On January 4th, I got a comment on one of my articles on Fantagraphics Books that was highly uncivil and most likely a troll trying to goad an angry response out of me. Here it is, poor punctuation and all:
Wah! Wah! Waaaaaaaaah!
You sound like a pathetic egomaniac. Can you please site how've you "have done better" when all you do is post commentary in a childish tone without any self awareness as to how Fantagraphics, or the other organizations you've discussed, actually operate.
The unusual schedules is likely due to that their staff can only do so much at once, and more importantly, that research and gathering the best print sources isn't always the easiest task, and delays are never impossible.
If you have an issue with the commentary given, you can always just stick to reading the meat of each collection. You site the Herriman commentary; some of the racial stuff in his comics is so incredibly obvious that you'd have to be some conservative ostrich not to see it or want to discuss it, especially since it is important to know that despite being mixed race, scholars aren't certain whether or not Herriman saw himself as black
Since you evidently are an ostrich and dig your head in the sand, I expect no response, perfectly in character for someone who doesn't care
As you can tell, this is not just a comment meant to disprove my claims. This was essentially an attack on me personally. If I was supposed to be enraged, this guy failed miserably. I was instead confused.
I had responded to the comment, but here I'd like to address his attacks more fully, just in case you agree with him.
I got to first point out that he bases a lot of this on either secondguessing my political views or calling me names. He calls me "a pathetic egomaniac", a "conservative ostrich", and just "an ostrich".
He says that first one because I stated I could do better than their commentators. This is taking what I said out of context. This does not mean that I'm better educated or smarter than the people I'm talking about, but that the notes are pathetically poor in research, citing internet searches as their broadest glossing. This is fine for a blog post or a Youtube video, not a professional, expensive hardbound book. Besides, Others have noted their laziness. As the previous link shows, he even gets facts about Kelly's life mixed up. These are not wannabe cartoons slamming away on a free blog like myself, but art scholars.
This dude may be right on the schedules thing, so I will say I was wrong. I just find it strange in has been over ten years and Pogo is still volumes away from over. But maybe there is a good reason. I do believe, however, they are extending the volume numbers to make more money-which isn't a unique evil, since most comic companies do this.
As for the ostrich attack, I don't remember saying I put my head in the sand about anything. He labels me conservative, even though I have never revealed my political opinions since, unlike Mark Evanier, I can actually seperate my life from what Donald Trump said today. Even if I were conservative, I'd like to know how being one is supposed to be evil. Would I say the same about liberals? No.
I devote most of my reading time to the Civil War, Reconstruction, the West, and its legacy through the Civil Rights Movement. All the time, nonstop, I am encountering America's race problem. I know it firsthand, where it came from, so I'm not just some insensitive skinhead, as he wants to portray me. But it is not the time and place to discuss this in these books since the artists had no agendas related to this whatsoever. The analysis of Barks and Herriman reads much like Critical Race Theory, which was hypothesized in 1989 and was not known to the general public until the last five years. Its rightness or wrongness is beyond the blog here, but it has nothing to do with Walt Disney Comics and Stories. Also, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its antecedents are products of the 2010s, and what the heck they have to do with Carl Barks or Uncle Scrooge can only be answered by God Almighty himself.
Orwell gave out many warnings about how history will be manipulated to fit political agendas, and the idea here is that these politically-active comic scholars are trying to impose their personal opinions onto the readers through the work they are reading.
It is different if a story really does involve politics, particularly if they are topical. Two of my favorite films, High Noon and Yojimbo tackle what is happening in the world, the former American blacklisting and the other Japanese commercialism. But the politics of old comics are not only non-existent but blatantly anachronistic.
I also would like to know where these "incredibly obvious" racial moment in Krazy Kat. Though he did reference blackness and whiteness in the strip, as the Sundays prove, as well as the hand-painted watercolors he did, Krazy and Ignatz were not those colors. In fact, they were beige and blue. Look, for example, as this envelope he sent (and colored):
The references Herriman has to "White...pure as the driven snow" are about the literal colorless white as a universal symbol for purification, not as a comment on racial barriers or the domination of whiteness in the 20th Century. The comparing of "black" or "white" ink he does is simply Herriman referencing the black-and-white format of comic strips, since he never did it in the Sundays. Am I totally writing off the possibility of this being--at least--Freud's Reaction Formation? No. But still.
Well, that ends that. I would like to get off of Fantagraphics for a while and focus on the current Mickey Mouse public domain news. Hopefully it'll be better for my mental health and yours. I won't be getting any Fantagraphics collections soon (no birthday or Christmas for a while, and I'm not in the mindset to spend $30 on something over 200 pages) except the Pogos, which is their best series.
In other words, Mr. Commenter...
