« Five Years Later | Main | Woof. »

September 12, 2006

John Byrne: Surrender Monkey.

John Byrne has given up the good fight against . . . emoticons.

I've fought the good fight for as long as I've been online. Here in the Forum, we've made pretty good headway ----- but out in the real world, a whole generation has grown up that is incapable of reading context into the printed word without little signs and signals to tell them how to think. The English language survived for a few hundred years without accent marks or umlauts or any of those appendages other languages seem to need -- but the InterNet has made it impossible for people to tell "I'm gonna moider that guy!" is a joke without :-) or after it.

So I give up. Emoticons. Use 'em if you got 'em. From now on, I'm going to. :-P

This is a crying damn shame. We live in a world that has emoticons, and those emoticons have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Joe Quesada? John Byrne has a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You have the luxury of not knowing what he knows. That saying Hispanic women with blonde hair look like hookers in the total absence of an emoticon, while tragic, probably saved lives. And that his existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want John Byrne on that wall, you need John Byrne on that wall.

Posted by YMB Staff at September 12, 2006 08:00 AM