Well I’m with you Bill! It’s about time someone took that limousine liberal suffragette Johanna down a peg!! I bet her and her bisexual Japanese friends are in some atheist coffee house as we speak, plotting to destroy Christmas and replace the statue of liberty with a giant statue of a WOMAN!!!!

Thank you for your comments – they were particularly balanced in the midst of a comment thread that often hasn’t been (and which I purposefully stayed out of because I didn’t want to make it worse). However, I have a bit of distressing news for you: I’ve seen similar behaviour from a lot of guys who are well over 22 (my age group, to be precise). I’m hoping they grow out of it before we hit 30.

Greg,

I was going to comment about Johanna’s e-mail after she first posted it, only I decided that I didn’t want to rile things up more than they already were. However, I’ve reconsidered that decision. I thought you might be interested in the thought processes of someone who settled down pretty firmly on Johanna’s side.

Shared networks/computers happen, so don’t worry about that. (I’m a student, too, so I’m sympathetic to library-related arguments:)) In reference to your comments, though, you are being overly harsh on Johanna. You asked, “Am I the only one not reading everything [written by the Man] as being aggressive?” Well, here’s a sampling of what the Man called Johanna:
*snobby know-it-all
*snobby prude
*man-hater
*condescending bitch
*snobby ass attitude
*shitty attitude

That’s only how he described her, herself; it doesn’t include his accusations about what she was doing, and it doesn’t include his consistent, derisive suggestions that not liking his comic made her an elitist who loves all things homosexual and hates all things manly. Forget aggressive, that’s nasty.

You suggested that his comments were taken out of context, but they weren’t really. Johanna was pretty even-handed in her initial description of their e-mail exchange (she called her own response blunt and his initial e-mail pretty good). Regardless, most of us would have been willing to overlook a single, rash e-mail to some extent. It was the deluge of immature comments that the Man posted here that nixed that possibility.

He has apparently calmed down significantly in the last few weeks, but even his first attempt at an apology was a passive-aggressive jab at her – he apologized, “for getting all in a hissy over your shitty attitude”, and promptly started telling her how badly she’d behaved. That isn’t sorry at all. (Yes, he came back and made much better amends, but the simple fact is that he had a lot to apologize for.)

That question aside, you’re forgetting one salient point where the Man’s comments about Johanna’s husband are concerned: jokes are funny. His comments? Not so much. We’ve all made a joke that fell flat at one point or another, but all throughout this thread you can see him expressing his anger through obnoxious comments which inexplicably tie having a low view of one of his works to hating masculinity and loving homosexuals/homosexuality, in general. That didn’t come from anything Johanna or the other commenters wrote – it was all him. So it’s hard to read that as a joke.

In contrast, Johanna could have deleted his comments, called him obscenities, published his name or otherwise fallen to his level. She did not. I, for one, wouldn’t have blamed her had she deleted his comments outright. Yet, she allowed him to keep defending himself as best he could.

By the way, what I was originally going to comment on? From her tone earlier in the thread, I thought Johanna had decided she was overly blunt in her initial e-mail. When I actually read the copy she posted, I was surprised by how much nicer it was than what I had imagined. She’s a busy woman, but she took the time to look at something that she wouldn’t normally be interested in, and she gave a fair bit of useful information that could have helped him greatly improve his project. I ended up thinking she went beyond the call of professionalism.

[...] PR: What Not to Do: Be a Kickstarter Jerk — 81 comments [...]

If anyone can remove that, it’d be appreciated. That place has quite a bit more worse junk than what you listed. Holy cripes did I find that out the hard way. I seriously did NOT mean to post that.

Is the comic linked to your name in comment #77 a sample of your work?

Two minutes of clicking around displayed a painfully cluttered and clashing site design, numerous basic grammar and spelling errors, and several examples of potty jokes and misogynist, homophobic, and anti-semitic slurs presented as a sophomoric attempt at humor (Eric Powell the creator is not).

If that site is yours, and is representative of your craft and professionalism, I am surprised that Johanna critiqued your work so gently.

If that site is not yours, or does not reflect what you are attempting in your Kickstarter project, you might wish to be more careful of what you link in your responses.

You are, after all, still trying to market your work, and the internet is still a surprisingly small place.

And yes, the husband thing was a joke…lighten up Jason. Please don’t tell me you didn’t know that was a playful jab. – But really, his chest hair WOULD increase ten-fold. -

So, this is going to seem out of character of me based on the past messages… but I decided to get my wife’s opinion on the whole thing (I usually keep her out of my BS comics stuff since she could care less). She said she understands why I flipped my lid, but I did get too accusatory in my original reply, then I proceeded to continue getting more offended with each reply.

I scrolled through the thread, and I do look kind of crazy. To a degree, I can see how I look like some kind of gay-crazed asshole making a straw man fallacy.

So, in the interest of being an adult; I apologize for ranting. I have faith in my works and have put a lot of effort into it (even if it’s glorifying misogygy) – well, all of us have put a lot of effort into it. It’s not a one-man show, and I owe the other contributors more than this type of behavior, privately or publicly.

It was not about the critique itself being negative; it never was. I perceived it as an attack on the content, and on me for being “a nobody”. I think what drove it home to me as an attack was the last sentence.

I apologize for getting all worked up over the whole thing. I’m still not particularly happy about some things in the article because they are misleading (the pricing thing is still not correct)…but I’ll leave it alone, and I’ll stand behind the fact that I am willing to admit wrongdoing.

I did have just one comment about what Jason said: Sure, it looks that way now that you point it out. when I read the email, I felt like she was pretty rude and judgmental about the book, to be honest. i ddnt think about it being a critique of his marketing pitch until you said it. For someone who is providing feedback, she may want to choose her words better, if that’s the case. I think both of their messages were misconstrued (spell check?) and that’s how the whole thing started. like I said before about the ‘sharks in the water’ he was being cornered and everything the Man was saying was being taken out of context, similar to how he took her words out of context, so he fired back. I’m sure weve all been in that situation before in some fashion.
With everything settled down a bit, it’s easier to look back and see how it fell apart. you know what they say about hindsight.
i’m not here to takes sides on the matter, but she’s supposed to be the professional here, i would assume, which is why I’m being more critical of her behavior. For all we know, this guy’s book could be great; its too bad he was put in a shadowed light publicly like this. It really should have stayed private. but that’s just my opinion.

ps – i think the comment about her husband was a joke. Am I the only one not reading everything as being aggressve?

“BTW, Jo, I did have a question on my mind: What does your husband think of the book? I bet he actually likes the idea. If you let him see it, his sack would probably drop another pair and his chest hair would explode from the top of his shirt.”

…and then it did. You really are a piece of work.

First of all, “The Man,” you completely and totally fail at reading comprehension. You keep whining that Johanna called your book ” generic, pointless, and ‘done before’.” But read what she wrote and she did nothing of the sort. She told you, and I quote,

“[Your comic] sounds like every second comic already out there. You need to find some way to make your work sound different, and ‘lots of action’ isn’t it.”

This is not a comment on the quality of your comic book. This is a comment on the quality of YOUR MARKETING PITCH. What she’s saying here, in quite plain English, is that your Kickstarter page does not do anything to differentiate your book from what else is on the market. This doesn’t mean your book *IS* generic (how would she know when she hasn’t read it?) but that you’re making it *SOUND* generic because you aren’t marketing it right, and that you would be well-served to rewrite your pitch.

And this is good advice! If your sales pitch doesn’t grab people’s attention, you should want to know that, because then you have a chance to tweak it to grab their attention. That’s how you get readers, by getting the word out what it is that makes your book worth checking out. Unfortunately for you, it seems you’re much better at driving people away with insults and childish behavior than you are at drawing them in.

I wonder how many of those 500 pages The Man has actually completed. What artist (let alone two competing artists) would draw 500 pages on spec, or even for a few thousand bucks? That’s at least a couple years’ of hard dedicated work. If he’s actually got two 500-page graphic novels ready to publish, my respect to him and his artists. That’s a big accomplishment.

I took Johanna’s post not as an attack on The Man, whose anonymity she respected, but as an example of the kind of thing she deals with all the time that gets exasperating. Once in a while someone asks me to evaluate their work and be brutally honest. I’m always careful to stress that mine is just one opinion, and they should take what works and leave the rest. I’m a kind person. Even with that, the reaction is invariably bad. Johanna’s right: very very few people really want honesty. They want praise. Creators who can truly take constructive criticism like a pro are one in a hundred.

The professional thing to do when you get feedback you don’t like is say “Thank you” and walk away. Arguing never helps, even if you’re sure you’re right. Let it settle for a while. Learn what you can from it. Don’t burn a bridge you may want to re-approach 1, 5 or 10 years from now. It’s a small industry.

In other words, show some class.

– MrJM

You make me laugh, Johanna (or should I call you Aaron? You do have full control over the site…must be conspiracy!). Next time I’m in the library, I’m gonna wait for the guy. I saw him sit there after I left; long-haired white dude? Yeah, I saw you! lol, you’re there all the time. Guess I shouldn’t have left the page open when I left, I might have saved you from becoming my puppet. lol

BTW, Jo, I did have a question on my mind: What does your husband think of the book? I bet he actually likes the idea. If you let him see it, his sack would probably drop another pair and his chest hair would explode from the top of his shirt.

Anyways, it looks like the jury is out and I was wrong all along. I apologize for getting all in a hissy over your shitty attitude, but maybe next time you want to give some blunt advice to someone, you’ll do it without the veiled attacks, then you won’t get attacked back.

The thing that set me off was that you insulted my book in the worst way possible: You essentially called it generic, pointless, and ‘done before’. That was uncalled for…but what upsets me even more was that you posted blatant lies in your article, and you still refuse to correct them (or even admit it).

Obviously, the fight is over. And while you’re out claiming victory, the fact is there was no winner. I’m sure you’ll have a snappy comeback for that too.