Secrets of the City

He shoots Lindsey Buckingham in the glans?

That’s not funny.

Thanks, Max. That was great.

That’s incredibly funny.

Not at all funny. Cecil B. Demented was funny.

John Waters is always funny.

If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks it’s not funny. This shatters.

And it’s too wordy for the comic book medium.

But it does give the glimpse at the psyche of the writer. Obviously a soul in torment.

Apparently what shatters the rat bends me.

I agree. It’s stupid. Easy, uh, target. Not very inspired. Arrogant. Small-minded. Simple. Predictable. Cruel for cruel’s sake. All the things that make for poor attempts at humor.

Ann Coulter (another soul in torment) does the same schtick, and look at what people say about her.

I haven’t read it yet, but I can tell you already that I love Max Sparber.

It wasn’t too poorly written, I suppose. And I definitely disagree with The Rat about the wordiness. There are plenty of fantastic comic books that are that wordy or even more so.

The art really wasn’t very good, at all, though. I know a couple of 15 year olds that write and draw a comic together. The art’s about on par.
Not a bad effort, but I certainly wouldn’t pay for it.

Maybe, aeklund. I see comics in the NYT Magazine with the same level of wordiness and cartoon frames. I pay for that, because I get the rest of the newspaper, which is well worth it. But I skip the comics

It’s true that it’s an easy target, but I like that there’s some fun had with the shock value of it. I like how it pays off, no surprises. I think it’s a good hyperbole of the frustration of the narrator… and I think that, low-hanging fruit as it may be, the criticisms are perfectly valid.

No trained sniper would use a remington. Lame choice.

What’s the valid criticism, in you’re estimation, jeffk?

If I was going to take out Fleetwood Mac in my little story, I would have had it done on the stage where they were celebrating with the Clintons and Gores after election night in 1992. But then to make it more fun, I would have had him slip at the last second and hit Chelsea in the forehead instead of his intended target, Stevie Nicks. Fun-NEE!

“All these kids, they’re all TV babies. Watching people killing and fucking each other on the boob tube for so long it’s all they know. Hell, they think it’s legal. They think it’s the right thing to do.”

Drugstore Cowboy

Valid criticism? That people have boring, dogshit taste in music. This isn’t about my taste vs. your taste; this is about soulless filth. Doesn’t the rat know crap when he hears it?

Although in all fairness, if it keeps the unwashed masses at arm’s length from the good stuff, I suppose that’s fine with me.

This is about a sick man assassinating people. Music?

would have been much better if he’d blown coke up Stevie Nicks’ ass with a straw…

Hi,

Wow. I checked my referrer logs this morning and saw a bazillion people coming from MNSpeak to read the comic. Thanks for reading it, and thanks for the feedback– even if you thought it sucked.

Couple of responses on my part:

Wordiness: yeah, I was a little worried about that, especially on pages 1 and 6. But I decided that those chunks of text were necessary to keep what it was about Jim’s story that first grabbed me. There might’ve been a more elegant way to do that, but this was the best I could do with my skillset.

Sickness/Torment: I can’t speak for Jim Walsh, when he originally wrote the story, but to me this was at least as much about the joylessness of writing about music as it was specifically about how much Fleetwood Mac sucks (for my part, I don’t really like them, but if I was going to pick a band to kill all sniper-style, I don’t think they’d top the list). Like, you get into it thinking, “Yeah! I love music, I love writing, and I get to write about music! This is going to be AWESOME!” But you quickly come to realize that it’s just a job, and that as often as not you’ve got to suffer though stuff you don’t like and then, under editorial pressure, find positive things to say about it. Or sit through something completely soul-dead and then try to find a way to make it interesting. And before long, the passions that used to drive you are just sort of dead and burned out, and it sucks all the more because it’s something you used to love. I haven’t written for one of the local dailys, but I’ve done music writing for the local alt-weeklies, and my experience was pretty similar to what Jim was talking about (but with fewer arena shows).

So, I wouldn’t say soul in torment. I’d say “massively exaggerated frustration.”

(oh, and I really, really doubt that’s where Anne Coulter’s coming from. She’s operating on the “if I say outrageous crap, I get buckets of money” principle; I, sadly, haven’t gotten any buckets of money)

Art: Yeah, there certainly are 15-year-olds who can draw better. But they’re off drawing other stuff, so this one fell to me.

Coke Up Stevie Nicks’ Ass: Agreed. Would’ve been a big improvement.

again, thanks, all.

replace fleetwood mac with fugazi or atmosphere and i could get on board…

walsh is like 40. ignore him. go see OUT WITH A BANG this weekend instead.

Jim Walsh is older than 40.

It looks to me like a revenge fantasy of a nerd who likes alternative rock. I wonder if the police or FBI could pick up a guy who draws a comic like that. I wonder if the author thought about that and concluded he didn’t care.