Is pecksniffery a word? If so, I'm adding it to my arsenal. If not, then it's a marvelous piece of invention, Omar.

I stand fully behind Graeme's right to be as pissy as he wants, and Omar's right to piss right back at him, but let's not forget who the real enemy here is: whoever the heck is editing Jeph Loeb on ULTIMATUM.

2. Your point is that you don't use a pseudonym? I think we can add "point" to the list of words whose meanings you don't actually know.

3. It's nice to see that your "last post" wasn't you last post, even with no intervening replies.

4. I think I've made it clear, repeatedly, that I don't want to talk to you. As far as I can tell, almost no one here wants to talk to you. The fact that you seem to be a prickly, irrational twit incapable of making anything resembling an argument for your putative positions may have something to do with that; your evident habit of entering a conversation by calling everyone in it a jerk or a moron, only to take umbrage when they respond in kind makes up the rest of the reasons not to take you seriously. We can't continue a chat about this like reasonable adults because you've ensured that I cannot perceive you as a reasonable adult; for that matter, you'd be hard-pressed to identify the subject matter of our "chat." I've been insulting you and tearing apart your conduct, and you've been indulging in increasingly self-contradicting bouts of pecksniffery and wounded non-sequitur.

You really don’t spend a lot of time on the internet, do you Graeme?

Actually, I do, Ted. I go to CBSG, well until today, because I thought it was a safe place to read great things about a hobby and interact with fellow fans and occasionally blow off steam.

I don't like starting a flame war, and so I feel I should apologize for that. And this is where I am getting off the ride.

2) Moreover, I at least use my real name instead of hiding behind an alias which was actually my point.

3) I am done here. "Omar", you can have the last word all you want. And since you do what you do anomynously you will, I am sure, continue to do it with impunity because hiding behind an alias enables you to do that.

4) If you want to talk with me, "Omar", feel free to e-mail me-- you can get my address from Brian-- with your real name and we can continue to chat about this like reasonable adults.

Bye

Who's bad mood started the problem here? Who lowered the tone -- in fact, did nothing but lower the tone -- and then started complaining that the tone was *gasp* lowered. Graeme showed up, took a dump in the comments, and then hung around complaining about the smell.

Some serious advice to anyone with a contrary opinion: if you have a problem with an assessment of Jeph Loeb's work, the best thing to do is to present an argument for Jeph Loeb's work. Don't imitate Graeme, making the conversation about how "good" or "bad" everyone here is rather than about...hell, whatever you want to say about Jeph Loeb's comics work. And know the comics you reference, as anyone discussing something should know their topic colorably well. Graeme's only reference to any real comic book got it wrong on the most basic details.

If you come to a comics site to argue, it helps to be discussing comics from the get-go.

You really don't spend a lot of time on the internet, do you Graeme? Because if this is a bad mood we've been in a bad mood for at least a decade. Don't go on IMDb, your head may explode.

In the interests of enlightening you, gentle readers, I shall now provide a proper example of hypocrisy: Mr. Graeme Burke, who had referred to posters here as, and I quote, "comic book fans [who] live up to the stereotype" and later explained that his opponents suffer from "the compulsive need to sound like idiots" has now told me what a naughty person I am for insulting him. This statement was not made in defense against me, as it appeared prior to my effort at verbal evisceration of the aforementioned victim of a cruel and capricious nature, Mr. Graeme Burke.

That would be definitive hypocrisy -- the setting forth of a moral standard one does not uphold, an the duplicitous pretense that one's conduct in the relevant matter has been unimpeachable. Fortunately, I do not profess moral disdain for insults, and can therefore now call Mr. Burke a thick-headed, functionally illiterate twerp for whom a keyboard and modem are instruments of inadvertent self-harm. Children everywhere should be brought out of school to point and laugh at the unfortunate Mr. Burke, the better that they might avoid his miserable example in life.

As I hate to speak entirely without support for my claims, I point you to an example of Mr. Burke's aforementioned functional illiteracy, to wit, his apparent delusion that Omar Karindu, a Marvel comics character, is "a Doctor Strange villain." In fact, in Karindu's only published appearances, he was an old friend of Strange's who safeguarded a dangerous mystical artifact. After Strange fell victim to the artifact, Karindu helped Strange's other allies free him from its malign influence. For those who, unlike Mr. Burke, are capable of understanding words, pictures and narratives, the story is summarized here: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/karinduomar.htm

I would submit that Mr. Burke inability to comprehend one of Gerry Conway's least nuanced stories in a long line of nuance-free stories, as well as his apparent failure to use Google to find a working summary thereof, ought constitute powerful if merely suggestive disclaimers regarding his opinions and readings of comic books in general, not merely those by Jeph Loeb. Added to his impressive series of malapropisms when attempting to pejoratively characterize others, I would further submit that his opinions on any thought expressed in any medium are suspect and likely worthless.

Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen of the Academy for the Hopeful Engoodening of Comic-Books. We may now return Mr. Burke to captivity, the better to observe and remedy his future imbecilities.

Sorry, T, I was in a pissy mood. I was having a bad day. We all were by the looks of it.

I have unsubscribed from this thread; I should have done so 50 posts ago.

Uh....thanks for the update, I guess?

ULTIMATES really was supposed to be AUTHORITY with Marvel characters, and I thought Millar sold that exceptionally well.

I vaguely remember Mark Millar claiming that The Ultimates was supposed to be pretty much the opposite of The Authority. Where The Authority was all about big scale widescreen action with whole nations getting wiped out in an instant, The Ultimates was on a much smaller scale with lots more time spent on characterisation and fight scenes only actually happening once in a half-dozen issues.

I don't think the truth is that extreme, but there is something to it.

Personally I just keep going after the Loeb thing because so many people say "well he used to be good" although, in my opinion, the weaknesses that fans recognize *now* are there in his older work, so I can't quite understand why the majority of fans seemed to have turned on him only now. So, my big question always is, how is something that suffers from huge, gaping plot holes like Hush "good" while something that suffers from huge, gaping plot holes like Ultimatum is "bad"?

But obviously enough people *must* like Loeb's writing (or at least Sale and Lee's art), or else he wouldn't have his 3 major Batman projects in Absolute Editions and an upcoming Animated Film based on "President Luthor goes bat$hit crazy for no other reason besides I can't think of a better way to get him out of the Oval Office" arc. And some of those people post here -- which, as T points out, is much less one-sided than the Liefeld or Austen hate, which is pretty much *everywhere*, including here.

I'd point out that the above doesn't have anything to do with the notion of "groupthink," but I think it's increasingly clear Graeme likes words he read somewhere else and vaguely understands mean something bad. Tune in tomorrow when he calls everyone "antidisestablishmentarian." When the big words don't work, he casts around blindly for his next pejorative and settles, of course, on something as blunt and content-free as "idiot" like Mark Millar working a close scripting deadline.

Jesus, Graeme, you can't even bitch about Internet posters competently. That's like needing directions to masturbate, only without the shameful trip to the emergency room after Yahoo! Answers perma-bans you for spamming. Or as Graeme calls it, how he spent his summer vacation.

Maybe I'm not being fair to Graeme here, using long sentences and full paragraphs and other things that make him tired, and cranky, and confused when he tries reading them. But on the upside, no one can turn around and accuse Graeme of "groupthink," since he's got no friends and doesn't appear to think.