Comic Drips

Penny Arcade is a real neat site for gamers which features an extremely clever and often hilarious comic strip. Anyway, today they pointed me to this edition of the truly obnoxious print comic strip Non Sequitur. It seems Wiley Miller, the creator of Non Sequitur, looks down on the Internet as a way for writers to get their work out.

If you don't feel like clicking through to the comic, one little girl tells another that she is a published novelist. When this comment is met with shock, the novelist reveals that her story was published on the Internet. The first little girl says "The stupidity of that rationalization is absolutely astounding!" And now, the punch line: "Absolutely astounding! Now I'm a critically acclaimed novelist."

Basically, the joke is that people who write things on the Internet don't have to go through a publisher, so they're not real writers. This is total bullshit. What makes a person a real writer? Having written something. What makes a piece of writing worthwhile. If other people read it and find value in it.

And that's it. Who gives a shit where people see it, or whether some big company decided it was bland enough to meet their standards for publication? You just know Miller is some old fart who doesn't really get the Internet, who thinks it's just made up of a bunch of punk kids writing dumb notes to each other and thinking that they've published something worthwhile.

But I bet I've written more words on this blog in one week than he'll write for his bullshit comic strip this year. And the guys at Penny Arcade aren't in the LA Times, but their comic is read and enjoyed and remembered by a hell of a lot more people than give a flying fuck about Wiley Miller and his dumb little cartoon about nothing. What the hell is Non Sequitur anyway? Who has ever even heard of it? Are there Non Sequitur fans out there who wait for one little girl to say something really offensive to a group of people they hate, and then cut the strip out and tape it up in their cubicle next to the picture of his/her six cats?

I'll give you an example of the typical type of humor found in this comic strip:

A sign reads "Caution: Drifting Snow" Right next to the sign is a snowman with its thumb out. Get it? He's hitchhiking! He's a drifter! And a snowman! Drifting snow!

Isn't that delightful? No wonder this guy is published! Forget I said anything.

Anyway, it just bothers me when successful "artists" (and I use the term loosely) look down on their less properous counterparts. Wiley Miller should be so busy being thankful that he has a job based solely on his sucky cartooning, there shouldn't be enough time in his busy schedule to resent online publications.