- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
Fire Toni Schlesinger (if she really writes this wretched mess; I suspect it's actually a drunken intern) and hire Tideswimmer.
Silly me, I thought being able to make your voice heard was a hallmark of being an American.
Silencing protected expressions of dissent is a hallmark of knee-jerk conservatism.
You should expect better from yourself.
The way the customers are being treated over this travesty of a comic strip is indicative of how they're being treated by the site as a whole. Advertisers have a right to know if they're money is not being spent well. Telling them works for me.
Next Week's "Adventure"
Joe: Kansas, did you ever hear of the Danvers Lunatic Asylym?
Kansas: The what? You mean the Asylum?
Joe: That's what I said, the asylim.
Kansas: There, you did it again. Only different this time.
Joe: Different what? What are you talking about?
Kansas: You keep misspelling "Asylum."
Joe: I'm not spelling it at all, I'm just saying, "Have you ever heard of the Danvers Lunatic Assylum?
Kansas: There! You did it again?
Joe: What are you talking about? Words are only how you pronounce them. They don't have a spelling.
Kansas reaches up and grabs a word balloon.
Kansas: Look, it's right here. Asylym. You spelled it wrong!
Danvers enters, dressed in a space suit, and wielding a ray gun.
Danvers: Drop the balloon, O'Flaherty. You're coming with me to my base on the moon.
Don't we want editors to be responsible for editorial content? Why in the world would we want corporations to dictate what gets published and what doesn't?
In this case, the editors have a responsibility to be responsive in some way or another to their customers -- otherwise, the customers can and will walk away. That's our prerogative, and that's our power.
Leaning on advertisers is a hallmark of knee-jerk conservatism. I expect better from progressives.
Step 1: Log out. There's a link on every page.
Step 2: Visit the comic again For convenience here's this week's URL.
http://www.salon.com/comics/oflaherty/2008/01/22/oflaherty/
Step 3: You may need to disable your ad-blocker.
You will now see two to four ads on the comic page.
Step 4: (optional) Refresh the page, the ads may change. In three attempts I collected six advertisers.
Dirk McGirk is writing this. He has to be.
Art: Mostly photocopies, no movement whatsoever. F
Spelling: Asylym. 'Nuff said. F
Geography: Even flying car cannot explain one-panel world travel. F
Penmanship: Incomplete. Has not attended class.
English Lit: Inability to remember what happened in the last thought balloon, much less panel, strip or story. F
Math: Cannot seem to divide anything of substance or interest by 4. F
After-school smartassery: can't even do that right. F
Seriously, Salon, what is the deal? This is so bad it is insulting to us all. And to you. Make it stop. If it is intentionally bad, which it had better be, it is not even doing that well, which is quite an accomplishment. That the "creators" can only muster one defender a month tells us all we need to know.
... slogging through weeks of this truly wretched attempt at a cartoon...
...to get Machete's link to Kukuburi:
http://www.kukuburi.com/2007/08/09/one/
Now THERE'S a cartoon to be proud of! A million thanks to Machete for the suggestion, and one small thank to KOF for being bad enough to turn me to it.
PS, an observation: I see that Ramon Perez, artist/author of Kukuburi, regularly responds to his readers on his cartoon's letters section. Why do we never, ever hear from TS and TB? Are they too embarrassed to read their own letters?
No responses, no explanations, no nothing but red-starred raspberries. I love that people aren't taking the editors' insults any more and are actually fighting back! More power to you.
In the end, I wonder: will all the ill will and potential damage be worth the passing, juvenile thrill for Salon of thumbing their nose at their customers? And over a rotten comic strip that nobody likes, of all things?
Looks like we'll see.
...to that awful movie "The Number 23" (which may earn Jim Carrey a Razzie Award for his performance).
Maybe I'm trying to be too hip here, but doesn't anyone else think that the "23 men" is a reference to sex? As in 23 chromosomes?
A snide,third-rate piece of snark slagging all the KOF hatas. That'll teach you fools to say mean things about Joan Walsh's friends!
This KOF phenomenon is Duchamps Urinal, Web 2.0. In the case of KOF (and Borat, etc) we have art = crap + frame + audience reaction, where reaction is primary.
And look at the reactions: membership cancellations! advertiser warnings! other strip suggestions! and, mainly, witty ways of calling the strip crap..
How many of us watched Borat thinking we'd never be fooled in a similar situation? We've all turned into.. almost.. characters in a play reacting to our playwright, kind of. Actually, maybe "tormenting" is a better word. I don't know. Forget that.
On a different note - who else got the evite to Toni's party next Thursday eve?!! I'm starting to realize how attractive she is.. with a mysterious past:
2003 Recipients of Henson Seed Grants
Toni Schlesinger (New York, NY)
"Dinner at 8:30" is a theater work with live performers, puppets, and musicians, featuring sets and puppets designed by New Yorker Magazine illustrator Tom Bachtell. It tells the story of a playwright who is tormented by her characters. In an effort to rid herself of them, she invites them to a "last supper" where seduction, intrigue, mayhem and murder ensue.
I like how the entire first panel (25% of the strip!) is devoted to the phrase "As you were saying..." which I guess is supposed to be some sort of poorly-handled linking device from the previous "episode"? At any rate, it's adding even more Waste to an already-huge waste of space. (and now I'm wasting my lunch hour writing about it... viva la waste!)
