A Waste of Time

So I had read before about Scott Adams’ various comments that had got him in hot water over the past few years and had people calling him a misogynist, and then when I went looking for the original blogs and things so that I could quote them in this post, I found this:  Douchebag Decree: Scott Adams, Douchetoonist, a blog on the Bitch magazine website in which they hand out Douchebag Decrees to people they deem deserving. Apparently when talking about these people, I’m not the only one for whom the term “douchebag” leaps to mind.  As an aside, I love the term “Douchetoonist.”

So, that article has done me the favor of providing me a nice rundown of Adams’ various controversial comments and, especially, documents the doucheitude of his responses to the controversy those comments have caused.  It’s all sort of the Orson Scott Card school of saying something horrible, and then going, What?  Why are people being mean to me?

Adams explains that people have low reading comprehension and just don’t understand what it was that he said.  Except, he said exactly what it is that people think he said, they just don’t appreciate what a hilarious genius he is, obviously.

As a brief rundown, there’s the women are the same as children and the handicapped comment:

“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.”

He got a lot of flack for that one.  Can’t imagine why, must be all the low reading comprehension.

And then there’s his repeated obsession with how society makes men feel bad for their “natural instincts.”

“Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

“The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, ‘Here’s your square hole’?”

He doesn’t mention what “natural instincts” of women there are that are comparable to rape but also accepted in society, so how sexual violence is equatable to something that women are allowed to do is one of the many incoherent points he’s trying to make.  He also never makes it quite clear what he considers the “natural instincts” of men to involve, but he mentions rape twice and it’s a little baffling how he makes the leap from sexual desire being natural to rape being the same.

He goes on: “The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.”

You start to wonder what these urges are that he has unfulfilled, and it becomes a little bit troubling.  I’m a gay man, so maybe I don’t understand the torture of temptation poor straight men are subjected to by all these thoughtless ladies leaving their homes and going out into public with their vaginas attached, but as a gay man I can tell you I’m thinking about sex with cute guys pretty much every minute of the day, and society does specifically condemn my “urges,” at least in the some places, like Utah, and I’ve still managed to satisfy quite a lot of them.  I’ve never felt particularly forced into a continual stage of “unhappiness” because I haven’t been actually raping dudes to fulfill those urges.

Whatever it is that Adams is thinking about that he can’t do, though, it’s troubling him to the point that this is the solution he forsees:

“Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond.  Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.”

He thinks that men will require chemical castration at some point to make them happy without performing these “urges” all over some poor lady.  He also seems to feel he’d need additional medication to want to “bond” with a woman whilst not urging on the bitch.  Tell me this dude isn’t troubled.  You can read the original blog that the specific quote is from here, since Adams likes to accuse people of misunderstanding his words, I’ll make it easy to read it just how he wrote it for anybody that’s curious.  He makes several comments in the post that I think he felt were supposed to be funny, I’m not sure due to my low reading comprehension, but about the chemical castration bit he especially doesn’t seem to be joking.

Then again, it’s hard a lot of times to tell when Adams is joking, which brings me to my second point.  My blog, and the Douchebags of Comics cards, are about comics, and I’m making the cards for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is crimes against comics, and Dilbert has never been funny.  Like, ever, really.

There’s also the fact that Scott Adams can’t draw, but that’s not necessarily requisite for quality cartoons.  The important part is to be able to sell the joke or tell the story, and a comic like Pearls Before Swine by Stephen Pastis, who’s not an especially great illustrator, can still work.  I haven’t read Pearls for a few years, because who reads newspaper comics?  But I remember it being really good.

Dilbert, on the other hand, always struck me as extraordinarily unfunny.  As a little kid, my brother liked Dilbert a lot, and I remember arguing with him, trying to explain to him that, no, he was mistaken, Dilbert wasn’t funny.  Of course, you can’t talk somebody into or out of finding a joke funny and Dilbert has its fans, but it struck me as so *un*funny that I remember my brain grappling with it, trying to figure out what the hell somebody could find entertaining about it.

I would probably say Family Circus was less funny, but Family Circus at least is fascinating in this weird meta kind of way.  A lot of times, Family Circus didn’t even have jokes.  Or observations.  Or anything.  And you would just kind of stare at it, trying to figure out what it was you were looking at and why it existed.  Kind of like a Rob Liefeld drawing.  I have to admit, I can stare at a Liefeld drawing a lot longer, in some cases, than a drawing by somebody who can actually draw, because there’s just something fascinating about it.  Traffic slows down when it passes a car accident.  You can’t *not* look.

Dilbert, on the other hand from Family Circus, makes jokes, they’re just not funny.  And Stephen Pastis can’t really draw, but you feel like his characters have this rich emotional life.  They’re expressive.  Dilbert is kind of a square with squiggles on top.

As a little kid, as a birthday present for my Dilbert-loving brother one year I drew a poster with all the Dilbert characters on it.  On that occasion, I owed Scott Adams some gratitude, because the whole poster with 20 or so characters took all of an hour to draw.  Conversely, as a little kid I remember trying to draw Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and agonizing over it, because no matter what I did it didn’t look exactly like Calvin.  I remember pulling all the pens and markers my mom had together and trying to figure out how to do the beautiful thick-to-thin lines Watterson did, which of course I’ve since figured out he did with brushes.  Even aside from the line width, the design of Calvin is very particular.  If you move the nose a little bit, or make the chin the wrong shape, he starts to look grotesque.  The simplicity of great cartoons is deceptive, because you’re trying to do so much with so few lines.  Watterson could do this because he’s a genius.  Dilbert, I drew with a sharpie on poster board, and it looked just fine.

Anyway, in the drawing I did of Adams for Douchebags of Comics, I thought the combination of the word rape with the shrugging hand gesture was the best expression I could think of for Adams’ comments on the issue.  Like a lot of times when people say horrible things, they kind of shrug it off like, What it’s just common sense.  They usually then act like they want a cookie for being “brave” enough to say what they know everybody else is thinking, but only somebody as great as them has the courage to come out and say.  Adams’ plays it off as all being very minor, and he uses the word “rape” twice, the rest of the time he talks about “urges” that society won’t allow men to act on.  If not rape, what other “urges” is he going on about?  Something worse?

Adams is a creepy little dude.

The problem with doing a card of Dan DiDio is that it’s difficult to say how much exactly of what has been objectionable at DC comics during his tenure has actually been his fault.

It’s impossible to say, really, how much of the Watchmen prequels is actually his decision, and how much of it is financial pressure from the corporate entities involved.  When things go wrong, whoever’s in charge gets blamed, and I’m sure it’s all much more nuanced than people on the outside can actually see.  There’s the problem, too, of the fact that a certain aspect of fan culture will go apeshit over any kind of change, when really the lack of change is what I’d consider to be the major problem at DC and Marvel.  From reading certain messageboards, you’d think that Dan DiDio is the Antichrist because something was changed about some character’s costume when he was editor in chief, whether he was actually involved in the costume change or not, and now five fans have devoted their time to messageboard tantrums on the subject.  Those fans are as much the problem as anybody working at the companies.

However, there’s been plenty that’s been genuinely objectionable, and also plenty of reasons to believe that DiDio is pretty hands-on with these things.  A few years ago I had an editor that’s worked at DC on some pretty major titles tell me personally at a convention that, when they got a script they really liked from a writer, there was a sentiment of, “Hope Dan doesn’t fuck this up too much before it sees print.”

Doing this portrait, I realized that the word “Iconic” was a nice summation of my major problems with the attitudes of DC and Marvel recently.  It was starting to drive me crazy that they used the word “iconic” for every fucking thing in interviews, and I was trying to figure out what exactly they thought the word “iconic” was supposed to mean.  In interviews with people at those companies, the word “iconic” had become like the word “literally” when idiots use it, they just shove it into any fucking place in a sentence and think it’s supposed to mean whatever their inflection indicates it means.

“Iconic,” I would think, would refer to something that’s deeply meaningful to people, and recognizable, and carries with it an intense set of associations.  What I realized “Iconic” means at DC and Marvel is, “Anything that’s been in enough comics that it’s possibly IP that we can exploit further.”

Dan DiDio would have got a card from me, anyway, because with my set of cards spending so much time commenting on the state of modern, mainstream comics, I couldn’t very well have so many problems with DC and not make a card of the guy that’s been running the show for most of the last decade or so.  His comments about the Watchmen prequels, though, would have put him over the top for me if I had any doubt about whether or not he was card-worthy.

DiDio on the Watchmen prequels: “The strength of what comics are is building on other people’s legacies and enhancing them and making them even stronger properties in their own right.”

The whole reason Watchmen has a unique place in superhero history is that it’s an actual, honest-to-gosh novel, with a purpose, and a beginning, middle, and end.  The reason there aren’t more books like Watchmen is because DC and Marvel don’t understand the difference between making something like that and creating IP that can be spun off into continuing franchises.  They don’t really understand that there’s a difference in the results when art is created for personal expression, and when it’s created for t-shirt sales.  Recycling is just as good as creating.  Better, really, because then you don’t have bitches like this Alan Moore character with some personal connection to the work muddying up the issue.  When people make sausages at a factory, they don’t get worked up over what sort of sandwiches those sausages are eventually used on.  Better if the artists they employ understand their place as cog polishers, rather than thinking they’re clock makers.

The fact that DiDio has referred to Watchmen prequels as being their attempt at being bold and creative shows that he doesn’t really have much of a concept of what creativity actually is.  Creativity typically involves creation.

There are the rumors that DiDio has said that he considered Countdown to be 52 done right.  The difference is that Countdown is a shit book, but you can see what he means, because 52 achieved its goal of moving around and positioning various characters so that they would be visible at time times when they tied into other comics, and thus serve their purpose as cross-promotion.  52, on the other hand, told a story.

When 52 came out, it was supposed to bridge the gap in DC’s “One Year Later” gimmick, in which, after Infinite Crisis, all of DC’s books jumped ahead a year, and there was a mystery created about what had taken place in that gap.  At the time, I actually thought this was an exciting notion.  You open the new Batman, and Harvey Bollock is back, and Harvey Dent is Gotham’s protector, and you’re wondering, Ooh, how on earth did that happen?  Structurally, it’s a clever idea for a mystery.  Then, these things were supposed to unfold within the storyline of 52, with, one would hope, exciting and surprising answers.

Then 52 proceeded to answer none of those questions.

Removed from the One Year Later equation, though, 52 actually told a great story, almost self-contained, about some minor characters that didn’t have much to do with the One Year Later mysteries.  52 had some great writers working on it, and they managed to make something.  Grant Morrison, as near as I can tell, is one of the few people at DC that just does exactly what he wants.  This is what, for me, makes his comics readable.  If 52 had been synchronized to tell the stories of the One Year Later mysteries, we can assume, with the level of skill at orchestration that the management of DC has, that it would have ended up something like Countdown, which was unreadable.

This is the difference between what happens when artists are allowed to tell stories, and when they’re hired as trained monkeys to entertain, to fill in continuity gaps between one piece of IP and another.  52 showed me that, when they do a big gimmick like One Year Later, you’re a fool to believe that they actually have something up their sleeve.  To find anything decent coming out of DC, you have to follow the artists that are able to slip their own personal vision through the cracks.

There’s this documentary I love called A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.  In that, there’s a segment called The Director as Smuggler, in which he talks about how, to create something personal or of value within the Hollywood system, artists often had to smuggle in their own agendas, talk in a sort of code, and operate primarily in subtext.  This is what I see Grant Morrison as doing, he makes just enough nods toward what is required of him so that he’s still able to play with the toys he wants, like Batman, but if you read his stories they’re about everything Grant Morrison cares about, from his nutty views about spirituality, to drug use, and so on.  The fact that he does this on these major icons makes him all the more entertaining to me.

But Watchmen was Watchmen.  It’s one of the only times in DC and Marvel history that something was made without all those fetters.  People make a big deal about how it was originally meant to contain the Charlton characters, and then Morrison changed them to analogs so that he could do things in the story that DC wouldn’t let him do with those characters.  They make this out as though it’s an indication that Moore isn’t as creative as he’s given credit for, since the characters were originally inspired by pre-existing creations, but that misses the entire point which is that Watchmen became Watchmen when it was removed from the constraints that would have existed had it been using characters like that.  Now, DC doesn’t see any difference between those characters that Moore created and the Charlton characters that inspired them.  It’s all just grist, it’s raw material for more garbage.

So, I guess my point is, who knows how many bad decisions at DC over the last decade were actually initiated by Dan DiDio (I’d guess a good number of them, but not all), but what’s more significant is that the *good* decisions didn’t happen because of him, or the corporate structure of IP propagation that he works for, but rather in spite of him.

Todd McFarlane could get a Douchebags of Comics card just for the whole backwards peace sign thing.  When I started looking for pictures of him to use to draw a portrait, I found this one and knew I wanted to do the peace sign thing:

I loved the hand gesture, but I didn’t think it was a very good picture of Todd for what I was doing.  I found this other picture:

And the face on there seemed to be a much better Todd face.

Then I went looking for some photos of people doing the backwards peace sign thing that I could use to draw Todd’s hands, and immediately I found this:

A List of “69 Ways to Know You’re a Douchebag,” which includes useage of the backwards peace sign as number 45 on its list of sure signs of douche.

Then right after I found that, I found: The Etymology of Human Male Non-Verbal Communications (or, Why Men Fist-Bump), which said of the backwards peace sign: “This says ‘I’m a douche.’ There are NO exceptions.”

So, the backwards peace sign says douche to people.  I wasn’t even Googling “douche,” I was googling “backwards peace sign” and phrases like that, but it seems the two are synonymous.

Then there are the flames on Todd’s shirt, the sunglasses on his head, etc.  It’s sort of a perfect storm of doucheitude.  I took the shirt and necklace I drew on Todd from another picture of him, as the flames wouldn’t have been very visible on the drawing I did and Todd does love him some necklaces, for whatever reason.  Mostly the type of necklaces they would have sold at PacSun in the mid 90′s.

When I wrote about Rob Liefeld for the Douchebags of Comics series, I said something about mentally deficient man children taking over the comics world.  This was the brief moment that happened at the end of the 80′s, the beginning of the 90′s, when for a short while there, it seemed like comics could be awesome, and instead they were taken over by bullshit.  All in a few years DC published Dark Knight and Watchmen, the Vertigo sorts of titles were starting to come into their own, Sandman was happening, Dave Sim, as crazy as he eventually became, was doing some pretty impressive things over in Cerebus.  For a brief, shining moment it seemed like mainstream comics were going to start hiring, for writers, people who could write.

And something went terribly wrong.  Pretty soon, with the interest in comics peaking, the companies smelled money and, being idiots, they thought that the way to get that money was through chromium covers.  The fans aren’t blameless, because they bought this shit.  They bought a lot of it.  The trend of actually being interested in people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller who made the comics led to the trend of superstar artists, which in theory should be a good thing.  It should be a good thing that people care about the artist whose work they’re reading, and would rather read the next book by an artist they love than just read whatever next book features the same costumed character they’ve been following since they were 10.

The problem was that people are stupid.  The superstar artists became the flashiest and crummiest of the people drawing at the time, and pretty soon the economics of the situation were dictated by people who could look at a Rob Liefeld drawing and not see anything wrong with it.  The people who should not have a say in the direction of art, in other words.

Todd McFarlane was not the worst of these artists.  He could kind of draw, when it came to certain things.  For some weird reason, since most of the pin-up type artists specialize in the sexy ladies, Todd had a really hard time drawing women.  I remember being a little kid, at which point I really wasn’t all that discerning about the art I looked at, and still staring at the Mary Jane panels in Todd’s Torment storyline and trying to figure out just what was wrong with her face.  There was something disturbing about it.

But Todd could draw a hella cool cape, and 10 year old me loves him some hella cool capes.  Thus, I loved Spawn.  It’s silly junk, but Todd draws silly junk with a certain flair, and if you’re a little kid and that’s what you want, I don’t begrudge you.  When you’re 40, that’s a different conversation, but we all have guilty pleasures.

My real reason I hold a grudge against Todd is more personal.  Todd taught me about selling out.

When this group of man children were the superstars of comics, they had the clout to leave Marvel and DC and start their own company, and do whatever they wanted with it.  Todd McFarlane had this moment where he was now able, for the rest of his life, to draw anything he wanted whenever he wanted, and he had enough fans that he would become obscenely wealthy doing it.  Any artist, ever, would kill for that chance.

Todd wrote Spawn himself until about issue 7 before bringing in new writers.  He drew it until issue 15 before hiring new artists.  Basically, Todd, in an astonishingly short amount of time, became a work-for-hire employer, exactly like what he had just left at Marvel.  And the type of work for hire employer that was pretty soon getting sued by Neil Gaiman, who he hired to write for him, over accusations of unfair compensation for his creations.  Todd didn’t stick it to the man, Todd became the man.

Still, if he didn’t care much about drawing and what he wanted to be was a work for hire employer, that’s fine too, I guess, although it seems spiteful to the rest of artists who would kill for those chances to have them and not really use them.

I really took it personally as a kid, though.  When I started reading Spawn, I read the letters pages, and I still remember in those early issues Todd talking about how the artists who make the comics should own their own creations, and that the people making the comics should be the ones who own them.  Yeah, thought 10 year old me, why shouldn’t they?! I found Todd McFarlane inspiring.

At the time, even young me was old enough to be getting fed up with Marvel and DC.  Around then the Clone Saga was happening in Spider-man, and my young mind was struggling with the concept that they really didn’t have any kind of decent plan for this thing, as was becoming increasingly obvious as it ground on.  They were just gonna keep pumping this shit out until people stopped buying it, and then they’d put Carnage or Venom on a cover and people would buy it again.  At that age, I still had a kind of trust that if artists were working on this story and selling it to me, they must have some vague notion of what they were doing.  I was really struggling with the idea that they didn’t, and I was being introduced to the concept of editorial control and how much the artists could be fucked with by the people trying to synchronize the business end of these things.

Mainstream comics at the time were by committee, and a storyline like the Clone Saga had to run through all the Spider-man titles, so that there would be a new installment out every week so that if you wanted to follow it you had to come back to the store.  So, even if the guy doing Spectacular Spider-man, say, tried to write a decent chapter, the next chapter was written by the dude doing Amazing Spider-man or whatever.  They talked, of course, but the things were on such a ridiculous schedule that they didn’t talk much, and they couldn’t revise much, and even when they did have a plan, editorial or somebody on the business end of things would come in and say, we haven’t used Green Goblin in a while, he has to be in this issue!  Or whatever.

What, Green Goblin?  He has nothing to do with the story.

Fuck you, artist dude, you’re writing funny books.

That’s basically how the “creative” process on these things breaks down, and it hasn’t changed much.

So at the time I was learning a lot about the harsh realities of art versus commerce, and then here was Todd beating the creator-owned drum.

Great, I thought!  Awesome!

Except that he wasn’t really using creator owned comics as a creative strategy.  He was actually using the creator-owned flag as a selling-point, a way of branding superstar artists, and then hiring other artists.  He was using what I thought of as the artistic future as a business strategy.

That’s a betrayal I never quite got over.

I just took the whole idea very seriously at the time.  I also remember him going on about storylines being endlessly dragged on, and that he thought that Spawn would run for a finite time, and when the story was done he would stop the series.  I think I remember him saying 75 issues at the time.  Spawn is now well past the 200 issue mark.  Recently, Todd has said that he’d like Spawn to get past the 300 issue mark to beat Dave Sim’s 300 issue run on Cerebus.  The difference is that Dave Sim, with Gerhard, actually drew those comics.

At the time, when Todd said 75 issues, I remember being really excited by the idea.  Imagine, a comic book story with an actual beginning, middle and an end!  I remember back at the time, Spawn had this little power counter bar that would get smaller when he used magic or whatever it was he did. It wasn’t great storytelling, but it made you feel like it was going somewhere.  It was exciting to think that this might have a plan, and something big it was building up to.

I’ve always loved comics, but sometimes loving mainstream comics is a lot of work.  Imagine if Agatha Christie was telling a mystery story, and then instead of dropping clues, she starts introducing new characters 50 chapters in, and then she spends a bunch of issues on Mary Jane being pregnant and then decides to forget about it and has some deus ex machina erase the pregnancy, and then sales slip so she has Wolverine show up for no reason to do a team-up with Miss Marple, and then about three years later she gets angry messageboard comments from fans because of the fact that she never resolved the mystery, and at this point she doesn’t care anymore, so she says that Mephisto did it.

That’s how DC and Marvel tell stories.

So Todd, maybe you didn’t mean to hurt me, but you did.  For a minute there, 10 year old me thought that Todd McFarlane was what was gonna be different than all that.  Maybe it’s 10 year old me’s fault, because 10 year old me was kind of stupid, but even now I can’t help but feel that comics- even mainstream ones whose main attributes are hella cool capes- can be so much more than that.

The word Bravura in the picture.  I started this thing with Frank Miller where I had him pointing and saying “Schmucks” which was a reference to his blog about the Occupy movement, and so now I’m trying to come up with a word or phrase that represents the people in each picture for me.

When I saw Todd at Image Expo, he was on the panel of the Image Founders, and one of the many long, rambling stories he told was about how some comics writers a while ago tried to start an independent comics company and used the name Bravura.  He scoffed over the name, and said it was the kind of name writers would come up with, because writers like fancy words like that.  Were Todd to have the vocabulary of a bright Middle School student, he would know that “bravura” isn’t an especially difficult word, and I think he would actually like the word.

I think the word “bravura” is a really good one for how Todd sees himself.  He likes to be the center of attention at panels, or wherever, and he thinks that people are hanging on his every word, even when he’s interrupting other panelists so that he can tell stories about the early days of Image that every comics fan has already heard 100 times.  Todd sees himself as a go-getting, and a big, determined larger than life personality that gets his way in the world.  I thought having him say the word bravura in the picture was fitting, because Todd has lots of bravura.  I just wish sometimes he’d use it for something more constructive.