By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
Comicon.com Forums
Just as the arid deserts of the American West were once verdant prairies where the deer and the antelope played, Comicon.com used to be a lively place, a huge, bustling forum where fanboys rubbed shoulders with Wizard Hot Picks. If you wanted to talk creator rights with Kurt Busiek, swap manga recommendations with Colleen Doran, discuss scripting with Nat Gertler, or get into a pointless argument about Jack Kirby with Erik Larsen, the Comicon boards were the place to go. Even the flamewars were star-studded; in my early days as a webcartoonist, I danced around the edges of an epic weeks-long battle in the "Online Comics" section between Scott Kurtz, Cat Garza and Scott McCloud. I think it was about hippies.
Today the Comicon boards, again like the American West, have been reduced to tumbleweeds and bunker-dwelling psychopaths. Many nerd historians believe the death warrant was signed in 2000 when Marvel.com shut down its terrible forums, releasing upon the Internet uncounted hordes of socially retarded people with pent-up rage and no jobs or friends to interfere with their posting time. Many of them found their way to Comicon, where they began a dedicated campaign to drive away the board's resident comic-book creators. Threads that used to consist of several industry pros casually shooting the breeze with fans turned into
fuck you judd your pissing in the eyesokets of Hal Jordan teh one true GL!!! Which is arguably true, but not the stuff of lively debate.
Even without the Marvel exodus, however, the Comicon boards would've fallen in the end, because they were a favorite hangout for comic-book creators, and if there's one thing comic-book fans hate, it's comic-book creators. Superhero fans, especially, see their favorite characters as independent entities who exist apart from human interference; the artists and writers are just jerks who try to get between Spider-Man and his fans and mess stuff up.
Nowadays, Comicon retains only a small, tenaciously Erik Larsenious population. It's a fave hangout of old-school trolls and embittered refugees from the John Byrne forum. Most of the other regulars are the kind of fans who not only download all their comics off BitTorrent, but will tell the creator and then get enraged when he asks them not to. Don't you know what a favor they're doing for you by ripping off your self-published comic, Erik Larsen? Why aren't you grateful for having fans? Huh? Huh? Asshole.
Traffic: Low
Reading Level: Third grade
Popular Topics: superhero movie gossip, crazy things John Byrne said, retailers arguing about why nobody reads comics anymore
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Tony Isabella
Typical Thread Title:
The Bryan Talbot "Extreme Dislike" Thread (10 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Depressingly Low
TCJ.com Forums
The
Comics Journal message board is worth watching for two constantly recurring events: twenty-page threads on Dave Sim, which tend to adopt the dual position that he's a hateful misogynist
and that women are mentally inferior animals or possibly some form of unusually alert topiary; and threads where Tony Millionaire gets drunk and calls people out. It's lucky that both threads pop up on a more or less bimonthly basis, because otherwise things get pretty dull over there.
The most necrotic section of the board is the "Comics Journal" section itself, where people only post to bitch that their subscription copies are late. Many TCJ subscribers seem to be under the impression that Gary Groth runs not just Fantagraphics but the U.S. Postal Service from his basement. They get really pissed. No one ever posts about the content of the magazine itself, proving that not even the most hardcore fans of
The Comics Journal read
The Comics Journal.
The only other time the board gets lively is when someone brings up superhero comics, which the regulars all hate the way Elizabeth hated Mr. Darcy. There were also massive threads on the
Transformers movie.
Traffic: Moderate
Reading Level: Community college dropout
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, which creators are overrated, plot developments in Spider-Man comics and how stupid they are
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Rick Trembles
Typical Thread Title:
I Don't Get It!!!!!!!!!!! (Manga) (8 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Acceptable
The Warren Ellis Forum/The Engine/Whatever the New Thing Is Called
Warren Ellis runs his forums like goth nightclubs. As soon as they get popular enough to attract anyone besides aspiring Suicide Girls and guys who draw vampires, they cease to be cool and he shuts them down. The original Warren Ellis Forum was the most fun, largely because of Ellis's proclivity for making Hunter S. Thompsonian posts from local pubs and flamboyantly banning anyone who mildly irritated him (including, on at least one occasion, himself). Also, he knew girls. The other great thing about the WEF was that one guy had an icon that was a recent photo of Michael Stipe with the caption MICHAEL STIPE IS OLD. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought of that icon. He really did look very old.
Eventually the WEF ceased to amuse Warren Ellis, so he shuttered it and opened The Engine, a meeting place for entry-level comics pros, specifically creators of what Ellis termed the New Mainstream. "New Mainstream," as it turned out, was industry terminology for "mostly comics about zombies." The Engine had its moments, and it helped some would-be writers hook up with would-be artists, but it was telling that the section of the forum set aside for TV shows was several orders of magnitude busier than any of the sections for comic books. Still, Tom Spurgeon got in some good jabs at "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," so it wasn't a total wash.
After that Ellis started another forum, designed to serve simultaneously as an online community for comics pros and a place for Ellis to plug his newest comic. I dunno. Warren Ellis's forums are so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.
Traffic: Whatever Warren Ellis says it is
Reading Level: Prissy English schoolboy
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, hot goth chicks, anime, cooking, the BBC, anything to avoid talking about comics
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Warren Ellis
Typical Thread Title:
Time's almost up: What are you drinking? (49 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Favorable
Newsarama.com Forums
I have this friend, Rob, one of those guys who loves superhero comics with a burning passion but wishes they'd get back to the kind of stuff Jim Starlin did in the 1980s. (Of course, all comics fans think the comics they read when they were twelve are the greatest comics ever made. It's built into the fabric of fandom itself.) Rob doesn't like most comics published within the last two decades, but he still follows all developments and has passionate, if almost uniformly negative, opinions on every issue that hits the stands. He's horrified by everything but unable to give up hoping, the comic book equivalent of a Cubs fan.
Anyway. From time to time Rob will ask me why everyone loved the latest terrible Marvel or DC mega-crossover, why everyone was wowed by some shock-value plot twist, why everyone dug Satan magically dissolving Spider-Man's marriage or the Scarlet Witch doing the makeouts with her brother. When, against my better judgment, I inquire further, it always turns out that "everyone" means "Newsarama." And that's Newsarama. It's where dumb comic books spawn dumber opinions. It's the message board of bad life decisions.
Also, bad spelling. Rob has cerebral palsy and it's physically hard for him to type, so he's got an excuse. Everyone else needs to get with the program.
Traffic: High
Reading Level: Preschool
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, superhero comic book gossip, how to "fix" various superheroes, what cartoon women might look like naked
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: Rob, or so he claims, but he'd totally post there even if he didn't have a website
Typical Thread Title:
Poll: Were those that said they were boycotting able to go 3 weeks without Spidey? (2 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Negligible
The DC Message Boards
Once, Kyle Baker went on the DC message boards to promote his then-new run on
Plastic Man. He was chased away under a hail of abuse and slurs in under 24 hours. Later, somebody posed as him under a fake username to further smear him. Populated by self-hating teenagers, woman-hating teenagers, and self-hating, woman-hating, forty-year-old teenagers, each a few IQ points short of the people who post comments on YouTube, the DC message boards are the most grotesque comic book message boards on the Internet, but only because Marvel doesn't have its own boards anymore.
Traffic: High
Reading Level: Remedial Preschool
Popular topics: DC superhero movie gossip, DC superhero comic book gossip, how to "fix" various DC superheroes, what real women might look like naked
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: No one on here is capable of running a website.
Typical Thread Title:
Poll: Anyone here sick of Dwayne McDuffie's racial biased against Superman? (4 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Hopeless
Byrne Robotics
To non-regulars, the John Bryne forum is famed in song and story as the source of John Byrne's most spectacularly wrongheaded comments, including the time he argued at length against describing Christopher Reeve as a "hero," the time he opined that Hispanic women with blonde hair look like hookers, or the time he lost it over whether
Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew was officially part of the DC Universe. What many people don't realize is that it's not just John Byrne, and it's not just once in a while. The entire board is like that
at all times. Pop into any thread and you'll see a dozen opinions with the same high concentration of angry and nutty, only some of them from Byrne himself.
The Byrne board is particularly treacherous for dragging you into that most frustrating variety of online argument, where you wind up defending something you don't even like because other people dislike it
for the wrong reasons. For example, John Byrne and I agree that
Fantastic Four is a bad movie. But I think it's a bad movie because the writing is bad, the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, and the story is bad, whereas John Byrne thinks it's a bad movie because the filmmakers cast a Latina actress as Sue Storm, destroying Lee and Kirby's bold vision of Sue Storm as a white woman. In the course of arguing with Byrne, I wind up defending
Fantastic Four, which, after all our
sturm und drang, is still crap.
There was only one time the Byrne board regulars turned against Byrne's decrees and openly argued with him, and that was when Byrne declared
The Incredibles taboo because the scene where a superhero's cape gets caught in a jet intake was "disrespectful to superheroes." A lot of things are accused of "disrespect to superheroes" on the Byrne board, a charge at least as serious as racism. Come to think of it, Byrne once posted that using the term "word bubbles" when you mean "word balloons" is equivalent to a racial or ethnic slur. Ever since, I've been calling them "word wops" in his honor.
With all that said, at least the Byrne board actually talks about comic books, unlike the other comic boards I've listed, which mostly talk about nerd TV shows, nerd movies, action figures, why women are inferior to men, why downloading isn't stealing, and tits. Also, flamewars are rare on the Byrne board, for much the same reason that heated political debates are rare in North Korea. It's even possible to discuss normally charged topics like abortion, gay rights, and atheism, as long as nobody drifts into
really controversial subject matter, like what shape the serifs on Superman's "S" should be.
Traffic: Moderate
Reading Level: Eighth grade
Popular topics: superhero movie gossip, John Byrne, civil rights, the existence of God, how much Marvel sucks since John Byrne left, comic books from the 1980s, JB's awesome run on
X-Men, Roe vs. Wade, how his old stuff totally wasn't better
Guy Who Posts Only to Shill for His Website: There is only one website, and its name is Byrne Robotics.
Typical Thread Title:
Have you liked any Marvel or DC comics in the last ten years? (4 pages)
Tom Spurgeon Levels: Probably banned
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
