A lot of who I am today I owe to my family. My parents, especially, deserve some thanks because they never lost faith in me, even when I was a screaming selfish teenager with more emotional problems than Tara Reid. They always told me that I was capable of achieving whatever I set myself to (especially if it was medical school), and it is that lesson that has kept me going at what is often a thankless task for the last 8.73 years.
But it was my cousins that taught me about peer interaction and showed me the reality of how difficult it would be to operate outside the protective sphere of my parents. I've got (literally) tons of cousins. My father's side of the family took procreation very seriously. Two of them in particular (one of whom, I believe, is a daily reader of this strip, along with his son) took great joy in inflicting all sorts of mental anguish on me when I saw them. I was the patsy for thousands of gags and jokes, the constant monkey in the middle. They were (and are) physically and mentally bigger than me, and had (have) no qualms about using those things to their advantage. I remember their cruel laughs as though it were just last month (which, come to think of it, is was).
My cousins taught me three very important things. First, there is nothing as much fun as the mental abuse of a child. I dug it. It was challenging and pushed me to better myself in the hopes of outwitting my cousins some day.
Secondly, they taught me not to take things so goddamned seriously. If someone takes the ball away from you, it's a goddamned ball. Why cry over it? If you look closely enough, almost everything that's not friendship or love is just a ball. Things just aren't worth getting upset about in general.
And finally, they taught me not to take myself so seriously. They taught me that I was fallible, and I always would be (because they would keep on beating me -- either of them can easily hit 350 points in a Scrabble game), and eventually I became comfortable with the idea.
These three things form the bedrock operating principles for the way I interact with the world. I try to have fun, I don't let myself get caught up in things that would distract me from having fun, and I don't take myself (or anyone else) too seriously.
And because I'm mostly caught up in having a good time these days, sometimes I forget that the rest of the world does not work this way. Especially the World of Warcraft Webcomics.
That's not to say that folks in the Webcomics business are a bunch of sensitive, caring fern-waterers. Most of the webcomics artists I am friendly with seem to operate pretty much the way I do. Oh, sure, they take the art of producing webcomics pretty seriously, but the trappings associated with that -- reader communities, critics, conventions, interviews, promotion -- well, not so much. It's entertaining at first, and then you develop a disdain for it after a while. It becomes a necessary evil, some thing that distracts you from the much more serious work of actually creating a webcomic. Right now, I could be writing the scripts for this week, instead of this.
So when we launched Fleen, I thought I would use a fairly common webcomics modus operandi by stirring up the shit a bit. If webcomics journalism/criticism (when you're talking about art, you can't really separate the two, unless all you're announcing is anniversaries and con dates) has taught us anything, it's that the best way to get attention is to stand up and stab Caesar in front of the other senators. It's not like drawing a good comic every day is going to get you noticed. And the one thing that a critic likes to talk about more than anything else is himself.
And it worked. Fleen got prominent links from a number of webcomics blogs and websites. They almost universally praised it in concept and execution while my wrathful ramblings here on this site drew most of the ire away from Gary and Jeff. And I, in my perverted way, thought that this gentle teasing would in some way do some good for webcomics criticism, in that it would engender discussion and maybe even a little introspection. Because you need to play Monkey in the Middle for a while before you figure out the real way to play it.
I felt vindicated in our approach for a while. The fact that these outlets were so easily manipulated by the evil schemings of a creator who wasn't even writing for them certainly gave creedence to the idea that they might be compromised by someone with similar aspirations from the inside.
But that didn't last long. Something happened that I didn't expect. I felt bad about it. I felt guilty about what I had done. Who knew I had a conscience?
So, here I am to apologize, like my parents taught me to do when I was being bad. I did a few things wrong in my post.
- I was mean.
You shouldn't be mean to people if they don't deserve it. I didn't realize it when I was writing it, but there appears to be real venom in some of what I said. I don't take this stuff seriously enough to feel real anger towards any webcomics critics, and while some of them certainly deserve a bit of wrath in their stockings this year (most notably, the ones that use the aforementioned shit-stirring technique and the ones that forget not to take themselves so goddamn seriously), I didn't really mean to be mean, if you catch my drift. I'm a fiction writer primarily, so I write for effect and not for accuracy. On the whole, the webcomics press are nice people with good motives and many of you do good work most of the time. I am sorry that I was mean to you.
- I was hyperbolic.
I suggested that all sorts of folks should stop writing things, This was clearly ridiculous and should have been your first clue that I wasn't being entirely serious. There's room for everyone to write. Should people take the context of who their writer is into consideration when reading? Absolutely. Otherwise we'd let politicians anchor the nightly news. Is it okay for a politician to speak on an issue? It sure is. But if I know who their electorate is and who their corporate sponsors are, it makes me a more informed voter.
- I was incorrect.
I also claimed that all of webcomics journalism/criticism was poorly written and unprofessional. I won't kid you, some of it is, but to say that it is universally awful is doing wrong by the writers and the writing. Making blanket statements never helps improve the level of discourse.
Doing these things did a disservice to my thesis, which is that having a creator-only press is potentially unhealthy and damaging to webcomics in general and the webcomics press in specific. Doing these things buried the legitimate reasons for something like
Fleen to exist (which by the way, is not for objective reporting -- objectivity and criticism don't mix. I never used the word objectivity once in my post). What I was trying to say was that there may be a conflict of interest in having the only souce of information come from creators. But all the bile-spewing turned the discussion from "is it healthy to have an all-creator press?" to "should people who are creators also be allowed to have a critical voice separate from their work?" These are two very different discussions, and I think that they likely have different answers.
So, folks, let's forget about objectivity, which we as adults know does not exist. Let's agree that everyone has the right to speak, and everyone else has the right to consider the validity of those words. Let's discuss the (non-)important things: is the webcomics press in a healthy state right now? Is recruiting people from outside the sphere of creators something we should be pursuing? Do we, the audiences of webcomics blogs, need to be wary of creator/critics in the same way we might be wary of a CNN movie review of a Time-Warner movie?
Again, I want to apologize to all of the webcomics journalists, critics and creators who were offended by my post. Next time I see you, please remind me that I owe you a drink.
Happy Christmas to all. And to all, a good night.
