4 ms·

I think it's plausible that Jim Davis was on vacation that week, and somebody with some talent filled in. Then he came back unfortunately.

by ojbyrne 18y ago

unalone 18y ago
By the time this came out, Davis wasn't writing his own Garfield strips anymore. I remember him saying in an interview that he thought this week was a "fun joke" to play on readers. He obviously didn't read much into it. Am I alone in really wishing this sort of thing wasn't on Hacker News? Not just because it deals with comics, but because it makes a mockery of real analysis. Garfield is not art. It's brilliant marketing, but no actual content - not by the time this strip had been created, anyway. Analysis like this distracts from the analysis that really matters: analysis that might introduce casual readers to an entirely new medium. I'm not exactly a comics maven, but I remember reading a strip-by-strip analysis of Krazy Kat, a comic that absolutely does benefit from such analysis. It got me into that entire era of comicry. There are more recent comics that benefit from such analysis. Peanuts. Bloom County. Calvin & Hobbes. Each has strips that benefit from really thinking, panel by panel. This? A mockery! Nothing interesting is happening. The person that made these strips was just stringing along clichéd views. The only interesting thing is that it happened in a strip that's usually punchline after punchline - the comic itself is bland, derivative, and in fact quite bad. This isn't the "I'm upside down" of Peanuts, or the pterodactyl flying away in Calvin & Hobbes. This is bullshit. And the analysis is bullshit compounding bullshit. It's a disgrace. Stuff like this is why people mock the sorts of analysis that really ought to be praised.
- markessien 18y ago
  Should I send you a box of matches, perhaps you'd be interested in burning his article? There is no "right" intellectualism, thinking about things and analyzing things does not first have to pass through a filter created by you on what is right to think about, and what not. Your statement is awful because it advocates the creation of a limited and closed world, with only special topics being "worthy" of thought.
  - ngvrnd 18y ago
    Well put.
  - unalone 18y ago
    You're fighting a straw man. I never said things weren't worthy of thought, or that there is shame in thinking about really stupid things. I said that I disliked the attention it was receiving on Hacker News. To take it to one extreme, while I'd never tell somebody that writing fanfiction was bad, I wouldn't nominate it for a Pulitzer. I wouldn't give the writer awards. I recall reading something wherein a fanfic writer was complaining that the lack of published fanfiction novels was "censorship" on behalf of publishers. Similarly, is it censorship for my to say I don't want awful, nonintellectual papers on Hacker News? No. The problem with your statement (I won't call it awful) is that the flip side of intellectualism is that there are standards to be had. It means that while I can't deny people thought, I can choose to rebut the things that they say, which I attempted to do. I didn't just say "Garfield, shit, censor." I said, "I dislike this, because it makes it look like analysis is merely bullshitting about really simple things." This article isn't thought-provoking. It doesn't teach anything unless you've never seen these comics before. Even now, I doubt anybody gets anything out of the article - all they get, they get from the comics. The article is fluff. By criticizing it, I wasn't denying high schoolers the right to critique! Far from it: I was saying that while high schoolers may not be smart or discerning in the crap they write, Hacker News is, and I dislike that so many people are voting up a crap story. There's no intelligent discussion coming up. The big talk is about whether or not Garfield Minus Garfield ripped off other things (which it did). People aren't discussion the fine art of comic craft, or anything interesting comics-related. This story's taking up a slot it shouldn't, and it's absolutely one of the worse Hacker News stories I've seen. It ticks me off because it's indicative of the community. And for that matter, it ticks me off that you think it's right to bend and twist what I said. You make me out to be an intellectual Nazi. "Send me a box of matches." All the suggestions of censorship. I mean, come on. You've been here longer than I have, and still you see it necessary to respond so childishly? It annoys me that this is what this site's becoming. And my original point was, calling this intellectualism is insulting the real intellectuals. It's like calling XKCD a physics teacher.
    - 18y ago

I think it's plausible that Jim Davis was on vacation that week, and somebody with some talent filled in. Then he came back unfortunately.

by ojbyrne 18y ago

I think it's plausible that Jim Davis was on vacation that week, and somebody with some talent filled in. Then he came back unfortunately.

unalone 18y ago

By the time this came out, Davis wasn't writing his own Garfield strips anymore. I remember him saying in an interview that he thought this week was a "fun joke" to play on readers. He obviously didn't read much into it. Am I alone in really wishing this sort of thing wasn't on Hacker News? Not just because it deals with comics, but because it makes a mockery of real analysis. Garfield is not art. It's brilliant marketing, but no actual content - not by the time this strip had been created, anyway. Analysis like this distracts from the analysis that really matters: analysis that might introduce casual readers to an entirely new medium. I'm not exactly a comics maven, but I remember reading a strip-by-strip analysis of Krazy Kat, a comic that absolutely does benefit from such analysis. It got me into that entire era of comicry. There are more recent comics that benefit from such analysis. Peanuts. Bloom County. Calvin & Hobbes. Each has strips that benefit from really thinking, panel by panel. This? A mockery! Nothing interesting is happening. The person that made these strips was just stringing along clichéd views. The only interesting thing is that it happened in a strip that's usually punchline after punchline - the comic itself is bland, derivative, and in fact quite bad. This isn't the "I'm upside down" of Peanuts, or the pterodactyl flying away in Calvin & Hobbes. This is bullshit. And the analysis is bullshit compounding bullshit. It's a disgrace. Stuff like this is why people mock the sorts of analysis that really ought to be praised.

markessien 18y ago
Should I send you a box of matches, perhaps you'd be interested in burning his article? There is no "right" intellectualism, thinking about things and analyzing things does not first have to pass through a filter created by you on what is right to think about, and what not. Your statement is awful because it advocates the creation of a limited and closed world, with only special topics being "worthy" of thought.
- ngvrnd 18y ago
  Well put.
- unalone 18y ago
  You're fighting a straw man. I never said things weren't worthy of thought, or that there is shame in thinking about really stupid things. I said that I disliked the attention it was receiving on Hacker News. To take it to one extreme, while I'd never tell somebody that writing fanfiction was bad, I wouldn't nominate it for a Pulitzer. I wouldn't give the writer awards. I recall reading something wherein a fanfic writer was complaining that the lack of published fanfiction novels was "censorship" on behalf of publishers. Similarly, is it censorship for my to say I don't want awful, nonintellectual papers on Hacker News? No. The problem with your statement (I won't call it awful) is that the flip side of intellectualism is that there are standards to be had. It means that while I can't deny people thought, I can choose to rebut the things that they say, which I attempted to do. I didn't just say "Garfield, shit, censor." I said, "I dislike this, because it makes it look like analysis is merely bullshitting about really simple things." This article isn't thought-provoking. It doesn't teach anything unless you've never seen these comics before. Even now, I doubt anybody gets anything out of the article - all they get, they get from the comics. The article is fluff. By criticizing it, I wasn't denying high schoolers the right to critique! Far from it: I was saying that while high schoolers may not be smart or discerning in the crap they write, Hacker News is, and I dislike that so many people are voting up a crap story. There's no intelligent discussion coming up. The big talk is about whether or not Garfield Minus Garfield ripped off other things (which it did). People aren't discussion the fine art of comic craft, or anything interesting comics-related. This story's taking up a slot it shouldn't, and it's absolutely one of the worse Hacker News stories I've seen. It ticks me off because it's indicative of the community. And for that matter, it ticks me off that you think it's right to bend and twist what I said. You make me out to be an intellectual Nazi. "Send me a box of matches." All the suggestions of censorship. I mean, come on. You've been here longer than I have, and still you see it necessary to respond so childishly? It annoys me that this is what this site's becoming. And my original point was, calling this intellectualism is insulting the real intellectuals. It's like calling XKCD a physics teacher.
  - 18y ago