Rick Veitch and Steve Conley have spoiled me for most other comics message boards.

Rick and Steve let us say what we want and do what we like (admittedly, with some of the more "colorful" stuff being reserved for The Gutters).

They almost never ban anyone, unless that person just goes off the deep end and starts posting Bible quotes across dozens of threads in troll fashion.

If they've ever edited or removed a comment from an ongoing thread, I've not seen it.

There are other message boards I like for different subjects, but for comics, Comicon is it. Lately, I've poked around Heidi MacDonald's The Beat -- which has some interesting subjects -- but even Heidi (who works for her own corporate entity) is quick to censor and ban when she thinks people are getting too "negative" about the product.

I concur, though, ironically, this is the only board where I've ever had a post removed (an innocent one, at that), but anyone who can't take it--or dish it--on interweb message boards should stick to Sudoku.

Cher had her moment. Daughtry I've never even heard of. But slagging Dio is a major no-no. That guy was rocking out before the Beatles even existed (yes, seriously), and he'll probably still be wailing when everyone here is dead.

Totally.

Maybe Morrison will finally get around to revealing why there are at least two versions of Kamandi running around in his story and what all the Metron as Prometheus crap is about... but as far as I'm concerned, why spend good money on that stuff when I can read Douglas Wolk's Final Crisis annotations for free?

Speaking of Metron... This guy on the DC boards got mad at me for describing that Metron/Anthro scene as a Prometheus riff. He tried to claim it was "deeper than that" because he could identify some other mythical tropes that Morrison threw in for fun.

The thing is... Even if you broke out your copy of Robert Graves' The White Goddess and started listing every single god who was ever associated with magic, secret knowlege or learning in general... that was still a dumb scene.

You might feel a little smarter because you can toss out allusions to Thoth and Mithras and the Ogham alphabet while arguing with somebody, but so what? "Fire = knowlege" gets to the heart of things pretty efficiently unless your Aspergers is acting up and you're being way too literal even by fanboy standards.

And it was still really pretentious and goofy. Catching an allusion to Hermes doesn't change that.

Lawson, here's the one thread I remember Rick "locking down". It's too bad, because it was one of the JUICIEST and SLEAZIEST threads I remember.
http://www.comicon.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/ubb/get_topic/f/1/t/012947/p/1.html

It's sister thread is similarly entertaining.

http://www.comicon.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/ubb/get_topic/f/1/t/013046/p/1.html

The only 2 folks I remember Rick banning in the past couple of years have been David Porta and Marvel Artist/Mexican Eddie/Mr. Blue etc.

*DING* Maybe we're just repeating a cycle in art/entertainment history, but it seems like what qualifies as good, smart writing nowadays (in comics and elsewhere) is spackling a bunch of allusions, references and metaphors onto a story.

Me? I don't know if I'm just getting cranky in my old age, but I'm not impressed with that stuff any longer. I'm much more into how well the basic elements of storytelling are executed. I recently rewatched THE TERMINATOR and CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and it's damn impressive how structurally sound TT is and how operatically effective CTB is.

Mike

Totally.

I agree with you about the first Terminator. It still works surprisingly well as both a science fiction story and a character study.

We were being spoiled by some of the action movies of the Eighties, and we didn't even realize it at the time. They actually had real character development and plots that could withstand some scrutiny. Heck, even the first Lethal Weapon still holds up pretty well.

The first Die Hard is the classic example. It's awesome mostly because it makes Bruce Willis seem likable and you find yourself actually caring about the dad from Family Matters. The explosions and walking on glass and stuff are just the frosting on the cake. That will always be better from a story perspective than any of the crazy action sequences in the sequels.

Talking about movies got me thinking about why I still like stuff from the Eighties. Even if it's stuff like Arion, Lord of Atlantis or this really cool little vampire movie called Near Dark that I discovered within the last ten years or so.

It's not just nostalgia that makes me prefer to kick it old school sometimes. Some of the stuff from back when I was in high school was more intelligent than I realized at the time. And the creators were able to draw on all sorts of influences without having the whole point being to show off that they knew that stuff.

Take the Shadowline Saga, for example. Those were great comics that drew on a lot of mythological and historical references. But they were great partly because writers D.G. Chichester and Margaret Clark incorporated their source material into the stories in a way where the comics still worked even if you didn't know what they were referencing.

They didn't make a huge deal out of things like possible symbolic meanings of Dr. Zero's red, white and black costume or why one of their recurring bad guys was a werewolf or why they based a character on a Korean folk hero called the Horseman. They just used all that stuff as subtext.

They let you figure out for yourself that the telepathic watchman guy from St. George was sort of like Heimdall. Or possibly a similar guy who hung out with the Tuatha De Danaan. And if you didn't catch that, the comics he was in still made perfect sense.

In a similar situation, Grant Morrison would probably introduce the telepathic guard, fail to make it clear why he was even in the story and then try to make a big deal out of the fact that he's kind of like Heimdall. So, instead of finding the character interesting a typical reader's reaction would be more along the lines of "Is this another lame Kirby reference?"

I'm not sure how Dio belongs with Cher and Daughtry. Kiss on the other hand....

Huh! I only dimly recall those threads. Juicy and sleazy indeed!

Unless I'm wrong -- and someone can correct me -- I think Rick worried about those threads because they were telling potentially slanderous tales about real people in the comics industry, particularly some indie creators who were flaming each other over a failed relationship.

I'm not saying the tales weren't necessarily true, but Rick thought he might be treading on legally murky ground by operating a Web site splashing all those details out there. This was a step above (or below!) a "Byrne sucks" or "DiDio is ruining DC" thread, which is unflattering but not defamatory in the legal sense.

The one time I met Rick in real life and talked to him about Comicon, at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Md., he mentioned these threads and wondered where his liability might lie.

As for the two guys banned: I always liked David Porta's insights into old comics, but he melted down and went on a troll rampage with those Bible quotes one weekend, pasting them in as many threads as he could given the three-minute delay. Rick had warned him about such behavior before.

The other dude, the Marvel Artist/Mexican Eddie/Mr. Blue idiot, was never anything but a troll who came here to attack Mark Evanier and defend Vince Colleta in such a way that he even turned off Colleta fans. Last I heard, he was running an anti-Evanier Web site.