Long before CMNS, of course, many blogs and sites had taken easy shots at the often wacky, sometimes perverse world of commercial comics, particularly those of the Silver Age. SUPERDICKERY is probably the best-known of these. However, while I might sometimes smile at an image that site reprints, I've never thought there was any particular wit in whatever comment the SUPERDICKERY guys added to the image.
Barnett's CMNS is pretty much in the same vein, but I, like many readers (according to the stats he cited), checked in regularly because nine times out of ten, Barnett added some wacky or perverse comment to a given comics-image that *enhanced* the simple goofiness of the image.
In this blogpost, Barnett, in the midst of suggesting how others might follow his act, suggests how he draws a line between what's funny and what's merely stupid:
If you're going to take over for me as one of the least-respected bloggers on the web, you've got to know where that line is between "Okay, I'll admit that's funny," and "Well, now you're just being stupid."
I won't comment on precisely how Barnett proves his point with some "out-of-context" dialogue from a Superboy comic; one can read that for oneself (as well as my own rave in the comments section). But it seems to me that Barnett provides a good baseline between "funny" and "stupid" by showing how he *develops* the goofiness-potential of a comic that was originally not meant to be either particularly wacky or perverse. The baseline, it seems, has a lot to do with attention to what he calls "details"-- which is what I don't get from SUPERDICKERY's posts.
If as the saying goes, "the devil's in the details," that must apply just as well to whatever devil's in charge of this kind of comedy.
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