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Penny Arcade - Comic - Illiterati
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Illiterati
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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1) Short-form fiction is a very well-established literary form.
2) Comic books can be seen as an offshoot of short-form fiction.
3) Tycho is the fictional alter-ego of a person who writes comics for a living.
can someone please tell me what in all blue hell is going on in the top right corner of this page?
He's offering a chance to plunder his booty for $10,000!
It's clearly an image of an elderly man dressed as a pirate. Hovering over the image indicates that it is a hyperlink to another webpage that concerns books targeted towards readers who read at a middle-school level (or, in all likelihood, middle-school students, since the adult segment of that demographic would be more than amply served by James Patterson's Bookshots™)
Isn't that Robert Pattinson?
Yes
but why
is the rum gone?
edit: and while Jerry's personal opinion might be exaggerated here for effect, there was definitely genuine indignation when he linked to this on twitter a few days ago.
I read those Maximum Ride books, and they always struck me as very childish writing. Like, he writes down to children, rather than respecting their intelligence. Did anyone else get that feeling? And then one of the books randomly goes for a full environmental message, which is fine, but seemed to come pretty much out of nowhere and be pretty preachy.
I would't pay 5 bucks for a James Patterson novella, though.
Based on my own personal revulsion, I'm guessing Tycho is objecting to Bookshot(tm) as a branded phrase, not to short fiction in general.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Still, I can't get too mad at someone who gets millions of adults to pick up a book, especially when if they weren't reading Patterson they might not be reading anything.
I just take umbrage with the amazingly ugly turn of phrase that is "bookshot."
Clearly he's really some kind of advanced supercomputer hidden deep in LB Books basement, designed to read market trends and automatically generate the perfect bestseller.
pretty sure a lot of those are more "James Patterson Presents: [author]"
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Question: Are these erotic novels?
Yup, most of "Patterson's" books are some amount of concept and outline work by Patterson proper then farmed out to a ghostwriter. Which is why anyone working at a bookstore will laugh at you if you come in saying you like Patterson and are looking for something similar (since each ghostwriter can vary wildly in style and quality).
You didn't envision a literary bartender, pouring words and paper into a shaker, and then into shotglass-sized covers?
I was actually looking for this one, but once I found it I discovered it was about another author (still funny though): https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/09/30/sanderfuge
-Tycho Brahe
Alternatively:
MHWilds ID: JF9LL8L3
Maybe Tycho just doesn't like popular authors. Except of course for the Anita Blake books.
That sounds like it could have been a prequel to The Lake House? It was about six kids who were half bird and half human who escaped from the laboratory that did the experiments on them. One of them was even named Max, I recall. The whole plot revolved around them laying low and then going back to bring an end to their captors before they could do any more harm.
Its one of two Patterson books I've read (the other was one in the Alex Cross series). The Alex Cross one was decent. The Lake House though? Holy shit was it ever generic and terrible in places. Some of it was some real amateur hour bullshit, quite honestly.
My wife felt the same way about Women's Murder Club and abandoned it midway through the second book. Looking at Wikipedia, he ostensibly wrote that not as YA fiction but for adults. So I think there's more to it than writing down to a younger audience.
I read some of his stuff, most of it's mentioned already in the thread. I just... I can't muster that much hate, because it's been so long that an author has actually managed to interest me*, so his stuff just seems normal lately.
*-The one exception is Kevin Hearne, who after repeated recommendations and a forced audiobook listen actually got me to break my personal rule against starting series that haven't been finished yet (because goddamn after having several authors in a row die or burn out on me in the middle of series I was enjoying, I started sympathizing with those book burning groups).
That said bookshots, seriously? I thought that was just made up but it's actually real. Can't he just call them light novels like the other 99% of the population instead of sounding like an asshole? Oh in English they are called Novella. I learn something new everyday.
I was thinking of some kind of drink recipe/origami book that taught you how to fold the pages into little shotglasses after you mixed the drinks.
On a separate note, has anyone seen the "Zoo" TV series? It's on US Netflix and it is positively dreadful. Some of the most wooden acting and horrific special effects I've ever seen, no clue how it made it to market. Although to it's credit, it does mirror the book in terms of quality.