Archive for June 27th, 2008
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Bullshit Quotient
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.