Lazy Sunday (Part 1)

I have two posts for you today considering I flaked out on last week.  In case you haven't noticed, the comments on Brooke McEldowney's Pibgorn have been disabled.  That I don't really care about.  I know Mr. McEldowney's work tends to get a lot of criticism and such.  9 Chickweed Lane's comments have been disabled for years.  The problem I have is the way McEldowney phrased the reason the comments were disabled:

So, I objected and objected and objected as time went on and the tenor of posts became subject more and more to abuse. I wanted my work to appear as it did in the beginning, alone, without a raging public forum affixed to it. It was like looking at a work of art with the walls about it scrawled densely with graffiti.

I firmly agree that comic strips are a work of art.  I mean, look at Krazy Kat, Pogo, Terry and the Pirates and Calvin and Hobbes:

Heck, even a one-panel day for Pibgorn can be amazingly beautiful.

But actually reading McEldowney's blog, he just seems like an angry old man who doesn't like people criticizing his work.  While I admit, I believe most of the comments were not appropriate and possible misogynistic (which was the reason Chickweed's comments were disabled), that's what people do on the Internet.  They post anonymously about things they have no knowledge about.  I could post a picture of Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and while there will be dozens of comments praising it and calling it a true masterpiece that all other masterpieces can only dream to be...

...there will be one jerk who will post that "Irises" is better because it doesn't get as much "face time" or maybe he posts it just to be a jerk (which the Internets call a "troll", Mr. McEldowney).

McEldowney wanted the comments moderated, which seems fair enough.  Newspapers can do it, opinion blogs can do it, The DCR can do it.  The syndicate refused giving him a spiel about them being a corporation and yada-yada-yada but the main (and untold) reason is probably they couldn't just justify paying a bunch of shleps to monitor every single comic posted on gocomics.com because if they are going to monitor comics they are not just going to monitor Pibgorn.  I do agree that there should be some moderation of comments when they do get out of hand (i.e. threats and libel) but Mr. McEldowney signed a contract with a syndicate and even though Pibgorn is a webcomic, he still has to abide by their rules.  He should be glad people are actually reading Pibgorn and that he's able to do what he wants to do for a living and that people actually pay attention to it.  I wish half the people who apparently read Pibgorn read my stuff.

But maybe if I could write or draw half as good as McEldowney, people would read my stuff.