Comment on Burned Loss
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 13 hours agoI 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.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 11 hours 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.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You are free to make your own interpretations as far as how he portrays/portrayed women in his comics. It’s been almost 20 years since that comic went up, and standards in social mores and comedy have changed a ton in that time, but when I read those comics back then, only being familiar with Buckley through CAD comics and nothing else, he never struck me as a narcissist or a misogynist. His self-insert character was a Homer Simpson type (“which was the style at the time”), which is hardly the caricature of a narcissist in my opinion. I find it’s very easy to invent a narrative about who someone is from how they portray themselves publicly, and also…it’s been 18 years. Whoever he was 18 years ago is very likely not who he is today. I don’t know that he’s a bad person, I don’t know that he ever was a bad person, and I don’t think it’s admirable to hound someone with a joke about something that they put out into the world so long ago. Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on. I didn’t feel good when I saw that comic the first time, nor was I intended to, but I definitely don’t feel great whenever it’s brought back up either.