Hey Beth -- Have you read the essay “The Problem with Comics”? It touches on a lot of the problems you mention here when it comes to the industry, and more.

The guy’s dealing with a real burden here - being the best and worst at everything on the team, being the most and least valuable player, etc. I’d like to give him credit for his hard work in preserving the team’s status as still being a more reasonable, appealing idea for a Las Vegas sports team than the Raiders.

Grooveshark’s troubles were legal, but not purely related to the piracy: they’d settled up with the big labels, but were being sued for failure to pay some of the agreed-upon sums or rates. It’s a shame that Grooveshark didn’t make it, because a.) I was grandfathered in on a $30/year plan for the premium service for…

Seeing as he looks like a slob fell sideways through one of the Joseph A. Bank outlets that shuttered after the merger with Men’s Wearhouse; rose to prominence at the head of an obnoxious, headline-grabbing organization; and used his millions in business, which would have been more if he weren’t constantly having bad…

I remember reading this in a TPB yeeeears ago, and thinking it was unbelievably cool. I even photocopied at least part of it, because it was a library book. I thought it was also cool that this directly inspired the return of the character on TV, and I was a little jealous of the cool parts Lego made for sets…

Pete Carroll will be withholding a one-notch increase in the emotion dial on Wilson’s control terminal as punishment for this.

I think this document better reflects where they started from — any faithful watcher of BTAS, even excluding later shows, knows they digressed from a lot of this a.) as the show found its footing and b.) where it contributed meaningfully to the episode and the greater plot. Look at the stuff about Batman’s origins —…

I’ll watch Doctor Strange on an airplane with constant engine droning in the background and barely sober, like God intended, thank you very much. Same for Suicide Squad; it’s how I finally managed to watch BvS.

No, I totally get where you’re coming from. To me, season 5 was the culmination of the showrunners realizing their lack of a long-term series bible had come back to bite them in the ass. Not necessarily that season 5 was entirely *bad* - I liked a lot of it, and it had a lot of good work and effective moments- but…

Figures a rich guy who loves pretending to be a rock star would side with the rich guy who loves pretending to be...

Well, I wanted to go with “movie star”, but ol’ Tangerine Nightmare pretends to be an awful lot of things.

I’m sure it has some genuine, hardcore fans, as anything does, but the memes are founded in its notoriety as a curio, a very weird sub-Pixar, sub-Dreamworks CGI movie that was also one of the first big projects undertaken by Jerry Seinfeld since the end of his eponymous show, undertaken explicitly as a star vehicle.…

That’s part of the joke - Bee Movie has so little going for it that the memes are almost of greater substance than the source material, and collectively speaking, probably are. Bee Movie was just so, so bad and misguided.

When they were initially brainstorming ahead of this episode, someone suggested “Beetlejuice”, and they misheard it as “belittle Jews”

Wow. At the beginning, I thought the word “grifter” was kind of colorful, a very “television guide summary of a domestic psychological thriller” word, but as the piece elaborated on the situation, its use became entirely appropriate for that exact reason. Jesus frickin’ Christ, what a character.

Possible sociopath has reproduced, threatens to reproduce again

I find it funny that a man who sounds and acts like Political Foghorn Leghorn is so fond of chickenhawks.

Alright, I’m cold on the man’s filmmaking at the best of times, but I’ll give him some credit on sartorial grounds. Dude nicely matched that blue white-dotted tie to the shirt, waistcoat, and of course, Batman gauntlet.

Oh man, and those are only the fees. My alma mater did the same thing -- chop up the cost of attendance into dozens of different ways to charge you money, leaving the official tuition looking perfectly reasonable all on its own. That was because the state college system had to hand over its revenues to the state and…

Oh thank god, I thought the title meant that we’d discovered an underwater supervolcano off the coast of Cape Cod.

As a bonus, you can help Kris Straub, the author, by doing stuff like buying the published version of the story (and other stories he’s written!), and supporting his other work, including the excellent horror webcomic Broodhollow: