From: lazlo@triton.unm.edu (Lazlo Nibble)
Subject: Re: Evan Dorkin and...El Santo (was Re: Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic)
Date: Sat, 09 Jan 93 07:41:11 GMT
Organization: Usenet Power Elite: Crush-The-Innocent-Newbies Strike Team
Distribution: na

dan@spiff.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Dan Parmenter) writes:

> Okay, I spelled El Santo's name wrong.  But I don't think that 
> invalidates my assertions.

You really didn't make any assertions to invalidate, Dan.  You expressed a 
lot of poorly-fleshed-out opinions and complained a lot, but that's about 
as far as it went.

> I agree with whoever it was who said that Dorkin obviously has no 
> affinity for a pair of metalhead characters like Bill and Ted, which is 
> why he transformed them into alternative wannabes.

How on earth do you get this from the movies *or* the comic?  Outside of 
the obvious Iron Maiden joke in "Excellent Adventure", the two movies 
never did *anything* that nailed B&T down as "metalheads", and outside of 
the T-shirts they wear, the characters do absolutely *nothing* in the 
comics that defines them as "alternative wannabes".

> Cartoonists like Dorkin seem to primarily function not by writing 
> stories, but by stringing together hip references and a lot of "attitude"  
> humor that seems more based on insulting and jockeying for superiority 
> than on real wit.

"Cartoonists like Dorkin?"  There's a *subclass* now?

If you ever pick up Dorkin's "B&T" issues again, try actually *reading*  
them instead of scanning the pages for "hip references" to get annoyed at.  
There are some wonderful stories in there, as good as or better than the 
stories in the two movies.  And the books are riddled with popular culture 
because a lot of what makes the Bill & Ted concept entertaining in the 
first place is the incongruity of seeing how characters like Napoleon and 
Death deal with things like water slides and "Planet Of The Apes" movies.
Without that kind of material, there wouldn't *be* a Bill & Ted.

> Consider this quotation from "Milk and Cheese": "You ass backwards MTV 
> watching top 40 singing backwoods jerkwater LOSER!"  That's pretty 
> typical of Dorkin's "humor".

By the same token, this straw-man excerpting is is pretty typical of the 
depth of your "analysis".  What does it accomplish, exactly, to take a 
random quote from some work or another and then use that quote as the sole 
support for your dismissal of the work?  Are we supposed to take this as a 
demonstration of some kind of insight?

(Consider this quotation from "Gone With The Wind": "I don't give a damn." 
That's pretty typical of Sydney Howard's "adaptation" of Margaret 
Mitchell's "writing" for this "movie".  Look, Ma!  I are a critic!)

Look, Dan, I don't have any problem with your not liking Dorkin's work. 
It's not to everyone's taste, especially stuff like Milk & Cheese (which 
even *he* admits is nothing but one loud bad joke repeated over and over 
again, though it's still a damned funny one sometimes).  My problem is with 
the way you pigeonhole the guy and then ascribe all sorts of nonsense to 
him that has more to do with the pigeonhole you've placed him in than with 
anything he actually *does*.  If you can't offer anything beyond a 
constant stream of snide dismissals, please don't bother the rest of us 
with it.  At least Dorkin's "attitude" manages to be entertaining.

--
Lazlo (lazlo@triton.unm.edu)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc