Bad webcomics

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Retink Retunk said:
So once a year if we're lucky? Shame he went off the deep end, he was actually somewhat talented and had unique ideas compared to the normal slop out there. If only webcomic artists and speed runners could stay away from that HRT.
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Even if he hadn't trooned out, his comic was doomed. You can look at the current state of the comic and trajectory of his early work. Once he did "the hob" it was all over.

At that point he went from "Fun vaguely SoL quasi-scifi geeks and nerds taken to the extreme while building to a punchline" was subsumed by his need to tell a "Deep and mature" (read: utterly retarded) story. His talent, narcissism-masquerading-as-humanism, open Euphoria, and constant fluffing and asssoothing by his retarded fans meant he was always going to go off the deep end and wind up with a fart huffing choir preaching output.

On a long enough timeline, all become faggot
 
Retink Retunk said:
So once a year if we're lucky? Shame he went off the deep end, he was actually somewhat talented and had unique ideas compared to the normal slop out there. If only webcomic artists and speed runners could stay away from that HRT.
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His only good comics were the nerd one-shot-joke ones, as Mr. @Ghostse said. Even then, his lameness constantly seeped through in any strip that used his waifu and "OCs".
He used to also post attempts at serious concept art and character design that were fucking tragic because of his one-step-above-kris-straub simple bubble style.
 
Caligura said:
Latest Sinfest comic has Tats partaking in the current drama with Captive Dreamer and by in large the BronzeAgePervert fanbase.
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bruh what is Tatsuya's beef with Mohammad Wali??? Is he against Kurdistan??? He's not even Jewish
 
Every so often I think about Subnormality and think about how strange it was that Rowntree was some flavour of proto-woke back in, what, 2009 or something? His editorial comics weren't much better but I fondly remember them out of sheer nostalgia for the old Cracked.com.
 
gasolineman said:
I love terrible political webcomics, and I've read tons of them over the years. Assigned Male is pretty bad, and so is Lefty Comics by Barry Deutsch. The absolute worst, though, I never see anyone mention: Mike Stanfill's Raging Pencils. Most comics at least make an attempt to look like a reasoned argument. Raging Pencils strips always begin and end with "my political opponents are stupid and ugly." This is how Stanfill chooses to present himself when you first open his website:
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All of his comics read exactly like this. Stanfill aggressively misunderstands and misrepresents right-wingers, and then announces that they're "wrong" without even bothering to explain why.
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I guess it makes sense no one ever talks about this guy. There's nothing substantive to respond to.
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Truly amazing how he managed to make all the right-wingers look perfectly reasonable and unnecessarily agrieved by this raging lefty.
 
Dr. Butt said:
He forgot tranny JUUUICE. There's only Fake Admiral tranny in the surveillance section. Is Tats' next sperg shift going to be pro-AGP? Could such sights as that await us??
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Tats over here drawing demonic symbols with his path on the political alignment spectrum
 
Neuropol said:
Back to had webcomics, anyone else remember that Keenspot classic, epitome of class and good art known as "Look What I Brought Home"?
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I sure do, mostly because of some very specific trivia.

Scott Kuehner, the creator behind LWIBH (alongside his wife Amanda) was friends with Keenspot owner Chris Crosby, so it's likely why the site remains up into perpetuity despite the fact that Kuehner has been dead for over 15 years. Aside from releasing a gross comic that has been burned into my memory permanently, Kuehner himself didn't seem like too horrible a guy (especially compared to the cows we know and love - or hate - on the Farms), so I imagine Crosby finds it simple to keep Kuehner's comics up as a sort of memorial to a friend long since passed. It also serves as a disgusting time capsule of toilet humor and, in later parts of the archive, some legitimate attempts on Kuehner's part to give it a somewhat consistent storyline.

For those who want some more context on the LWIBH strips, this was the general expected quality. It never improved tangibly, though it remains a fun gag to send to your friends to make them hate you.
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Where the interesting trivia comes in, however, is that Kuehner's cause of death isn't declared directly on Keenspot, but it is on places such as Voices for Vaccines, where it turns out Kuehner died of genuinely horrific complications from chickenpox. I'll include the articles below for posterity. (This isn't an invitation to turn this into a pro- or anti-vaccine argument, this is just a fascinating context I didn't know about until years later; I imagine I may be one of the few to make the connection at all.)
Link | Archive

We Lived the Worst-Case Scenario: Scott’s Chickenpox Story​

I sat down to write this piece and I asked myself “Where do I start?”

My best answer for that would be to start at the end of December.

Scott and I had moved to a decent apartment, the bottom half of a pretty house. We loved that apartment; it had a lot of space. We had an en suite bathroom, a cold pantry, our own laundry room, big windows, and it was in a good neighborhood. Haley, almost ten, could stay at the same school. Scott was working full time as a merchandiser and loved the job. Everything was finally going in the right direction!

My mother told me in the first week of December that my sister’s two kids had the chickenpox. Since we only saw the kids on holidays anyway, we didn’t really worry about it. We knew Scott hadn’t had the chickenpox and neither had Haley, who was also unvaccinated. But we figured the chances of the catching it from my niece and nephew were pretty slim; we wouldn’t see them until Christmas Day and that was weeks away.

Our routine continued as normal over the next while. We had a fight when we went to put up the Christmas tree, and I realized how many ornaments had been broken. I was upset, so when my mother called December 10th and invited us over to bake cookies with my sister’s kids at her house, I was perhaps too easily convinced that my sister’s kids couldn’t infect Haley. After all, they were scabbed over and feeling better.

Thirteen days later, Haley started feeling sick. When her spots erupted on December 24th, I was pretty much in full-blown panic mode. In addition, I knew if Scott contracted them from Haley, he could get really sick. I didn’t know how bad it could get, but unfortunately, I was going to find out.

People ask me sometimes why Scott wasn’t vaccinated against chickenpox since he never caught them as a child. He had been offered the option, but he’d turned it down because he didn’t want to have the needle. He said, quite literally, “It’s the chicken pox; what’s the worst that could happen?” I now hate that phrase. I can tell you the worst that can happen. In fact, I can tell you exactly what the worst-case scenario is. I lived it.

Haley’s case wasn’t too terrible. She developed a few spots, with her worst rash was across her back. She was constantly picking at them and I remember yelling at her not to, telling her she would scar. I also tried to keep Haley separate from Scott, but they were the best of friends and it was hard to keep them apart. I would tell her to stay away from him, and then turn around and she was curled up next to him. I warned Scott that this could be dangerous, but he only laughed at my concern, telling me I was overreacting, that even if he did get sick he’d be fine.

On New Year’s Eve, 2008, Matt, Scott’s best friend, and his wife Sarah, invited us to come by and visit before the end of the evening, so we decided to take them up on the offer, if only because Haley was feeling better and we had both been cooped up with a sick child all week. Scott sat down on the couch and both fell asleep, which I thought odd at the time, but didn’t question. The next morning, Scott had to head in to work. He called me at around 1:30 that afternoon to tell me he didn’t feel well. I – and believe me, I have guilt over this one – laughed at him, called him a dumbass for going in to work with what was likely virulent chickenpox. I told him to come home.

By that night, the spots started showing up on his skin. The first couple appeared under his arms, across his back, then between his thighs. He loved to take photos, so he started documenting the progress of the eruptions. By the second, he had full blown rashes erupting in patches all over his body. By the third, he started telling me it hurt to swallow, to blink, even to go to the bathroom. He soon stopped eating altogether.

On the fourth day, January 4th, it had been almost thirty hours since Scott had gone to the bathroom; he had stopped drinking. I kept trying to force fluids into him, but he really didn’t want anything. I finally called an ambulance, not knowing what else to do. The paramedics came. And I made my second mistake, the second fork in the road to his death where I will always second guess myself.
The paramedics assessed him, then proceeded to tell him that his SATs were okay, he was lucid, he was mobile, and he wasn’t “overly febrile.” They told me that if he were to be taken to hospital, they would make him wait in chairs for hours, give him some antibiotics and a stern lecture on exposing the hospital to a contagious illness. They said it was his decision, but they would advise him against a trip to the hospital. So of course, Scott being Scott, he chose not to go.

The next day he collapsed. I have always beaten myself up over the fact that I didn’t fight harder, didn’t argue longer, didn’t push him to go. He was an adult, but the medical world was one I walked in, I should’ve known better than him, I felt.

On the fifth day, he wasn’t really awake much. He slept quite a bit, and when he was awake, I could hear him almost whimpering with the pain. When I went to check on him before going to try and sleep on the couch, I found him on the floor, and I couldn’t wake him up. I called another ambulance, and I called Matt and Sarah, so someone could come stay with Haley and I could go to the hospital with him.

I managed to get him awake and he tried to walk out to the living room, but was too shaky to do it, I helped him to the couch and sat him down. That was when I noticed I was sticky; his pustules had started to break and seep. I had fluid from the pox in my hair, on my face, arm, hand, and anywhere else I had touched him. He was just leaking all over. This time, when the ambulance came, I made well and sure that they took him to the hospital.

They took him back immediately, put him in an isolation room at the back of the Emergency Department. I sat with him til about 1:30, and then they told me to go home, I was exhausted. They wouldn’t have answers for hours, and my child needed me. So I went. I would have stayed had I known how little time he had.

The next morning I got Haley up and didn’t want to go to school. We argued, but I finally told her she didn’t have to go. I didn’t have the energy to fight with her that morning. I called the hospital and they told me Scott had been moved upstairs into the critical care unit. They needed me to come in and talk to the specialist they were consulting on his case.

When I got to the hospital, they told me Scott was in full liver failure and bilateral kidney failure. In addition, there was so much infection in his dermis they were “concerned for its integrity.” Some phrases are burned into your brain no matter how much you want to forget them, and that is one of mine. I know now what they meant, though I didn’t understand its meaning at the time. I called Matt and Sarah, my parents, Scott’s parents, and told them all they needed to come and see him, that it didn’t look very good.

By this point, Scott was on an IV, morphine, and antiviral meds. They had to change his sheets every hour or so, because of the seepage. Every time they had to move him, he would almost cry from the pain of being touched, saying his skin ached. His eyes were starting to get puffy, the sclera turning red.

I stayed with him all day that day, only stepping out to give his parents and brother some time alone with him; I took Haley down for a snack at the cafeteria to give her a respite as well. At 7:30 visiting hours were just about over, and Haley’s birthday was the next day, so he told me to take her and go, he would see me the next day. So I packed up and headed home.

At 10:23 pm, he called me. I will never forget that phone call. He told me he loved me, he was sorry for everything, all of it, but he was so tired and he had to go. He asked me to wish Haley a happy birthday for him, I told him to do it himself in the morning. Again, I was jokingly harsh, told him he was being a dumbass for thinking that I needed to talk to Haley for him. He said again that he loved me, then he said goodbye.

I should’ve known. Scott never said good bye. He always said “later, bay-bee.” He was saying goodbye because he knew he was leaving us, I am sure.

I woke up the next morning at 6:15 because it was Haley’s birthday and I had promised her blueberry pancakes for her birthday breakfast. I woke her up, got her going, and had started mixing up the batter for her pancakes when the phone rang. I looked at the call display, 6:37 am, Guelph General Hospital. I figured it was Scott calling to wish her a happy birthday and answered it thinking I would hear him. Instead, it was a woman. She identified herself, but I can’t remember her name. She told me not to panic, but that there had been an event, and that I needed to contact anyone else who needed to be there. I was not to drive myself, but I needed to get to the hospital as quickly as I could.

Once we got to the hospital, they told me Scott had sat up in bed, gasped for air, vomited bloody fluids, and collapsed. They managed to restart his heart after the heart attack that caused the flat line, and they were trying to identify where the bloody fluids were coming from. They said they wanted to air evacuate him to London University Hospital, because there was an immunologist from England that was working there and he would be the best chance, if anything could be done. I agreed immediately, but a snow storm hit.

It took an hour to assemble a full crash team that could travel with him in an ambulance, since everyone had to be screened for pregnancy and chickenpox antibodies. At this point they were starting to think Scott had some mutant form of chickenpox, and we were going to have a mass outbreak of lethal chickenpox on our hands.

My father agreed to drive me to London, and we followed the ambulance. Even in the storm, they still got him there way faster than they should have; they had to have been flying down the roads. We got there in an hour and forty-five minutes.

When we got there, I was told, in the gentlest of terms, to start making preparations for Scott’s death. Scott was in liver failure, kidney failure (both), had had a massive cardiac event, and was in skin failure. They had him hooked up to dialysis and were doing all they could. I hadn’t seen Scott in about 4 hours by that point, and when I did see him, I barely recognized him.

Skin failure happens when the surface of the skin is pierced and infected in so many places that the organ itself actually starts to turn black and die. He looked like someone had taken a baseball bat or 2×4 and beaten him systematically from head to toe. He was swollen and distorted, his features were barely recognizable. He was gray or black from head to toe and he had tubes and IVs and the ventilator all hooked up. He didn’t even look human any longer, let alone like my husband.

I was so glad I had refused to let Haley make the trip with me. The next day passed in a haze of me walking the halls of the hospital or sitting with him. I was convinced by some insane logic that if I stayed with him, he would live through my sheer force of will.
Thursday afternoon, the 8th, he had another incident, this one involving his brain. Later, post-autopsy, we knew it to be an embolism, but at the time they couldn’t tell me exactly what had happened. Every time they tried to attach the pads to his skin to give him an EEG, the skin slipped off and they couldn’t get a reading.

The next morning, they told us they could not detect any active brain function. Besides that, even if he managed to live through the worst case of chickenpox anyone had ever seen, he would need a kidney transplant, liver transplant, skin grafts, and would likely still be bedridden with severe brain damage. He would never speak again, would never recognize us again. He would be able to breathe and that was likely all we could expect, if he should live. It was my decision, they told me. They would continue care as long as I asked for it. However, at this point they felt it was only going to prolong the inevitable.

At 10:55am on Friday, January 9th, 2009, eight days after eruption, Scott Edward Kuehner (Keener) died of a “simple childhood illness” that to most people is no big deal. He was thirty-three years old, in good shape and good health, didn’t smoke, and had quit drinking. He was my husband and Haley’s father.

If I could go back and give myself and Scott the information that I have now, we would make our decisions about vaccination differently; that I can guarantee. I tell our story in the hopes of preventing the same mistake from being made by others. It’s the same reason I helped the doctors to turn the case into a teaching case. Those pictures Scott had taken of himself? The hospital continued to document, so they have the full progression of the disease, from eruption to autopsy. I also allowed them to sample organs and tissue for study as well. If I can prevent it from happening again, I will do my best.

When they autopsied Scott, they found chicken pox internally as well. He had them in his nostrils, esophageal tract, lungs, stomach lining, sinuses, inside his eyes and ears, in his mouth, his rectal cavity, inside all of his organs, and more. The agony he must have suffered before his body gave out must have been horrible. There’s no reason for it, when one simple poke from a needle and some possible mild discomfort for a day or two is the alternative.

I want people to learn from our mistakes. Don’t bury your loved ones from a disease you can easily prevent and don’t fool yourself into thinking that diseases like chicken pox are always mild. If that is the only thing you take from my story, please take that away. It isn’t worth the gamble. Those odds, the statistics they quote? Those are human lives. And one of those lives lost was my husband. Don’t let it be your spouse or child. Please.
Link | Archive
GUELPH — When his daughter Haley was born, Scott Kuehner’s doctor recommended he get the chickenpox vaccine.

He had never had the contagious childhood disease, putting him at risk for a more serious case as an adult.

“He turned to me and said ‘It’s chickenpox, what’s the worst that could happen?’” his wife Amanda Butts remembers.

“We both hate that phrase now,” said Butts, sitting at her dining room table with her daughter looking at a scrapbook filled with photos of Kuehner.

In December 2008, then nine-year-old Haley came home with a case of the itchy, red blisters.

After a Christmas spent battling his daughter with Star Wars themed lightsabers and eating shortbread cookies, Kuehner went to work at the Brick furniture store on New Year’s Day. Butts remembers he called her and said he had a few spots under his arm.

“So he came home and by that night he was starting to feel rough,” she said. Just a few days later he was in the hospital in liver failure and partial kidney failure.

“On Jan. 6 he called me at 10:30 p.m. and he sounded so tired,” Butts said. He told her he loved her and to wish their daughter happy birthday. “And then he said, ‘I’m so tired I have to go and I want to go to sleep.’”

The next morning Butts was making birthday blueberry pancakes for Haley when she got a call from a hospital staff member telling her to get there as fast as she could. When she arrived doctors told her Kuehner had slipped into a coma after a cardiac arrest. He never woke up.

The cartoonist with a goofy “South Park style,” sense of humour who loved to play pranks like putting hot sauce in people’s food without telling them, was dead at 33.

It’s extremely rare for someone to die from chickenpox but it does happen. A vaccine is available and is free for kids in Ontario.

Speaking publicly about her husband’s death for the first time, Butts’ message is simple: get that needle.

“It was so rare that at first even the doctors weren’t sure exactly what they were dealing with,” said Butts of her husband’s case.
Kuehner, known as Scott-O to his friends and family, was otherwise healthy.

“Even the immunologists that they brought in on his case had never seen anything like this,” Butts said.

Haley, now 16, said people often don’t believe her when she tells them her dad died of chickenpox. The high school student still struggles with feelings of guilt because he caught the disease from her. She wasn’t vaccinated either.

“But I want people to know that vaccinations are a good idea, because I want them to know (chickenpox) can be dangerous,” she said.
Haley spent hours watching old game shows and playing Legos with her dad, a fun-loving parent who didn’t bat an eye when she covered her face with red marker as “blush.”

“I’m just upset because my dad will never walk me down the aisle. He’ll never have his grandchildren sit on his lap and he’ll never be able to tell them about Star Wars,” she said.

“He’ll never be able to tell them about how Haley had an imaginary friend named Gene Rayburn (the host of the 1970s show Match Game) or how when Haley was three she wrote her name across the playroom wall and blamed Super Mario for it,” added Butts.

According to data from Statistics Canada, Kuehner was one of only five people in Canada who died from chickenpox in 2009. The disease, caused by the varicella zoster virus, usually produces relatively mild symptoms like fever, headache and fatigue, in addition to the signature “pox.’”

Janice Walters, of Wellington Dufferin Guelph Public Health, said in her 15-year career as manager for the control of infectious diseases and tuberculosis, she has been involved in the investigation of two deaths related to chickenpox locally.

“Unfortunately, it’s the tragic consequence of the disease for some people and we do know that chickenpox can be more severe in adults,” she said. “This is one of the frustrations of public health because we still hear from people that they feel chickenpox is a normal childhood disease and (they want to) just let it run its course.”

Chickenpox can have serious complications such as pneumonia, swelling of the brain and skin infections, including flesh eating disease. Walters said estimates are that the odds of dying from chickenpox are about one in 100,000 for kids and as common as one in 5,000 for adults. The disease can also cause serious problems for pregnant women who become infected.

The vaccine, delivered in two doses, has been available free for children in the province since 2004. A recent study from July of this year found the publicly funded vaccination program has been linked to a huge drop in the number of chicken pox cases. In 2014 the chickenpox vaccine became mandatory for kids attending school in Ontario.

After Kuehner died Amanda and Haley had to bag up his clothes, pillows and blankets and burn them. The health unit was worried that the chickenpox might have been some kind of super bug, although it turned out not to be. But they have memories.

Like when he took Haley trick or treating in a goblin mask and pretended to be a kid to see who could get the most candy. Or when they made “Spacos,” a combination of spaghetti and tacos, while experimenting in the kitchen. Butts and her daughter hope that by sharing their story they encourage people to get vaccinated for chickenpox and other preventable diseases.

“I’ve heard so many people say, ‘we don’t want to get our kids vaccinated because it can cause autism,’” Butts said.

In 1998 a study falsely linked the Measles, Mumps Rubella (MMR) childhood vaccine to autism. The study was later found to be completely bogus and its author was discredited. There is no scientific evidence of any link between vaccines and autism. But the legacy of the study, fueled by celebrity anti-vaxers such as Jenny McCarthy, persists.

For people like Butts, the consequences of skipping a vaccination are all too real.

“If you know a grown up who hasn’t had chickenpox or one of these other child hood diseases that you think is simple and it’s not going to do any harm, don’t take the risk, get the vaccination,” Butts said.

“If Scott had been vaccinated, chances are he would be alive now.”
Sorry if any of that's been posted before, I rarely come across anybody who knows about the comic so it's been percolating autistically in my mind for eons. It's just such a bizarre way for an otherwise generally mediocre and unremarkable guy to go. Nonetheless, my heart goes out to his wife and kid.
 
Magic Pickle said:
Our routine continued as normal over the next while. We had a fight when we went to put up the Christmas tree, and I realized how many ornaments had been broken.
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He sounds like a retard who shouldn't have had a wife and kids.
Magic Pickle said:
I warned Scott that this could be dangerous, but he only laughed at my concern, telling me I was overreacting,
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Oh, ok. He was a homosexual.
Magic Pickle said:
Everything was finally going in the right direction!
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This chick had a shit marriage and didn't respect herself.
Magic Pickle said:
I have always beaten myself up over the fact that I didn’t fight harder, didn’t argue longer, didn’t push him to go.
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Why? It was his right to refuse the vaccine and stay home from the hospital if he so chose. you communist skank.
Magic Pickle said:
Nonetheless, my heart goes out to his wife and kid.
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They're better off without him. Look at this retarded wife-hater:
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"oh no, she got fat, how dare you malign this man whose life was totally worth something when he did her suuuch a favour by sitting around the house breaking her shit and drawing incest pants-shitting porn" -replies to this post
She's still physically way out of his league even in the fattest photo of her. Women, stop hating yourselves.
 
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Magic Pickle said:
Where the interesting trivia comes in, however, is that Kuehner's cause of death isn't declared directly on Keenspot, but it is on places such as Voices for Vaccines, where it turns out Kuehner died of genuinely horrific complications from chickenpox
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My husband got the chickenpox when he was 12 or 13, and at that age it kicked his ass. He said that he had gotten chickenpox in his throat and that made it hard to swallow. I can't even think of how bad getting chickenpox would be for an adult.

Dr. Butt said:
He sounds like a retard who shouldn't have had a wife and kids.
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Well look at his comic. That line is just casually thrown in there like it's nothing. What the hell.

Keenspot really was something.
 
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