PA & PVP versus old media comics

[Samprimary]

haha, fine.

[Polysorbate80]

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity."
--Robert A. Heinlein

I'm not directing that quote at you personally, Sam.  I'm just playing "Captain Obvious" and restating that success is all too often independent of actual merit.

[Musashi]

The thing I find most ironic about this whole thing is that mainstream syndicated artists have been crying for YEARS about the bullshit that has been foisted on them from newspapers.  You'd think they'd have been at least receptive to the idea of the artistic freedom the internet dudes enjoy.  Not to mention, free money.

[Quinton]

The thing I find most ironic about this whole thing is that mainstream syndicated artists have been crying for YEARS about the bullshit that has been foisted on them from newspapers.  You'd think they'd have been at least receptive to the idea of the artistic freedom the internet dudes enjoy.  Not to mention, free money.

I think most of them don't want to deal with the details.  With the syndicates, they sign their contracts, send in their strips, get published, get paid.  All the successful webcomics I'm aware of are pretty much self-run small businesses, managing hosting, publication, advertising, merchandising, etc. 

There have been a number of webcomic hosting collectives, etc, but I'm pretty sure the successful people have mostly gone it alone (or graduated to going it alone once they started building a fanbase).  Hell of a lot more control over your destiny... a lot more work compared to having somebody handle all the details for you.

[Merusk]

That's exactly what it is. Nobody wanted to put in the work, so they dismissed the entire industry as "You're just selling T-shirts and dolls. I'm selling art."  That fallacy is pointed out in the original thread.   What it really boils down to is people don't want to do all the work themselves.  It's why a lot of people I know have stayed at stupidly oppressive jobs instead of starting up their own businesses when they're perfectly capable of doing so.

[Ironwood]

And yet PA has been really succesful, in part, due to the recognition of that fact and, you know, hiring some other fucker to do it.

Which is actually how it SHOULD be.

[Merusk]

Well, yeah, as you grow you have to do that, and that's when you rely on other people being too paranoid/ lazy/ not having the knowledge to do it themselves.  Very few people get to start out at that point, though.

[Ironwood]

I was under the impression they got their 3rd man quite early in the development.

[Hindenburg]

Officialy since 2005 2000, it seems.

[Ironwood]

That's not what I meant.  I meant the business partner they acquired, the chap that allowed them to focus on what they were good at, thus turning it into a powerhouse.

[Johny Cee]

That's not what I meant.  I meant the business partner they acquired, the chap that allowed them to focus on what they were good at, thus turning it into a powerhouse.

Giant Wired article on Penny Arcade (and the business side of it) from a couple years ago:

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/mf_pennyarcade

Per the article,  before they hired away the consultant to run the business side of it the guys were about ready to quit.  They had made one ridiculous blunder after another (including signing away publishing rights for their strips for a song), fucking up the adversting rates, etc.

[Ironwood]

That was the very article I was thinking of.

Thanks.

[Sky]

Should have a new ad campaign:

Scott Kurtz is going to make you his bitch.

[IainC]

Should have a new ad campaign:

Scott Kurtz is going to make you his bitch.

He's sort of got that vibe going already.

[Litigator]

Of course the major problem for newspaper cartoonists trying to find a new market is that most of them are shit. The newspapers haven't been pushing for quality in their cartoons for decades and syndication has meant that the cartoonists themselves have no need to try and produce anything of quality.

I don't think that's necessarily the case.  There are a lot of submissions for newspaper comics, and it's a very competitive gig to get. 

The problem is that the audience is fairly shitty, and they demand a comic that they can understand and that is inoffensive.  Continuity is also prized.  Readers like the same strips, year after year.  If the cartoonist dies, they get someone else to pick it up, or they reprint old strips. 

A lot of the tired stuff in the papers has been around so long that the writers have exhausted the humor in the premise and are essentially just phoning it in.  It's also very difficult to make a product that is palatable to the newspaper-comics readership, which includes children and the elderly, and still make it laugh-out-loud funny.

PA benefits from being frequently topical, and for commenting on a subject that garners a big audience.  "The Boondocks" in the newspaper tries to do something similar, as does "Doonesbury," as did "Bloom County."  PA is also unprintable in a newspaper, and probably incomprehensible to the bulk of a newspaper audience.  "Boondocks" in the paper is a lot softer than "Penny Arcade," and it has had some serious problems with content and offended readers. 

PA's readers really dig what they do and buy their merch, and game companies pay them to produce custom comics, and that's great.  It's not evident at all that their model could be reproduced by more general cartoons.

I think as long as there are print newspapers, there will be comics pages.  Comics are popular and cheaper than other kinds of content.   But as circulations shrink and two-paper towns become one-paper towns, royalties will drop.

I also think that, as long as there are print editorial pages, there will be a need for editorial page art, which means that there is some kind of a gig for editorial cartoonists.  However, as budgets tighten, lot of local papers may buy cartoons about national news from a syndicate rather than hiring their own cartoonist.  This is also a problem for editorial-page writers, who are really getting their lunch eaten by blogs.

Comic books may be a growing area, and there may be a growing market for comic books outside the superhero niche.  A lot of popular newspaper cartoonists would have worked better as graphic novelists than internet cartoonists; particularly stuff like Garfield and Calvin.  Cartoonists who don't do narrative stuff will have to adapt, though. I'm not sure the Far Side could be the hit today that it was in the 90's.

[Kail]

The problem is that the audience is fairly shitty, and they demand a comic that they can understand and that is inoffensive.  Continuity is also prized.  Readers like the same strips, year after year.  If the cartoonist dies, they get someone else to pick it up, or they reprint old strips. 

Newspaper comics aren't a new medium, though.  The audience they have is made up of the people who are attracted to the comics they publish.  If they wanted a new audience, they could publish different comics.  There's certainly an audience out there for edgier material, but they aren't willing to publish that, so the readers have to go elsewhere.  Now enough of them are going elsewhere that it's cutting in to the bottom line.  Now nobody really cares about newspaper comics, save a dwindling core of aging readers.  Now newspaper comics are shrinking and cutting staff and people are looking for the life boats, while Gabe and Tycho can pull in a million bucks in donations just by asking, and host one of the biggest gaming conventions on the planet.

I mean, yes, you could blame the octogenarians sitting on the porch enjoying Marmaduke, THOSE SCHEMING BASTARDS THIS IS ALL THEIR FAULT, but there's a reason the funnies have such a narrow audience, and it's not because only boring, stupid people want to read comics.

[MahrinSkel]

I'm actually old enough to remember when the Sunday Funnies were nearly the high point of my weekend.

Picture this: It's Sunday morning, 3 of the 4 channels your TV can get are showing preachers, which you have no interest in (you'll get trapped in a church soon enough today).  The fourth is a couple of old farts arguing about something political, you don't understand what because they keep going off on tangents about crap that happened before you were born (and since you're 5, that's almost everything).  Nobody else who is awake has any interest in playing board or card games (video games is just two random words strung together as far as anyone knows).  You can't go out to play because you're wearing your nice clothes for that trip to church you're dreading.

But there's the comics pages!  12 huge pages of bright colors and jokes you mostly understand, with some worthless stuff mixed in (why the hell is Mary Worth such a meddling witch, and why does anybody want to read about it?).  Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Marmaduke, the list goes on.  It's the most fun you'll have all day, the only thing better was the cartoons on TV the day before.

Older people, who grew up completely in a world where entertainment choices were about finding the best option out of a very limited menu, have a lot of emotional weighting tied up in those comics.

Newspapers aren't dying for any complicated reason.  It's really simple: In a world where information is no longer hard to get, you don't need a professional staff to assemble it for you and print it on a bunch of paper.  People bought newspapers for a lot of different reasons (TV listings, editorial pages, politics, stock tables, sports scores, classified ads), but they all centered on the idea that information had to be packaged, embedded in physical media, and sold.  Now, we're awash in information, and our problem isn't access, it's searching and sifting it.  If we need context, we can go find it ourselves.  If we need opinions, they're like assholes.  Newspapers are dying because they suck.  They always sucked, they just sucked less than the alternatives.  Now we have the internet, which sucks in totally different ways, none of which newspapers can offer a solution to.

--Dave

[Litigator]

The problem is that the audience is fairly shitty, and they demand a comic that they can understand and that is inoffensive.  Continuity is also prized.  Readers like the same strips, year after year.  If the cartoonist dies, they get someone else to pick it up, or they reprint old strips. 

Newspaper comics aren't a new medium, though.  The audience they have is made up of the people who are attracted to the comics they publish.  If they wanted a new audience, they could publish different comics.  There's certainly an audience out there for edgier material, but they aren't willing to publish that, so the readers have to go elsewhere.  Now enough of them are going elsewhere that it's cutting in to the bottom line.  Now nobody really cares about newspaper comics, save a dwindling core of aging readers.  Now newspaper comics are shrinking and cutting staff and people are looking for the life boats, while Gabe and Tycho can pull in a million bucks in donations just by asking, and host one of the biggest gaming conventions on the planet.

I mean, yes, you could blame the octogenarians sitting on the porch enjoying Marmaduke, THOSE SCHEMING BASTARDS THIS IS ALL THEIR FAULT, but there's a reason the funnies have such a narrow audience, and it's not because only boring, stupid people want to read comics.

The audience for the comics in the newspaper is the same audience as the audience for the newspaper.  Just about anything laugh-out-loud funny would probably offend somebody, and newspaper editors would rather publish an unfunny comic like "Family Circus" that doesn't cause them any trouble than a funny comic like "Boondocks" that results in a steady stream of angry letters and canceled subscriptions.

Syndicated cartoons are products developed to be mildly interesting and inoffensive to a broad audience, while web comics have to generate enthusiasm among a smaller audience.  So when the syndicated cartoonists tell the web cartoonists that the model doesn't work, they're right that it won't work for what most of them do.

The Cagle aggregation site aside, the editorial cartoonists are also in bad shape; there are no new spaces opening up for them.    Most of them are pretty banal in the first place, and you see the contempt for what they do in the thread. 

The funny 1 panel political gags are few and far between; I tried that gig in college, and the problem is that if you don't do something obvious, nobody will have a damn clue what you mean, and there is no joke in the political humor sphere that is both funny and inoffensive.

Even worse for them, if you actually look at the Cagle site, you can see how many cartoonists on any given day make the same joke about whatever the news event is.  And you can see how, in a cost cutting environment, employing an individual to draw the exact same obvious joke as 20 other cartoonists doesn't make sense when you can pull your ed page art off a syndicate.

There is also no way to sell most of these guys on the web.  A major reason the editorial cartoon is there is to keep the editorial page from being a solid page of text.  Outside of the print editorial page context, it's not clear the form has a future.

[Litigator]

Newspapers aren't dying for any complicated reason.  It's really simple: In a world where information is no longer hard to get, you don't need a professional staff to assemble it for you and print it on a bunch of paper.  People bought newspapers for a lot of different reasons (TV listings, editorial pages, politics, stock tables, sports scores, classified ads), but they all centered on the idea that information had to be packaged, embedded in physical media, and sold.  Now, we're awash in information, and our problem isn't access, it's searching and sifting it.  If we need context, we can go find it ourselves.  If we need opinions, they're like assholes.  Newspapers are dying because they suck.  They always sucked, they just sucked less than the alternatives.  Now we have the internet, which sucks in totally different ways, none of which newspapers can offer a solution to.

Bullshit.  Newspapers are not in trouble because their coverage has been usurped by blogs.  Blogs are fucking horrible, and they mostly aggregate their coverage by linking to reporting done by professional journalists, and then commenting on it.  Asking why you would read a newspaper when there are blogs is like asking why you would go to a bookstore when there is fanfiction.

Newspapers are in trouble because their classified ads were enormous revenue generators, and that function has been usurped by eBay and Craigslist.  When you only need to go to one website to find an apartment to sublet, a whore to kill in it, and a truck to haul away the body with, then the classified ads are raw-dog fucked.

On top of that, conventional advertisers are getting pinched by the economy and are cutting back on their ad buys.  Subscribtions have been dropping, but it's not subscriptions that are putting major papers and companies in the toilet.  It's ad revenue.

[Samwise]

The fact that you conflate "the internet" with "blogs" suggests to me that you don't get it.

I don't understand why anyone ever read newspapers in the first place, tbh.  I sat down and tried to read the phone book one time, barely made it a few pages.  The printed word is a yawn and a half.

[schild]

Bullshit.  Newspapers are not in trouble because their coverage has been usurped by blogs.

He didn't say that. I stopped reading there.

Also, you really butchered that bbcode.

[dusematic]

Penny Arcade is pretty funny.  Might not be everyone's cup of tea, and that's fine.  But some of you guys are acting like Penny Arcade is mainstream beefcake, and that's ridiculous.  If they put out just a single comic every week, I'd expect more from them.  But point me to someone that has consistently funnier comics and I'll probably follow your link and then immediately question your sense of humor forever. 


They're just regular good ol' nerds who made it.  Tycho has an interesting voice.  The Thesauraus thing is ridiculous.  He's writing as a character.  It's funny.  Get over yourselves assholes.

[UnSub]

Newspapers aren't dying for any complicated reason.  It's really simple: In a world where information is no longer hard to get, you don't need a professional staff to assemble it for you and print it on a bunch of paper.  People bought newspapers for a lot of different reasons (TV listings, editorial pages, politics, stock tables, sports scores, classified ads), but they all centered on the idea that information had to be packaged, embedded in physical media, and sold.  Now, we're awash in information, and our problem isn't access, it's searching and sifting it.  If we need context, we can go find it ourselves.  If we need opinions, they're like assholes.  Newspapers are dying because they suck.  They always sucked, they just sucked less than the alternatives.  Now we have the internet, which sucks in totally different ways, none of which newspapers can offer a solution to.

This is true, as is Litigator's comment that revenue from classifieds is way, way down for newspapers. Print media is getting it in the neck from several different directions.

Of course, how well the internet aggregates information will be tested when online news sources start moving heavily towards a subscription model. Murdoch wants to head this way and he might just have enough market power to enforce a change away from free news for all (just look at the banner ads, plz).

[MahrinSkel]

The real question is not whether "respectable journalism" will go to closed subscriptions (which I'm pretty sure is doomed, putting something behind a paywall is a good way of ensuring none of your potential customers ever hear of it, even the porn business is having a harder time making that pay lately), but whether there's still a role for professional journalists, people who get paid to track down the stuff that can't be found online, root around in the trash and find the dirty little secrets.  Lord knows the current media does a crap job of that, they pay people to act as stenographers at dog and pony shows (also called "press conferences"), and re-write press releases to be a little less blatantly slanted.  I'm pretty sure the unpaid amateurs can do *that* just as well.

My father was an old-school journalist, and a pretty good one.  He could go on a 3 hour rant about how worthless "journalism" had become.  He always said he preferred his ad copyrighting gigs after the 70's, at least he was getting paid for coming up with *original* fiction, instead of just redlining someone else's.

--Dave

[Litigator]

The fact that you conflate "the internet" with "blogs" suggests to me that you don't get it.

I don't understand why anyone ever read newspapers in the first place, tbh.  I sat down and tried to read the phone book one time, barely made it a few pages.  The printed word is a yawn and a half.

I don't conflate "the internet" with blogs.  But blogs are the main new innovation that is pulling readers away from newspapers, and bloggers are presumably going to replace professional journalists if the institution of the newspaper goes belly-up.   Daily newspaper readers are not canceling their subscriptions because their news time is filled with porn and pictures of cats and video clips of skateboarders falling down.  People think they can replace their papers with HuffPo and InstaPundit.

To the extent that there were people who only got the paper for comics, yes, they can go online.  And to the extent that there were people who only got the paper for stocks or sports, yes, the Internet is provides that information much faster.  But nobody else is doing that kind of reporting or generating that kind of coverage, especially at the local level.  Blogs don't do a good job of generating news; they aggregate news from other sources published online, and they comment on it.

Nobody is generating reliable news coverage except the professional news outlets.

And the printed word is a faster and more efficient way of conveying information.  You can get much more news in 30 minutes of newspaper reading than in two hours of looking at cable news. 

[Raph]

I'm actually old enough to remember when the Sunday Funnies were nearly the high point of my weekend.

Picture this: It's Sunday morning, 3 of the 4 channels your TV can get are showing preachers, which you have no interest in (you'll get trapped in a church soon enough today).  The fourth is a couple of old farts arguing about something political, you don't understand what because they keep going off on tangents about crap that happened before you were born (and since you're 5, that's almost everything).  Nobody else who is awake has any interest in playing board or card games (video games is just two random words strung together as far as anyone knows).  You can't go out to play because you're wearing your nice clothes for that trip to church you're dreading.

But there's the comics pages!  12 huge pages of bright colors and jokes you mostly understand, with some worthless stuff mixed in (why the hell is Mary Worth such a meddling witch, and why does anybody want to read about it?).  Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Marmaduke, the list goes on.  It's the most fun you'll have all day, the only thing better was the cartoons on TV the day before.

Heck with the argumentative part everyone else is quoting, I wanted to QFT this part. Nicely written, Dave!

[Samwise]

I don't conflate "the internet" with blogs.  But blogs are the main new innovation that is pulling readers away from newspapers, and bloggers are presumably going to replace professional journalists if the institution of the newspaper goes belly-up.

In your last post that's precisely what you said wouldn't happen.  If you're going to construct a stupid strawman and knock it down, don't try to rebuild it after the fact to make it look like a more credible opponent.

[Jeff Kelly]

I don't conflate "the internet" with blogs.  But blogs are the main new innovation that is pulling readers away from newspapers, and bloggers are presumably going to replace professional journalists if the institution of the newspaper goes belly-up.   (..) People think they can replace their papers with HuffPo and InstaPundit.

Without bloggers we would know only about half as much about the Bush Administration's dealings as we actually do today. Professional journalists my ass. Why are people flocking to blogs in droves? Because they offer something the 'professional' journalists don't any more. Investigative journalism. Where were all of these 'professional' journalists when they lied about WMDs? Where were those professional journalists when they ordered the torture of people? Where were those 'professional' journalists when they redefined habeas corpus and the geneva convention to strip their precious guantanamo inmates of basic human rights?

People think they can replace their papers with blogs because most papers today are nothing more than echo chambers edited by lapdogs of the system that would't even publish slight criticism of the administration because it was deemed 'unpatriotic'

Papers became irrelevant once people realized just how much information was being withheld from them just so that some smart washington correspondend was still invited to the luxurious free lunches or because the publishers were afraid about their bottom line.

Nobody is generating reliable news coverage except the professional news outlets.

Au contraire. People read blogs because they feel that they are the only once providing reliable news coverage.

[Merusk]

I'm actually old enough to remember when the Sunday Funnies were nearly the high point of my weekend.

Picture this: It's Sunday morning, 3 of the 4 channels your TV can get are showing preachers, which you have no interest in (you'll get trapped in a church soon enough today).  The fourth is a couple of old farts arguing about something political, you don't understand what because they keep going off on tangents about crap that happened before you were born (and since you're 5, that's almost everything).  Nobody else who is awake has any interest in playing board or card games (video games is just two random words strung together as far as anyone knows).  You can't go out to play because you're wearing your nice clothes for that trip to church you're dreading.

But there's the comics pages!  12 huge pages of bright colors and jokes you mostly understand, with some worthless stuff mixed in (why the hell is Mary Worth such a meddling witch, and why does anybody want to read about it?).  Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Marmaduke, the list goes on.  It's the most fun you'll have all day, the only thing better was the cartoons on TV the day before.

Heck with the argumentative part everyone else is quoting, I wanted to QFT this part. Nicely written, Dave!

Yeah, I remember those days, too. It's probably the only reason I'm all weepy that our comics section is now down to 4 pages with 15 strips crammed onto them and a full back page ad: Nostalgia.

[Sir T]

Talked to a girl at work the other day and she is actually taking her blog to a newspaper to apply for a job, which is interesting.

I advised her btw to take out the swear words. She said she was going to hand in a sanitised version.. and I told her to sanitise the online version as well, which seemed never to have occurred to her. I think she will fit right in in a newspaper. 

[Samwise]

I'm actually old enough to remember when the Sunday Funnies were nearly the high point of my weekend.

Picture this: It's Sunday morning, 3 of the 4 channels your TV can get are showing preachers, which you have no interest in (you'll get trapped in a church soon enough today).  The fourth is a couple of old farts arguing about something political, you don't understand what because they keep going off on tangents about crap that happened before you were born (and since you're 5, that's almost everything).  Nobody else who is awake has any interest in playing board or card games (video games is just two random words strung together as far as anyone knows).  You can't go out to play because you're wearing your nice clothes for that trip to church you're dreading.

But there's the comics pages!  12 huge pages of bright colors and jokes you mostly understand, with some worthless stuff mixed in (why the hell is Mary Worth such a meddling witch, and why does anybody want to read about it?).  Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Marmaduke, the list goes on.  It's the most fun you'll have all day, the only thing better was the cartoons on TV the day before.

Heck with the argumentative part everyone else is quoting, I wanted to QFT this part. Nicely written, Dave!

Yeah, I remember those days, too. It's probably the only reason I'm all weepy that our comics section is now down to 4 pages with 15 strips crammed onto them and a full back page ad: Nostalgia.

I would feel more weepy if all the good comics artists I remember from my youth hadn't already retired, and if all the good contemporary ones weren't already online.  Luckily they good old guys all have nicely bound "complete works of" collections that I will buy someday once I have enough shelf space for them all.

[Venkman]

Blogs don't do a good job of generating news; they aggregate news from other sources published online, and they comment on it.
...
Nobody is generating reliable news coverage except the professional news outlets.

Wut? The web and the blogs are all aggregating (and spinning) the same information the newspapers are aggregating and spinning from the one or three sources worldwide with actual reporters in the field.

Newspapers are dying because the business model is done, but the business model is done because of what MahrinSkel said. It has nothing to do with the actual news nor the reporting and all about how it is consumed. People want it, they can go get it any time they want, rather than wait for publishers to see if news will survive their own internal filters.

We're in transition right now. The bohemian attitude of the early web developers wanting everything to be free has resulted in a problem for people trying to transpose what they do from one business model to another.

[Hoax]

Wake me up when we're no longer fighting about whether "citizen journalism" or whatever the current buzzword is will work and instead fighting about what makes it work well.  Because the papers are done for, I wish the music industry had gone first but oh well.

[Soln]

all BS aside, I thought the music industry was done.  No?  I thought musicians made more money off concerts and their own swag.  That's what PA learned -- build your own community/fans that only you own, and then sell them stuff only you make.

re. Sunday comix -- I had the same experience growing up.  No cable, only one major paper around and a sunday color supplement.  Problem was there was only ever 1 or 2 comics I enjoyed reading.  The rest was shit like KAthy, or the Christian family circus.  I like today's online anarchy of choice.

[IainC]

Necroing this.

Scott Kurtz is having another public pissing match, this time with Wizard on the PvP site.

    From: Larry Ernst (learnst@wizardent.com)
    to: Scott Kurtz

    Dear Kurt,

    I hope things are well and business is good.

    We wrapped up Big Apple Comic Con a couple of weeks ago and are now focused on our 2010 shows.

    Our next show is in Toronto in March and then in Anaheim. The Anaheim dates are April 16th-18th. I have attached the form for reserving space in Anaheim and hope you can join us. As you will see, there are no drayage fees.

    The celebrity list will grow substantially in the coming weeks but we have confirmed the attendance of Eliza Dushku from Dollhouse.

    Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

    All the best,

    Larry

    Larry Ernst
    Sales Manager
    Wizard Entertainment

Dear Larry,

First of all my name is not Kurt. It’s Scott. Scott Kurtz. It’s written right there in the email you just pretended to send me. Not that my name’s important or that you are actually aware of who you’re addressing. I’m a pioneer in my field and a “tastemaker” with a large podium, why would it be important to get my name right? Let’s not dawdle on such mundane details.

Your conventions are total horseshit, so it’s wise to stop branding them with the name Wizard. But no amount of polishing is going to make me want to attended any of the 5 turds your company is going to crap out in 2010, especially when you schedule them against other shows in some bullshit dick measuring contests that serves no other purpose but to fracture an already dying industry that I have nostalgic ties to.

Remember Mike Wieringo? Remember how you guys only cared about him when he was the “hot artist” for a window of time and then you quickly forgot his name despite the fact that he was producing some of the best work of his career on Fantastic Four with Mark Waid? And then remember how after he died you had the balls to name one of your panel rooms the Mike Wieringo room? I will eternally hate everyone associated with your company for that. For eternity. For Jack Kirby’s version of Eternity where the concept is embodied as a giant man made up of the universe. That’s me, hating you for the Mike Wieringo thing. Forever.

Maybe if you cared enough to actually get my name right, or maybe if you cared about creators like the late, great Mike Wieringo beyond what they can do for you THIS FIVE MINUTES, the entire industry wouldn’t all be anticipating your inevitable bankruptcy.

Give Dushku my best. She’s pretty hot and Dollhouse is alright. Otherwise, shove everything else up your ass.

Best.

Scott (Kurt) Kurtz
Cartoonist
www.pvponline.com

p.s. please take of me off the comp list for your retarded super-hero boobs magazine.