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The rest, not so much. Basically other than rule 1 I don't see why the publishers should do anything other than whatever they think makes the most business sense. That obviously is tempered through the fact that if they screw fans around too much, fans will stop buying their comics.

Too vague for my purposes. I preferred to write about putative "rights" in reaction to a handful of much more specific pet peeves; cases where it's much easier to gauge whether or not a "rule" is being "broken."

I mean, you can point at any comic book you think is awful, and call it "bad," and the creative team can just reply, straight-faced: "No, no, no! We worked hard to make it a GOOD comic! What a shame that YOU just don't appreciate it properly!"

Or to put it another way: To make such a rule stick, you'd have to define exactly what makes a comic a "good" comic, and then get everybody else (or at least the overwhelming majority of all interested parties) to accept your definition exactly the way you had written it. (Good luck with that!)

Doug Atkinson said:
"And I have to call foul on the P.S. referring to “well-justified complaints” after a list of complaints that don’t have justifications, examples, or any room for counter-arguments.

Providing specific examples of pet peeves struck me as being contrary to the general purpose and appropriate tone of a "Bill of Rights" (even one that wasn't meant to be taken completely seriously). The original Bill of Rights, comprising the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, did not mention any specific complaints of bad behavior on the part of the British government which the United States had just recently rebelled against. It's my understanding that the painful memories of bad British behavior helped inspire the composition of at least some of the amendments in the Bill of Rights (maybe all ten of them, for all I know!), but rehashing those old arguments by spewing out fresh tirades of anti-British propaganda was never the mission statement of the Bill of Rights itself.

Or, to put it another way, I WASN'T trying to build up an airtight case against any particular writer, editor, etc. I wasn't trying to recruit people for a vigilante mob to go track down and tar and feather one particular person in the industry. I was trying to make more general statements -- statements triggered by various pet peeves, but I wasn't trying to start rousing debates on the Pros and Cons of one particular writer's story arcs on a Superman title, for instance. (If that were my mission statement, I'd simply do it that way on a Superman forum.)

Incidentally: Just in case it wasn't clear on the first pass . . . the passage in which I briefly mentioned "well-justified complaints" did not say and was not meant to imply that EVERY complaint made by any modern comic book fan should automatically be considered a "well-justified" one.

Doug Atkinson also said:
"(Besides #2, #4 is unnecessarily absolutist–Sandman has been getting along fine for years collecting the short stories separately from the arc stories, thank you. #3 is self-justifying and can be used to justify any fan behavior, no matter how bad. #9 and #10 assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer. And so forth.)"

On your point about #4: I've only read a couple of TPB collections of Sandman arcs, many years ago, and decided the title really wasn't my cup of tea. So I certainly can't claim to be a certified expert on the details of what has been done right (or wrong) in its TPB reprints in general. However, looking back on it, I note that I specifically said, regarding my preferred reason for issues of a title to be collected in order:

"so that the internal continuity, with its gradual development of long-term subplots, etc., actually makes sense to anyone reading the TPBs as they are successively released."

If Neil Gaiman's shorter stories about Morpheus were carefully written to be as self-contained as possible, without spending a few pages at a time showing the slow development of little subplots in the background that would become central to the plots of other stories in the future, then he neatly AVOIDED the problem I refered to, but did it in a different way than the solution I was advocating. (And good for him, I say!)

On your point about #3: I simply don't see it as justifying "any fan behavior, however bad." That's an incredibly sweeping statement. In #3, I was only talking about free speech in online forums -- a venue wherein there's no face-to-face contact, no risk of physical violence, etc. I wasn't talking about (for instance) stalking people in real life, or being violent toward people who have aroused your ire, or stealing anybody's property, or any of the other horror stories I've heard about the lunatic fringe of fandom . . .

On what you said about #9 and #10: Frankly, I don't think I follow your meaning when you claim they both "assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer." Could you please elaborate a bit?

Doug Atkinson also said: "An actual well-justified list is one thing; a rant is another; disguising one as the other and being disingenuous about it is quite another thing altogether."

Huh? "Disingenuous"? At the end I specifically CALLED my own silly list a "rant," so where does "disingenuous" come in? I thought I was being quite candid about what I had just perpetrated!

Same goes for this blog comment- if one of the people running CSBG decides they don't like this comment and want to delete it, they can, and they're within their rights to do so. I'm pretty confident they won't, which is why I'm making this comment in the first place, but there is overall a centralized control, by _somebody_, for pretty much any comment on the Internet these days.

Lucion - I agree about the Starman trades. But maybe that rumored big hardcover series will do a better job.

I would be pretty happy if I could just have #1 come true. I buy trades for the most part, but when I buy floppies I read reviews to find out if it is a self-contained story or at least part of a one-title story arc. I think it's ridiculous that I have to do research to ensure I don't become ensnared in Countdown to Planet Armageddon CompleX. Actually, I'd like to see a banner, similar to the Civil War/Countdown logo across the top of the book saying, "Not part of a company-wide crossover!" like Nextwave #11.

Jeff Holland, that makes me sad hearing about how messed up the Starman trades are. I have heard a lot of good things about the series and wanted to pick it up in trades sometime soon, but learning that they did such a poor job with it is dissapointing.

But aside from that, I'm in TOTAL agreement with you. You'd think these writers that keep doing stupid things like we're always griping about... It's like they're not fans of the medium or of the characters.

Because you don't. "Good comics" is ultimately a matter of personal taste. The person who loves Scott Pilgrim may loathe New Avengers, but that doesn't mean there aren't people who love New Avengers and wonder what the hell is up with all those videogame references in the kiddie comic all the critics keep pimping.

Taste is subjective, so "good comics" is ultimately a shifting value. Except for Immortal Iron Fist. If you don't like that, there really is something wrong with you.

I was on DC's own boards. Fan Alpha (to invent a name) said something. Fan Beta said something in response that included some trace of irony or sarcasm -- not expressed as a scathing personal attack, but at least meant to inject a note of humor into whatever was being discussed (I can't remember the original topic). Fan Alpha said, very snippily, that it was totally inappropriate to use sarcasm in that fashion on these boards.

I was AMAZED at Fan Alpha's arrogance in acting as if he were a self-appointed Maker of Rules of Conduct on DC's Boards. He didn't seem to have any formal authority (such as being an official moderator hired by DC), but he still seemed to feel he had the right to invent a "rule of etiquette" out of thin air, to suit his own taste, and to then lay down the law about what good and polite fans would or would not say in future conversations on those boards!

Some of us (including yours truly) responded to him rather critically, and others simply ignored him. I don't recall a single case of anyone saying, "Fan Alpha, you have opened my eyes! Never again will I commit the terrible sin of offending people by using sarcasm on these boards!" (Frankly, if anyone had said that, I would have suspected him of being extremely sarcastic.)

Nor, for that matter, can I judge whether or not the first version of the origin story fell into the category of "a good solid origin story" I mentioned above, since I've never read the actual story! Just summaries of the basic idea.

(Although I've known for years that, apparently by an incredible coincidence, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing had similar origin stories when they debuted almost simultaneously at different companies, and the writers in question (Len Wein on Swamp Thing and Gerry Conway on Man-Thing) were roommates at the time they wrote those origin stories . . . but apparently they both swear they'd never even compared notes as they were working on those creations!)

Actually, I think a lot of these rules can be boiled down to, "You have a right to expect honesty from the people you're giving money to. This doesn't mean they have to tell you the truth when you ask, 'Hey, is Captain America dead?', but it does mean that they have to deal with you on an above-board basis. If they write a story, they don't get to ignore it or retcon it away as soon as it becomes inconvenient. They don't get to say, 'This is our last crossover,' then do another big crossover two years later and say, 'We never said that was our last crossover.' They can't say, 'Continuity isn't important, we're all about telling good stories' when they get caught in a blatant continuity error, then demand that you buy 'Countdown'. They must, fundamentally, stop relying on tricks, gimmicks, and flashy 'nothing will ever be the same again!' changes, and focus on telling good stories, or otherwise their readers will feel cheated, get jaded, lose interest, and walk away from the hobby."

And, of course, rule #11: "We, as comic fans, have a right to a 'Hawk and Dove' series."

I own all the individual issues of Starman, too, but thought I'd go for the collections, as they're easier to break out on a whim and lend to friends. But the first two trades (which I just to catch up to the monthlies) omitted the early "Times Past" stories, which had to be reprinted out of order in a later all-TP trade. The Shade miniseries, which is pretty important for Grand Gugnol, hasn't been collected yet, nor has the 80-Page Giant. Only the main "secret files" story was reprinted (the whole thing, particularly the timeline, is really illuminating). And I'm not sure if the romance-themed annual (one of my favorite parts) ever got collected. Which is a shame, because though the breaks could be frustrating on a monthly basis, when read in large chunks you can see that the TP and specials were very placed very specifically in the narrative.

Several years ago I was in a used-book store. There was a TPB of "Maximum Carnage" available, cheap. I have a shameful confession to make: Not only did I buy it, but I then took it home and read it. Yes, ALL the way through. (By the time I finished, I certainly understood why the previous owner had been willing to trade it in at the store.)

So I know what you (and your brothers) suffered.

I was certainly going for an ironic or sarcastic tone in general (I always have trouble telling those two things apart) -- sorry if you felt it went downhill in the last few items. But as long as I was ranting and raving about things I can't actually change, I figured I might as well not pull my punches . . .

It might amuse you to know that #9 and #10 were actually written long before some of the earlier material that you say you found more tolerable. I didn't write those various "rights" in the same order in which I posted them. If anything, #10 was meant to laugh at myself as much as at anyone else, since I was basically admitting that while I may (pretty much) agree with the sentiments expressed in this silly Bill of Rights, I am keenly aware that I have no way to "enforce" them, so the entire piece is all pretty pointless except for any entertainment value it may have for my fellow diehard fans who share some of my pet peeves . . .

And I have to call foul on the P.S. referring to "well-justified complaints" after a list of complaints that don't have justifications, examples, or any room for counter-arguments. (Besides #2, #4 is unnecessarily absolutist--Sandman has been getting along fine for years collecting the short stories separately from the arc stories, thank you. #3 is self-justifying and can be used to justify any fan behavior, no matter how bad. #9 and #10 assume that everyone in the industry has to think the same way as the writer. And so forth.) An actual well-justified list is one thing; a rant is another; disguising one as the other and being disingenuous about it is quite another thing altogether.