zole.org

It looks like the Death To The Extremist Wikipedia entry has been un-marked for deletion. I don’t know why. The next time you try to look up some useful information and get my entry instead, feel free to shake your fist at the sky and shout MICHAEL ZOOOOOOOOLE!!!

One of the complaints raised in the deletion discussion was that there wasn’t much in the entry that you couldn’t discern from the DTE site, and that’s a valid point. I’m not going to edit my own entry, but if anyone wants to flesh it out, I can provide additional information on request. David Malki of Wondermark interviewed me a while ago, but I don’t think he’s put it up yet. (Which is a shame, because I have a great tirade against the term “webcomic”.)

In other news, I’ve received 736 spam comments in my first three blog-months. It started out slow, but now I see what all those blog-people have been talking about. Please yell at me if one of your comments gets tagged as spam, I’ve got a Roomba in there doing it and it’s not that great.

So, the Death To The Extremist article on Wikipedia, which for the record I’ve never touched, has been “marked for deletion” because DTE is apparently not notable due to a too-low Alexa rank.

I wouldn’t really mind, except this seems to be part of a mini-vendetta against articles about Web comics. Comixpedia comments on the deletion of the article on Attitude 3 (which DTE was featured in) and Jeff Rowland, who is notable just by virtue of being incredibly awesome, also has some good things to say.

This could spark a larger discussion of what constitutes notability in today’s world, but mainly I can’t believe web comic article are being considered for deletion while Wikipedia has a 3000+ word article on Donkey Kong’s animal buddies (complete with a discussion on why Yoshi is not technically an animal buddy). I’m a rabid gamer and I didn’t even know Donkey Kong had animal buddies.

Although I wrote Death To The Extremist for almost seven years, I’ve never thought of comics as my field. I was always more into music, and that kind of seeped into DTE in the form of many references to various bands. I was afraid to do this too much (more on that in a future post), but I was curious who I’d ended up referencing and how much, so the other day I sat down and made a list. It took about two hours, which is time I could’ve been using to do something else. I’ve included the list below, if that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in.

What I learned: I’m a big nerd who references They Might Be Giants and Devo a lot. This may be tempered by the fact that I reference Dr. Dre just as much, or it may just underscore why people associate me with Michael Bolton from Office Space. Also, I should point out that the number of references is not necessarily a reflection of how much I like the band, otherwise Shonen Knife and Veruca Salt would be on there like 16 times.

Legend: Direct references (i.e. name-checking a band) are in bold. References in the subtitle (hold your mouse cursor over the comic) are in italics. Some of these references are kind of obscure. If you’re curious what the hell I was thinking, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can explain.

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Seven comments on my first post! I feel like that is a better blog reception than I probably deserve. I realize that is probably a one-time-only thing, though. From here, I will have to blog-sink or blog-swim on the strength of my blogging skills. Also, I’m thinking I should never say “blog” again.

While Death To The Extremist is still over, I still have a bunch of “bonus material” sitting around on my hard drive, and thanks to some computer problems I wasn’t able to upload it all on January 2nd as promised. So, I’m uploading an “outtake” every day until I’m out (probably two more weeks’ worth) and updating the “Background Gallery” on Fridays. I’ve also uploaded the template I used to make Death To The Extremist along with the ill-advised Arcade font. Go ahead and fill the void with your own comics! Send ‘em to me and I’ll put them on the site, if you catch me on a good day!

Just to be clear, these are outtakes for a reason. This isn’t going to be like those Simpsons outtakes where the problem was that they just recorded too darned much hilarity and had to cut some for time. This is more like meat that is deemed unfit for human consumption but suitable for dog food. This is evidence that, contrary to what many have said, I do have a quality control process.

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Welcome to my blog. I’m very late to the blog party, so I don’t know if I need to make a grandiose mission statement or something. Mainly I’m just hoping I don’t come across like I think my ideas are totally important just because I installed WordPress.

So, I recently quit writing my comic, Death To The Extremist. I’ve been writing DTE on a schedule since sometime in 2001, albeit with some large gaps over the years. So far it’s kind of nice to be off the schedule, since DTE was getting a bit stressful. I never figured out a writing method more streamlined than “open Photoshop and attempt to have hilarious idea”, so each comic took hours to make. In the last year or so, my self-imposed deadlines caused me to run comics that sounded funny in my head but didn’t survive the trip out, and some I just wasn’t happy with. That comes with the territory, of course, but when you’re doing anything creative it’s important to have fun with it. Now that I think about it, it was probably a mistake to step up my schedule so aggressively. I did it to attract more readers, but really, if you don’t like my comic, I’m not sure 50% more of it is going to help. Anyway, that’s the long version of why I quit.

It was a tough decision, though! I will miss being able to turn a sudden obsession with an old L.L. Cool J song into a comic. Also, a bunch of people wrote in to say they were sorry DTE was going away, which is really flattering. I’ve always felt like the most basic version of “making it” as an artist (cartoonist, whatever) is to have people enjoying your work who don’t know you personally. The fact that my crazy talking circles comic “made it”, to some degree, is kind of hard to wrap my head around.

What’s next? There are a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to spend time on, and they’re not all Guitar Hero. I intend to learn Flash, for real this time. I haven’t written or recorded any music in a while; it might be time to get back into that. Maybe I should try stand-up comedy? Well, the main purpose of this blog is to share whatever I happen to do. I guess I could also just write in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.