Staring at the Puzzle Cube (It is A Cube, Right?)

Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are a strange pair. They’ve got that thing about magic. Well, Alan Moore is a practitioner of Magic, while Grant Morrison is a man who goes in for Chaos Magick (pronounced Mage-ick, if my sketchy sources are to be believed, don’t put too much stock in it). I won’t go into what either of these things actually mean, because I don’t fucking know and I don’t have time to rummage around to find out. Actually, their interest in these similar-sounding esoteric pastimes is really the only strange thing about either of them.

Not being friends with either man and not even being acquainted with one, I can’t give any insights into their thought processes. You know, that whole having only a shallow exposure to them, so anything I were to say about what’s going on in their weirdly oppositely-haired domes is going to speculative at absolute best and spurious at worst. I hate spurious.

Fucking hell this is starting to sound serious. Lemme give some disclosure, I’m not an academic^* or a journalist. Anybody who claims so is up to something and should probably be hunted down and forced to do something unpleasant, like watch nothing but Eastenders and River City for a week. Yes, I am a terrible man.

Anyway.

I find they both sound even-tempered and reasonable when they speak. The only anger I’ve ever encountered (in my limited experience, mind you, I have to stress that again for those gimps picking and choosing words to use against me) is from Grant Morrison when he talks about Mark Millar. A whooooooole different kettle of bile, there, and something I will never touch on again. Intelligence is the lasting impression from Morrison and Moore.

They are both also highly successful and influential comic story tellers with a background in artwork. Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell are some of the seminal comics works Alan Moore has graced the world with. Grant Morrison spent five years telling the story of The Invisibles. Both have done much, much more than I’ve listed and you have to whole internet right there to find out, you lazy fuck. They’ve both got something of a pedigree, in case you aren’t familiar.

There is also THE FEUD. Alan Moore doesn’t like Grant Morrison. At least that was the impression given for a long time and the best you could say was Moore wasn’t a fan. Then an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, claiming to be Moore’s last, swatted the internet in the buttocks a few days ago. And my, my did it get a squealy reaction. Moore hates, hates, hates, hates, HATES, HATES, FUCKIN’ HATES Grant Morrison. With a side order of hate^**.

My understanding is that Grant Morrison, again, until recently wasn’t entirely in love with Alan Moore either. Again, this changed with an interview at the end of 2012 conducted by Laura Sneddon in which he showed some consternation and confusion about the tension between himself and Alan Moore, as well as the timeline and events^†.

The comics internet was shaken to its core and turned a lot of people into fuckin’ Twilight fans – turning into Team Moore and Team Morrison with all the ridiculously juvenile and noxious bullshit that entails. Seriously I’m embarrassed for the comics community (and some of the industry) for the way this whole business has been treated. Them and us isn’t a healthy attitude in relation to a personal conflict like this, no matter if the participants want you to do it^‡. It’s human nature to leap on a flaw of someone you aren’t enamoured with^§, but I do wish more people, people who oughtta know better would take a step back and use the mushy grey stuff in their skulls. Oh, and engage the empathy bone. Essentially a lot of Forest Whitaker eye going on – and there was enough of that anyway.

So, it’s turned into a complete fucking mess with people making arseholes of themselves on either side of the argument. Though there have been some islands of sanity and sense in this lake of bubbling vitriol.

I was going to compare and possibly contrast their accounts of Morrison’s and Moore’s ongoing relationship, because relationship is what it is, one based on verbal swipes through intermediaries. It’s not a pleasant relationship, but there is a connection and it’s something they need to work out between them, without the braying peanut gallery of the internet inciting more from them, something that’s been absent from historical literary feuds. Looking at the two interviews (the Morrison one being a weirdly editorial affair with him adding changes in red and everything) it seems so tangled and twisted I’d just find myself in knots about them. It invites another one of those Can-Can moments, I’m afraid.

So, as I’ve written this, with an eye for looking at the affair, I find myself being distracted and disheartened by something that’s bothered me about the comics community for a long time: the vocal minority of arseholes it engenders. The unwelcoming trolls and ogres who have set themselves up at the gates of the community judging who is worthy, grovelling at the feet of people in the industry while preparing knives to hamstring and hack apart those same individuals. Seeing industry figures jumping in on this behaviour just makes me stand back in confusion and go, “Huh.”

There’s an ingrained aggression in the comics community. Nothing wrong with aggression, it creates energy and drives artistic expression. It’s when this aggression gets redirected at inappropriate sources like women, gays, creators and each other it’s done with all the grisly violence of a troop of chimps taking a baby, and it’s about as brutal and upsetting as that image conjures. It’s what taints the medium for people outside of it. And there’s a lot of writing on this behaviour, particularly the shameful treatment of women (and in the last year, incidentally, of women in the games industry), and I’m not the best source for it.

So what do we do about this handsy uncle no one talks about part of the comics community? Well we start talking about it, we engage it; see if we can change something about it. Not an easy task for the spittle-chinned glaring bastard, threatening us with death and rape, but in this case robust discussion needs to take place. Because (clumsily switching metaphors) cancer doesn’t go away by ignoring it. Treatment, that’s the thing.

It might not be so bad if the industry side of the didn’t foment it and encourage it. Pandering to the lowest members of a rich community is not the way to keep it alive–

Stop acting like cocks, is what I’m saying.

Fucking hell, that’s all it boils down to: stop acting like cocks. Think about what you’re going to say before you launch into a venomous tirade or write yet another story objectifying women and consider, perhaps there’s another way. Being a cock gets you attention but it fucks up the whole place for everyone else. This doesn’t mean disagreements aren’t going to happen, but perhaps it will create discourse a bit better than, “Youre a fucking fagot fucktard,” and it means we can have industry characters who aren’t misogynistic, homophobic narcissists.

Of course, yes, I’ll do the obligatory it’s only a minority of the community who behaves that way. And I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, however it would be nicer if it were a dwindling minority. Let them be as vocal as they want, too, then we know who they are and point out to those who don’t know, that’s not the way to behave.

So, what was going to be a sticking my oar in to an argument I have nothing to do with (albeit, I was doing it dispassionately, with a hint of humour^§§ and adopting the middle ground) has turned into a small attempt at weakening the hold on the comics community of the sweaty arsehole element. I think that’s in the territory of ‘win’, don’t you?

Now I’ll shut up for a few days.

^* Y’know despite this little nugget of internet obscurity having an academic bent. Or it was.

^** He’s no fan of Laura Sneddon, either, but that’s for someone else to blether about.

^† The Alan Moore interview can be found here: Last Alan Moore Interview? this is a long article. The Grant Morrison interview can be found here: The Strange Case of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as Told by Grant Morrison. I so wish these interviews had happened closer together. No doubt by next week there’ll be a new Morrison one.

^‡ Which Alan Moore does and it disappointed me. Perhaps it was point-making hyperbole, but it’s so easy to misunderstand. And people did, wilfully and enthusiastically.

^§ I’m guilty of it myself and it drives my wife nuts. Doesn’t mean I condone it.

^§§ “Y’whut?” I hear you cry. Cunts.


Will

A Hinter Tale.

Come, take a walk with me.

I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.

Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits; I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.

I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them to function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.

Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.

There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.

Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future, that.

I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”

There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, and then have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you a fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”

Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was fourteen or fifteen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.

I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.

I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.

There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.

News corporations, particularly the papers, have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.

In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have a comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.

Weirdly though, both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.

The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.

Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.

And no matter what the story - doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world - you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”

It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?

But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…


Will