There seems to be a lot of controversy floating around the web comics universe lately and I’m wondering where it’s all coming from.
This morning I was greeted with a message in my in box from Mambo the Breakdancing Clown. If you don’t know him, he’s the guy who draws Super Stick Figure Crime Fighters. Apparently he got his knickers in a twist for being banned from Top Web Comics for violating the terms of use.
The body of the e-mail was basically a call to arms and to rebel against TWC and its fascist ways. While I agree with Mambo that we can do without TWC, he was going at it entirely the wrong way. TWC has a right to disassociate itself with content it finds offensive.
The whole episode got me thinking about the TWC in general and I found it indicative of the problem I have with vote sites in general. If you’ve been visiting the site at all in the last 3 weeks, you would know that I had links up for TWC and was fishing for votes. I later took them down after coming to the realization that these votes don’t mean a damn thing.
Web comics like all art are entirely subjective. What I may find funny, others may not. To try and put a label on it saying “this is good, this isn’t” seems silly and a waste of time. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: If Theater Hopper fails to catch on, it’s my fault for not putting out material of quality or doing the marketing legwork to spread the word. Putting that burden on the audience by whoring for votes just seems really low class to me. I can only hope Mambo comes to the same conclusion. For the record, he later retracted his e-mail saying it was something he put together in the heat of the moment.
In other ridiculous feuds, Zach over at No Pants Tuesday picked a fight with a certain Euro-centric gaming comic. I don’t know how much of my personal feeling I should inject into this commentary. Zach is a friend of the site, so it’s kind of hard not to side with him.
What’s lame, I think is the defense Little Gamers puts up. Basically, they’re saying, “You can’t take a joke” which is fine when you put it in context to the subjectivity I was talking about earlier.
But they latched onto the bit that Zach was complaining about their bashing Americans. That’s not what I took from it. It looked to me like he was complaining more in the overall disappointment the strip had become for him – stale jokes, and what not – and that’s his prerogative. But LG took the criticism, flipped it on its head and politicized it. In my opinion, they got defensive over the wrong thing.
I guess it makes me think twice when they say Americans deserve to be made fun of because we’re violent, gun-toting freaks and then they turn around like a rabid dog lunging at a Slim Jim at the slightest provocation. That’s like me saying it’s okay to make fun of the Sweeds because they’re not worth anything more than cheese, clocks, chocolate and neutrality. It paints them with a pretty wide brush.
I’m probably only adding fuel to the fire, but for chrissakes, people! They’re only comics – you know? Funny pictures with words and all? Lighten up!
