Fanboy Rampage:
I don't generally read Fanboy Rampage, because I'm roughly a year behind on catching up on who's who and what's what in the Blogosphere. But I do read The Beat, who linked to Fanboy Rampage and the enormous clusterfuck of a thread reacting to Paul O'Brien's Ninth Art column, which I also linked to a few days back.

It's funny, because I agree with almost everyone in the thread on some points, but it does seem like a lot of people are willfully missing the point. Some of them doing it in a way that has them acting quite a bit like assholes. I was gonna chime in, but really, I don't read the blog, I'm not a community member, I didn't want to crash such a lovely party and it was all pretty much over by the time I read it. So, this being the 21st century, I figured I'd do what everyone else is doing... type my thoughts on my blog.

What's interesting is that everyone (including Heidi) is offering up: "How can you be bored? Look how many indy comics are great this year!" And I think what everyone is missing, or maybe this isn't the point and I'm just off my rocker, is that these indy comics aren't selling anywhere near where they should be. That maybe Paul is bored because the boring shit is winning. It's all anyone talks about, and, if you look at the Diamond Top 100, it's all that sells.

Now again, maybe that wasn't Paul's point... but I think that's where the common ground is to be found. Or maybe there's a different emotion going on here with me, not boredom but frustration, that the things a great deal of us find so boring or reminiscent of comics we read 10-20 years ago, are pretty much dominating the top 50 or so of the mainstream comics market right now, and there's not enough rewards to go around for the really great stuff. I know that that's where I keyed into Paul's column, not "Gee, I wish the X-books were better," which is what some people seem to be taking away from it. Personally, I could give a shit whether the X-Books are even published anymore, but I *still* got what Paul was saying.

OK, I probably shouldn't post this, because God knows I don't want to get into the middle of the Internet infighting that I've tried really hard to stay away from in recent years, but... Jesus. That thread was one ginormous clusterfuck of misguided indy rage, with a few calm heads (including, as always, the well-spoken (well-typed?) Kurt Busiek) making sense above all the noise.