Jesus tapdancing Christ

ESPN The Magazine devotes entire issue to how good Boston is.

This is a real thing. I swear to you. DJ Gallo didn’t make this as a Photoshop just as some kind of sick joke. ESPN actually did this. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKS AND I HOPE THEY BURN IN GODDAMN HELL. ALL OF THEM. Chad Millman, who is the editor of ESPN The Shitheap, needs to be tied to a post and lashed with a dead stingray for this. This is fucking horrible. This is White Vick with a fucking House of Pain tattoo grafted on for good measure. Did you people NOT get the fucking memo? Were you not aware that the entire goddamn world hates you already for overcovering Boston sports? Did you not know that there are entire sites like this one that were founded specifically to act as a counterbalance to your ongoing and utterly baffling provincialism? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

I love the Bruins, I adore the Celts, but this seriously is a bridge too fah. The only thing worse than incessant tone-deaf homerism is commercializing it -- also see ESPN Boston, ESPN New York, ESPN Los Angeles, ESPN Chicago, ESPN Dallas....

Fifty-two channels and nothin's on

The ever-awesome alasdair at his blog makes a bold statement:

Of late, the subject of DC’s reboot has come up in the sort of conversations I mention. And I think it’s worth saying this: DC’s new reboot, when viewed collectively, is one of the most creatively bankrupt pieces of shit the medium has ever put out, and if there is any justice in this world, it will be remembered as the moment that DC began the death spiral that ultimately lead to the collapse of the American comics industry.

Seriously: if you are buying any one of these fucking pieces of crap, just stop. If you’re telling yourself that one of the titles you’re buying is better than the rest, even if you’re right about that, just stop. Every single week, in addition to a load of titles that are just an undifferentiated mass of bland crap, DC manage pump out a couple of pieces of hideous crap that fall somewhere on a spectrum between “unfortunately sexist” and “outright misogyny”. From where I sit, if DC are managing to publish one or two titles that aren’t complete shit, I assure you, it’s a mistake that they’re bound to be rectifying soon.

Read excerpts from Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws online. Don't buy them. Flip through them. Those are just the two most egregious pieces from this week. There've been worse. There'll be worse still. There may be one or two titles in the lineup that are, by some statistical anomaly or the result of a pact with a chaos lord, good books. There are others which are merely mediocre and they stand out as the paragons of the line. The rest is four-color slurry, best left to sluice through the grates and into the sewers, never to be polybagged.

They had the whole of reality to retcon and start afresh and managed to distill each comic to its barest essence -- so they could foul the very soul of the title, insuring it would never bear edible fruit. It's a garden fertilized with mulch made in the 90s, sprouting with swords and spikes and impossible knees and pouches and capes...this is not a proper garden; nothing green can stay.

Alasdair is right: And even if I’m wrong about that, you know what: if a few good comics have to fail, just so this reboot can die on it’s arse, and ultimately put the shambling corpse of the comics industry out of it’s misery, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Which reminds me, I do need to review one of the series Alasdair talks about above, one of the few still readable, and write a lengthy piece as to why you probably shouldn't read it. Maybe later.