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Our Timmy Okay, What the Hell? Posted 23:36 17th July 2007 This is getting ridiculous. Spot the difference, folks, between this comic and this one. The same basic premise in both - only one's a lot more obvious and subsequently a lot less funny. Check the dates on those puppies, too. Don't try to tell me Buckley doesn't read Penny Arcade, either. Everyone reads it. My half-blind grandfather doesn't even have the internet and he reads it. Probably. So if it is possible to more or less prove that Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a hollow facsimile of better strips, why then is CAD so successful? Because as long as morons draw breath there will always be a demand for the dumbed-down and obvious, especially if it ties in with a particular subculture such as, I don't know, video games for instance. If I ever start doing this - and by this I mean either borderline plagiarism or blatant pandering - just shoot me. Hunt me down using Google Maps and shoot me. Buckley vs Knowledge Posted 8:45 14th June 2007 I spotted a mistake in another comic and I was originally just going to make a short post in the forums of that comic and walk away but in the time it took me to trawl through the forum posts to make sure no-one else had pointed out the error (nobody had) I got so annoyed reading the consequences of the mistake, which cast new light on the original strip, that I had to look at the whole situation again. And that forum post has gained in mass as it rolled down the snow-slope of my consciousness and arrived at the bottom a news post. So here goes. If you look at the latest Ctrl+Alt+Del strip you can read Tim Buckley's response to a complaint made by the Church of England about the use of Manchester Cathedral in a video game. I don't want to get into the validity of the complaint at this point, rather Buckley's response to the situation in his comic. It includes the classic line - much quoted in the CAD forums - "Don't you dare use logic with me! I'm a priest!" Ooh, you kinda dropped the ball there, Tim. The Church of England doesn't have priests, only vicars. Last time I checked the Anglican church was Protestant. Remember that whole fall-out between Henry VIII and the Pope? Something about divorce? Closing down monasteries? Relationship between church and state changed forever? Ring any bells? Birth of the Anglican Church right there, my friend. Ouch. You don't think it matters either way? Well, the first page of the forum thread about this strip was nothing but people talking about the Catholic church. One guy even said "As a catholic, its always nice to see someone poke fun at the preists [sic] over something other then homosexuality." Way to go, Timmy. Way to go. Would it have killed you to use Wikipedia? By the way, this in no way reflects on Tim's intelligence but you've got to appreciate the sheer delicious ignorance of the joker who made the first post on that thread: "religous zealots ftw." Jesus Christ, that has to be the first time the C of E has been described as zealous. I guess that's the problem I have with the strip itself. It's the assumption that someone complaining about Sony (God forbid, no pun intended) is a zealot or illogical or a priest or an idiot. It's just fucking dumb. He could have used the opportunity to take the Anglicans up on, y'know, their actual grievance but instead he starts with "How dare you use our church in your video game!" and the whole thing descends from there into bullshit about God suing Sony over fictional representations of the real world which, as the guy in the strip points out, is a logically flawed self-defeating argument - the Anglican Church is thus thwarted. Or at least it would be if that was its actual argument. It's one thing exaggerating and extrapolating a flawed argument to its logical conclusion but the entire representation of the church's argument save the first sentence is from the fucking moon. That gets to me a little - Buckley sets up a straw man and his fans lap it up unquestioningly when he knocks it down. Let's look at reality for a second. Yes, the church doesn't want their Cathedral used in a violent video game. No, it's not because it's fictional (how does that make any fucking sense?) it's because there's a certain argument which, whilst I don't personally agree with it, is perfectly legitimate which suggests that if people do something in a video game (in this case shoot guns in a church) they may be more likely to do it in real life. Sony, by this argument, is encouraging violence in churches. That's the argument. If you don't agree with it, Buckley, argue with it. Don't just make up a whole new one totally divorced from reality and put it in the mouth of a 'stupid illogical crazy priest who wants to sue everyone' character because in my own experience of Rowan Williams (he's on the radio all the time) I've found him to be a quietly-spoken, eloquent and intelligent man. Compare that to this guy. Buckley has misjudged the whole situation and shown himself up to be an utter tit, along with the vast majority of the people in that forum thread. My reaction is always the same to any poisonous, offensive, knee-jerk ignorant remark whether it's a racist remark made at a party or an old man muttering something about gay people in a bus station. I instantly feel emotionally invested and an overwhelming desire to correct the person seizes me. It's not like I'm invested in this in any other way. I'm of the ethnic majority in my country and I'm not gay. I'm not even a fucking Christian. There's no bias here. The only reason why I'm offended by Buckley's comic is because it's stupid. The kind of stupidity that breeds more stupidity, the kind of stupidity that comes from someone who doesn't know the situation running off their fucking mouth nontheless - in this case talking about people he doesn't know who are members of a denomination he clearly knows jack shit about in a country he doesn't live in. All I can say is ouch. You really dropped the ball there. He Really Should Start Reading Penny Arcade Posted 16:42 (GMT) 29th October 2007 Right. I know revealing Tim Buckley as unoriginal is like exposing Hitler as a racist but every now and again Buckley makes a comic so glaringly, shockingly imitative of another strip that it transcends his usual watered-down, hackneyed banality and explodes into full-blown plagiarism. Tim's comic about the video game Eye of Judgement is just such an abomination. 24th August 2007 - Gabe and Tycho publish this comic on their website. 24th October 2007 - Buckley publishes this comic on his website, a full two months later. I don't blame him for waiting. Obviously two months is the exact amount of time it takes a community of artists and writers to forget what they've already read. Just read those two strips. The exact same idea, the same play on the meaning of 'judgement', the same mocking of characters' personal appearance from the 'eye'. Buckley's taken the exact same joke and re-done it. Badly. And in a way that isn't actually funny at all. Now, superficially (and this is the important part because 'superficial' is the level upon which Buckley operates and is in fact his definitive characteristic), superficially the comics look different to one another in that the character of 'the eye' is depicted very differently. In the Penny Arcade strip it looks like the PlayStation Eye, in Ctrl+Alt+Del it has a more fantastical appearance. Don't be fooled - Gabe and Tycho have done another, even earlier strip about that as well. Back in fucking May. So Buckley's ripping off two Penny Arcade comics at once. That's pretty impressive. Okay, so aesthetically it's unoriginal. But in the interests of fairness I must point out that, superficial similarities aside, the way the two comics are scripted is very different. Aside from both telling the same basic joke, the voice of the eye is distinctly dissimilar in Buckley's version. But wait a second... isn't that voice uncannily similar to that of another character we're familiar with? Perhaps I'm going overboard and I certainly do have a knack for identifying stark but probably coincidental similarities between characters. The fact is I don't know whether Tim Buckley even reads Penny Arcade. That itself, however, isn't really enough and it's no reason to not be outraged by these comics' similarities. After all, this isn't the first time this has happened. If Tim Buckley reads Penny Arcade he is a plagiarist, plain and simple. If Tim Buckley doesn't read Penny Arcade... what the fuck is he thinking? Whether he likes the comics or not, it's his responsibility as an artist to at least read the big ones like Penny Arcade and PvP to make sure shit like this doesn't happen. If I made a comic about, say, the PlayStation 3 dispensing kittens and then I read this I would refrain from publishing it. I'm not saying to be a cartoonist you have to read every other cartoon by everyone else to make sure you don't copy them and I know there are times when my own work touches upon ideas from other comics and from TV shows and this is unavoidable to some extent. But for Christ's sake Tim it's Penny Arcade. If you read no other webcomic, if you feel you are above reading the works of your peers to ensure you don't step on ideas they've already expressed, at least read this one. It's the biggest player out there and for someone who also happens to be doing a webcomic about video games there really is no excuse for not reading it. When you make these faux pas it just makes you look insular and irresponsible. And let's not forget this is if we are being charitable to Buckley and giving him the benefit of the doubt. The alternative, stated above in bold, is that he is a fucking thief. This isn't just one of those 'parallel thinking' things when two cartoonists make similar comics about the same video games within the same week and then laugh about how great minds think alike. Buckley had two fucking months to read Gabe and Tycho's comic. These guys are genuinely famous. They straddle the world of webcomics like colossi. They're casting long shadows. It's not enough to be kinda different anymore. You should be actively endeavouring to avoid those shadows. Look, I know Buckley's doing a lot better than me with his strip. That's precisely why I'm taking it upon myself to talk about his specific crimes - his peers are, of course, above such things. I don't care that he has more readers. In all honesty if I have to draw Ctrl+Alt+Del to get a Ctrl+Alt+Del audience, I'll stick with my smaller audience of intelligent men and women. I'd rather draw Life on the Fourth Floor than be Tim Buckley. In fact, I'd rather slam my genitals in a filing cabinet. Fucking hack. Buckley Grows Posted 18:36 (GMT) 27th April 2008 Hey check this out. And now this. It seems Tim Buckley has listened to my stern rebukes and stopped making comics eerily reminiscent of Penny Arcade strips! He's actually growing as a person. I can't wait till my strip is famous enough for Tim to coincidentally have the same idea as me a few weeks later. It's only a matter of time. Miscarriage of Justice Posted 14:36 (GMT) 14th July 2008 Has anyone been reading Ctrl+Alt+Del or however you're supposed to pronounce it lately? What the hell has happened there? It's been a while since I ranted futilely about Tim Buckley's shortcomings but I have focused in the past on his biggest flaw, the hopelessly derivative nature of his work. It seems since then he has developed a whole new flaw - horribly down-beat drama. Allow me to elaborate. Actually, before I do I'll stop myself. I've criticised Buckley for writing about the same topic as another writer and (accidentally?) writing the same material. So, full disclosure, I've watched Yahtzee's critique of webcomics and found it very funny. I suggest you go away and watch that before hearing what I have to say. He basically covers all of the main points here, definitively, forever. This is a seminal work of Buckley-bashing which will shape all future works. I prostrate myself before him. He has cut to the very heart of the matter - the ease with which Buckley does what he does, his refusal to accept criticism in any way and the eccentric and charismatic author-insertion persona who behaves like an idiot/jackass and is loved by everyone nonetheless. It's all there, it all fits, it sings. Since Yahtzee never actually mentions Ctrl+Alt+Del I fear I might be giving the game away. However, he does at one point mention "Bontrol-Bolt-Belete" so perhaps I'm not spoiling anything for you. He also says this: "Let's say, for sake of example, that you're sick of making Companion Cube jokes, and suddenly do a serious storyline about your female character having a miscarriage. Obviously, you'd need to have several blood clots in your brain to think this is a good idea; you're established as a wacky humour comic, so this is going to be an awkward tonal shift at best, and hugely disrespectful of the subject matter at worst." You might have guessed that this is exactly what has happened in Ctrl+Alt+Del. And I have to agree with Ben Croshaw on this one, it's an incredibly stupid move. Now for my thoughts. I'd be lying if I said the storyline hadn't affected me. I know people who have had miscarriages. I think even people who have never had children can understand to a certain extent the excitement and anticipation of pregnancy and how a miscarriage represents those hopes being crushed. We all get it. And so I was touched on an emotional level - even though I don't give a shit about any of the characters in Ctrl+Alt+Del. It's not my fault, I've never been given a reason to care about them, Tim has no idea how to write sympathetic characters. Still, this storyline got to me, not because it was well written but because I am a human being. Which makes me feel a little used and manipulated. I was thinking "What? This is how we're going to play it, Buckley? Miscarriages?" It's just mawkish. You feel dirty for being made to care about these characters by a writer going for the lowest-common-denominator tragedy. And that's what this is; the equivalent of winning a fight by kicking the other guy in the balls and running away. Yes, you've succeeded but you really shouldn't have had to go there to do so. And this whole pregnancy story arc felt like an after-thought anyway, like Tim rushed into it. One second, it's stupid jokes about glue and plans for a wedding, the next - BOOM - pregnancy. At the risk of sounding like a broken record I will point out the fact that February is the month PvP's wedding storyline got into full swing. I'm not saying it's related, I'm just saying. Anyway, because of its awkward pacing Ctrl+Alt+Del's pregnancy was never treated with any real emotional gravitas until it ended. And even now, in the aftermath, characters are working through their emotional problems in a way which does not equate to real human behaviour. In any way. In my years of reading Ctrl+Alt+Del I've noticed a tendency for Tim Buckley to rigorously apply logic to any human interaction. Two characters will argue, one will deliver an impassioned speech and the other will respond by pointing out exactly why that is illogical... and thus somehow win the argument. Defeated, the angry character will exclaim "Logic... my anger's mortal enemy." Or some such bullshit. Have you ever heard anyone say that? Yes, it's meant to be a punch line but only a few weeks before that punch line was a dead baby - now we're supposed to be in the realms of real human suffering. But instead, it's emotion being overcome by logic, drama for Vulcans. But we all know in our hearts that this rings false. Emotions cannot be rationalised, passion defies reason by definition. Whatever logic the head contributes, the heart will over-ride it. Heated arguments are never about who can provide the most reasoned response but about who can shout the loudest because that's the way humans work. Tim Buckley... just doesn't get us. I can't avoid the feeling that he would prefer us to all act like the emotionless robot character. I would argue therefore that he really has no business writing about miscarriages. And now it looks as if Lilah might be breaking off the engagement. I'll try not to roll my eyes. That's a nice message to send out to couples going through these kinds of problems - yeah, life doesn't really go on following a tragedy. But really, if anyone is going through something as sad as this in real life, are they really going to want to read about it in Ctrl+Alt+Del of all places, a strip which in between installments of a storyline about a dead foetus treats us to a one-off 'gag' about a man being rendered sterile? So... he can't have a kid either. Nice. No, not nice. That's just psychotic. What the fuck is he thinking? And really, if Lilah does break off the engagement over this it will be biggest plot hole ever, since she's managed to put up with her fiancée acting like a complete douche in every single previous strip. It's a retcon, really. Like I said before, he just doesn't get us. Which makes me wonder why I read Ctrl+Alt+Del at all. Why do I torture myself like this? Why do I keep coming back to a strip I don't find funny, one which is so badly written as to make me question whether the writer has ever spoken to people in real life? I think I read it because I still have hope, hope that it can improve. I get the impression he's trying, somewhat desperately, to make his strip work on a real emotional level, even if it's handled with all the delicacy and precision of a gorilla performing brain surgery with an electric shaver. As I said before, I've ranted in the past about how unoriginal Tim Buckley is. Well be careful what you wish for because this car crash of a storyline is Tim Buckley trying to be original. It is original, I'll give him that. But only because no cartoonist in their right mind would ever do this. At least, not this way. Another Coincidentally Identical Gag Posted 16:28 (GMT) 25th July 2008 I was
quite amused to find this comic on the Ctrl+Alt+Del website,
the site I mysteriously keep returning to like a dog returning to
its own vomit. Tim Buckley has Then again I can't crow too loudly since, for all my attempts at originality, my modus operandi has always been to create what is essentially a remake of Friends in the style of Family Guy - at least, back when both shows were funny. They've both rather lost their way as of late. But don't worry, the same won't happen to LotFF because it's not written by a team of people the membership of which is in a constant state of flux. No, the comic will always be written by me so it can't get any worse. Who am I kidding? As if it could get any worse. Here are two external links which illustrate similar points better than I ever could: Tim Buckley's Guide to Sexism in Webcomics by Refried Yahtzee's trenchant critique of Buckley's writing style (Scroll down to '23/03/08: You CAD') |
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