Friday - October 1, 2004:

Wow is that one of the darkest strips I've ever read (sexy losers, that is), funny but dark. It certainly seems to have an audience though.

The Presidential debates held my attention this year. I waited all night for the word flip-flopper to come out and it didn't. I waited for the candidates to interrupt each other and they didn't, not once. I hoped there would be at least one "and you're no Dan Quayle" line and there wasn't. I thought Kerry stood up straighter, but the President looked like he was just there to hang out, both have their supporters, I guess. I don't know who did a better job. As I've said, I'm probably biased for Kerry but happy with neither. I thought he spoke more clearly and with fewer of the abstractions that bother me so much about Bush. I'm not sure where the Bush campaign got "we've climbed the mountain and can descend into the valley of freedom." It sounds Biblical and I hope the writer who came up with it gets paid lots. It was interesting to me that the spin doctors who followed the debate on every network were far more articulate than either candidate. Finally, I'm pretty sure Kerry promised to raise taxes. That's been a death knell in the past though I'm not sure any candidate has ever admitted they would raise taxes during an election. Oh yeah and Bush is shorter. Now back to comics.

I felt a little guilty reading "Sexy Losers". The strip regularly breaks every sexual taboo there is, with its characters laughing or digging for a punch-line while they do. There is not really a plot but several themes corresponding to each taboo. One can read through all strips of a certain theme. I could not be paid enough to dig through the whole archives to do a more thorough review, though I know of at least two that have been done in the past few months, one for the Web-Comics Examiner, for which I write and the other for Comixpedia, I think. I wonder if the strip's readership is very public about it. I had never even heard of it until the review appeared in the Examiner, but I'm not much of a pop-web-comics trawler. This brings me to my problem, does my mention/use of the strip in "HB" legitimize it? It certainly does a bit of advertisement, but I think I have very few readers at this point anyway. So, do I have a moral obligation to hide or not mention something that I am morally opposed to? Well, my goal with "HB" is to stimulate a little discussion. I imagine this could do the trick. don't misunderstand me; I would defend their first amendment rights to create "Sexy Losers" as a matter of course. I did, after all, spend the past nine years teaching about democracy and government in a history classroom, but should a web-comic creator's or viewer's responsibility extend beyond protecting their freedom of expression?

I tried once as a teacher to take a very public stance on an issue about which I felt very passionately, Indian mascots. My whole department was involved. The vast majority of the town and school and local newspapers was quickly arrayed against us and after a year-long battle, the history department lost some of the high esteem in which it was held. We won a couple of small concessions in the process, but it is not a process I would like to go through again. I think, looking back, that we picked our battle poorly, but the experience was an important one in my life. When does moral conviction necessitate action? What would constitute action for a web-cartoonist? What would be the purpose?What would be the purpose? Inevitably, the more people talk about the problems with the strip, the more popular and profitable it'll become, but does all of that lead to acceptance? Hasn't it already?

-Bob Stevenson