🎨 Artcow Iconoclast / Jonathan Mack Sweet - The Chris-Chan of Arkansas

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Meowthkip said:
Never stopped Gonterman.
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It's the damnedest thing, because I was just thinking about that Sailor Moon USA story he wrote and thinking about how much he comes off like our pal Sweety in it. Casual racism, disturbing sexual fetishes, wanton display of his white-trash roots, constantly portraying himself as a victim, using the story as a vehicle for his political views...the similarities between Sweets and Gonty are eerie.
 
Shadow Fox said:
It's the damnedest thing, because I was just thinking about that Sailor Moon USA story he wrote and thinking about how much he comes off like our pal Sweety in it. Casual racism, disturbing sexual fetishes, wanton display of his white-trash roots, constantly portraying himself as a victim, using the story as a vehicle for his political views...the similarities between Sweets and Gonty are eerie.
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Except Gonterman at least lightened up in later years and embraced his Ed-Wood-of-webcomics reputation. Also he actually seems to be making comics because he likes to make comics, whereas Sweetums is still trying to use his comics as a vehicle for Fame and Fortune™.

Also I can get enjoyment and entertainment out of Gonterman's comics. I get neither from Sweets'.
 
I've said it before, but holy hell, Iconoclast comics are hard to read. And it's not because the material is too advanced.

Also, there's a whole town called "[J-word] Junction" in the comics? Damn.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
I've said it before, but holy hell, Iconoclast comics are hard to read. And it's not because the material is too advanced.

Also, there's a whole town called "[J-word] Junction" in the comics? Damn.
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Yes. Not only did Sweet name his CWCville a racial epithet, he wrote a detailed wiki article about it.

He explicitly addresses the racism in a section of bold text.

Jonathan M. Sweet said:
The deliberate use of a racist slur to name a town is perhaps the most in-your-face statement I could make on the state of America. It's as if New York took The Reverend Jackson's suggestion seriously and renamed New York City "Hymietown", or changed the name of San Fransciso to "Gaywad Gulch". It's not even meant to be offensive; it's intended to be laughable, it's so over the top. It's holding up a mirror to society and watching it squirm at the sight of its own ugliness. I see Jigaboo Junction as the logical outcome of forty or fifty years of rampaging liberalism: a town so racially polarized and corrupt it's become a caricature, an absolute joke. Aspects of this really do exist over in real-life cities like Memphis and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina--folks who are so beat down by generations of dependance, leftist thinking and entitlement that all hope and ambition is bled from them. I do not consider myself a racist; I think that word is so overused by the left that it's become silly and meaningless--a party-game word, like "abracadabra": just chant it and poof, your enemy's credibility magically disappears. Go visit Africa, fartknockers--the Sudan, Darfur--then come back and tell me about real, hard, substantive racism, not this "wah, I can't get a cab at two a.m" shit, then maybe I'll take your dumb ass seriously. Morons. I just call it what it is: a town of, for, and about everything negative in man, as embodied by the black thugs that rule its nights.
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Taking Sweet's claim about not being a racist at face value, one wouldn't expect to find anything racist elsewhere in the very same article.

Not a racist said:
Jiggabeaux Corners swelled, soon sprouting small satellite communities like Jiggsboro, Jiggsdale, Jiggsburg, Jiggton, East Jiggton, Fagetteville (named for its prosperous cottage industry of prepackaging fagots, or dry bundled sticks for burning), Pickaninny Flats, and Honkeyburg (named for Mad Jeff's second wife, Sara Honkey). Shortly after it fully incorporated in 1889 the town was renamed Jigaboo Junction.
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Totally not a racist said:
As seems obvious from the name, perhaps the town is largely minority, mainly African-American and some Hispanic. The town gained an influx of blacks during the Reagan administration, which settled mainly in the poorer quarters and within twenty years had integrated and become a burden on the school system, quadrupled crime, and virtually ruined the downtown area. "A Flip of the Coin" gives Jigaboo Junction's population as around 22,000 souls. The fallout from the Rodney King verdict has deeply scarred the city, however, and may have affected both the population's demographics and numbers. It is said that a fire set at the town dump in 1992 by rioters still burns to this day, despite both attempts from the fire department and drunken hoboes urinating on it to put out the flames.
This is based on actual data culled from and observed in Blytheville, Arkansas (pop.15,620 in the 2010 census) [4], where the creator grew up.
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Definitely not a bigot said:
The city is divided into three basic zones: red, for areas of large black gang activity, yellow, for those with moderate activity, and blue, for areas with minimal gang threat. The railroad tracks is the town's largest red zone, and seems to bisect the city like a scar, being visible in the background in a number of stories. A frequent running gag is any white character who ventures onto the tracks being approached by a gang of blacks who simply appears from nowhere, armed, and beats them without any provocation. Most of the Warriors live in a nearby yellow zone, which is said to be "not the bad part of town--you have to walk half a block and turn left to get to that".
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And yet...and yet...and yet...Sweet seems always teetering on verge of self-awareness. One page on his confusing, antiquated website appears to be a selection of short stories he uploaded in 2005. In it, the narrator describes a "novelist" who is very likely a reference to Sweet's favourite topic - himself.

Like I said, this isn’t a novel, and I’m not a novelist. Just a guy telling you what happened. You want novels, check out something by that crazy guy upstate in the ‘Heel, the one that wrote all those books filled with cuss words and conspiracy theories. She had a couple of his books. Read them in study hall. She liked them. To each his own--another thing they say. I’d ask who "they" is, if I cared.

***

That writer I told you about? He lives up that way--the other side of the state, with the school shooters and the plane-bombers, and spends his life writing books full of racist, sexist little remarks and folks farting and throwing up on every other page. Makes you wonder what sort of people Southern colleges are turning out, giving each one a diploma and a pat on the po-po as they shove them out the old revolving door. I ain’t decided which he is yet. But I don’t blame him. He’s the symptom, but not the disease.
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Deep down, Sweet probably acknowledges that he frequently says racist and misogynist things - but takes issue with the labels "racist" and "sexist". It's an odd position.

Also, the story shows Sweet revisiting subjects he covers on a recurring basis: school shootings, the debauchery of college life (and its fattening food) and...underage girls :(

There’s something about the South. Cartographers--folks who make maps--call it a "tropical depression", which is another way of saying the land dips so that it grabs the heat and holds it in. Makes the girls’ breasts ripen faster, I think, like peaches somebody kept in the trunk of their car too long in the summer, or in a basement where ventilation is poor. Don’t know if it ripens the boys’ parts up early too--I don’t look, God, no--but I can safely say the sight of all that ripe and abundant lil’girl-flesh makes a lot of the older goats plain crazy with lust. Just look at that judge upstate, the one who got scared when those pictures turned up of him with that underage girl and hung himself. That was more than twenty years gone, and folks still talk about it. He wrote a suicide note in his Bible, they say.
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Mean crazy’s those kids that shot up that school. Not Columbine. That’s the one they talk about all the time when they get on TV and magazines and go into their song and dance about school violence, but I mean the one that happened a year before that. Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden’s baby. Right down the road from that same college, matter of fact. What the hell is it about colleges? I’ll bet college towns’ crime stats are right off the map; same with teenage pregnancies, because you’ve got horny college boys cheek to jowl with ripe underage virgins, and the booze flowing like water, and no parental supervision. A lot of those college kids are fresh out of high school themselves, really--it’s their first time away from Mom and Dad, and they go nuts. It isn’t just food. Not only their middles get the "freshman fifteen"--life turns into a free buffet of sin and porn and vice, and for that first year away at school they just gorge themselves. Most come up sadder and wiser by the time their second year rolls around, I would hope.
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Another wiki page about one of his characters, another confirmation of Sweet Bro's inability to let go of the past. The same character appears in two separate stories about a man wrongly forced out of his job by a conspiracy.

Shalp's parents threatened to sue the university for their daughter's death, but agreed to settle out of court if Gregory--whose experiment was unsanctioned by the university, thus making him an ideal goat--was terminated. Gregory was given a perfunctory hearing by the seven regents of the board, which included two of his friends--Leo Greer and a fellow associate professor from his department named Asa Tarch. After a week of "deliberation" Gregory was asked to step before the board again. The doctor benevolently said he only did what he did because he was "blinded by greed" and had no "malific intent", adding that he humbly hoped the board would be guided by God in their decision. Greer then coldly told him he was fired. Gregory protested, then went mad with rage. He started screaming, whereupon he was escorted from the room; he then threatened the board, saying, "You will know fear." After this Gregory suffered a nervous breakdown. He spent several months in a mental institution, disappearing shortly after.
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Rasputin was also the (unseen) villain of "Beautiful Dreamer", the first commercial fiction by author and artist J.M. Sweet, and third story in the Almasheol collection. Rasputin appears only as a nonspeaking character in the courtroom during the murder trial of former ad executive Albert Watson, who is drawn to the man's eyes in the galley. He thinks how shiny and bizarre they are, "like a pair of glass marbles mounted in the eye sockets of a dead head", and wonders if they are contacts. Later, in prison, he recieves a letter signed Dr. Nicholas Gregory, describing the horrific experiment that Watson has unwittingly been a part of. Watson was fed a plagiarized idea and fired from his job. Later, under a post-hypnotic suggestion planted in his head through radio static, he murders his boss and three top board members of the rival firm, who had produced the original ad he had supposedly stolen. The letter ends saying that Watson was the beta test and the cryptic promise "There will be others", When he tries to show the letter to a guard to clear his name, it turns out to be just a credit card application; the text with Gregory's confession had been another implanted suggestion.
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Using sexualised terms to describe underage girls appears to be a recurring feature of Sweet's work.

The Belch Dimension comics feature a character named Angela who is canonically 15 years old, and his self-insert's love interest. She is apparently often shown in "skimpy" outfits.

Angela has a natural knack for mimicry, and often assumes character roles. Her most frequently-used persona is "Dr. Ruthless Eastheimer"--which is basically just her in a skimpy nurse's outfit, though even while looking her full in the face the bad guy always fails to recognize her!
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I've also noticed something. With CWC, A-Log, and Iconoclast, the stories they make up are really limited in scope to where they live IRL. CWCville is in VA, stories by A-Log are apparently set in NY, and Iconoclast comics are set in the MO/AR area. The settings seem to be limited, contemporary, and mundane overall. Why not a medieval fantasy world, or a scifi space opera type setting, for example? (Yeah, Sonichu had "RuleCWC" in it, but overall, the setting is CWCville.)

Anyway, I don't like labeling stuff as "racist" or otherwise offensive when it isn't, but there is clear racism in Iconoclast comics. And no, I'm not much of a leftist, if I even am one at all.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
I've also noticed something. With CWC, A-Log, and Iconoclast, the stories they make up are really limited in scope to where they live IRL. CWCville is in VA, stories by A-Log are apparently set in NY, and Iconoclast comics are set in the MO/AR area. The settings seem to be limited, contemporary, and mundane overall. Why not a medieval fantasy world, or a scifi space opera type setting, for example? (Yeah, Sonichu had "RuleCWC" in it, but overall, the setting is CWCville.)
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This is a very good point, and one I hadn't realized until you pointed it out. I think that it has something to do with the fact that these guys are so completely focused on themselves and their experiences. Couple that with a life where they haven't really been intellectually challenged (I presume), and you end up with someone who's not only quite myopic, but rather unimaginative as well.

ToroidalBoat said:
Anyway, I don't like labeling stuff as "racist" or otherwise offensive when it isn't, but there is clear racism in Iconoclast comics. And no, I'm not much of a leftist, if I even am one at all.
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Oh, no, Jon is clearly being rather racist here, and it's not surprising. He has a history of grouping people together and putting those groups down when they somehow bother him (black people, rich "townie" girls, liberals, the old staff at the Herald, etc.). Jon sees himself as a weak, put-upon person. Bigotry may be one of the few ways he's able to make himself seem bigger than those who perpetually overpower him.
 
Cooking with Dr Belch

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The way Sweetums dissects his own writing like he's performing a scholarly analysis of famous literature is so surreal to me. It's all very Branson Crabgrass.



Here, the author uses the humorous soubriquet "Sweetums," punning on "Sweet," the surname of his subject, in a satirical jeu des mots. Furthermore, the author describes Sweet's verbiage as "surreal," meaning, "very strange or unusual : having the quality of a dream."

"Branson Crabgrass" is, of course, the beleaguered protagonist of Ca Ira's seventeenth book, "Stories From Ragweed Bend," in which the eponymous Crabgrass, after a series of idiosyncratic and rustic adventures through the fabled backwater byways of the deep Midwest, is beaten senseless by a horde of rampaging negroes.
 
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wow

Finally found Sweet explicitly coming out and saying that he thinks the Virginia Tech gunman was in a similar situation to his own - was being "led on" by "some upper-class trollop", and he "handled it badly". (Source, backup)

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He then once again brings everything back to himself, because a book he was trying to get published at the time is "sympathetic to a stalker" who shoots two people over a college relationship gone sour.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
I've also noticed something. With CWC, A-Log, and Iconoclast, the stories they make up are really limited in scope to where they live IRL. CWCville is in VA, stories by A-Log are apparently set in NY, and Iconoclast comics are set in the MO/AR area. The settings seem to be limited, contemporary, and mundane overall. Why not a medieval fantasy world, or a scifi space opera type setting, for example? (Yeah, Sonichu had "RuleCWC" in it, but overall, the setting is CWCville.)

Anyway, I don't like labeling stuff as "racist" or otherwise offensive when it isn't, but there is clear racism in Iconoclast comics. And no, I'm not much of a leftist, if I even am one at all.
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There are plenty of actual writers that set a lot of their stories around where they lived: Stephen King has a lot of his stories take place in Maine, for example. An author can make their home state or hometown into a living, breathing place, showing a part of it that outsiders may not be familiar with, and appealing to locals who could read those works and say "Oh hey! I know that place!"

Chris, A-Log and Sweets only end up showing how tiny a pool of reference they have and end up limited by the fact that they rarely stray far from their home states, let alone their own houses.
 
Absinthe said:
Jonathan M. Sweet said:
I do not consider myself a racist ... everything negative in man, as embodied by the black thugs that rule its nights.
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I love how quickly he goes from "calling someone racist is just a cheap way to hurt their credibility" to actually being racist. It seriously makes my head spin.
 
Ca Ira said:
The way Sweetums dissects his own writing like he's performing a scholarly analysis of famous literature is so surreal to me. It's all very Branson Crabgrass.
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Yeah. For me, this was actually one of the Things You Can Learn From The Lolcows. Long ago, I used to stick random author notes everywhere to explain this high-flying thought process of mine for the mere mortals who can't comprehend this shit. /seriousfuckingsarcasm. Then I read the Iconoclast's ramblings on his own stuff and realised that a) I really don't actually care that much, and b) doing that stuff is just as productive as explaining jokes is in general. The material you write should stand on its own. Sure, having behind-the-scenes stuff available can be interesting, but your writing shouldn't depend on readers being interested of that right this bloody instant. Some people will always skip the footnotes.
 
John Titor said:
I sometimes wonder if this idiot is serious about the soda law. I looked it up and the New York "ban" on soda means that restaurants have to restrict the cup sizes they serve. It does not effect soda sales in convenience stores nor will you get arrested for carrying a large cup.
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He does love to spin things to suit his own ends, but he also seems to be genuinely lacking in reasoning skills. In 2011 at least, he clearly believed that Ryan Cash was a TRUE AND HONEST person who had an hero'd over Sonichu :stupid:

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(Source, backup)
 
Absinthe said:
wow

Finally found Sweet explicitly coming out and saying that he thinks the Virginia Tech gunman was in a similar situation to his own - was being "led on" by "some upper-class trollop", and he "handled it badly". (Source, backup)

View attachment 12124

He then once again brings everything back to himself, because a book he was trying to get published at the time is "sympathetic to a stalker" who shoots two people over a college relationship gone sour.
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"Now if I may be forgiven for making this personal"

Ah, hold up, Mr. Sweetchuck: You started making this personal when you decided to justify the actions of a perverse madman by painting his victim - a person whom you knew nothing about- as an "upper-class trollop" for no logical reason whatsoever.

Or, no, wait, excuse me - You had a reason. Yeah, see, a girl who gave you the name of a fictional character from a popular TV show as her own was supposed to give you sex for free, despite the fact that you only physically met her once. You've had the blueballs for almost four decades now, and have become bitter at women because of it, making "Ashleigh" the face of your frustration.

But see, Sweets, it's not just your sexual frustration, it's your anger at life in general. You yourself have directly stated that you are a weak person. You know this. You know that you have no agency in this world, you know that no self-respecting woman would be attracted to you, let alone a rich and pretty one, and it has made you bitter. How bitter? Bitter enough to write a story about a cowardly cretin murdering two innocent people, because one of them "seduced him several years earlier."

You're going to die alone and untouched. That brings a grin to my face.
 
Bound2 said:
I love how quickly he goes from "calling someone racist is just a cheap way to hurt their credibility" to actually being racist. It seriously makes my head spin.
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He's racist as fuck. And he's a gigantic pseudo intellectual poser. So he has no credibility to damage. Racism is just one of a multitude of stupid things he espouses.
 
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