SWASTIKA EYES

Man, remind me to call people sincerely retarded again sometime soon. It really is fun.

OK, maybe this is my fault - maybe I'm too "subtle." My wife is always accusing me of being a horrible joke-teller because I'm so straight-faced you can't tell when the punchline is being delivered (to say nothing of the content of the jokes themselves). I hope I'm too subtle - because I don't want to think people are stupid.

Do you remember Spinal Tap? Everyboy loves Spinal Tap. The post from two days ago was The Hurting's idea of satire. Does this mean that the ideas were stupid? No. But the way the ideas were communicated... satire. I hoped that spending pages babbling about "Millennium would clue people into the fact that, hey, these words are about as rational as a foil-wrapped cucumber in my pants.

I got into a wonderful e-mail conversation with Larry Young after the last post. Basically, I think he "got" it, but I don't know if he "got" that it was basically a put-on. Yes, there's some deep frustration in there, but it's the type of frustration I think every person who truly cares about comics - from Gary Groth on down to your local retailer and even you, yourself, in your darket moments - can relate to. So, when I start babbling about a horrible 17 year-old crossover, take it from me that I'm not presenting any deep and thoughtful analysis, I'm not seriously staking any claim to any freakin' side of the "continuity" debate whatsoever...

I look around the blogosphere and see all sorts of people reacting with a totally straight face to words I wrote in a feverish tizzy of insanity. It's funny. Not because I fooled you, because I didn't mean to fool you. I meant every word I said... I just didn't mean you to take it so seriously. It's funny because it's sad, you know? There are some good bits in there that, if I had wanted, I could have sat here and wrote a good straight opinion piece on, but instead I chose to weave a strange rambling dissertation on "Millennium" and sincere mental retardation. If that phrase wasn't enough to tip you off that my tongue was planted firmly in cheek, well, I'm sorry. Do I need to label it as I humor column? Do I? Does the presence of a few valid points in betwee nthe sarcasm invalidate the humor content? Is the humor content even humorous? These are the questions I wrestle with during the long, dark midnight of my blackened soul.

And, hey, just so you know - I didn't buy Wildcats 3.0 or (until very recently) Stormwatch: Team Achilles either. Yeah, I'm a hypocrit, so what? But my point is still 100% valid - whether I bought the book or not, shouldn't we as an industry be able to support smaller niche titles without having to call out the National Guard in order to do it? I regret not buying Wildcats while it could have made a difference - it's actually a book that had been on my "should give a try soon" list. I feel bad whenever people's favorite books get cancelled, it's happened to me too. I feel bad when books that by every objective standard are critical darlings can't gain sales traction. Basically, Steven Grant wrote the non-Bizarro version of Tuesday's blog post over at this week's Permanent Damage. We must be sharing some kind of cosmic brainwave loop or something, because seriously, he is writing exactly what I was thinking, only he didn't write it as a dismissively insulting satire. Anyway, read what he has to sday, go back and re-read "Kill All Hippies" and tell me you don't see the satire now.

Seriously, people, I'm starting to get worried. It's like the blogosphere wants to
hyperventilate on controversy.