This weeks Dandy

[big bad bri]

hope its b4 2moro as im going on hols for 3 weeks so no internet also wont be able to get beano or dandy either

[Lew Stringer]

Of course I don't "devote my online time to tearing down comics". I repeat: I was only talking about the cover. I don't think I even mentioned any of the other 43 pages. How can you draw a conclusion about my view of the comic based on that, especially bearing in mind that one of my principal objections was precisely how much the cover wasn't representative of the comic as a whole?

I said "comics". Plural. Most of your online comments about comics are criticisms. Your long diatribe about a cover is just the latest.

I'll say this once and then I'll waste no more time on it. Martin, it's not that anyone minds you expressing your dislike of aspects of comics. Constructive criticism is always good to hear. It's just the sneering manner in which you express your opinions and how you lash out at anyone who doesn't agree with you. (Saying Phoenix is drunk for instance, or the unpleasant messages you sent me a while ago.)

One example of your criticisms:
"The jarring style clash, and sense of a job left undone, looks highly amateurish."

There's nothing that "looks highly amateurish" about The Dandy. Have you worked in design? Dislike what you choose and say why you dislike it, but when you doubt the professionalism of people in the industry you'd be best to have some grounding in knowing what you're talking about.

hope its b4 2moro as im going on hols for 3 weeks so no internet also wont be able to get beano or dandy either

Bri, have you asked your newsagent to reserve you copies?

[big bad bri]

none of my local newsagents stock beano or dandy anymore i have to go whs every week and the village in ireland im going on hols never stock anything apart from farmers mags i might be able to get 1 iss out of the next 3 if i take the 30 odd miles bus trip to the nearest big town as they have tesco & asda but they never seem to have dandy.i may subscribe when i get back and save money on the gift issues as well

[-MikeD-]

none of my local newsagents stock beano or dandy anymore i have to go whs every week and the village in ireland im going on hols never stock anything apart from farmers mags i might be able to get 1 iss out of the next 3 if i take the 30 odd miles bus trip to the nearest big town as they have tesco & asda but they never seem to have dandy.i may subscribe when i get back and save money on the gift issues as well

The Nisa store on the corner where I live only stocked the tabloids, People's Friend, Take A Break and celebrity idiot magazines until I asked if they could get The Dandy a few weeks ago. Now they get three Dandy's and the same number of Beano's and they've sold them every week so far (Of course, I buy one of each!). So...it's worth asking in your local newsagent/supermarket.

Now, I return you to your regular flame war...

[Phoenix]

If I was to write about all the things I approved of, every week, I'd probably overflow the forum database with 60000-character descriptions of 60-odd pages every week (more in school holidays)............./.............. As for Phoenix, I'm just going to ignore him now. He can't still be drunk, but he's definitely acting out of character and seems immune to reason. In arguments with such people, everyone, especially the rest of the beleaguered users of this forum, can only lose.

I didn't realise you were still at school. It's so much easier now for me to see where your over-zealous criticisms and such wildly extravagant assertions as the one above, are grounded. It also does go some way towards explaining why you are prone to making unwarranted assumptions such as your claim that there are beleaguered users on this forum. What, or who, exactly are they? In your quotation above, which begins with As for Phoenix, you assume that I actually get drunk, which I never do, and you infer from comments I've made that I'm acting out of character. As far as I'm aware, everything I do is displaying my essence, the entity that is me. As a reader of literature throughout my life I can assure you that I have learned that if a fictional character does something that appears to be 'out of character', I must look again at that character to discover any hints or suggestions that the author has laid down earlier to indicate the possibility of such an action later, which must then clearly be seen to be 'in character'. You would do well to remember this because fiction mirrors real life. You go on to claim that I am immune to reason. Let me tell you, swirly, that the minute that statement is true I will have been dead for one minute. My final point for you to consider is that when you say, Phoenix, I'm just going to ignore him now, you are instantly guilty of rudeness, arrogance and dismissiveness, not because you are somehow forced to pay any attention to me, but because I asked you politely to give me the meanings of troll and PUI. I still don't know for certain what either of them mean. You must know because you've used them. Do you always ignore people who ask you nicely to do something for them? Maturity is still some way away for you, swirly.

[swirlythingy]

+ + + + THIS POST HAS BEEN REINSTATED AFTER IT WAS DELETED + + + +



You know, I could point out all the holes in the arguments, all the half-truths and no-truths about what I may or may not have said or done, all the hypocrisy and all the important parts of my previous post which have not only been completely ignored, but which I predicted in that same post would be ignored, and which directly contradict some of the false statements made about me, but you know what? I'm not going to. I've had enough. I can see nobody's going to win here - it will just become a roaring fireball of flames and lies and must-have-the-last-word-at-all-costs, unless one of us pulls out, and that plainly isn't going to be anyone else. I've seen it many times before, on many forums, and many other chat mediums, and I've made the mistake of participating in a few of them, and on occasion I've watched them bring down entire communities in a deafening wail of bitterness and white noise. History will eventually judge who was at fault in this thread, but going for short-term wins can only lead to pain. I've posted enough in this thread to gather a reasonable sample of data about the likely reactions to anything I might want to write, and even the things I have posted so far which might have been considered beyond question, such as correcting factual errors, have done nothing to alleviate the situation. Internet flamewars are an unholy ground where the normal rules of reason and logic don't apply. I recognise all the signs, and all the trademark argumentative tactics. I've been here many times before - sometimes as a contestant, other times merely a disinterested observer. I have watched others fail, and I have foolishly attempted myself, to use rational arguments against someone who is not acting rationally. In the end, neither side wins, and everyone else loses, sometimes doing irreparable damage to the atmosphere of a community. I don't want that to happen to Comics UK, but I think in some respects it already has.

I wish we could have a few more forum rules, because the current set don't seem to have cured the problem of people starting flamewars for the sake of it (or "trolling", to use the accepted definition). Incidentally, that part in the rules post where Al mentions people saying the atmosphere was hostile? That was me. In my short time here, I've been shocked by the petty playground bullying I've been subjected to, in spite of having done nothing wrong, and not having gone looking for any trouble. Speaking as someone who used to experience it in real life, I didn't take long to see what was going on. As ever, the culprits are the vocal minority, sometimes with an army of hangers-on who are too scared to break ranks in case it's them next, and instead try to pretend it's not happening.

Far from simply being disagreed with, I have been variously called a liar, accused of "sneering", charged with "bitching", been sent overtly unpleasant messages by supposedly respectable posters hiding behind sock puppets, been hauled over the coals for the most ridiculously tiny little minutiae (such as, memorably, referring to Alan Digby as "Digby"), been subjected to unhinged rants based on misunderstandings (or outright lies) about what I wrote, and finally been accused of having "extreme reactions" or "lashing out" when I attempt to correct these assertions in a detailed and level-headed manner. This is why I'm not going to bother doing it again. I know it's futile.

The extreme reactions (irony noted) to my posts go far above and beyond anything justified by their content, even the most grumpy ones. Sometimes, as happened here, and as happened prominently in the Beano 1998-2003 thread, an entire flamewar sprouts from a single post, or even single phrase, which I wrote pertaining to the subject matter of the thread without a second thought and didn't imagine any sane person could possibly construe as deeply offensive, or believed to be generally accepted opinion among the community. The culprit in such cases is very easy to identify, right down to the level of the individual post which marked a conscious attempt to turn the atmosphere sour.

I don't know if the atmosphere has always been so volatile, or if this sort of thing happened on a regular basis before I was here. I wouldn't know, I wasn't here. But the remarks of others (always the non-perpetrators) would seem to indicate that things have got worse. Discounting Scoobie's abortive attempt to stalk me onto Andy Fanton's blog, and recent (but not unexpected) cross-contamination problems at the Beano Forum, this problem is entirely contained within Comics UK. I've never experienced anything like it anywhere else. I'm active (or lazy) in several communities, mostly with very little overlap, and, sure, I've put feet wrong sometimes, and I've been admonished, and I've had very occasional arguments, but afterwards life goes on as normal. That hasn't happened here. The past four months have been one long flamewar, and the same names, apart from my own, keep cropping up in the middle of it again and again. I'm sure nobody else wants this. The common factors in every attack have been constant, and the silent majority try to keep well out of it.

That was why Phoenix's post shook me so much - after four months, I've compiled a mental list of who I should avoid and who is likely to turn nasty, and he was nowhere near it. In fact, a few short weeks back he was politely chiding Scoobie for doing exactly the same thing. The unprovoked attack (with a non-existent justification) came completely out of the blue, not even matching his usual posting style, hence my initial assumption that he was not responsible for his actions, but now I'm left considering whether, in a dangerous corner of the web which is seemingly hiding a lot more nasty surprises, I should continue to risk my blood pressure by posting here.

I don't want to have to give up. If I'm driven out of this site, for one thing that means the trolls have won, but I also consider it an informative place and a veritable fountain of knowledge about British comics, the likes of which simply cannot be found elsewhere. I want to be able to contribute, and I want the right to air my own opinions to mix in with all those already here, and just maybe, if the wind's in the right direction, be able to answer a question from somebody less knowledgeable than I am. I certainly don't want to "sneer", and I don't want to go around picking fights. If I don't like a poster's tone, I don't have the right to get all "net police" on them - I should simply ignore them. In actual fact, I haven't encountered anyone whose posts offended me in and of themselves yet. I'm happy to be factually corrected - learning is part of the point of being here, after all - and if somebody has a different opinion from mine, that's their right. But - and I emphasise this once again, it is only a vocal minority - some seem to think that their opinions are automatically better than mine, or that I am a bad person for holding them, or that I am "complete ignorance" of the facts (even when the matter at hand, like the overall quality of a given issue, is solely one of opinion), or that I am giving my opinions as the facts (frequently misused in similar situations, when statements are opinions by definition). Frequently this spills over into outright ad hominem, or huge nonsensical diatribes which would be funny if they weren't aimed at me.

After several such incidents, I've already taken to tiptoeing through the roses, forever scanning and re-scanning a post for any possible trace of offence, or inserting more paragraphs if I feel it could be accused of being off-balance and biased too far to accentuating the negative while ignoring the positive. It hasn't been enough. In fact, since my early days, the problem has, if anything, got worse. Usually, the amendments are completely ignored and the post selectively quoted to look pretty much as it would have done had I submitted it in its original form (some good examples of that in this thread as well). An alternative tactic, as mentioned above (and also used here), has been simply to manufacture offence based around an innocent sentence selected pretty much at random. It can only take one post for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down once again, as all the peace and quiet we had been enjoying is shattered by the regulars leaping back onto the bandwagon and devoting entire posts specifically to why I am an awful person and how I never have anything positive to say (usually combined with the selective quoting tactic above). Lew Stringer is a serial offender in this regard - only about half of all flamewars in which he is dominant were actually started by him (and, yes, you can see that in this thread as well). Once I got so tired of him that I PMed him and told him precisely what I thought of a particularly offensive post, in which, among other things, he had hysterically accused me of jeopardising the work of "future comic historians" by posting opinions in "forums which may be used for research" (no, I'm not sure what he meant, either). Yes, that was a selective quote. I can't remember the rest, and in any case the worst bits were subsequently deleted. In this PM, which I had sent because (as I pointed out to him, and explained that he should have done so too) I didn't want to pollute what was already a very murky thread any further with a message which was no more than a personal attack and hence had no place in the public sphere, I pointed out to him that he was not the net police, and he had no business as a non-moderator in attempting to discredit posts which did not meet his personal standards, and that he particularly had no business complaining about people destroying the atmosphere of the forum with their posts via the medium of a post of his own which was destroying the atmosphere of the forum, unless he was happy to be called a hypocrite. Shortly afterwards, he selectively quoted, in public, shorn of all context, part of one sentence. I wondered why I felt so surprised.

All this has been a bit of a ramble, and in many respects resembles the very unhinged rants it decries, but I can't be bothered to go back and structure it properly and I don't think the effort required to form it into any kind of persuasive argument will be justified by the replies it will inevitably receive no matter what it says. Good luck teasing my true feelings about the issue and the most important points of my argument out of that mess. Not that I think you'll bother - and "you" know exactly who I mean by "you" when I address "you". It'll be same old, same old, all over again, and every time a little piece of the forum dies, and a few more people wonder why they still read such a hostile place, and none of you seem to care. So, go on, then. Selectively quote away. Respond to things I haven't said, and misconstrue things I have. Open fire with both ad hominem guns. Spend yet another entire post accusing me of lowering the tone of the forum and once again completely fail to appreciate the pathetic self-demonstrating hypocrisy of that statement. (I can't believe Scoobie hasn't been along yet. Where the hell is he?) But don't expect me to give you the pleasure of another reaction. I'm well out of it. I'm dropping out of this thread, and I'm going to reconsider my position yet again. I'll tighten up my criteria for posts which must not be responded to or mentioned in any form, and I'll amend my list of suspect posters, and I'll try to shove yet more positive content into my already dangerously tilting opinion balance while somehow not adopting the position of "Why this is all lovely and wonderful and lovely and it's covered in fairies and glitter and it rides a flying unicorn through a field of pansies and fluffy bunnies and a little pony with a rainbow shooting out of its arse" which seems to be the forum default, while simultaneously giving some thought as to possible reasons why that may have become so common. But it won't help. It didn't help last time and it won't this time, until I finally turn my back on this naive notion that everybody is acting perfectly rationally and will bear all the facts in mind while making a reply and that no part of a post, especially not the bits surrounded by markers saying "PLEASE DO NOT IGNORE THIS", will be completely ignored. All I can do is knuckle down and say even less, and hope that the problem will eventually get better. After all, it did when I was battling playground bullies for real. After a few years, I completed the final year of the school. Will I never learn?

[Phoenix]

I will start this post as I intend to finish it, Swirly. I would like you to remain a forum member. There are many posters on this site who know an enormous amount about comics and story papers, and who, therefore, are a great asset to comicsuk, a forum that you admit is a quality one. They provide knowledge, insights, analyses, general experience and, where necessary, criticism, all for the benefit of other posters and those guests who may never post themselves but will read posts and learn from them. But they are not bullies, and they are certainly not bullying you. Scoobie was, in my opinion, and I feel that I was right to complain about his attitude to you, because his posts seemed to contain some quite arbitrary and unjust insults. Under similar circumstances I would do so again. Comicsuk isn't a closed shop, though. If it were it would eventually consume itself, like a Premier League with no promotion or relegation. Anyone with knowledge, enthusiasm for comics, and the desire to share all that with the rest of us, is welcome. Their different take on comic matters provides a breath of fresh air. This is where people like you come in. To judge from your posts so far, you are bright, articulate, and you feel strongly about comic matters. Ergo, you should be a member, and an active one at that, because you are surely capable of livening up discussions in a positive manner that will be appreciated by other members. I said earlier that comicsuk forum members are not bullying you. They are not. What they are doing is trying to persuade you to look again at your posts in the hope that you will see what they see. This is currently proving quite difficult because you are not finding it easy to empathise with other members, particularly those who draw your attention to what they perceive to be your defects or errors. None of us on here are perfect, we have all made mistakes. I made a mistake when I accused you of trashing an entire edition of The Dandy, when I should have realised that you were only referring to the front cover, and I apologise for that. This is naturally not the only apology I have ever made, but the process is calm and straightforward - apology made, apology accepted, move on. My feeling is that there are issues that you need to face up to if you are ever to be able to fit into the apology made, apology accepted, move on scenario. I want you to understand that I am not about to become confrontational, but I may well say things that touch a raw spot. I hope you can see that I want to be helpful. I have read your most recent post twice in a calm and collected way in order to get a clear picture of you the person, from your own words. You have clearly been bullied at school, a trauma that has meant a lot of time away from formal education, possibly several years, but you have persevered and completed your courses. Incidentally, I am assuming that we are talking about GCSE courses, but even if we are not, it doesn't materially affect the thrust of what I want to say. This will have taken a lot of courage, and you can be proud of your success. However, your extremely uncomfortable school experiences do not permit you to assume that everybody everywhere is against you, denigrating who you are and what you've achieved, putting you down at the first opportunity. To do so would only emphasise the adverse effect of the bullying and, in your eyes, the bullies would win again. As I see it, an all-pervading theme in your post is that bullies are everywhere you look. One advantage you have, though, with regard to those comicsuk posters that you see as trashing you, is that they are not a physical presence. I remember a saying from my childhood, Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. If you feel threatened by criticism in the form of written words, I doubt whether anything I say will be particularly helpful because I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. However, I did spend over thirty years teaching in a comprehensive school, and obviously I needed to deal with such matters fairly frequently. Reading through your post, though, it seems to me that you go on the attack first as a defence mechanism, you anticipate criticism of your arguments, as evidenced by your compiling a mental list of who you should avoid and who is going to turn nasty. We are quite close though now to an issue that you could begin to address. It is very likely that one result of your horrific experiences with the playground bullies is that in an attempt to become self-sufficient you have closed up to protect yourself. An unwanted side-effect of this normally is to become self-centred and self-pitying. These are unhealthy, and there is evidence of both in your post. You may like to count up the number of times you use the words I, me and my. I stopped counting at 85 so there are probably getting on for a couple of hundred. If you can manage to stop seeing bullies round every corner, especially on this site where you never actually meet anybody, you will slowly heal. In my opinion, you should persevere with comicsuk, not just as some kind of therapy, but because your contributions will become more measured in the fullness of time, with the acquisition of greater wisdom and greater humility to add to the qualities you already have, and as you move from the self to the comics. Remain a forum member, please.


Please do not remove this post.

[Lew Stringer]

Some wise and helpful words from Phoenix there and I hope Swirly/Martin carefully considers them.

I think comments on forums like this can sometimes be misconstrued into being harsher than intended. With no tone or body language cold print/pixels can easily be misinterpreted as being more confrontational than it is. Even the use of emoticons isn't always helpful. (Even Alan Moore sometimes has his online comments misconstrued as being arrogant when he's only being self mocking. It happens to everyone, especially when people are passionate about a subject.)

Swirly, I'm sorry if "sneering" was the wrong choice of words to describe your criticisms. I hope you will accept that I wasn't bullying you. I'm 52 and have no intention of becoming a bully now, and I certainly wouldn't try to belittle a 19 year old student. (Indeed, I did 'Tom Thug' for ten years in order to ridicule bullies.) However, when you raise your criticisms of comics you have to accept that some people will offer a counter point, either to explain the whys and wherefores of publishing that you may be unaware of, or simply to disagree with your opinion. And vice-versa of course. It's just a debate, not a fight.

I hope you will remain on the forum and that we can move on.

Lew

[Phoenix]

Could I respectfully ask the administrator responsible for deleting Swirly's long post if he would be good enough to reinstate it. I accept that it did contravene Al's new forum rules, but so did several surrounding it. In my opinion, it was an important post. The fact that its removal makes the area around it look like a field of corn just after it's been harvested is not really the point. I just believe that if the administrator had read and understood Swirly's post as it deserved to be read and understood, he would not have deleted it. Naturally, I would not object to a new thread being prepared for it, as has been the case once or twice before. This is a democratic forum whose very existence is based on free speech. Let reason prevail.

[Digifiend]

Yeah, I agree, should've been forked into a separate thread, as has happened once before recently. Deleting posts just makes the replies make no sense.

[AndyB]

Am I allowed to say that I don't like the layout of the summer Dandys?

I think it loses a lot by having the main cover image at the bottom - including the extension at the top, it is barely over 50% of the front of the comic.

I think it would have been better without the boxes - in other words, with the main cover image bleeding across the full cover. I'd rather have a full-width logo, but I could stick having "headlines" in the top right hand corner if I had to - I just don't find this layout aesthetically pleasing.

However, the good news for all Beano fans is that tomorrow's Dandy finally returns the favour by having a full-page ad for the Beano. Buy it to see which strip they have used.

[AndyB]

Just as a wee note - once we delete a post, I'm sorry to say we can't put them back again as they are deleted irrevocably from the database. We try and remember to keep copies of the deleted posts for our own records.

[Raven]

I thought the front cover of last week's Dandy (Issue 3545) is probably a contender for the worst in its entire history; strange, as the Dandy and Beano covers have regularly been their most eye-catching and inspired for ages, lately. I think trying to sell Dandy as some kind of mock women's celebrity rag, and the reliance on the Simon Cowell stuff is really misconceived.

Still you have to try new things from time to time, and the squirty specs are the cover's main draw anyway.

I do sometimes wonder if Dandy is bearing in mind the age of its readers (presumably mostly tens and unders?) with some of the TV stuff, though. I'm sure I can remember Jonathan Ross being featured in it a while back, during a time he was only on TV after 10.30pm, and in this week's Harry Hill - though the artwork be frenetically fab - will Dandy's readers really recognise Basil and Sybil Fawlty? Has Fawlty Towers even had a terrestrial repeat in the last seven years, at least? (I doubt many under-tens watch Gold.)

[Lew Stringer]

I thought the front cover of last week's Dandy (Issue 3545) is probably a contender for the worst in its entire history

I prefer the previous layout too but I thought "SIMON COWELL EATEN BY HIS OWN TROUSERS" is one of the funniest headlines I've seen.

I do sometimes wonder if Dandy is bearing in mind the age of its readers (presumably mostly tens and unders?) with some of the TV stuff, though. I remember Jonathon Ross being featured in it a while back, during a time he was only on TV after 10.30pm, and in this week's Harry Hill - though the artwork be frenetically fab - will Dandy's readers really recognise Basil and Sybil Fawlty? Has Fawlty Towers even had a terrestrial repeat in the last seven years, at least?

Fair point. When IPC were doing Oink! in the 80s they found that the younger kids just didn't get the satirical strips. As you suggest, readers have to be aware of what's being satirized to get the joke. That said, today's kids are much more media savvy than they used to be.

[Peter Gray]

I'm not keen on the covers either...
Jamie's desperate Dan covers or Nigel's Harry Hill were miles better...
though the logo does work when covered up and it does peep out..
who could forget the recent cover of Desperate dan eating Cow pie...or the totem pole one...or the who ate the pie cover with lots of secret black marks hiding the evidence...
or Harry singing in the rain..
see these covers are better..