Don’t look at a complimentary comic book in the mouth
Heidi MacDonald wrote a blog post over at The Beat that has got a lot of attention from some in the comic book online reviewer community. It concerns something some of them evidently include with their online reviews.
Heidi wrote:
What is it with the comic book reviewers who include this in their reviews?
This review was based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.
I guess it’s supposed to be some kind of ethical high ground thing, but, ironically, it makes the reviewer look like a complete amateur.
Because the way the world works is that publicists are SUPPOSED to send out free product so it can get reviewed.
Evidently quite a few of these comic book online reviewers that include just such a phrase don’t appreciate the implication that they are in any sort of way amateur. At least that’s what I inferred from the lengthy comment section of Heidi’s blog post.
I think she’s got a valid point. I think it does look amateurish if and when someone posts just such a phrase, but not for the reason Heidi gave. When someone receives something complimentary, it’s not for them to read and then review. It’s for them to read and hopefully enjoy.
It’s a gift.
There’s an old saying, Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I guess back in the olden times, people liked to give each other horses. It was considered rude to look at the teeth of a horse someone just gave you. The point is that if someone just gave you a horse, you should be grateful of your good fortune and don’t look for more by examining it to assess its value.
The same thing is true with complimentary comic books. Instead of looking at them with the critical eye of a reviewer, you should just enjoy your complimentary comic books. On the other hand, if instead the reviewer receives a promotional or review copy of a comic book from the publisher, all bets are off. A promotional or review copy is sent out by the publisher with the intention of having it reviewed. Not only is it not rude to look at such a comic in the mouth, it’s expected.
So yes, it does look somewhat amateurish when someone posts that they are reviewing a complimentary copy of a comic book provided by the publisher.
The ease in which you take offense offends me
Heidi at The Beat posted about the new blogging crew over at Blog@Newsarama and she made the analogy that they were like the characters in the movie The Dirty Dozen, the 1960’s World War Two movie staring Lee Marvin. In the movie, Lee Marvin is an Army officer that takes a bunch of condemned soldiers off death row and turns them into commandos to take part in a deadly suicide mission behind enemy lines that nobody else wants to do. The movie always struck me as being kind of goofy because I think history shows that the Allies in World War Two didn’t seem to care an awful lot about risking the lives of it’s soldiers.
Watch the first hour of Saving Private Ryan to see what I mean.
Heidi made the The Dirty Dozen comparison because like the condemned soldiers in the movie, the new Blog@Newsarama crew have been, in her words, “made sport of by the Nazis soon after landing in Brittany“.
In her analogy, the Nazis were other bloggers weighing in on the new Blog@Newsarama team. If you guessed that someone claimed to take great offense to this Nazi comparison you would be correct. If you guessed that it was the people actually being compared to the Nazis in The Dirty Dozen, you would be wrong.
Two of the people from Blog@Newsarama commented on Heidi’s post.
Lucas Siegel wrote:
The only other thing I’d like to put here is that, honestly, a killed-in-action metaphor in relation to myself is, well, offensive. You may or may not have read in our introduction post or in the comments section of the blog in question that I served in the Army for six years. I’ve served overseas, in a warzone, and seen people actually get killed-in-action. I assure you, it’s not something to be used as a joke under any circumstance. Thanks.
So let me get this straight. Getting killed in action in a war zone is not something to joke about or to make reference to lightly, but it’s OK to bring it up to score points in a silly Internet discussion? The Dirty Dozen was not real. There was no actually commando unit in World War Two comprised of death row inmates. Heidi made a comparison to a movie of fiction.
Lucas Siegel wasn’t the only Blog@Newsarama blogger to claim to take offense. Sarah Jaffe quickly chimed in.
She wrote:
Gee, thanks. I love not even being slagged off properly and compared to victims of Nazis since my family actually was killed by Nazis. Wow, classy.
Once again, they were movie Nazis. They were not real Nazis. They were actors playing roles in a movie.
I don’t really understand how people become so easily offended. The moral indignation some choose to display when they are exposed to something they claim to be offended by always seems so fake to me. I just don’t get it.
More about the demise of Blog@Newsarama
Heidi at The Beat has some more details concerning the news that the people behind the popular blog section of Newsarama are leaving at the end of this month.
JK Parkin explains:
Anyway, everything came to a head in September, when I decided to step down and the rest of the blog said they were going with me. The headaches, problems and lack of response from Imaginova just weren’t worth it anymore. But Matt (Brady) talked us into staying, promising some changes in how things worked, how we interacted with Imaginova and our first pay raise since we started with the blog back in 2006. He offered a pretty decent pay system that turned this from a side hobby we were all probably spending too much time on into a legitimate freelance opportunity.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he came back in November and said those changes he’d promised were effectively null and void. So we decided to leave, effective Nov. 30.
JK Parkin states that he decided to leave Newsarama and the rest of the team, Kevin Melrose, Tim O’Shea, Carla Hoffman, Melissa Krause, Jeff Trexler, Matt Maxwell, and Jennifer de Guzman, decided to go with him. Or maybe not. In the same post over at The Beat, Matt Maxwell left a comment stating that he hasn’t yet decided if he is leaving Newsarama or not. Maybe there’s others who having decided to leave quite yet.
It doesn’t make much sense for any of them to remain blogging over at Newsarama. As I pointed out in an earlier post, traffic to Newsarama seems to have dropped off dramaticly since Imaginova relaunched the site. If making money is their goal, they could still do that on their own site by placing ads for the same entities that were buying ad space on Blog@Newsarama.
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