I never saw it as a dick move. It always seemed to me like any other creative person putting their life experiences into their work. That didn’t make it good, but his best work in a comedy comic isn’t likely to come out while he’s grieving. It was sort of a shark jump moment for that site, but it always seemed way more distasteful to me to make it into a meme.
Comment on Burned Loss
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 days agoTaking a traumatic, devastating, and most of all very personal health event like a miscarriage that your girlfriend went through and hand drawing it in a cartoon style to post on your public “Funny haha” gamer douche web comic is generally considered a dick move.
Some further context is that the author Tim Buckley was generally pretty despised at the time and considered a huge dick. The comic itself IIRC was full of that turn of the century gamer douche “haha women bad” type comedy. So the posting of that comic was not only like a comically huge tonal shift but almost felt like him trying to somehow appear more sensitive and likeable.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 days ago
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Well, it was more like putting his college girlfriend’s life experience into his work, and then making the work about him. You’ll notice he’s in 3 of the four panels and she’s in one. Where he appears as the empathetic and caring boyfriend, while she is the one grieving.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I believe that in the life experience that he’s drawing from, that he based his self-insert character on, he’s in every panel, yes. I certainly took it to mean that he too was grieving the child that he expected to be born into the world.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You are giving the author a whole lot of benefit of the doubt that he hasn’t earned. You’re looking at this through the lens of a guy using his art to express his feelings of grief. Thats certain what he wants you to think, and if that’s what it was, it wouldn’t be so bad. But that’s not what it is. I mean for gods sake a couple comics later the female character crying on the hospital bed in the fourth panel apologizes to his self-insert for having the miscarriage. If that’s the type of guy to empathize with I don’t know what to tell you other than YIKES pal.
This is just a comic made by a notorious and blatant narcissist who dug up the traumatic experience of someone else from his past in an effort to be taken more seriously because his comics were regularly mocked as a poorly made ripoff of another popular comic at the time. If bullying a bad person is immoral then hey maybe you’re right. I’m not really prepared to have that philosophical debate at this time lol.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Thanks for the context. I only looked at it from within the frame of the comic. From that perspective, it only seems strange to have such a tonal shift - a usually comedic comic presenting a more serious issue. So the problem was the context, got it.
MehBlah@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Or perhaps it was a genuine expression of how he felt and he used the tools he had to express it.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
this is probably the case but it doesn’t matter because everyone looks at your life from the outside and puts together the story based on what type of ball pictures you post on the internet
Zoomboingding@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah I think it became such a meme partially because the comic itself was out of place in CAD, but mostly for Buckley’s reputation. Plenty of other serial webcomics had similar range of tone and style.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 days ago
A genuine expression of how he felt about an event that had happened years prior? I guess that’s possibly, although an odd choice.
As for his tools, his tools were his ability to draw. He probably could have drawn something to express his feelings that didn’t involve his funny haha web comic characters.