Mutual Friends, Mutually Childlike

I wonder if anyone ever reads these rants...

This is one of the first strips for this plot arc that I wrote without David. You can tell this because of the incredibly wordy panels where I try to squeeze a lot of dialogue and plot detail into one strip. I actually wrote this a while ago, before David and I started doing equal amounts of script writing on a regular basis, so I hadn't really gotten the hang of writing it in his style. Fear not, future strips will mesh better with the overall style of Shit Happens.

Now for a diatribe:

Online comics are a funny business; writers and artists are either really petty or really friendly, and you can find out you know people via six one-degree of separation. For example, the other day I was talking (via a LiveJournal community) to the writer/artist behind Lacunae, wondering why their comic looked familiar. Turns out, we have a friend in Scott (who is the Trent Reznor of Deathboy before Trent went mid-life crisis.) Small world.

I've also discovered by talking to a few other people that we small-time, starting out comics writers and artists are a nice group of people. Unlike the uber-competitiveness you'll find in your regular writing communities, where it's every man for his or her self and most criticism tends to be of the "Everything's great! Don't judge me harshly!" or the "Oh yeh, that's a good idea. Ha!" type, small-time online comic people are cool people.

The problem comes in the online comic people who make it big, who get the readers and the book deals and that sort of thing. Some of them still retain their small-time coolness, of course. Aerie from Queen of Wands seems really cool, as does Fred over at MegaTokyo. But every once in a while, some people tend to forget that these are online comics and teh InterWebs isn't high school. Take a recent argument between the writers of two online comics. Quite petty, if you ask me.

And then there's another comic writer, who also will not be mentioned (because we only the cool people deserve to be mentioned by name) who seems to really hate Shit Happens. Sure, once he linked to us with two words: "It's nice." Which is fair enough, considering he was talking about one of my really shitty (art-wise. I really can't draw) guest strips.

Fair enough. But when repeated emails go unanswered, that's when I start to get angry. Not Zell Miller angry, but you know, a bit peeved. At Shit Happens, we do aspire to answer all our emails, especially repeated emails, and especially emails were other comics are concerned. Especially where, you know, gifted art and advertising and donations...the least a person can do is say, "I think your comic sucks! You are two talentless hacks who suck at everything you do. I hate you. I hate everything about you! Now leave me the fuck alone!"

You want to know what makes me angry? Being ignored makes me angry! Being treated like we don't exist makes me angry! I miss the days when you could challenge a man to a duel!

Pistols at dawn, Matthews! You. And me. Twenty paces. You're a dead man!