§ Nice art: Tom Scioli’s variant cover for Monsterpiece Theater #1. Looking at this just makes me happy. I don’t know why. The Beat LOVES Monsterpiece Theater.
§ TRUTH: As great as it is, Scioli’s Monsterpiece Theater, which mixed Godzilla with Jay Gatsby, is NOT the first Monsterpiece Theater. That would be a segment on Sesame Street that feature Cookie Monster as “Alistair Cookie,” introducing various classics aretold via puppetry.
You have to be a certain age, I guess, to know that this was a take off on Alistair Cooke, the host of Masterpiece Theater, a PBS show that still runs as just Masterpiece. The Muppet version ran in the 90s though. Here’s one episode which takes on Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot.
You know, I am NOT a person who believes that everything was better in the old days. Often it wasn’t. But we were better (or at least younger) and thus the olden days seem more familiar and better.
That said, I’ll remind you that Sesame Street is a television show aimed at children aged 2-5. These tots of the 90s didn’t know who Samuel Beckett is, the definition of theater of the absurd, or why Waiting for Godot is a much discussed classic. Why make this segment then? Maybe it was just aimed at older kids. (I was way too old for Sesame Street ever but I did watch The Electric Company for the Spider-Man segments.) Maybe it was just aimed at the people who made the show. Or maybe it was just that learning about Waiting for Godot wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for small children back in the 90s. Even at age five, you may now know what “theater of the absurd” is but you know what is strange and uncanny.
Kids nowadays watch YouTube all the time. I know because when I visit relatives with small children (and I have many) the kids love to watch YouTube. According to Statista, the most subscribed to kids shows on YouTube include ChuChu, Masha and the Bear, Baby BumBum, El Reino Infantil, and so on. If you have kids you know better than I do. What I am curious about is whether these contemporary shows parody Waiting for Godot or maybe, Glen Garry Glen Ross. Let me know in the comments.
§ THE BEAT GOES ON: It was a strange week! A lot happened, and doubtless some of you have read many editorials from your favorite online media vowing to keep on and asking for your support.
Well, I am no different! Earlier this week, before all hell broke loose, Joshua Tyler, founder of the entertainment/tech site Giant Freakin’ Robot wrote an editorial called “The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot” in which he announced the site is shutting down, and explains it’s because Google is hellbent on killing independent publishing on the web.
GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT isn’t the first site to shut down. Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way. I’m in communication with dozens of other independents focused on different topics. None of them are doing well. They all expect to be out of business soon.
I went to Google directly, on their behalf, and told them about the problem. The message I walked away with, was that they do not care. Our industry is done.
Future entertainment news and opinion will come from AI recaps scraped and stolen from our archived content or from the big media companies backed by hedge funds that Google has chosen as its designated survivors.
Tyler shares gruesome traffic charts, showing a rapid decline since Google’ implemented their sadistically named “Helpful Content Update” last year.
The Beat’s traffic chart isn’t quite as gruesome (we haven’t been shadowbanned….yet) but it shows a similar decline. Part of what we’re penalized for is having pop-up ads, but without those ads I literally couldn’t eat or keep the site running. Google penalizes sites with ad networks because they want you to run only Google Ads, which pay less (I think) and so it goes in a never ending downward spiral. That AI is just scraping all our content in order to replace us is just the puke icing on the poop cake.
Anyway, as I do a few times a year, I humbly ask you
PLEASE SUPPORT THE BEAT ON PATREON.
If you think this site is worth $5 a month, please show us. I always promise to put more efforts into our Patreon, which is difficult with a volunteer staff and my own time constraints, but this time I mean it because it’s the only way forward.
The Beat really leveled up in its 20th year. We launched a sister site, K-ComicsBeat, sponsored by Tapas; and we did a TV show, Con Daily – or to give it its proper name, Con Daily, powered by @Comicsbeat, on #ElectricNOW. Those efforts took time and money to launch, although they are self supporting, time is finite.
And we’re going to do even more in our 21st year. (Con Daily season 2?) One of the things that is highest on my agenda is building our community. I’ve sort of let that come naturally over the years, but it’s clear that now is the time to build new channels to gather and converse.
We’ve stuck it out this far. How much farther are we going to go? I’m not certain, but I know we will all go there together. So thank you all for getting this far!
AND NOW BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED LINK BLOGGING:
§ When I saw Alan Moore trending on Twixxer going on about superheroes, I thought it was yet another interviewer who touched Alan’s hot button, but NO it was an actual editorial BY Moore, called “Fandom has toxified the world” and whaddaya know, he nailed it:
There are, of course, entirely benign fandoms, networks of cooperative individuals who quite like the same thing, can chat with others sharing the same pastime and, importantly, provide support for one another in difficult times. These healthy subcultures, however, are less likely to impact on society in the same way that the more strident and presumptuous fandoms have managed. Unnervingly rapidly, our culture has become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. Our entertainments may be cancelled prematurely through an adverse fan reaction, and we may endure largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate from those who think “gate” means “conspiracy”, and that Nixon’s disgrace was predicated on a plot involving water, but this is hardly the full extent to which fan attitudes have toxified the world surrounding us, most obviously in our politics.
I’ll let you figure out the rest. And here we are.
§ I last Kibbled in August (!) and I’ve been squirreling away links but some of them are looking dated, so a rambling assortment of chestnuts, starting with How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library by Willy Staley, which looks at how Netflix’s endless algorithms begat a sprawling wilderness of entertainment that no one can keep up with. And Staley’s symbol for this is….a Richie Rich TV show. Does ANYONE remember that? (It starred a young Jenna Ortega so maybe?)
“Richie Rich” was part of the early cohort of Netflix Originals, released at the tail end of the short era in which casual TV viewers could still keep track of what the company was producing. It premiered on the platform in early 2015, the same year as shows you probably know, and may even love, like “Master of None” and “Narcos.” Netflix was fresh off the enormous success of “House of Cards,” something the company could tell a nice story about: Seeing that its subscribers liked Kevin Spacey, David Fincher and the original British version of the series, Netflix bought a show that checked all three boxes. It was expensive to acquire, but Netflix could spend more on its programming because it knew what we wanted before we did.
“Richie Rich” tells a rather different story. The show was written and produced by a content studio called AwesomenessTV, which had recently been acquired by DreamWorks, which itself had recently acquired a company called Classic Media, a private-equity-owned concern that had been buying dormant intellectual property and had the rights to a bunch of backbench cartoon characters: He-Man, Voltron, Felix the Cat, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Baby Huey and, of course, Richie Rich. The show was originally conceived of by Awesomeness to air on YouTube, and it was shot with a YouTube budget. According to Jeff Hodsden, a creator of the show, Netflix executives showed up on set one day, and about a month later word got out that they would be acquiring it. You can still see the bumpers where commercial breaks were supposed to go.
And then Netflix was off to the races, borrowing billions and billions before it became the most influential platform in all of entertainment…all while churning out endless, endless content. More than anyone could consume. Anyway the whole piece is worth a read.
§ Very old, but I enjoyed this Crabcakes and comics: Celebrating the milestone years of SPX and Baltimore Comic-Con Which does the twofer of Maryland shows and talks to folks about their experiences and memories:
Tom King: When I first came into comics I did the Maryland con circuit with all the guys and women trying to break into the business. You know, Annapolis, little little shows and fire stations and stuff like that. I think I did 20 cons a year. Just hand selling my book and you get a little community of people who are all doing that and they’re still here and we’re all, you know, grayer and balder. And I’m fatter. But we’re still a community. We still support each other. We’re still, you know, working now. I haven’t noticed a huge change. It seems like the same nerdy stuff it’s always been. It’s a wonderful con. It’s focused on creators.
§ You may know Bruce Eric Kaplan as BEK, the New Yorker cartoonist who draws those funny, blobby people. But he’s also a TV showrunner, and he wrote a book about it: They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir
A darkly comic memoir about being a working creative person in a world that is growing ever more dysfunctional, by acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and television writer Bruce Eric Kaplan. In January 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life as a television writer in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad, which eventually became They Went Another Way.
I want to read this book! Kaplan was in the news again recently when he signed on as co-showrunner for the troubled but popular Netflix (!) show Nobody Wants This. I guess he’s still got some fight in him.
§ Remember NYCC about a million years ago? Bill Sienkiewicz preserved the memory of a dinner of hall of farmers, including Charles Kochman, Patrick McDonnell, Sienkiewicz, Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, and Matt Groening. CAN YOU IMAGINE what was discussed at this dinner of titans? Probably what TV shows they were watching.
§ Since this is so upbeat, let’s look at another dying industry, For Gag Cartoonists Wondering When Did Selling Become So Difficult; Part 1 from Bob Eckstein’s Substack. It is paywalled, because writing is not cheap, but even the intro is gloomy:
Connecticut is empty. You can’t give away fedoras. Time has a way of distorting pain. It was never easy breaking in but now I hear many colleagues in the cartoon field tell me they have stopped. Okay, now that all the latecomers are all caught up, grab a cup of tea and let’s look at this…
The point is comedy is in full stride of a shift in tone and style which veteran cartoonists, comics and humorists are addressing with varying degrees of success and disgust. Straight up joke-driven material now feels very, “oh, haven’t we heard that one before…” and audiences feel “if it’s not directly about me, I don’t care.” There are always exceptions and room for everyone but I think my generalizations here are correct.
§ Sam Thielman is reviewing Chris Ware, Frank Miller and Olivier Schrauwen at the NY Times. Schwauren is our man!
§ The Funko era enters a new, more spartan phase, ICv2 reports:
Funko is seeing warning signs in consumer behavior which are leading it to cut its sales guidance for Q4, the company said with its Q3 financials release on Thursday, the second under new CEO Cynthia Williams. “We are seeing some indications that consumers are increasingly looking for value, which among other things, has resulted in certain wholesale customers remaining cautious ahead of uncertain consumer spending during the holidays,” Williams said.
§ Just as we finally recovered from SDCC ‘24, the gears of SDCC ‘25 have been grinding into motion. The open badge sale took place on October 26th, but it was a bit of a disaster, as the whole system crashed – leaving some people who seemed minutes away from getting much coveted tickets coming away empty handed. The SDCC Unofficial Blog has info on the second attempt, which has been rescheduled for Saturday, November 23, and it’s good for the privileged among us who know they are going to get a badge to remember that many, many people only DREAM of going.
We don’t want to scare you, but the odds of purchasing a badge in Open Registration are a lot harder than in Returning Registration, simply because the pool of people wanting to score a badge is exponentially larger. But thousands and thousands of attendees manage every single year, and we’d like each and every one of you to go into the sale as prepared as you can be, to walk away with the golden ticket.
So: Are you ready?
Well, are you?
English (US) · 