Apologies for the sparsity of posts this week – expect things to remain a bit slow as NaNoWriMo approaches.

A few brief thoughts I meant to discuss this week, but which never had time for a proper post:

1) Halloween storylines are starting to emerge among webcomics, as they are prone to do this time of year. I have, however, been pleasantly surprised by both PvP and Schlock Mercenary, whose storylines seem to have flowed from the existing events in an entirely natural fashion, rather than feeling like the usual shoe-horned October spook-fest.

2) There has been a bit of hubbub in the last week about New Avengers #35, wherein superheroine Tigra is brutally beaten in a rather exploitative fashion. What really bothered me about the scene, however, was learning that the likely reason for the occurence was a simple one – the author, Brian Michael Bendis, hated the character, and wanted to humilate her in the worst way possible.

Might not be true, though thus far it seems otherwise, as apparently this is something he has done before. And, mind you, I like his work on a lot of other comics. Still, this is bothersome, since the entire idea of using one’s position as a writer to put the characters one hates in their place… well, it seems remarkably petty.

I recall a little while back where a similar thing happened between Garth Ennis and Frank Tieri. In Ennis’s Punisher, Wolverine got his face blown off, his legs chainsawed, and was run over by a steamroller, among other things. It was a ludicrous portrayal, the sole purpose of which was to make him look bad and the Punisher look good. The current author of the Wolverine series, Tieri, took offense to this – and so had Punisher show up in his title, wherein Wolverine kicked his ass, and to top it all off, pointed out the gay porno Punisher happened to be carrying around. Ha ha! You sure told him!

Look. This sort of childish nonsense might be something I’d expect in webcomics, if only due to the lack of editorial control – sometimes people want to lash out, and use whatever medium they’re skilled at to do so. But I really expected better from DC and Marvel – the entire point is for them to be professionals, and when writers stop worrying about producing stories, and instead simply about indulging their own illicit bits of fan-fiction… man, it’s just kinda sad. When people are actually getting paid for this, you would think they would be held to slightly higher standards.

So that’s my rant of the week.

3) So, I’m probably going to SPX this weekend.

I’m never entirely sure what to do at these sort of conventions – as cool as I find the concept of meeting webcomic creators I respect and admire, I pretty much end up just wandering around without any idea of how to actually converse with them, and I usually end up simply spending more money than I should on various webcomic paraphernalia.

But on the other hand, I really can’t come up with an excuse to not go to a con with so many webcomickers in attendance, especially one such a short drive away.