People who have been in fandom for 20 minutes: It’s funny how this is making fun of that one particular show.
People who have been in fandom for 20 years:
uprockinrainbow asked:
itswalky answered:
I am curious to know how MadTV, a live-action sketch comedy from another decade, belongs in a grouping with those three current animated shows, and why it gets to be in quotes. Are you, like, sarcastically saying it’s been part of the pop culture?
I haven’t seen much of any of them, but I’m as aware of them as you have to be if you’re on Tumblr. Except MadTV, obviously.
Cartoon sketch show on CN a few years back that went under the same name.
That is just MAD! No TV!
Also I forgot that existed.
I got an email today concerning the new storyline-based direction of my comics. I won’t republish the entire thing, but rest assured that the reader in question was NOT in favor of my recent tonal shift from “all pop-culture commentary all the time” to “some pop-culture commentary wrapped in a bit of a silly narrative.” Well, to be fair, he was in favor of the first two mini story arcs, but the current one lost him, and he assumed that 1/3 of a disappointment was enough disappointment to warrant an entitled email.
He ended his plee for a return to “the good old days” with this:
[The current HE storyline is] everything I hate about bad webcomics. It’s not topical, it’s insular, it’s slow-moving. Just because you know you have plans for something to happen in the future, doesn’t mean we the audience are actually interested in the unfolding of those events.
I replied thusly:
“Just because you know you have plans for something to happen in the future, doesn’t mean we the audience are actually interested in the unfolding of those events.”
What you meant to say is “doesn’t mean I am actually interested…”
Enjoy the free entertainment or don’t, but never assume that I am making this comic specifically for you. The feedback from the audience is overwhelmingly positive with regard to the direction I am taking the comic. Of course I’m going to lose some readers along the way. That’s what happens when you change creative direction. Your mistake is in thinking I am doing something inherently wrong. I might be doing things YOU don’t like, which makes it wrong for YOU. I hope you can understand the difference. My comics are not meant to be love letters to you and your sensibilities. I make comics that I like, that interest ME, and others with similar tastes are invited along for the ride. If our tastes have diverged, don’t take that as a sign that I’ve lost my way. I’ve simply lost you.
-Joel
One thing this (potentially former) reader doesn’t realize is that if he’s enjoyed ANYTHING I’ve created in the last five years, it was all built on a foundation of ignoring emails like his. The only way I can ever grow as an artist/creator is to try new things, make mistakes and follow my instincts. My instincts, my peers and the VAST MAJORITY of my readers are telling me to keep going in this new direction. I am happier with my comics now than I’ve ever been, and that is how I know I’m doing the right thing. Sorry, guy. You can’t compete with that.
I love the folks who speak for my entire readership. I remember days when I’d get emails from two different people with mutually exclusive positions arguing that their vision for my strip was the Way It Should Be and that everyone else obviously agreed with them, like duh-doy.
uprockinrainbow asked:
I am curious to know how MadTV, a live-action sketch comedy from another decade, belongs in a grouping with those three current animated shows, and why it gets to be in quotes. Are you, like, sarcastically saying it’s been part of the pop culture?
I haven’t seen much of any of them, but I’m as aware of them as you have to be if you’re on Tumblr. Except MadTV, obviously.
Dumbing of Age: Fandom
So people in the Transformers fandom are occasionally all “hey why don’t they re-release that BotCon exclusive figure I like but can’t get at mass retail, they sold BotCon 2005 Fallback as Target Crosshairs I mean”.
So I took a picture of Fallback next to Crosshairs.
Yeah.
rc85747 asked:
Did the Warner Bros. Studio Store's supply of Batman stuff factor in to your decision to work there?
When I was a kid I loved that place because of Animaniacs, honestly. We’d drive into Chicago once a year before Christmas and my family had to drag me out. You can get Batman stuff anywhere, but the WBSS was a place you could get less pop-culture-saturated stuff.
Hey there… Well if you’re here maybe you are as tired as I am of all the hip-hop, sex and 99%er garbage that dominates pop culture.
I am. I am tired of all the hip hop and sex.
"I have a sleeve tattoo that is strictly patriotic and political"
Me: Man I really hate this trend of just. Rebooting popular movies and franchises to prey on nostalgia in order to make a quick buck. It’s annoying that I can go to the theatre and like one in ten movies is at all new or original and it’s really turning pop culture into this sort of gross masturbatory mess
*new bladerunner trailer appears*
Me: Fuck everything I said
I mean. I really hate this line of thought. By 1939 there were eight Wizard of Oz movies. There were seven Dracula movies before Bela Lugosi and and over a dozen more than by the time Legosi died in 1956. William Shakespeare had thirty-four film credits by the time the 1910s ended.
Hollywood has always, always, always been in the business of appealing to the masses through endless recycling. It’s not a trend, it’s a default state, and any deviation from it is an abberation.
How many of those movies got as popular as the reboots we have now? How many of them were just obscure attempts that failed miserably?
And it’s not just Hollywood, it’s everything. Fucking. Half the shows on Cartoon Network are shitty attempts to appeal to nineties kid fandom. Every other day some reboot or revival of an old video game franchise gets announced.
Also regardless of if it’s a new trend it’s still annoying
I mean, plenty of reboots have tanked in this day and age. Does anyone remember James Franco’s Wizard of Oz? Dracula Untold? What was the last big Shakespeare movie–fucking Strange Magic? Whether or not films live or die has nothing to do with whether they’re adaptations or reboots or whathaveyou.
And TV? Cartoons specifically? How is rebooting Powerpuff Girls any different than the sea of both literal and figurative Scooby-Doo clones Hanna-Barbera has put out?
Video games specifically need reboots because the industry has decided, for some fucking reasons, that 99% of its own products should become completely inaccessible every six years.
I honestly don’t get why it’s annoying. Like. Mystery Inc. was really good. Hell, Wizard of Oz, Legosi’s Dracula, god knows how many adaptations have survived because they were the cream of the crop, or at the very least entertaining and interesting. You yourself acknowledge you’re looking forward to the new Blade Runner. Whether or not a product is good has nothing to do with how original it is.
And most adaptations at least have the good grace to, for better or worse, rearrange the original idea. Which is exactly what so-called “originality” is really about–everything is a remix of everything else, all adaptations do is acknowledge that.
Now go catch up on season three of Carmilla, which is at least the thirty-third revamp of the character since 1960, already.
The reason things like Carmilla and Mystery Inc don’t work for me as counterexamples is because they ACTUALLY change things. The original Carmilla wasn’t set in a weird college or told through the format of video blogging. The original Scooby Doo wasn’t an ongoing narrative about actual eldritch terror
The stuff that annoys me is shit like. The live action Jungle Book or Beauty and the Beast where it is literally just the same exact story. If those movies actually went through the effort to be unique in their take? Sure. Fine. But they dont.
Did you see The Jungle Book? Because Mowgli not only stays in the jungle at the end, he rallies the entire jungle behind him and convinces everyone that he and his way of doing things belong and can thrive in their society. That’s…not what happens in the original Disney version. Which itself changed a lot from the original books.
And yeah, some reboots are lazy and just rehash the originals. But you know what? So do original works. How many action movies with new names and new characters are just Die Hard? How many sci-fi movies are just Forbidden Planet or Star Wars? How many horror movies are just Friday the Thirteenth? The concept of readaptation or reboots isn’t to blame for that in and of itself. Even if reboots stopped happening, unoriginality wouldn’t.
Like, if Jungle Book wasn’t “remade” into a cartoon back in the 60s (it was already the third movie adaptation of the original stories), we wouldn’t even know or care what Jungle Book is to have an opinion on it being remade again. We’re just having sads over new remakes of the remakes we saw and enjoyed as children.
This comic might look familiar too you. That’s because a version of it was originally published almost exactly a year ago in my very short lived HijiNKS ENSUE spinoff comic, FANEURYSM.
http://hijinksensue.com/comic/the-dark-knight-in-the-bright-light/
Even though I had moved on with a new direction for HE, I still wanted to make the occasional pop culture strip. I made less than 20 FANEURYSM comics total, but a few of them are some of my absolute favorites of my own work. Since the series started and ended so quickly, I’ve always feared that those strips would be easily forgotten and certainly never get published in a book.
So I’ve decided to rework those few favorite FANEURYSMs into Sharksplode strips, by resizing, re-laying out and recoloring them to match the Sharksplode esthetic. I’ll probably toss one in the archive each week until the 4 or 5 I don’t want to lose have been shared.
COMICS: http://www.sharksplode.com
STORE: http://store.hijinksensue.com
PATREON: http://patreon.com/hijinksensue
zeromayhem
siphersaysstuff
Who is your dad, now?
I WILL reblog this video every damn time I see it because this kids is A GENIUS
