NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 4

A lot of comics-forums remind me of a certain SOUTH PARK episode in which the main characters egged on a fight between two other kids who didn't have anything against each other. Often the posters on comics-forums don't care anything about the issues involved: they just want to see cyberblood.

But in Part 3 of this series A. Sherman Barros made an intelligent request as to my question, "Should I bother to respond to Tom Spurgeon when he'll never read it?" So I'm bound to tilt my lance at the Spurgemeister once more, and see if indeed his response is the "chickenshit mendacity" I predicted it would be.

Let's see here...

Seriously, I didn’t understand any of that. I also don’t understand why you think I’m suggesting you feel inferior to me and my kind, although it seems psychologically revealing that you’d just toss that out there. I don’t even know what “my kind” is supposed to mean (Methodists?), although again that I’m representative of some group that you might feel is against you could also be seen as psychologically revealing

Yep, bigtime mendacity. In addition to having tossing out a lame caricature of fanboys as (horrors) Wearers of the Dreaded Unhip Ponytail, Spurgeon tells me that he's sorry that "life turned out the way it did for you" as a stratagem to make me sound like a simple troll who's taking issue with his statements out of a frustration with life's unfairnesses. But that wasn't meant to make me feel "inferior," heck no. It was just another one of the sage observations by the guy who just got pegged (by someone or other on THE BEAT) as "the conscience" of the online comics-community. Odd thing to say of a fellow who unjustifiably accused one of your fellow workers of having given a blowjob to DC Comics, but hey, maybe tossing the rabid dog a steak will keep him from biting off your balls (if any).

I guess I could spend the time trying to figure out what you’re getting at, attempting to identify where you went off course and trying to explain you out of what I feel are your leaps of logic and what I’m guessing you think are your great gordian knot splitting sword-slices of truth, but that would be silly and likely a huge waste of my time.

And Tom Spurgeon knows whereof he speaks as to leaps of logic, since as noted earlier Rich Johnson's cautious praise of DC's past achievements becomes in Spurgeonworld a "blowjob."

However, I don't think he knows what a "reducio ab absurdum" is. When I ask him rhetorically whether he thinks Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman should bow down before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb (a DC Comics reference that people on THE ABSORBASCON would probably get), I already know that he doesn't expect either individual to "worship at the feet of Robert Crumb."

The entire point of taking a premise to an absurd level is to show that the premise is absurd at its core. In Spurgeon's case it was this statement:

A lot of the rest of this seems like nonsense to me, too. To take one: Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die.

Putting aside many side-issues-- that Rich Johnson did not call Vertigo a "boundaries-pusher" or claim that it had eclipsed EC and the undergrounds, that the Vertigo line was an attempt to *make* experimental comics "hot" under a banner of their own, rather than a marketing of comics that were already "hot"-- the central premise here is that once EC and the UGs reached some lofty level of quality, no one who didn't exceed EC and UG by Spurgeon's standards can claim to have "expanded what comics storytelling could achieve" (Johnsons's actual words). I suppose in Spurgeon's mind "expansion" correlates with the notion of real-life explorers pushing into new territories. I don't know if that's what "expansion" means to Rich Johnson, but I'm certain it doesn't mean that to me. Literary accomplishment, even in pop-literature, is more than just "who did what first" or "who supposedly climbed higher in the rankings of 'who's more significant.'"

In TS's final paragraph he floods THE BEAT with crocodile tears about the "damage" he thinks he's done me. Yes, flatter yourself some more, Tommy Boy. I once told TS during one of our long arguments that I'm naturally contentious by nature and, as proof, cited my long history of writing the lettercol of COMICS JOURNAL back when it was a magazine worth a damn. Many of my letters pick fights with various other columnists/essayists-- R. Fiore, Carter Scholz, Kim Thompson. Some led to long discussions probably no more profitable than this one; one led to a simplistic "fuck you" reply from none other than that Thompson boy. Sorry, TS. I've crossed swords with many before you and will cross swords with many after you. You're just not that special.

Are such arguments, long or short, a waste of time? In the sense that they don't accomplish any physical aim, like removing grout from your bathroom walls, they are. (Of course, one could say the same of ranting about other people doing PR for DC, which TS has carped at on other occasions before this one.) Still, even if you can't see your mind's muscles, they do need exercise even as the body's do. I didn't get much exercise contending with TS this time, but maybe the next opponent will offer more of a fight. I did think that anyone who wanted to be as insulting as TS was in his original BEAT post was someone who wanted the exercise of a good cyber-battle.

But-- it seems not so.