Having said that I hope @Mister Dongs once again takes one for the team and provides a detailed synopsis.
Lately I've been busy catching up on Billy Tucci's channel as apparently they've been featuring
Roy Thomas (
still sporting the same haircut he had in the 70s)
as a semi-regular guest. As it turns out John Cimino, Roy Thomas' manager/handler, has teamed up with the comic appraiser from Pawn Stars to form a
generic low level comic book talking head channel that nobody watches and, presumably to garner eyeballs, have folded their show into the PopXP "network" (whatever that is) as well as occasionally bring Roy on to juice up views to questionable success. Is moonlighting on Billy Tucci's obscure channel the most responsible or effective use of time for Stan Lee's protege and former EiC of Marvel Comics? Probably not, but at least he's not getting his blood drawn to mix with comic book ink like the weird Satanic shit that happened to Stan Lee at the hands of his manager during his twilight years, so whatever. Seeing that Roy Thomas is in many ways the inceptor of fandom as a
concept, a first hand witness to the entire Silver Age of comics at the highest levels and a fascinating character in his own right, these streams are very interesting.
Anyways, this isn't about those streams.
10/08/2022 - COMICSGATE LIVE! ESG IN COMICS! TRUMP ARRESTED??? W. ROBERT ROMANO
First 10 minutes is the obligatory Frog compilation of intro meme videos. The next 10 minutes were Frog warming up by having some lighthearted banter with the chat. The following 10 minutes after that were spent reading off some Hollywood movie news ephemera about Rosario Dawson mistakenly stating a Disney+ Punisher series was in the works. Frog is already bored at this point and decides on a course correction for the stream by loading up "
Simp Rejected By Krista Nova" for the entertainment of both the audience and himself, the chat regaling itself by making many comments in regards to Cecil's height and prowess with the opposite sex. Cecil lets his presence be known in the chat in the hopes that Frog will stop playing the video. He doesn't.
Frog follows this up by sharing his enthusiasm about Bill Willingham's generous and extensive critique of
Rekt Planet which he feels has steered him in the right direction in regards to the development of his own writing. At around 50 minutes the first guest, Billy Tucci, arrives, game for some "light" (read: banal) celebrity commentary and gossip that the rest of Frog's Comicsgate "green room" can't be bothered with. Cecil also shows up, not really wanting to carry a celeb chat stream either but on the whole probably finding it preferential to getting shit on.
Today's celebrity call-out are directed at Kevin Smith and Patton Oswalt, presumably out of anti-SJW solidarity after the two Gen X figures tepidly
replied on Twitter to Yellowflash's calls for the pair to fuck off. Frog opens with
a tweet of Patton Oswalt making a weird sexual joke at the expense of an 11 year old Finn Wolfhart as part of a history of inappropriate conduct around children and Cecil flatly stating Oswalt murdered his wife. Billy is an earnest, boomer-y soul, getting visibly riled up at all this rhetoric and starts talking about how he wants to beat this shit of this punk asshole who made a nice kid feel bad before excusing himself from the stream, possibly not really feeling comfortable with associating himself with this level of 'celebrity commentary'.
What follows after Tucci's quick departure is an hour of low energy banter between Frog and Cecil in a free floating topic that drifts leisurely from Cyberfrog's genitals, to the demographic folly of appealing to homosexuals, how Cecil in fact actually isn't that short, the scene where James Bond gets his balls whipped in a chair, stories of binge drinking, and talking with the chat about who their favorite villain in film was.
At two hours the prattle mercifully ends when Robert Romano joins, taking a break from his dayjob of being a Washington small-government lobbyist to be rolled out by Frog so he can rebuff noted comic book commentators Perch and Simple Zack on the matter of federal tax legislation concerning the regulation of the investiture of retirement funds. This seems like overwhelming overkill on Frog's part. But before we get to that, there's the matter of the FBI's raiding of Mar-A-Lago and seizure of confidential documents from Trump. Frog invites Romano and... Cecil to join him for an hour of discussion of this development and its implications.
Cecil, gauging the social media landscape right now in between simp DMs, tells the audience that in his estimation all right wingers are super pissed about about the Mar-A-Lago raid and that this will result in a "red tsunami" that all but guarantees MAGA 2024.
Romano's concerns are mainly what sending agencies like the FBI against a potential Presidential candidate means for the rule of Constitution law; when guaranteed rights and freedoms are conditional on partisan affiliations, the pillars upholding the Republic begin to shake. He cites De Tocqueville's writings cautioning on how civil society and all the protections that affords end once political opponents like Donald "Lock Her Up" Trump are imprisoned. These are more dangerous times than people realize. Unchecked, this retrograde force undermining civil law and democracy will have America will backslide into a Hobbesean Leviathan where the State rules by force in the absence of law.
Frog agrees at the sense of the loss of civility he seems to feel in these times. Not stuff like the Patton Oswalt thing, but how other comic book professionals are insulting his art, which normally is considered a deep taboo among fellow artists. Cecil theorizes that it was how the January 6th thing "blew over" in the public eye that drove the Democrats insane, analogizing "they're like the coyote going after fucking Roadrunner where they light the fucking rocket". Romano relates an unbroken chain of federal and State Department investigations directed at Trump before, during and after his presidency spearheaded first by Comey, then Mueller and now Durham, all plainly orchestrated by Hilary Clinton in retaliation for the Benghazi investigation. Cecil gamely repeats the Wile E Coyote analogy. Frog theorizes that the documents seized may be evidence and materials implicating Trump's enemies instead of Trump himself, because Trump is a guy that's all about offense.
From this point, there's some discussion of the impact of mail in ballots on the 2020 election, rethinking electoral strategies in the age of CDC-mandated COVID shutdowns, decrying panglossian calls of Trump's impending victory when America has a +75% relection rate of incumbent Presidents, and debate over which Trump lawyer is the hottest. Frog decides this is the time to invite Jon Malin in to join in, not just for all this hot political discussion but also the upcoming Perch video dissection.
After another digression into superchats and a surprisingly angry rant by Frog over DC putting out a line of LGBTQAI+ candy bars, the Perch ESG efap is finally delved into. Cecil recuses himself for the Perch efap, which is kind of weird but hey I'll take any reason. Billy rejoins to lend his 'boomer right' perspective on the whole Trump thing, but alas he's too late for that (again, boomer). He's right on time though for Romano's extremely technical articulation of what Environmental Social and Governance metrics are and how such neoliberal-guided incentivization policies instituted by the Democrat party run counter to America's interests not just as a geopolitical entity with competing interests against other nations like China, but as a society itself. What's happening in comics, where they are fading into complete insignificance by producing terrible comics intended for negligible demographics due to them being repurposed from a creative enterprise into loss-leading virtue signals on behalf of their parent corporations as part of a desperate bid to gain access to retirement slush funds, all while manga sells comics to hundreds of millions of readers worldwide, is simply a microcosm of what's happening in key American sectors at the highest level. Romano cites examples like energy and finance where ecoactivists are given a spot on the board of directors of Exxon so they can gain a higher Enviromental-compliance rating during a wartime energy crisis.
These arguments are as one-sided as you can imagine when they're made against a guy like Perch, who neither names let alone cites who he's disagreeing with so he doesn't have to represent their arguments correctly, or provide any evidence supporting any of his own arguments in lieu of droning out a long strike of baseless declaratives made in an authoritative sounding tone of voice. That sort of thing might work on a weak-minded child or Richard C Meyer, but it aint gonna fly here. If a 50 minute impassioned debriefing on the subject of capital gains tax policy regarding retirement fund investment interests you, I'd recommend giving it a watch. Definitely not the usual Comicsgate fare to be sure.
This diversion concluded, normal programming resumes as Frog starts playing some videos about some MAP apologist TikToks to get the crowd riled up. Billy Tucci gets mad about how he always seems to be getting roped into talking about child molestation and shit on Frog's stream, he just wants to grill and shill for god's sake, and then leaves agane. Irene (who joined earlier but said nothing of note) by contrast starts screaming at the top of her lungs about kid fucking. Cecil rejoins so he and Frog can hold a requiem for Simple Zack, and Malin proudly boasts about how he's being hailed as "the modern day HP Lovecraft". And so our story ends...
...or does it?
11/08/2022 - PERCH COMICS - INVESTMENT RANT: USE YOUR HEAD, PEOPLE
It goes without saying that Perch has some serious disagreements with some of the unspecified talk going around by unnamed individuals lately. Perhaps spurred on by alcohol as the thumbnail suggests, Perch shares a bit of insight into his own personal history. That he is a man who has lived on every continent, is familiar with many nations and cultures, and this cosmopolitan experience has afforded him a unique perspective. As a man of finance and a man of the world, though it gives him no joy in saying this, observing China's impending dominance of crucial technology sectors like the semiconductor market have left him no choice but to forcefully disagree with the positions held by CG emeritus Jon Malin. Namely, that he will not be sucking Chinese dick. He will. We all will.
America is a nation in decline, says Perch. Even the moronic discourse surrounding the Batgirl movie cancellation is simply emblematic of our society being one that can no longer able to communicate intelligent ideas or basic factual information to one another. Pax Americana is winding to a close before his eyes, while the beginning of the Age of the Central Kingdom is just getting started. Perch makes it clear that he is 100% doomerpilled as far as the fate of the United States goes, and that we may as well
all prepare to s China's d.
Perch takes a few minutes here to explain to his audience
the sunk cost fallacy, which he terms "throwing good money after bad". Both sides are too fucking stupid to grasp this basic concept (which Perch doesn't know the actual term for but whatever). The dumb idiot journalist sites like Variety and Hollywood Reporter who are attributing David Zaslav's actions to Trump-fueled racism don't grasp it. Nor do the "big name Youtubers fleecing people out of their cash every day" with talk about there being an ESG-derived incentive to fund woke content "because it gains them clicks and attention" get it. The scores of business executives that preceded Zaslav must not have been aware of the entry level basic economic concept that is "sunk cost fallacy" either. Only Perch.
Perch closes by wishing a sincere "fuck you" to the SJW out there clipping every time he uses ableist language like "retard" and tagging his SJW cancel culture pals like Ron Marz on twitter (lmao), as well as ending on a positive note by saying that he has been blessed by two smart daughters who he feels confident will be able to secure safe, comfortable positions in America's impending dark future as opposed to winding up as white meth-whore playthings for their Chinese overlords, as many less fortunate Texan girls no doubt will be. Comicsgate poked the bear, are they ready for the rise of Dark Perch? And with that thought, good night.