant focus, and adds a lovely "blame the victim" mentality as to why 20 & 30-somethings are being screwed over by the sour job market.  The only reason anyone likes it is because it's well drawn; the Cartoonist Society probably looks at the pretty art, ignores the bile in the word balloons, and decided to award based on its superficial quality.  Lio said it best in their Sunday parody: "Since...