Har! Yes, Ted reminds me of the Bill Hicks bit:

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself.

No, no, no it’s just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself – seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you’re going, “there’s going to be a joke coming,” there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.

Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, “he’s doing a joke…” there’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi… Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing, he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill’s very bright to do that.”

God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.

“Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market – look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?

“What didya do today honey?”

“Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores]

Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya, this is your world isn’t it?

I like the superhero genre. Before Watchmen could be good superhero stories (like the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four or Alan Moore's work on the ABC line), but if the remaining issues are no better than Nite Owl #1 I probably will stop paying for them.

Some people think talent trumps genre, or that perceived aesthetic qualities matter more than other considerations. I have my aesthetic limits (see my recent review of the DCnU Huntress mini-series. But my aesthetic limits are mine alone, and I don't believe that they are any more or less valid than yours.

And I certainly never said that Moore's work is "crap". On the contrary, I said he is "probably the most talented to have ever worked in the medium". I just think it is a shame he writes so nihilistically (cynically, perhaps?) towards others' creations when he could be doing so much more to elevate the medium.

But if you want to engage me, do so as jack has done, rather than trot out the same tired old arguments that Ceci does.

No it can't. By virtue of what it is, no it can't. The best you can hope for here is a passably well-crafted Secret Wars,* or any other product of a marketing committee.



Apparently they're so tired, they can't even be addressed! The fatigue induced by my arguments forces... FORCES poor Ted to ignore them completely, and just repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over again. He can barely even find time to make up a strawman and attribute it to me!

But give the plucky little guy credit... somehow, despite the odds, he manages to make up that strawman.

---
*Which is not to say that Secret Wars was well-crafted, of course.

Did it ever occur to you that Moore was looking for a payoff in the '80s when he sold the rights to his story to DC? He could have kept the rights and done the story through a smaller publisher, but he chose money over rights. I'm sure he regrets the choice now.

As someone who thinks there's nothing ethically or morally wrong with BEFORE WATCHMEN, I still have to agree that "We had to do it because Alan Moore won't" is total crap.

And all of the handwaving about Moore's own work and its use of other's creations is just another example that there have always been special rules for special people.

Mike

He then continues, "This baby wasn't going to rape itself!"

And I would like to see some numbers to support that assertion. Once again, he was coerced into writing Neonomicon for Avatar because he had a looming tax bill.

(Taken in concert with The Courtyard, Neonomicon is quite a great comic, btw)




Hahaha. No, it isn't.



If Watchmen does go out of print for a while, that won't have anything to do with BW. It will be because Warners flooded the market with copies of it before the movie came out. Actually, BW is probably the result of the market for Watchmen sales being completely saturated for the first time in 25 years.

Ultimately, there is no point to BEFORE WATCHMEN. There wasn't anything that was missing from the original that need to be addressed.

Len Wein's arguments are crass to say the least.

And Allen's right, Neonomicon is a great comic.

I heard quite a few people criticize Neonomicon as being just creature porn. And it is. By itself, it's very much just a prototypical blood-gore-sex comic that one would expect under the Avatar brand. But put it together with the previous mini adapted from Moore's short story and it's absolutely brilliant. The TPB collects the two.