Saturday 24 October 2009

Pet hates

In Britain we have a TV show called Room 101. (Or maybe we used to have it and now it’s gone; I don’t know, I don’t watch broadcast television.) Anyway, the idea of the show is to pick the things you really can’t stand to go into your personal Room 101, on the principle that “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

From comics, my 101s are:

  • Lots of different fonts on one page. Noisy. Extra aggravation points for multiple fonts in one word balloon.
  • Motion lines. Sometimes unavoidable, but mostly just crass. Like sticking on a caption saying, "Look, children! See Ben Grimm clobber the bad man!"
  • Talk scenes. Again, sometimes you just have to. But do the work, daddy-o, have something else going on while they gab.
  • Big eyes, small mouth. I don't find this cute, I just want to punch their faces to beefsteak.
  • Dandy, Beano, Viz - all those Brit comics. Apologies if they're your thing, but to me: wet chalk on a blackboard.
  • Solipsistic comics about splitting up with the person who was never quite your girlfriend. This is over. Next.
  • Stories about the mutant menace, superhero registration, etc. Metaphors are fine, but they have no power when they're that obvious.
  • Wolverine. He's so grumpy. Shoulda been stuffed in a sack and thrown in the river years ago.

Lock me in a room with the above and I’ll say anything to get out. But Room 101 is all about the personal. What are your comic hates?

5 comments:

  1. Dave - you're a great ranter! :-) What I want to see now is a comic frame of Mirabilis Dave (with steaming coffee) pummeling the crap out of a BESM character.

    My pet hate is how every Batman writer seems to want to make him grumpier and darker than ever before. A kind of 'my dark knight is darker than yours' one upmanship. Very tiresome (although I do like Batman I might add!)

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  2. Heh! Thanks, but I don't think this was much of a rant, really. More of a moan :-) Look at "Idiocy of the system" a few days back - *there's* a rant.

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  3. Brilliant! I would add horribly over modelled computer colour that conflicts with and ultimately destroys the artist's original line work.

    The trouble is that I am so wary of most mainstream comics these days that to add further carps to this modest list of one would be a little insincere, but the over egged school of death by Photoshop is a huge turn off for me.

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  4. P.S. Interesting to note that you don't watch broadcast television either.

    Now that really is a pet hate of mine, the thing that really sums up how bad it's got is the TV Awards phenomenon. It's evident that TV programme makers regard their audiences with such contempt/condescension that they actually have the effrontery to televise their own awards shows and expect their loyal audiences whose brains have been wiped by endless cookery, property and reality (whatever that is) TV shows to watch them congratulate themselves on yet another year of producing shite.

    The frightening thing is that audiences do actually watch even these shows.

    Now that is really sad ...

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  5. I decided this year to save myself the licence fee and spend it on Lovefilm instead. All the shows I watch are US drama series (The Wire, The Shield, Dollhouse, etc) and I prefer to see them on DVD anyway. The only frustration is when Leo starts telling me about the latest episode of something like Flashforward and I'm going to have to wait months to see what all the fuss is about.

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