Diseased #Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

[Gee Willows Wilson!]

This episode of Open Bar was interesting. Few of the familiar faces showed up, either physically or in mentions:

Mr. H showed his face in the friendzone of Eric July after panning his low budget live action trailer for a comic.

Star Wars Girl got a mention in a superberry touting how brilliant her video on "fake geek girls" was. Both nerdrotic and Drinker were surprised she made a video. I would assume this is in between scarfing down the soil in her potted plant, and deciding how long into the baby's life they'll start giving them cocaine.

Once again Drinker was told that Zack was making videos of him, and Nerdrotic who was on the panel. It was met with both men's bewilderment and apathy. "Okay" came from Nerdrotic while Drinker said he had no idea why Zack was so angry with them, but ultimately they didn't seem to give a shit and moved on. Honestly, a fine enough response, at this point they were streaming to about 15k which is about 3 times the views his videos get. He's basically an ankle biter to them now, when he used to be the top dog in the sektor.

Oh well.

 

[Captain Manning]

Star Wars Girl got a mention in a superberry touting how brilliant her video on "fake geek girls" was.

Was the video about her? Because, if not, I doubt very much it was brilliant.

Somebody once told me they asked her some Star Wars questions once, and she couldn't answer a single one. She's fake AF.

 

[Mr Processor]

If you treated the so-called "Birthday Party Clowns" as something more than Geek News Anchors that happen to not insult those one the right of Stalin and that happen to have side-gigs, then that is on you. You should not have been holding them in too high regard as some sort of rolemodels or some shit.

Also, on respecting the source material: In my opinion, you do that by making a good product that translates the meaning and intent of the author while being careful about what might need to be cut. Not to mention that those that make things for the ever illusive modern audience (I swear I have run into more unicorns than I have run into these supposed real crowd) change things around without caring about the original work, resulting in a product that neither appeals to anyone and was asked by no one.

It's very rare that a corporate product can entirely toss out the source material (except for the name) that they bought the IP rights to and end up making something better or equal to the original source material. It does happen, of course, but it's an exception rather than a rule. Usually when they do that they make embarrassing dreck. It's even worse when you have stuff made by a committee. At least if you give Sam Peckinpah or Stanley Kubrick a book to adapt and they deliberately deviate from the source material, you usually get something good (even though there's usually a debate over whether the original novel was better. I think Peckinpah's version of Straw Dogs and Kubrick's version of The Shining actually were better than the original books. However, that's an arguable point based on personal preferences. I certainly don't think the latest Disney slop is better than anything.).

 

[Gee Willows Wilson!]

Was the video about her? Because, if not, I doubt very much it was brilliant.

Somebody once told me they asked her some Star Wars questions once, and she couldn't answer a single one. She's fake AF.

Ironically both Drinker AND Nerdrotic were gargling on her fake tits with how "knowledgable" she is about Star Trek and Star Wars,

Proving once again if you're an averagely attractive big titted bimbo who has the right politics, you get away with anything.

 

[Captain Manning]

Ironically both Drinker AND Nerdrotic were gargling on her fake tits with how "knowledgable" she is about Star Trek and Star Wars,

Proving once again if you're an averagely attractive big titted bimbo who has the right politics, you get away with anything.

I am not even sure her politics are genuine.

What I think the refrain should be is that you can get away with anything if you are mildly attractive, big titted, and can FAKE being a right-leaning girl geek.

Also, high intelligence is not a prerequisite.

 

[Miniluv]

Let’s face it, most of us stopped watching the birthday party clowns for the reasons he’s stating.

No argument there, but most of us also stopped watching that shit 5 years ago. It was somewhat relevant during the Last Jedi shitshow. They started building up steam when everyone seemed to realize that Rise of Skywalker completely sucked and wrote Star Wars into a corner they still can't get out of and that the post-Endgame MCU was even more retarded than the pre-Endgame MCU.

Since then, it's just the same old shit. My interest in these franchises is nearly nonexistent and my interest in content whining about them is less than that. I don't need to watch hours of livestreams to remind me that Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Marvel are shitty. Anyone still watching rage content is a true dent and anyone who consumes rage content just to make more content bitching about it is an exceptional faggot. Why Zack would wait until now to start doing whatever he's doing is a mystery explained only partially by the fact that Gary hitting a million subs and Ed Piskor flipping happened around the same time.

The canned phrase that stopped me watching was “respect the source material.” No, make something good. In fact, if you make something amazing you can not only shit on the source material from a great height, people will be in awe of how you did it.

I think there's a big difference between respecting source material and being slavishly devoted to it. It seems unrealistic to expect a 100% faithful adaptation of anything.
However, it also seems obvious that if you're adapting a property for film or TV (or anything else) and you're expecting that it will come with a sizeable built-in audience, you should probably at least try to understand what people like about it and to present that as well as you are able.

This is especially true for superhero adaptations. I have yet to see one that is a 1:1 adaptation of any story, but some get close. When you're dealing with characters that have been around 50 to 80 years, it becomes harder to faithfully adapt a single story, given the continuity issues and retcons, but much easier to identify what makes a character work and what doesn't. You don't have to make a completely accurate adaptation of a particular Batman story as long as you get Batman right. Getting Batman right should be the easy part since you've got almost a century of source material to draw from.

IMO, it's a positive for any adaptation to have people working on it who are at least a little familiar with what they're adapting and it helps tremendously if they understand why there's an audience for it. When the showrunner for Halo, for example, comes out and says most of the writers don't know anything about Halo and that they purposely didn't want to know anything about the lore, it should be a huge red flag for the pre-existing Halo audience.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t “respecting source material” or making stuff “no one asked for”, the problem is they’re making shite.

That's always been the problem, though. Hollywood is a diarrhea factory. Getting something good is uncommon, and something both good and respectful to whatever source is relatively rare. Probably safe to say we'll never see anything quite like the Lord of the Rings trilogy again in our lifetimes.

 

[FluffyJackal]

This episode of Open Bar was interesting. Few of the familiar faces showed up, either physically or in mentions:

Which episode?

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Manga is disgusting. Either you're into it or you're not. You can't introduce normal human beings to that backwards uncolored nonsense and honestly expect them to care.

 

[Gee Willows Wilson!]

Why Zack would wait until now to start doing whatever he's doing is a mystery explained only partially by the fact that Gary hitting a million subs and Ed Piskor flipping happened around the same time.

This is what I don't "get". Besides, as our Postal autist pointed out, we stopped watching them for the reasons Zack said. But much like @FROG 's retarded one sided fight with Eric July, it makes no real sense for Zack to be attacking people who don't give a shit about him and really only mention him when his name comes up from fans.

Which episode?

Today's Open Bar, Drinker usually streams, takes it down and reuploads it on his archive channel in a few days. The superchats come towards the end.



Protect Zack all you want, but he's acting like Frog, Dick, Vaedo and others in that area of seething, and people here mostly understand that's just stupid behavior. He doesn't like old fans anymore, he wants different fans that will agree with his dented takes.

 

[FedPostalService]

If you treated the so-called "Birthday Party Clowns" as something more than Geek News Anchors that happen to not insult those one the right of Stalin and that happen to have side-gigs, then that is on you. You should not have been holding them in too high regard as some sort of rolemodels or some shit.

Also, on respecting the source material: In my opinion, you do that by making a good product that translates the meaning and intent of the author while being careful about what might need to be cut. Not to mention that those that make things for the ever illusive modern audience (I swear I have run into more unicorns than I have run into these supposed real crowd) change things around without caring about the original work, resulting in a product that neither appeals to anyone and was asked by no one.

They were entertainment with a dash of geek culture news, but they’’ve ceased to be entertaining.

I‘m smarter than Zack in this respect as I just stopped watching them rather than declaring a self destructive jihad on them.

 

[KingofSomething]

Manga is disgusting. Either you're into it or you're not. You can't introduce normal human beings to that backwards uncolored nonsense and honestly expect them to care.

You realize you're more likely to randomly see someone reading manga than a comic these days, right? It's not some niche interest anymore.

 

[Tepes Thot]

Manga is disgusting. Either you're into it or you're not. You can't introduce normal human beings to that backwards uncolored nonsense and honestly expect them to care.

Zack, you made it! How do you like the place?

 

[Incecticyder]

I think Peckinpah's version of Straw Dogs and Kubrick's version of The Shining actually were better than the original books. However, that's an arguable point based on personal preferences. I certainly don't think the latest Disney slop is better than anything.).

These guys had respect for the source material. They made changes but knew where to cut something and where to add. That and they tried to enhance the story, not change it for political reasons.

They were entertainment with a dash of geek culture news, but they’’ve ceased to be entertaining.

I‘m smarter than Zack in this respect as I just stopped watching them rather than declaring a self destructive jihad on them.

It is hard being entertaining when the same slop has been coming out for years. Sucks the life out of you.

 

[BrodyDaMan]

This is especially true for superhero adaptations. I have yet to see one that is a 1:1 adaptation of any story, but some get close. When you're dealing with characters that have been around 50 to 80 years, it becomes harder to faithfully adapt a single story, given the continuity issues and retcons, but much easier to identify what makes a character work and what doesn't. You don't have to make a completely accurate adaptation of a particular Batman story as long as you get Batman right. Getting Batman right should be the easy part since you've got almost a century of source material to draw from.

I think the Japanese have shown that you can translate anything to an appropriate medium faithfully, and and in most cases it's either a matter of sheer laziness or overconfident tards who want to shove in their own agenda or fetishes. Most comic characters can be excluded from such standards though, unless the adaptation is of a specific run, since the characters change between writers all the time. But adapting something like The Boys or Warrior Nun could be done faithfully and very well even in live action.

 

[Flexo]

It's very rare that a corporate product can entirely toss out the source material (except for the name) that they bought the IP rights to and end up making something better or equal to the original source material. It does happen, of course, but it's an exception rather than a rule.

Only one I can think of is "How to Train your Dragon." There is literally nothing in common between movie and book save the character names and even the author admits the movie is better.

Jaws would probably be close second but from my understanding it still draws enough from the source material to not qualify for this.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

I find Zack an interesting character. I can't finish more than 3 mins of any of his videos because he is so freaking boring, but I feel like he was thrust into being a CG figurehead by happenstance. There was no one else at that time that got blown up to be as big as he is in CG, thanks mostly to the action of other people, so Zack was the "face" even when he's arguably the dumbest and least eloquent of the first-gen CGers out there.

He never has any long-term plan aside from writing soldier hero books, which shouldn't be surprising as he couldn't commit to any long-term job or relationships either. He doesn't know what to do to change his situation, probably too stupid to even understand why he was once hailed as the hero but now he's trailing behind everyone else that came after him and blames everything around him for his current situation.

He's so used to people agreeing with him, and now he's unable to understand why people are laughing at his horrific bad tastes in movies. Why isn't he loved and hailed as the greatest like before? Since he's too simple for self-reflection, he blames everyone else for his fall. Someone must have turned people against him... must be the popular kids that stole the audience that he considers his!

Poor stupid Zack is someone that cannot last long under any scrutiny and limelight, so his fall from grace is inevitable. I'm just surprised and impressed that he didn't crack sooner.

 

[Mr Processor]

I find Zack an interesting character. I can't finish more than 3 mins of any of his videos because he is so freaking boring, but I feel like he was thrust into being a CG figurehead by happenstance. There was no one else at that time that got blown up to be as big as he is in CG, thanks mostly to the action of other people, so Zack was the "face" even when he's arguably the dumbest and least eloquent of the first-gen CGers out there.

He never has any long-term plan aside from writing soldier hero books, which shouldn't be surprising as he couldn't commit to any long-term job or relationships either. He doesn't know what to do to change his situation, probably too stupid to even understand why he was once hailed as the hero but now he's trailing behind everyone else that came after him and blames everything around him for his current situation.

He's so used to people agreeing with him, and now he's unable to understand why people are laughing at his horrific bad tastes in movies. Why isn't he loved and hailed as the greatest like before? Since he's too simple for self-reflection, he blames everyone else for his fall. Someone must have turned people against him... must be the popular kids that stole the audience that he considers his!

Poor stupid Zack is someone that cannot last long under any scrutiny and limelight, so his fall from grace is inevitable. I'm just surprised and impressed that he didn't crack sooner.

His position in ComicsGate was helped a lot by him being a Marine combat veteran who served in Afghanistan, more than the comics he was making. The other thing was the shocking decline of the American comic book industry. There was a whole media organized around the idea that the terrible comics that were coming out were not only great but better than the comics that came out in the past. So, almost anyone who was willing to take on that narrative despite the attempts at intimidation by those people would get some clout.

The trouble is the gang that was protecting the those comics at the time decided he had to be crushed when he tried to get a publisher for the comics he was making. If they had just let Antarctic Press publish his books (since it seems like they wanted to) and not called them to threaten them, he would have faded into obscurity, I think. He would certainly not have made as much money as he did with crowdfunding (probably), and he wouldn't have been the guy "fighting the power."

The cracks started appearing whenever he would talk about Lucasfilm and have been going on for a long time. He has weirdly always jumped to the defense of Kathleen Kennedy a woman who would probably have him roughed up by security if he somehow found his way into her office.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

I feel like that's because he is never truly CG. Guy just wanted more super soldiers, as was said, in the comics he was reading at that time. Detractors used him as a target, supporters used him as their figurehead and battering ram. He never asked for any of this because, I think, his fuzzy brain never really articulated what he wanted anyway in the first place. Except maybe more GI Joe and super soldiers.

Everything else is just him sputtering and coughing based on feels and impulses.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

I feel like that's because he is never truly CG. Guy just wanted more super soldiers, as was said, in the comics he was reading at that time. Detractors used him as a target, supporters used him as their figurehead and battering ram. He never asked for any of this because, I think, his fuzzy brain never really articulated what he wanted anyway in the first place. Except maybe more GI Joe and super soldiers.

Everything else is just him sputtering and coughing based on feels and impulses.

Nah, Zack 1.0 (Rabbit hutch in NYC with hunting knife chopping up the latest issue of X Men and throwing it in disgust behind his radiator), the version he's gone to some length to scrub from memory, was a very different creature than what he later became, and is now. If he acted back then the way he is acting now he'd have gotten a few hundred subscribers tops and probably faded from memory in short order. Perhaps I'm wrong in the sense that inertia has seemingly propelled Zach along far longer than I honestly ever would have thought it could, so there is that.

Curiously, Zack 1.0 was the version Cecil parodied at first when he pretended to be an SJW with a shredder, shredding early Fantastic 4 issues over the latest iteration of Squirrel Girl or something.

How things have changed, I guess. Early on ComicsGate was retarded, but fun. Nowadays ComicsGate is retarded and boring.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Nah, Zack 1.0 (Rabbit hutch in NYC with hunting knife chopping up the latest issue of X Men and throwing it in disgust behind his radiator), the version he's gone to some length to scrub from memory, was a very different creature than what he later became, and is now. If he acted back then the way he is acting now he'd have gotten a few hundred subscribers tops and probably faded from memory in short order. Perhaps I'm wrong in the sense that inertia has seemingly propelled Zach along far longer than I honestly ever would have thought it could, so there is that.

I think Zack had faded from most people's memory for a long time now. He stopped becoming relevant to CG the moment he didn't give the rest of CG a triumphant happy ending against Waid like they wanted and some even paid a lot of money to see. That's when people begin to realize that the real Zack is nowhere close to the fantasy CG Hero-God Zack that he was built up to be.

I mean, people only talked about him now because we're all bored of Ethan's obsessive Lifetime movie "The Wrong Comic Maker"-style hatred for July and someone noticed how Zack had quietly become unhinged. If Ethan had been entertaining, we probably would still not notice nor care what Zack is doing. It's even worse outside - no one cares about him, not even the people he is attacking. Truly irrelevant, and kinda sad way for a hero's journey to end.

I missed the rabbit hutch phase, but it'd probably be more interesting to me that whatever Zack was even during his peak CG era. Hell, I find this unhinged Zack to be far more interesting than I ever found him in the past!