Position: Gratefully not bent over any motherfucker's barrel.


The following is a story about rock and roll. And about my Managing Editor, Pat. And about comic books.

I've had some extra time in the wee small hours of the morning recently (owing mostly to that fuckin' poultry virus I caught a day or two before Xmas). Specifically, my workout regimen has been put on hold (along with the related Beefy Enchilada series of articles/shirtless self-worship), and I've been killing time in my NyQuil-induced stupor by working on preliminary drawings of Joel and Mittens (see the Heroman teaser below). I'll discuss the talking cat and the dude in the turtleneck at length in a future installment, but suffice it to say that Heroman is on its way to God. Damn. Heroics. Soon.





I permanently shelved my aspirations of becoming a recording artist back in 1998 for numerous reasons, not the least of which being that I wasn't very good at singing/songwriting/musician-ing. Actually, I kind of sucked, but there were plenty of other factors. We (the band) had been together for five-plus years and were burned out. We'd spent two years and too much money producing a lackluster sophomore CD. And I kind of sucked. Etcetera.

The final nail in my music career's coffin was a telephone conversation I had with a guy named Jimmy. Jimmy (last name withheld) was in A & R, and had produced several superstars in his day that I'm sure you've all heard of. I won't go into any more detail here, because the purpose of this entry isn't to do any name dropping.

Jimmy mentioned something to me during our talk that put me off music/performing/recording/making it/selling-out/whatever forever. It was - I'm certain - one of those industry euphemisms for "you're crap kid, now leave," but I took it quite literally. It was one of those off-hand comments that sticks in your head for the rest of your life.

"Jb," he said, "you're going to have to decide what it is you want: do you want to be a music artist or a music businessman?"



He was referring to the aforementioned second CD I'd sent him. There were some arty-farty bits on it, squeezed in between a large number of loathsome bubblegum bullshit tracks that we'd gone to great pains to overproduce the Hell out of.

(By the way, that part of my life is over and done with. Any comments regarding my foray into the music biz will be summarily deleted.)

Jimmy's words still haunt me:

Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be a businessman?

Fast forward six or seven years, and I'm now looking at popular culture with older, wiser, more jaded eyes. I can see the UPC codes, and the shrink-wrap, and the marketing department's seal-of-approval on just about everything I read, listen to, or look at. I can see the person behind the desk over at Popular Culture Inc. deciding what demographic the product will appeal to, how many tiers of advertising will be required, and assigning a dollar value to some poor fuck's inspiration.

And all of a sudden, I'm involved in a lengthy, somewhat-heated email discussion with FTW Inc.'s Managing Editor over subject matter and indirectly, the course FTW Inc. is going to take in the near future.





To clarify: immediately after we ("we" meaning "I") brought Pat on board as FTW's Managing Editor/Proofreader/Bad-Idea-Poo-Poo-er, I sent him an article for review that he promptly panned and returned to me along with a rather involved diatribe, chiding me for "pandering to the lowest common denominator."

And that's his job, by the way. And the article in question sucked. It has since been shitcanned, much to our mutual satisfaction.

What I took issue with was the accusation of "pandering." I don't pander. I don't kowtow. I'm Jb, and I do what I want, when I want.

Emphasis on the "what" and the "when." Emphasis on the "I." Emphasis on the "want."

Pandering?

Pandering is what the large companies do when they want to move product to the unwashed masses. And the unwashed masses eat it up - the pop music, the all-production/no-story television programs, the Hollywood ending, the latest fashion craze - they swallow it whole and chase it with a supersized Diet Coke and some Big 'Ums fries. And if you're too cool to buy into that shit, well...Hell, Popular Culture Inc. has a whole separate line of mass-produced, trademarked, copyrighted, counter-culture music/apparrel/lit-a-chure/horse shit for you to adopt into your idiom.

And if that's still too trendy for you, there's always something even more underground and cutting edge out there for you to dig that the execs have already earmarked for mass production in another couple of months or so. One way or another, they're gonna get your dollar.

Really, the only way to be REALLY cool is to hate fuckin' EVERYTHING. And nobody's that cool. Not even Jb.



Joe Strummer didn't know how prophetic he was being when he sang "they think it's funny/turning rebellion into money."

Ironically, these days I can go just about anywhere in the USA and purchase a Clash t-shirt, CD, or poster in less than 15 minutes.

Sigh.

Back to The Editor.

Ok, I admit: maybe I WAS pandering in that particular now-shitcanned article, and that's why I took it so personally. It was full of blaxploitation references, a bit about Billy Crystal being a pussy, and a joke about Aquaman sucking. Looking back, I suppose the internet's LCD would have eaten it up.





Re-wind about 15 or 16 years, and I'm officially submitting my resignation as a certified "comic book collector." No mas. I'm done. No more mylar sleeves and acid-free backing boards. No more Overstreet's Price Guide. No more trips to the comic shop to pick up the twenty or thirty books with the letter "X" in the title.

For the most part, I'd grown out of it. I was starting high school, and discovering stuff like wrestling and dope and how difficult it is to get any pussy when you're 14 years old and stigmatized as the kid who reads comic books.

But there were ideological reasons to abandon the four-color world I'd grown up with, as well. This was about the time that "creator's rights" became a big issue. For those of you who were actually cool during adolescence and have no clue what I'm talking about, there was a big stink - brewing for quite a while - that came to a head in the early nineties regarding intellectual property. It was the struggle between the artist and the publisher; the creator vs. a faceless corporation turning a profit off his work.

A group of shit-hot writers and drawer-ers rallied together behind the "Marvel Comics Screwed Jack Kirby" banner and set off on their own to forge for themselves a creator-owned utopian community. It was all very idealistic, and would have been grand had it not been for two major problems.

First of all, there were the egos. Todd McFarlane suddenly decided that he could write. Rob Liefield suddenly decided that he had talent. Their compatriots followed suit, and the market was quickly saturated with mediocre must-have-collector's-item first issues of new books that looked very nice but gave you a headache to read.

I don't think many of the people who bought comic books at that point actually read them.

Which brings us to the second problem. We now had a creator-owned company, who could have done anything they wanted to with the medium. They were the industry's heavyweights. Instead of bringing in a good writer to make Spawn a quality product, McFarlane concentrated on releasing Spawn action figures. Spawn t-shirts. A fucking Spawn race car.

And a really bad Spawn movie, of course.



Liefield focused on ripping-off every superhero he could find in his quest to set the record for "most first issues released ever." Nearly everyone else on the Image bandwagon (except maybe Sam Keith) fell flat on their faces as well. All the "new" characters were carbon-copy, cookie-cutter plagiarisms. All the storylines were tired. Everything that came out was a reflection of what was already selling in the industry.

Foil covers. Embossed covers. 24-karat-gold-leaf-ultra-rare-you-can't-be-the-King-Dork-without-it limited edition ashcans.

Fucking collectable action figures.

The Image Comics mission statement stopped being about creators' rights and evolved into the same greed that the Big Two companies (Marvel and DC, for you non-nerds out there) our shit-stirring heroes rebelled against were guilty of. Except that with the new generation, the greed was creator-owned.

It was a classic case of "the King is dead; long live the King!"

It was a classic case of pandering.

"The public doesn't actually READ our crap - they just buy it on the off-chance that it'll be worth a small fortune thirty years from now!"

I'm surprised that they actually took the time to print anything between those breathtakingly airbrushed gatefold wrap-around covers.

What started out as a new age in creative freedom became a mishmash of aesthetically pleasing, no-substance crap that hit the average comic buyer harder in the pocketbook than ever before.

And Jb stopped buying comic books.





Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be a businessman?

When does something cease to be genuine expression and transform into Brand X?

And what is art, anyway? People were asking this question ages before it was possible to get a college degree in the subject.

I'm not even going to try to provide a decent answer, but I'll offer that the line of demarcation lies somewhere between Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kincaid. Between Videodrome and Speed 2. Maybe it's hiding somewhere between Andy Warhol painting a soup can, and a reproduction of that soup can image appearing on a t-shirt.

All I can say with any certainty is that a work's artistic merit is inversely proportionate to the dollar value envisioned at its conception.



Jimmy's words - Pat's words - they're still bugging me.

Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to pander to the Lowest Common Denominator?

Kurt Vonnegut has said on numerous occasions that the aspiring author should limit his intended audience to a single person. That by writing with only one reader's enjoyment in mind, one's thoughts will be more free-flowing, be more understandable, and will be delivered with a better, more conversational voice.

This brings me to my twofold pledge to you, dear five readers, a pledge that you can take to the bank at least until the end of 2006.

And please, don't misquote me - I'm not saying that anything you'll find at FTW Inc. is "art", per se:

You will not be pandered to.

Because I take Vonnegut's advice seriously, but I also take it to it's logical conclusion:

I write for ME.

Everything you find here in G.D.H. (and in my little corner of www.ftwinc.com), from the lowbrow dick jokes, to the surly punch-you-in-the-face-isms, to the poorly-drawn webcomics is there because I want it to be there. It exists solely because I found it thought-provoking, humorous, or worthy of mention.

G.D.H., and the "Sea Tales" section of the FTW Inc. website will not target a specific demographic. It will not tone down its content for fear of offending its audience, nor will it necessarily gratuitously devolve into wanton obscenity for the sake of shock value. We cater to no one. We kowtow to no one.

We, *ahem,* pander to no one.

We take the phrase "Fuck The World" very seriously.

G.D.H. is being written/drawn/posted because Jb does what he wants. When he wants. Emphasis on the whole damn Beefy Enchilada.

And Jb doesn't care if you like it or not.

That's not entirely true. I hope you enjoy what you find here. I really do. But it's not being written/drawn/posted for you. If you find that you like watching the hooliganery from the sidelines, more power to you, and I thank you for your patronage. And if it isn't to your taste, well, you're probably not reading this.

So fuck you.


And what about the other part of the pledge?

God. Damn. Heroics. will never cost you one red cent.

To quantitate something creative; to assign a cash value to it; to package it and advertise it and sell it in a store cheapens it. Compromises it.

Art should be free. Art should be shared.

Expression should be free. Information should be free.



This is one of the joys of non-commercial writing: because I'm not trying to sell anything, I don't have to worry about pissing off an advertiser. Or alienating my readership. That being said, I should admit that FTW Inc. t-shirts are in the works, but I don't expect you to buy them. And I certainly don't expect to flip on the tube and see Puff Daddy wearing one in a Pepsi commercial anytime soon.

Ok, it's time to climb down off my high horse now. Next time: back to the dick jokes.

-Jb
CEO FTW Inc.
01.07.06







Sometimes, Popular Culture Inc. manages to sell me a winner...

I was introduced to Masamune Shirow's manga years and years ago back when I was in ultra-fanboy mode and was spending the bulk of my allowance on comic books featuring artwork by Arthur Adams. Fortunately for me, Adams did the covers for the US translation of a then-unknown comic called Appleseed whose thought-provoking storyline, plausible future tech, and philosophical brand of man/machine science fiction got me hooked from the the get-go.

By the way, Masamune Shirow is also responsible for another unknown manga called Ghost In The Shell. Yes, I'm being sarcastic.

Anyway, they've finally made an Appleseed movie. Huzzah. I'm sure it's been out for months, but as we all know, my timetable doesn't quite sync up with that of the real world, so I only just discovered this last week.

Other than dumbing down the story a bit, there aren't too many changes from the original manga, save that the sleek black & white art has been replaced by sleek full-color animation, including some of the sweetest blending of CG and traditional cartoon art that I've ever seen. The rest is pretty much as I remember it: Deunan Knute is still a hot badass, Briarios is still my favorite man-machine ever, and there's still more than enough powersuit action to give Surge a chubby for at least a week.

Soundtrack by the Boom Boom Satellites (tied with The Seat Belts for the Coolest Band Name Ever award - the Japanese always have the best fuckin' band names...), and some other folks.

The boys at the FTW Ranch can expect a copy to arrive in the mail within a week or two, but the rest of you are going to have to go out and buy it.