Well, I’ve gotten a grumpy email from an underground comix luminary. I’ve arrived!

My blog item about a recent anti-war cartoon in Reason magazine by legendary Hate author Peter Bagge was referenced in this Comics Journal messboard thread, which led Peter to defend his work both there and in a couple of email messages to me.

Taking issue with my comment that he appears to blame the woes of the world on WalMart shoppers, Peter pointed me to this cartoon, where he cops to being a mall shopper himself.

I stand corrected. But then on the message board thread about the strip, Peter said:

QUOTE: “I also don’t know how I can NOT portray average Americans as anything other than dunderheads when most of us believe that Saddam used chemical on our troops, that WMDs WERE found, and that Iraqis took part in 9/11, even though no one in the government or the mainstream media has even SUGGESTED any of the above!…We’ve become such a pathetic and horrible nation of people that it’s gone way BEYOND ‘funny.'”

I certainly share his confusion and disgust about those kinds of poll results (9/11? Huh??), but it just seems like a lapse of emotion over logic to leap from there into general misanthropy about “average Americans.” I may have gotten Peter’s motive for attacking them wrong–he likes WalMart, they like WalMart, it’s all water under the bridge–but I feel I accurately characterized his overall feelings about them.

In a subsequent email, Peter defended the character he depicted in the strip by saying:

QUOTE: “I don’t see how what I wrote applies to any specific economic class, or any specific group of Americans. That’s why I drew a wide variety of people, even if you and others still denigrated all of them as ‘stereotypes.’ I was targeting the majority of the American public who DO believe in all these aspects of the Iraq war that either aren’t true at all or that I find morally reprehensible.”

I definitely got that last part, but I still feel that Peter employed the different “types” he drew as representative of their peer groups. And hey, fine–there’s nothing wrong with stereotype (call it “caricature,” it’s a less loaded term) in satire. I just think it conveyed a sort of anti-middle class/Middle American bias that thwarted the political efficacy of the cartoon, regardless of whether this was the cartoonist’s intent. (While we’re on the subject of political cartooning, Tom Tomorrow” does a pretty good job of skewering the American attitudes he feels deserve skewering without using pictorial stereotypes, due to his effective use of clip-art style generic, uh, “peoploids.”)

Finally, Peter took issue with my rhetoric a bit, saying it was “high school” of me to say his own outlook was “tedious in high school.” To which I can only reply, I know you are, but what am I? In all seriousness, I wasn’t dissing him as immature (he’s obviously a sophisticated guy, but at any rate, what’s so bad about being like a high schooler anyway?), just saying I outgrew way back in the day the outlook he seemed to be espousing. But I think my big rhetorical mistake was saying “YOU can’t help but feel that” Peter was attacking Middle America, not “I can’t help but feel” that way. It’s me writing this thing, after all, and it’s presumptuous and dopey to speak for the general “you.” So I’ll take a hit on that one, no problem.

All that being said, what I take from this is that this Internet thing has its pros and cons. I think Peter thought I was being a much bigger jerk than I really was, but since he doesn’t know me, how could he judge? But on the plus side, I had a one-to-one debate with Peter Freaking Bagge. And I think (cheesy after school special music GO!) we both learned something about the effects of his comic strip. And he was such a cool guy about it that he let me post quotes from his emails on my freaking website. Three cheers for fighting about politics and comics on the World Wide Web!

Eff this, man. I’ve been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon for half a goddamn decade already. Inspired by my uncle and father-in-law, I started drinking it because it’s cheap, the can looks neat, Dennis Hopper drank it in Blue Velvet, and as far as cheap beers go, it tastes really good. (Jesus God, it’s so much better than Coors Light, just for example.) Long have I complained that it’s so hard to find on Long Island–in the years I’ve looked for it out here I’ve only found it once. If this idiotic retro-chic reported-on-in-square-publications trend makes it easier for me to buy PBR, great, but that doesn’t make this trend any less obnoxious. Pabst Blue Ribbon deserves better than hipsters.

It totally rules when you’re on your fifth draft of some piece of writing and your computer crashes and you lose everything you did that day.

What I’m saying is that if the posts are few and far between today, it’s because I’m too busy fuming. Or drinking.

There are several irritating things going on in this Pete Bagge anti-war cartoon (courtesy of Franklin Harris). First, there’s the generalized contempt for the average American, as represented by the various suburban stereotypes Bagge presents (the dopey talking head, the dopey mother, the dopey college girl, the dopey veteran, the dopey old woman, the dopey blue-collar guy–noticing a pattern here?). Certainly one can feel frustrated with one’s fellow citizens from time to time, but you can’t help but feel that Bagge’s point is that everything would be fine if it weren’t for those boozhwah WalMart-shopping flag-waving automatons, blah blah blah. Man, that shit gets tedious by the end of high school.

Second, there’s the bit about how, if the Iraqis decide to “elect” a fascist or Islamist, we’ll need to “teach them democracy all over again” or whatever. Ha ha ha, stupid American, who are we to decide what’s best for them, if they vote then we must respect them, it’s a different culture, besides, Florida and hanging chads and all that, blah blah blah. But the fact of the matter is, there’s nothing ridiculous about the notion that a “democracy” that elects a fascist or fundamentalist theocrat is invalid (ha ha ha, what about the U.S., Ashcroft, blah blah blah–folks, I’m way ahead of you on this stuff). If, after World War II, it became apparent that democratic reforms in Germany, Italy, or Japan were leading to the rise of another set of nationalistic militaristic demagogues, you can bet your bottom dollar that we’d use the troops in place in those countries to put the kibosh on those elections so fast it’d make your head spin. And this wouldn’t be anti-democratic in the slightest. The thing about democracy is that it presupposes the existence of, ahem, certain inalienable rights–life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness among them. Elect a leader whose explicit goal is to restrict those inalienable human rights, and that election is invalid by definition.

It’s stupid, and actually insulting, to act as though different cultures need not allow for those rights. If you believe in a liberal democracy, as most anti-war folks would claim, you believe that those rights are, in fact, inalienable, meaning you can’t rightfully get rid of them no matter what. Even if 99% of the population voted for a dictator, he’d still be a dictator, because you can’t choose to do away with an inalienable right. For some reason, a lot of people are finding this notion tough to deal with–and that’s a notion I find tough to deal with.

Lots of quibbling and cavilling going on about the post-Hulk stock dump, but the best analysis comes from Newsarama, which points out similar declines after quite a few Marvel movies, as well as one for Scholastic this week, following the release of the Harry Potter book. Ain’t no one arguing that that was a disappointing performance, are they?

As I said before, this just seems like a logical time for people who are looking to cash in to do so, and would have remained so even if the Hulk movie had done Spider-Man business. It seems to me that most claims to the contrary–that the dump was due to disappointing box office–originate from one oft-quoted Bear Stearns analyst, Glen Reid, who you can find quoted here (in a Pulse article that bases its entire weak thesis on this one dude’s read of the market), as well as every other damn place that reported on the story.

The one aspect of the box-office-gloom theory that holds water is the fact that as this summer has made perfectly clear, franchise and tentpole movies need to make a goddamn killing the first weekend out, because in this blockbuster-packed 6,000-theater front-loaded movie climate, one week is often all you get to establish your strength and make almost half of your box. Variety’s dead-tree edition makes this case fairly effectively today.

Bottom line: Unless you’re making stuff up to get column inches and air time, or have an axe to grind with superheroes or superhero movies, it’s tough to spin this as anything but par for the (show)business-world course.

Also seen on the subway: a flier for Planned Parenthood reading “WARNING: BUSH POLICIES HAZARDOUS TO WOMEN’S HEALTH.”

Hee hee!

I’ve noticed ads in the NYC subway for the Bronx Zoo’s latest attraction, Tiger Mountain. Is some humble zookeeper a closet Eno fan?

Jo Rowling really knows how to do “unfair.” The entire Harry Potter series has been essentially a laundry list of grown-ups and bullies who, for one reason or the other, pick on the main character for no fault of his own. The arbitrary exercise of power, the base delight in cruelty, the adamant refusal to believe unpleasant or unusual facts, the cloying condescension from adults to children and teenagers, the politically- or peer-motivated malfeasance, the bossing, the punishing, the bullying, the class prejudice, the age prejudice: It all adds up to a perfect portrait of a world that’ll screw you over simply because it can, and because you can’t do anything to stop it. I often think that a huge chunk of the books’ appeal to children is this faithful re-creation of what the world of “because I said so”-spouting adults must look like through those children’s eyes.

NeilAlien offers his own summary of MoCCA, with the caveat that he’s not “a name-dropping scenester.” On the other hand…

Note to MTV: If you’re taking suggestions, I think a good idea for an episode of Punk