From the Komix Thoughts blog. Shudder. I simply had to post this, as it’s just so intensely weird.
Nightmare Fuel
80 thoughts on “Nightmare Fuel”
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From the Komix Thoughts blog. Shudder. I simply had to post this, as it’s just so intensely weird.
Comments are closed.
Son of Stuck Funky 
I can spot the Moores and the Bushkas and maybe Harry. The rest of them are ciphers.
What’s with Byrne giving the youngest girl a Band Aid on her skinned knee? He retconned the Fantastic Four, which canonically had Reed and Sue meeting when he was 19 and she 16. Now he’s drawn like he’s 30, and she’s 12 but drawn like she’s EIGHT. Eight and horny! Check out the following link, and look at Sue’s knee. Given Byrne’s habit of writing “older men and much younger women”…
Not squicked out enough yet? Note the position of the Raggedy Ann’s legs.
That’s Funky, Holly and Cory there next to Bull’s family. I think.
Oh. Not Overweight Funky, but Alcoholic Funky. There’ve been so many time jumps that I can’t keep them straight (just like Tom).
So, if the merging of the Funkyverse into CS number 4, and that last week of FW #5?
OMG I GOT AN IDEA! Jump back 65 years to Jim Henson’s Funky Winkerbean Babies!!
(didn’t say a good idea)
From left to right, it’s Linda, Bull, Jinx, Funky, Cory, Holly, Les, Summer, Donna, Maddie, Crazy Harry, Becky, and Rana.
Of course, Funky, Holly, and Donna hadn’t yet evolved into their potato forms, and Jinx and Rana hadn’t yet vanished like they never existed. Also, Becky is using Rana to hide her stump, which I’m sure Batiuk wasn’t happy about. (Gotta have those pinned-up sleeves front and center, Byrne!)
The Band-Aid on Maddie’s knee is supposed to show her as the “tomboy”, I guess, prone to scraped knees from being rambunctious. Maybe. (Why Byrne gave it to Sue in that flashback I can’t even hazard a guess, though.)
(The less said about Byrne’s habit of pairing older men with younger women, the better. And even less should be said of his habit of women being mind controlled. I’ve said before he’s written some really great comics, and I stand by that, but he’s also written some seriously skeevy stuff…)
What crappy art. This looks like an ad for the original “The Sims” PC game.
That “college freshman” looks like he’s 14?
It’s Reed Richards, who’s supposed to be a super-genius, so maybe he is 14.
Byrne himself has described the scene as “an eight year old Sue ‘crushing on’ an eighteen year old Reed”, so it’s probably the case where he wrote and drew it with Sue at 8, then someone in editorial stepped in and said, “ew, no”.
(He also tried to deflect the blame to Stan Lee, saying Stan had established a ten-year age difference between them. Except that I don’t think Stan claimed they met when she was in elementary school, and not all ten-year age gaps are the same. Eight and eighteen is NOT the same as, say, 25 and 35.)
In “A Visit from the Fantastic Four,” in *F.F.* #11, Reed says he’s always loved Sue “since they were kids.”
When the story was reprinted in a Treasury Edition, Roy Thomas suggested that Reed had also served in Korea, because “Sue’s not that old.”
Reed may have skipped a few grades, but he has to arrive at Empire State University in order to room with Ben Grimm, who was accepted on a football scholarship, not because he was “a big brain” like Reed. The impression is that they’re both the same age.
According to the questions and answers data on the F.F. in the 1963 *Annual,* Reed’s white temples stem from rescuing POWs during World War II.
Next (clobberin’, of course!) time I listen to the “Halls of Ivy” radio episode about Merton Savada, the teenage genius, I’m going to be thinking of Mr. Fantastic. Merton’s bright enough to develop unstable molecules…and to keep out of the Negative Zone!
See, I recognized Byrne’s style in the pencil art on that link. And it was very publicly known that he did the character aging models.
But I really thought that these… gouache paintings? or whatever they are were painted by someone else. They don’t resemble Byrne’s faces (though the bodies do have the Byrne touch). And they don’t resemble Ayers’ faces. And they don’t resemble anyone’s faces other than perhaps the odd Hieronymus Bosch background character.
Some digging around led me to a site, we’ll see if this link gets caught in the chute:
https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1521585
I did vaguely recognize the style as something Byrne had used on Next Men and Babe. According to the caption it’s by his friend Gary Cody, maybe a fellow Canadian. I thought maybe an early computer coloring approach but it does say acrylic.
Loved when Byrne got his buddy Gary Cody to start doing painted covers for the Next Men with issue #23. Happy to luck upon this Jasmine (and Hilltop!) cover for “Lies, Part 2 of 4.”
Art on thick particle board from 1994 – 16×22 (scan is trimmed near image area).
a new sales kit was put together and a sales relaunch of the strip prepared. This was not something that was usually done for a thirty-five-year-old comic strip.
God, everything’s proof of his greatness, isn’t it?
No, 35-year-old comic strips are not usually relaunched, because 35-year-old comic strips don’t usually throw away their entire premise and need to drastically reinvent themselves to continue existing. Which was mostly a lie anyway.
“Funky What-er-bean? Huh? Oh…it is? Thirty-five years?? Really??? Huh, how about that. So he’s doing what with it? Time skip? Why? Oh…really? Cancer? Are you kidding me? Um, yeah, whatever, so are we leaving the strip in the same position on the page, or what?”
I like how he claims he wanted to skip over the bulk of the “mourning Lisa” stuff, then proceeded to mourn Lisa for years on end anyway. He’s just so remarkably full of shit.
The links to Byrne’s message board that were posted by Billy the Skink in the last thread were quite revealing.
1. Byrne doesn’t like us much, guys. Not much at all.
2. I looked at BTS’s last link and read the whole thread that contained it. I found something very interesting. Byrne claimed that he did the pencils sometime around February.
Many of us thought that the strip had been abruptly canceled by King Features, forcing Batiuk to hastily construct some kind of rushed ending.
Well, Byrne’s comment blows that theory to hell. And in a way, that makes it worse. TB had a year or more to brew the Harley/Village Botsmith story. It wasn’t rushed. It was carefully, throughly, exhaustively planned.
Just when I was getting over the WTFery of the finale, I am re-gobsmacked.
Unanswered as yet: Why didn’t Ayers pencil the final week?
Maybe that’s when Ayers’ contract ran out? Or he himself did, after decades of putting up with the Batiukshittery. “Sorry, Tom, you’re on your own.”
As to #1, I give Byrne a pass on that. It’s clear the two were very good friends and when you see a friend being criticized, you tend to take his defense.
You’ll notice though that he simply attacked the critics non-specifically, and he had no positive defense of Batiuk’s work. That should tell you a lot.
One of the posters on Byrne’s message board compared these images in today’s post to Byrne’s Next Men and Danger Unlimited.
Next Men appears to track.
So, I guess we’ve got, without me GrandpGoogling, it’s:
Bulgy Redhead! He always keeps a spare toilet! (for he breaks them)
Cyclops, Undercover X-Cop! (Hey- Scott: disguise ain’t workin’)
Puck! (from Alpha Flight! If you don’t know that, you are not allowed in the Tommyverse anymore!)
Black Dress Guns Miniskirt! Was this comic done in the 90s? Or is this…multiverse Lisa?! “And now, having gained their trust–the BURNINGS begin! ONLY ONE BOOK WILL SURVIVE!”
Almost-Black-Dressed Miniskirt…Her powers are…gloves? Look closer, and you’ll see that she’s thrown a spiked manhole cover on the ground. Yes! It’s MAN-HOLE GIRL! (ed: name needs work)
Piece of String for a Top Girl! I once had a conversation with a friend when we came across 90s action figures in an antique store (yes, 90s antiques). “How come the men all are dressed head to toe, and the women wear pieces of string for tops?!” We went to the comic shop, and she grabbed a figure from the clearance bin and laughed. I said “What did I just say, STRING FOR A TOP!” She pointed the doll’s crotchal area and the second piece of string. I said “Well, they do say that you should floss everyday!”
Wow! I’ll bet this comic WAS from the 90s!
For the record, yes: it was from the 90s. (I could probably try to explain who the characters are and the premise of the book, but… honestly, does anyone care?)
It is worth noting though that, in one issue, Danny (the one that’s not Puck from Alpha Flight) is trying to get somewhere, so he flags down a passing driver. Driving a school bus. The driver is an older guy, with a red windbreaker and red-and-white trucker cap. He acts like a jerk and drives off without Danny.
I’ll give Byrne props for the amusing cameo, honestly. (It was also a rather well-rendered drawing of Ed, too. Byrne’s style, but it’s easy to tell who it’s supposed to be.)
It wasn’t rushed. It was carefully, throughly, exhaustively planned.
Nah. I’d bet Batiuk still had the obsessive need to stick to his pointless, self imposed schedule. Which means once he found out the strip was over, he only had about 7 weeks worth of strips left to draw — so he just wrapped it up in that amount of time.
I guess what I’m saying is that it was carefully, throughly, exhaustively rushed.
1. Byrne doesn’t like us much, guys. Not much at all.
We’re not even that critical of Byrne. I’ve said positive things about his work on FW. I thought his art style was a good fit for the soap opera strip Funky Winkerbean had become. But Batiuk refused to write to his own art style.
Right, there is nothing wrong with his art per se, it’s just that it didn’t work with the writing.
Besides, there are plenty of successful strips that had mediocre art, at least in my opinion, and yet I still enjoyed them.
1. Byrne was still venting his spleen seven full weeks after everyone else left the discussion. Five days later he adds yet another post?
RAGE! JOHN BYRNE! RAGE!!!
Why are there no other messages in reply to JB? Did someone delete them? Did anybody besides JB post a message after 02 January 2023 on this topic? Who read these? It’s just John Byrne all by his lonesome. It’s reminiscent of old man yells at cloud. I don’t know whether to offer to buy him a drink or a shoulder to cry on.
#SAD
He says…
I’m not 100% sure but I believe that “clown” was me. The world famous John Byrne called me a clown! 🤩🤩🤩
Mr. Byrne! Call me! 📞🤙😍🥰😘
Seven weeks? Hah, that’s nothing by Byrne standards. In a Fantastic Four issue, he included a subtle dig against Chris Claremont (referencing the final straw that led to Byrne quitting X-Men) three YEARS after the incident in question. As far as I know, Byrne STILL hates Peter David for an incident that occurred in 1984 – that David wasn’t even responsible for!
(From what I understand, Byrne is also VERY quick to delete and ban posters from his forum for disagreeing with him.)
So congratulations on drawing the ire of Byrne!
Send in the clowns. (singsong) ♫ It was my comment! ♫
The most surprising thing about John Byrne’s comment is that my “clown” post was made on January 30. Byrne read through a month or more of Son of Stuck Funky blogs after the Funky Winkerbean finale! Is John Byrne a regular reader?
Hi, John!!! 👋
I have this mental image of John Byrne reading through the SoSF archives. Hunched over his computer. Breathing heavily. Pounding on the keyboard. Spittle flying.
Seethe! Anger! Rage!
https://i.postimg.cc/7PGK3N2h/100.webp
I just happened to see his newest “Match To Flame” thing today, and my first thought was “oh yeah, that shit is definitely SoSF worthy”. Everyone is all lithe and lean and kind of sexed up, even Holly, which is especially jarring. And what’s going on there with swarthy Harry? Is that supposed to be a tan? They all look like soap opera stars.
I suppose we should be grateful that he wasn’t writing it, too. Imagine Batiuk’s writing being superior to anything…the mind reels. But Byrne’s vision was just too strange.
Harry here is a PSA to other letter-carriers not to forget their sunscreen too many days in a row.
Wait, that implies that Batiuk passed up the opportunity to give a character skin cancer. That can’t be right…?
Bahahahaha!
That art looks like when a amateur artist traces someone else’s line art to make ORIGINAL CHARARACTER DONUT STEEL! It’s obvious the lines were originally Byrnes, but who the heck did that hideous paint job?
And why does Cory look like WALLY in his depressed dishwasher uniform from 2010?
Oh, hey, it’s a comic that starts with “so” where it actually sounds like natural dialogue! Wally’s using it as filler to strike up a conversation. Good job, Tom!
Also from Match to Flame 200 – “after Lisa died, I didn’t want to spend a long time in the strip mourning her.”
Seriously?
No, instead he chose to make her the worship object of the Lisa Cult with Les installed as high priest and Keeper of the Flame.
Translation: I could think of anything to write and so I moved on.
That’s the real reason. Tom Batiuk simply can’t write real human emotions, and is intimidated by the prospect. Nor would he let Les to grow up and face what happened, much less his own failures as a husband and father. He’s a fraud, and all his avatars are frauds.
*could not
“I didn’t want to spend a long time in the strip mourning her. That’s why I decided to skip ten years, then have Les *still* mourning her, and continue to do so for the next 22 years (in-strip time) even after he gets remarried. Why, Les will mourn Lisa so hard, he’ll get a Best Actress Oscar for it! It’s called writing!”
I mentioned this in the last thread, but it bears repeating, I think.
A parent with a very young child does not have the luxury of becoming a bottomless bucket of grief. A real-life Les would have had to put on the bravest face he could, knuckle down, and get on with it, and save the weeping for quiet moments when the kid’s asleep.
What I’m saying is that he obviously didn’t have to show Les performatively grieving for 10 years.
Somehow it never occurred to him to maybe talk to some folks who’d lost a spouse to cancer, or read some books about young widowers with children, and draw from that. Or just use his own damn imagination. Hint: People grieve, but life goes on.
Any explanation he gives of the time-skip is frankly a pathetic cop-out. How can he not see that?
He wrote himself into exactly this situation and took YEARS to do it, and then couldn’t muster the courage, creativity, or give-a-shit to write himself out of it.
#SAD
You cannot be serious. YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!!!
I actually think the alternate art is an improvement? The characters may be a little too scrawny and leggy but I like the general direction…
It was definitely an improvement for the soapy stories TB had been increasingly trying to tell since the HW Bush administration. It was also a huge improvement over TB’s original artwork for conveying action, emotion, and atmosphere… though TB appeared to have little-to-no interest in writing two of those three things.
Byrne’s new artwork’s only real weakness is that it did not convey humor of any kind well. It completely flattened gags, jokes, and even comedic situations that other soapy comics make work from time-to-time. Not that it was supported by TB’s writing… but try using it to tell jokes you know work, it will deaden their impact. Even after TB and Ayers strayed a bit from Byrne’s redesigns, that aspect of the art remained. Of course, it also came into play less and less because TB wrote less and less humor in late Act II through all of Act III, but it made it doubly jarring when TB would reach back into that well.
Frankly, the only reason we talked about the artwork as much as we did in Act III was because the strip’s pace had become so slow that there were many days where there wasn’t much else we could talk about.
Batiuk didn’t want to write gag-a-day anymore, because it was beneath him, but he kept doing it anyway. He wanted to write drama, but did a time skip to avoid the drama he created. He switched to a more serious art style at the same time he promised to bring back less serious subject matter. And then quickly abandoned it all in favor of comic book publishing stories.
He was good at gag-a-day.
Yes, that was another problem: he pivoted away from what he was good at. And why? To chase awards and feed his ego. Batiuk is a great example of the Peter Principle: promoted to the level of his incompetence, and then left there for the rest of his career.
I think Byrne was a very bad influence on him. If Batiuk wanted to move into drama, he would have done better to approach a man who wrote a drama strip, not the joker who likes taking a wrecking ball to continuity because he wants everyone to enjoy his childhood.
“Frankly, the only reason we talked about the artwork as much as we did in Act III was because the strip’s pace had become so slow that there were many days where there wasn’t much else we could talk about.”
And many times, there was no dialog at all, for days at a stretch. Those were tough, man. Like that inexplicable one when Funky explored an abandoned house, or when Linda was reading the rejection letter from the NFL, or when it took three or four full days for Adeela to get arrested. I really dreaded getting one of those.
I’ve always thought it was kind of obvious that he bit off more than he was capable of chewing with Act III. He breezed into it, all full of ambition and brimming with crazy ideas, but he diluted it way too much, and wasn’t up to the task of keeping up with his regular characters AND the new additions. Then there was the fact that Lisa was his main pathos-generating engine in Act II, and without her, Batiuk was lost. He kept finding ever-more ludicrous ways of keeping her in the fold, but he had to let that go, and at that point, you could see him lose interest. And, sadly, the strip continued on like that for ten, eleven more years.
He kept finding ever-more ludicrous ways of keeping Lisa in the fold, but he had to let that go
Did he ever let it go, though? Even in the last year, Crazy Harry’s “offgassing” time travel trip had him encounter Lisa so he could fail to tell her to get a mammogram, even though nothing was preventing him from talking. And, there was another flashback in 2022 so Harry could give her the idea to record those dumb tapes.
The asshole thinks he wrote “Come On Eileen” with this shit.
Not to mention Marianne Winters winning the Academy Award for playing Lisa in a movie, and the Timemop flashbacks to getting Les and Lisa together. And, again, that was just in the last year alone.
Oh, he absolutely kept shoehorning Lisa in there, but early in Act III, she was pretty much still a full-fledged cast member, as opposed to a curiosity. Killing her off was his biggest mistake. There was no reason to have her die, aside from the shock value of the whole thing, which never generated the kind of attention he assumed it would. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I missed her or anything, as I always found her to be totally insufferable, but still. It might have spared his readers the series of idiotic contrivances, like secret diaries, VHS tapes and etc.
Notice Batiuk never points out that this concept art was never used. It might be interesting to learn what events caused this very different art style and direction to be scuttled, but Batiuk will never give you that kind of insight. Or any insight. The point of all his writing is to obfuscate the truth, and to try and dictate the reality he wants.
The man missed his calling in life. Batiuk should have gone into politics, either as a candidate or a press secretary. He’s great at talking at length without saying anything, and refusing to acknowledge any inconvenient realities.
“this concept art was never used”
This fact makes it all the more interesting that Byrne is so quick to jump to Batiuk’s defense against us beedy-eyed nit pickers.
Byrne’s thought processes (such as they are) become rather clear when you consider his misdirected vendetta against the Legion Of Super-Heroes. A normal person would realize that in about a thousand years, history would record that Superman teamed up with Gandalf and Captain Picard to fight Thanos, Lex Loofa and Howie Mandel. The kids from the future wanted to test him to see if he lived up to the legend. Dorko conflates them to the jerks who bullied him in high school.
While your reasoning makes sense, the Legion has always been presented as having perfect records of history. (And they had time machines, so they could actually observe history without relying on any potentially inaccurate records.)
And to be honest, the Legion really were a bunch of jerks. Not just in that first story, either, though that was kind of a dick move on their part. I mean… “we were inspired by you, but we’re going to test you to see if you’re worthy to join our group” is pretty dickish. Rigging the tests so that Superboy fails them isn’t much better, just to see how he reacts to the rejection? Then they later… er, earlier… er… anyhoo, then they reject Supergirl for an EXTREMELY stupid reason. Hold on, this one’s gonna need some explaining. Silver Age DC Comics, man.
Okay, so… after Superboy was admitted to the Legion, they tried to recruit Supergirl. Only now the Legion were the children of the original members who recruited Superboy (probably because DC wanted to account for Supergirl not coming to Earth until years after Superboy became Superman). (And the less said about THAT story, the better.) This would be very quickly forgotten, though, so we’ll go with the retconned version where it was the same Legionnaires. Anyway, while testing Supergirl, she accidentally gets exposed to Red Kryptonite, which causes her to become an adult instead of her normal teenage self. So the Legion rejects her because she’s too old for their club of teenagers. Even though she was aged artificially, the Red K effects only last 24 hours, and they’re time travelers. The Legion are… EXTREME sticklers for their rules. Just like teenagers, amirite?
Eventually, they do give her another chance, though, and this time she’s accepted. (And let’s just say that’s EXCEPTIONALLY convoluted. As in, Superboy joined some 15 years before Supergirl, but Supergirl joined before Superboy. Silver Age DC Comics, man.)
But back to the jerky Legion. As was common for comics at the time, the characters would act like complete sociopathic douchebags if it meant they wouldn’t need to explain something in a simple and straightforward manner. Saturn Girl finds out a prediction that a Legionnaire will die on their next mission, so what does she do? If you said “use her telepathic powers to get herself elected leader, then proceed to find pretenses to expel EVERY OTHER MEMBER so she’ll be the only one in danger of dying”, congratulations! You can write Silver Age DC comics!
And that’s just one example. I mean, I know Byrne may reference just that original story for not liking the Legion, but… they really could be jerks. Like, a LOT.
There’s a reason it’s called Super-Dickery: the writers in the fifties were jerks too. This is the past Batiuk reveres: a shithole world filled with boorish weirdos who would rather eat a bucket of live scorpions than explain themselves because someone is writing backwards from a nitwit deus ex machina ending. No bloody wonder Jim Shooter got his start writing for them: he was the only one big enough a dick to get them.
Saturn Girl’s behavior resulted in the death of Lightning Lad, who got better, and the death of Proty, who did not.
While Superboy was “a super-good sport” about the Legion’s treatment of him in *Adventure* #247, he did get a bit of his own back in a 1970s story, in which he shows up his teammates with lightning, magnetism and what seems to be telepathy.
It’s not nice to fool a Boy of Steel, you know.
“Stay and be my girl,” Brainiac 5 pleaded to Supergirl, but she did not.
She did think him cute, though, as did Shadow Lass (quite briefly, as she transferred her affections to Mon-El a couple of issues later).
Well, unless you count the 90s retcon that said that, rather than Proty sacrificing his life force to revive Lightning Lad, instead his consciousness was transferred into Lightning Lad’s body. So Lightning Lad was actually Proty possessing his reanimated corpse. But the less said about that, the better.
I agree with you, Green Luthor. The only time I really gave the Legion a chance was with the 1990s retcon: I lasted five issues and was glad to leave it to those who could enjoy it.
Dare I ask if the same thing that happened with Lightning Lad and Proty also happened with Mon-El and Eltro Gand?
“Fools rush in where angels take a break,” sang Lou Reed.
Years later, while working in Brooklyn, I frequently found abandoned comic-books on the sidewalk.
(Mr. Batiuk has fainted! Quick, get some coffee from Luigi’s!)
Among them were quite a few post-Bierbaum/Giffen issues of *The Legion,* and I felt very pleased that these were characters I recognized, especially Laurel Gand with Brainiac 5, revisiting the Supergirl romance with a bigoted Daxamite. When he develops a cure for lead poisoning for her, he offers it to her only if she’ll admit that he’s superior.
“I won’t,” she says.
“Then say I’m inferior,” he says.
“I…can’t,” she says.
“Damn right,” he says, and he gives her the serum, and she says:
“Brainy…I’m sorry…”
It’s funny what stays with you. As I wrapped up *Greeks Bearing Gifts,* I found Philip Kerr alluding to the film version of *From Russia with Love* (the book is set in 1957, the year that book was published) and when he had a character with an Ian Fleming paperback in his room, I was sure that it would be that. But it turned out to *Casino Royale,* and I immediately thought of Bond’s final report about how 3030 was a double working for Redland and his profane explanation for why he was speaking of her in the past tense.
Jim Shooter, for what it’s worth, likened the joint effort of the Legion and the Fatal Five to THRUSH joining forces with U.N.C.LE.
TIXE YNLO!
Byrne on our reactions to the Village Botsmith finale:
Guys, he’s got our number. Stupid, vicious, and evil. I mean, who could read the works of CBH without shuddering at the “deeper darkness than … seen even in the worst comic fans”? Come to think of it, every time I open this site, the room is suddenly permeated with the smell of sulfur and an eerie red light…
Probably outgassing.
Anyhoo, I wonder what types of things Byrne considers “deep darkness from the worst comics fans”. Like, what would he think about this:
(That was in response to Jessica Alba being cast as Sue Storm. Three guesses who said it, and any guesses that aren’t “John Byrne” don’t count.)
And since his propensity to show relationships between older men and younger women was brought up earlier…
Yep.
But, yeah, WE’RE the ones with the “deeper darkness”.
And an extra bonus, considering Byrne’s own appearance in Funky Winkerbean:
Kind of a long way from “hentai has a long tradition in Japan”, innit?
(Apologies in advance if the formatting tags don’t work right.)
The love I bear John Byrne can afford no better term than this: Ugh. Gross.
The creepiness of the “Sue meets Reed” panel only increases in light of that comment about pedophilia.
I really, really don’t want to start a discussion about pedöphilia here, but I have to remark on this.
Ephebophilia is the term for those attracted to pubescent and just-postpubescent people.
Pëdophiles are attracted to children.
Children are not “strong and healthy for breeding purposes.” Children are not fertile and can’t “breed” at all. (Jesus, come on. “Breeding.” 😨🤢🤮)
Girls who are just at the onset of puberty who are “bred” (😨🤢🤮) have a very high rate of complications and death in both mother and child. Just-pubescent girls are actually the worst prospects, not the “strongest, most healthy for breeding purposes.” (😨🤢🤮)
That’s probably why, contrary to Byrne’s assertion, most men are attracted to young women maybe 5-15 years post-puberty, NOT to children.
I have many many choice words for people who justify sêx with children, but I’ll leave it at the above, a scientific explanation of why Byrne’s “rational explanation” is 100% WRONG objectively and scientifically, leaving morals aside (since no doubt he’s one of those that proclaim all sëxual morality to be oppressive bourgeois conditioning).
After reading that retina-searing tripe, one can’t help but chuckle anew at his description of us as harboring “deeper darkness than [he’s] seen even in the worst comic fans.”
In retrospect, I think I probably should have put some kind of warning about the skeeviness I was about to unleash on the comments, so if I offended (or nauseated) anyone by quoting Byrne, I do sincerely apologize. (But, in light of his “deeper darkness” comments, it really did need to be said, I think. I mean, it’s one thing to dislike what we do here, but… I don’t find being someone Byrne disagrees with to be a bad thing…)
(If I could edit the post to add a massive WARNING, I would.)
Um yeah, that got real creepy real quick LOL. While I understand why the negativity of FW’s snarkers might have upset him, the way I see it is, we were merely judging the work. And by any objective measure, that work stunk. Here at SoSF, we never went out of our way to draw attention to ourselves, or to be “dark” just for the sake of it. Speaking for myself, I was criticizing it, and if that upset him or anyone else, too bad. Do a better comic strip then.
Oh, and I can’t help myself from commenting on this:
Is he living in Iran? Saudi Arabia? Because in this country, “Pride Month” has just begun and we are inundated with rainbow flags and the like. Today, nonprocreative sex, and even medical procedures that leave people unable to procreate, are celebrated to the sky by the government, global corporations, the media, Hollywood, etc. That’s a fact that both pearl-clutching church ladies and leather bears marching in Pride parades can agree on.
One thing that few people celebrate is sex with children. Methinks he’s setting up a straw man so he can mock society’s “prudery” without admitting the truth: He’s got one of the few paraphilias (attraction to children) that isn’t widely celebrated, at least not yet. And that’s why he feels unaccepted and angry, and lashes out at the whole uptight world allegedly demanding “procreative” sex “in the missionary position.”
I would honestly hate to see the contents of his hard drive.
I agree with you that Mr. Byrne doth protest too much.
The only thing I’ll say about that is the specific comment was from 2005. Not that he’s done anything to disavow them since then, or stopped writing skeevy age-inappropriate interactions in his works. (And has said some things that are offensive in many, MANY other ways.) (And it was on his own message board, so it’s not like he couldn’t delete it when they’re brought up about him.) Just that he said them in a different context than 2023.
Okay, that’s a fair cop. I rescind the comment about Pride Month, etc.
However, it’s still a straw man, though a bit less egregious. Most of us here remember 2005 and it did not in any way resemble the puritanical, repressive hellscape he described.
Translation from Fragile Egomaniac to English: “They made points that I don’t want to face.”
Well let’s be honest here. For every clever thoughtful post by CBH there’s a nonzero number of … less clever… things said by various posters, grinding various axes that seem to have lingered for a decade or two, or quoting various internet statements that are older than current-day college students. And while i enjoy a decent number of posters here (yourself included ofc Duck) i wouldn’t exactly have my shock face on when the subjects of our various comments find it off-putting.
If they don’t like it, why do they read it?
/s
I prefer to think of it as choicest brimstone.
So, Byrne went on a tirade when the Funky finale was discussed here.
Can you imagine his reaction to this entry’s comments?
We do seem to have a rogue downvoter today… do you think? Naaaah..
But I mean come on, from just an objective storytelling perspective, The End sucked the big one. if you showed that series of strips to 100 people who’d never read FW before, I’m sure at least 99 of them would have said “eww, this stinks”. And the hundredth one was probably drunk or something.
And as far as Byrne is concerned, I’m not the one who drew all the Act III student females as painfully lithe waifs in crop tops…he did that.
Come on indeed, ED. Part of the deal when you put your work out into the public sphere is that some people aren’t gonna like it. EVERY artist in every medium has critics. There is no creator who is universally beloved.
I get that nobody particularly likes criticism, but really: Tough noogies. Deal with it. Countless millions work their lives away in terrible jobs with oppressive bosses or angry customers bearing down on them with — yes, believe it or not! — criticism. At least you get to be a famous artist and make money doing what you love. Get a damn grip already.
It’s not like we’re aiming low here. No one is remarking on Batiuk’s personal life or anything he hasn’t made public. No one here would dream of doxxing him, threatening him, wishing harm on him, or really doing anything other than critiquing work that he himself has put out in public. It’s fair game.
Finally: Why don’t Batiuk and/or Byrne come over here and defend themselves? I can’t speak for our gracious hosts, of course, but I have a feeling they’d be welcomed and their perspective would be heard with respect. Perhaps argued with, but heard with respect.
“You can’t criticize us! It’s not fair and you’re poopyheads! We don’t have to defend our work — it’s your job to LOVE everything we do and cheer us on, and you’re not doing your job so you’re bad people! So there!” — Batiuk & Byrne
I just read an article about a new author losing her publishing contract on her highly-praised first book. Some cruel, evil, likely beady-eyed person said–and strap yourself in, it’s nightmarish:
“This was a really great first novel!!! Stella’s experiences were obviously based off the true stories of the author. And I loved how intricate the details about the show Stella was on were lol. The ending was kind of predictable, but other than that is was incredible!”
And the reviewer left the author not 5 stars–BUT FOUR. Commence author outrage! And losing the contract for her next book. It’s called Writing! something you’ll regret.
Hey, Byrne, if you’re reading this page, go read this next one. Might give ya some perspective. Unless you’ve broken all the mirrors in your house.
https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-sarah-stusek-three-rivers-goodreads-backlash-1850498236
I should point out that I really was a fan of Byrne in the day. I really did buy every issue of his run on Alpha Flight, starting with #1.
Now, my dream is to run up to him at ComiCon and beg him “Can you sign my first issue of your greatest work?!” and hand him X-Force #1.
Hm, I wonder how Byrne might react to something like that…
(It should be pointed out that this was written by Byrne himself, so he was somewhat poking fun at his own image. But also that there’s a nonzero chance he’d actually do it.)
BtS, that link was amazing in so many ways. Thanks for sharing it.
Y’welcome.
It made me want to read the book more, even if it “only” got 4.8 out of 5 stars. Her parents had her kidnapped to make her perfect in their eyes. All this time later, she clearly still has to be perfect, but in her own mind. That’s heartbreaking. This whole thing is not a winner for anyone.