Offspring,
After getting home at about 1am after the night of August 24th, 2011, I StumbledUpon this comic (please read before reading the blog), and was so enraged, I simply had to write (and send) this e-mail to the author;
Dearest Author,
After getting home at about 1am after the night of August 24th, 2011, I StumbledUpon this comic (please read before reading the blog), and was so enraged, I simply had to write (and send) this e-mail to the author;
Dearest Author,
After drunkenly stumbling and scooting home and finding myself unable to fall asleep due to the lack of a response to an emotionally vulnerable text to a girl I like, I decided to Stumble for a while in the (now-)vain hope that she had merely decided on a post-midnight shower. After showing me all the cool ways of hacking vending machines and animated .gifs of adorable kittens jumping into glass windows the internet had to offer, StumbleUpon brought me to your comic entitled "If The News Was A Media Person".
Now, I'm not saying that my judgement is highly representative of a population that critically and after thorough analysis demands more from those who fuel its consumptive lust. I could never make that claim after 7 pints of micro-brewed beer and a drink called 'Esc' that looks like Red Bull, but claims to have the opposite effect (and I can't say it's worked). No. I write to you as a man who recently turned 20, and realises when he feels he has been robbed of his time by a comic strip.
You are a proponent of a medium. That medium is comic strips. Over the ages, the medium has evolved and seen many iterations. From the Garfield and Archie comics that surpass my grandparents for a place in our collective minds made time immemorial, to the likes of xkcd for the high-mono-browed geeks among us, through the drivel that is 'Three Word Phrase', arriving at the sporadically-updated, but ever-genius Perry Bible Fellowship Comics, those panelled works of humorous, insightful, poignant and witty art have served to console, humour, entertain and inspire us for decades. I have a folder on my Chrome bookmarks bar called 'Comics', where I store links to the 'most recent' page of every comic I like at the time, and click on on a daily basis to both crash my Intel Core i3 laptop temporarily, and to exercise my funny bone. And among my 6 or 7 rotational comics, not all of them disappoint, nor do all of them appoint. On some days, Cyanide & Happiness will elicit a 'share to Facebook' response from me, while xkcd will send me to xkcdexplained.com. On other days, Married to the Sea will have me in stitches in one panel while its bastard brother Toothpaste for Dinner will leave me wondering why I didn't just swallow detergent when I had the chance as a 2-year-old. Alas, I am sorry to say that neither "Subnormality!" nor any other of the comics hosted on Viruscomix.com will ever make my Comics list. Before I delve into the reasons why, I feel that I owe you an explanation as to why I even bothered to write this, rather than to Stumble on drunkenly, and forget the experience altogether.
I learnt something tonight. About 3 pints in, I learnt that talking to the hot blonde German girls and asking the most single and least inhibited one if she'd like a drink meant that I was infinitely more likely to get her number than I was had I decided to sit across the bar and stare at her pervertedly all through the night. Though it didn't work out, I felt as if I had achieved something. I had shown her that I had an opinion of her, and she could choose to act on it - or not - if she pleased. She politely declined my offer, and we both went happily on with our lives, likely never to meet again. It is with this spirit that I type out this already-wordy e-mail. I'm not here to tell you how you can make your comic better, I'm here to tell you why you have permanently lost 1 potential reader. Should you choose to act on it is your prerogative.
To begin, I feel that your comics are far too long-winded for the awkward and ultimately un-funny punchlines you choose to decorate them with. Before you ejaculate steam from your ears and turn the colour of beet-root flesh claiming 'Viruscomix are "Comix with too many words..." you fucking drunk moron!', understand that I see what you're trying to do, and I respect that some things can not be expressed in three panels the same way they can be expressed in just under thirty (in the case of the "Media Person" comic). Having said that, I don't believe there is a single idea in the world that requires 29 panels filled with over (an estimated) 600 words to articulate, unless the articulator is a pretentious, self-important and conceited so-faux-sticate, or perhaps the idea is either "The Middle-East Peace Plan" or "How to Get Attractive Women to Text You Back at 1am". Seeing that instead, you have opted to cover the issue of the over-saturation of our minds with irrelevant information by the mass-media (part of an interesting concept summarised from Huxley's "Brave New World" and contrasted with Orwell's "1984" in this comic of 19 less-texted, less-detailed - yet genius - panels), I can only deduce that you are an egregious self-aggrandising (pardon the Australian/British) comic artist who chooses to express their grievances with the world around them through what is frankly unnecessary and unimaginative artistic detail and a sub-par wit. Oh, and "too many words", of course.
The reason the "too many words" persists as a major problem of mine is two-fold. Firstly, your artwork is, as mentioned, unimaginative and bland. Visually, I have seen nothing more than the physical setting for an hypothetical conversation with an hypothetical figure, a la a particularly surreal scene in House S02E24, with House eating a sandwich on the bonnet of a car with his staff while in his hospital gown... down-town. You could just as easily vent your frustrations in blog form (see "It's Alf! In POG form!" for full comic effect), and perhaps elicit less disappointed responses to your comic(s). Further on this point; your minutiae only serve to distract the somewhat more intellectual crowd you aim to attract to your comic. The joke about the Avogadro Sandwich could have been about 12 times better, and 16 times less distracting. Instead, you upstaged yourself by making a joke that ultimately wasn't funny except for the part where you made fun of how 'Avocado' kind of sounds like 'Avogadro'. 14-year-old Mashood made that joke. Nobody likes that joke. But instead of paying attention to the flogged dead horse of a point that the news media bombards us with sensationalist headlines, I found myself reaching for the nearest razor and questioning my co-ordination to make a clean incision to end my life in the shortest possible time.
Secondly, get better punchlines. If I've spent 5 minutes deciphering both an unclear delineation of chronology (though I can accept that that seems deliberate to demonstrate the obfuscation of the precision and deliberation with which the news media delivers current affairs) and ultimately-random scribblings on the wall behind the subject of the comic, I want a good punch-line. I don't want to be left feeling awkward for the news media man who is actually just a horn-dog preying on women he sees. This was not the point of your comic, and portraying News Media Man in this light right at the end, while casting the protagonist as a temperamental bitch who got fed up with him and suddenly decided to convey the view of the author that they will be abandoning current affairs programming and their live Fox News feed on their iPhone for an indefinite period of time shows that even you did not know how you wanted to actually end the comic.
Here is my summation of your comic in three panels on a verbal story-board;
IF THE NEWS WAS A MEDIA PERSON
- Summarised by Mashood Qureshi
Probably just under enough words since 2011
[Protagonist (P) stepping out of her house, greeted by News Media Man (NMM)]
1. (P): hey! How'd that by-election go yesterday?
(NMM): The way you anticipated, based on my forecasts, of course ;) Did you heard about the family that was stoned in Iran for allowing their daughter to go to college?
P: No?! What happened?
NMM: I'll tell you about it over lunch.
[P and NMM meeting over lunch, conversation continuing]
NMM: ...and basically, Iran is where we should go next, to liberate the people.
P: I question how you came to that conclusion.
NMM: You're entitled to- OH! Don't eat that profiterole! You'll get fat.
P: I maintain a healthy and balanced exercise regime and diet. Your so-called expert opinion is not tailored to match my life-style.
[P and NMM are now in a park, P looking rather frustrated, NMM defeated]
P: Come to think of it, you've seldom given me information relevant to my life-style. All you've ever done is fed me a life-style to emulate - but always fall short of - the lives of starlets and harlots, and I think it's about time I stopped talking to you!
NMM: Perhaps it's time for you to hear a more expert opinion on this issue?
P: Perhaps it's time for me to go and educate myself on the issues that actually concern me.
END
It's probably not the best thing in the world. But I don't see how I've not covered - in 3 supposed panels - any idea you took 29 to convey.
I am beginning to feel the effects of that 'Esc' drink (or maybe it's that old 2:43am-itis I've been hearing about), and coincidentally feel I have made my point in an ironically inflated period of time and number of words.
I implore you not to take my words as those of someone who knows what he's talking about, but rather to take them as feedback on your comic from a person who also read the John Lennon one, and didn't like it either.
Your artistic talent is quite reasonable, but it suffers under the weight of all of those words. If you want more regular readers who donate/share/tweet/post/+1 your comic, either get funnier, get more precise, or get actual punchlines. If you're smarter than I think I am, you'll do all three.
Kindly,
Mashood Qureshi
___________________________________________________________________
Is that what I should have done? Should I have lived and let live? Only time will tell. But you can tell me, too! Also be sure to show your friends! My goal in life is to never be able to introduce myself without someone asking me if I'm the ass who wrote a scathing e-mail to an innocent webcomic artist.
Perniciously,
Dad.
P.S. Yes, I do realise it's been over 7 months.
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