Unfair Use

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I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of  “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.

I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.

National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:

Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)

Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.

All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.

Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?

Greed. That’s all.

Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”

When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.

If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.

I’m too sexy for this bullshit.

Happy National Squirrel Appreciation Day!

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Squirrels are assholes. They’re the only animal that sounds like they’re swearing when they make their “cute” little animal noises. I’ve heard stories about them stealing food out of people’s hands when they have lunch in the park. They watch. They wait. And in 2006, they went to war with me.

The first salvo began at our house in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was living with my wife. We had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened at the bottom, onto our front porch, and it was a warm enough day that we did just that. A squirrel descended from one of the majestic oak trees in our front yard to enjoy his tasty acorn on our porch, right out front of the open window. At the same time, we had three young cats, aged six, six, and two. They parted the vertical blinds and crouched, so tense I was worried they’d spontaneously combust, staring, glaring, and chattering in that way that they think is imitating wildlife. I don’t have the heart to tell them it actually sounds like a cat chattering. Eventually the squirrel strutted away, and they were so wound up afterwards, they started their own little war that permanently damaged parts of the house.

They weren’t done with us. I don’t know if this was the same squirrel. (I know, it’s speciesest to say, “They all look alike, but they do.”) This time, Kate ordered to get rid of it before the cats exploded. I grabbed our porch-sweeping room and stepped outside. An ordinary squirrel would have run away at that point, but this was no ordinary squirrel. This was personal. I poked it, and it didn’t move. So I charged it, and it fled. When I chased it to a tree that it shimmied up, I figured it was over. It was not. It circled the trunk and swung back over, inches from the bristles of my broom, swearing at me. After enduring the verbal abuse long enough, I backed away and retreated inside. Later, a friend would ask me what I would have done if it had jumped onto the broom. “I would have screamed in a very unmasculine manner, dropped the broom, and retreated inside.” I didn’t add that I’d probably go to the bathroom in my pants.

Then there was the kamikaze squirrel that jumped in front of my car one day. That “crunch” haunted me for years. I’m certain that instilling guilt in me was the purpose of that admittedly heroic sacrifice.

But the war climaxed one beautiful spring day when I left for work. Our porch wasn’t much of a porch, per se, but rather a concrete landing with a couple of chairs for smoking cigarettes and a canopy. That morning, when I stepped out from under said canopy, breathing in that pollen on a perfect sweater day, and a squirrel landed on my head. I screamed, and the squirrel screamed and scrambled off of my skull, leaving behind a scalpful of scratches.

It failed to kill me, which I’m not sure was its goal. I think it wanted to intimidate me. Well done, squirrel. After that, the hostilities ceased. I see them, munching on their snacks—a lot of them snacks left behind by the litterers that live in our neighborhood—planning their next move. Luckily, there are no trees near my new apartment (there’s a beautiful neighborhood about a block southeast, though), but I can never relax. I know they’re out there, watching me. Waiting.

Happy National Squirrel Appreciation Day! Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Schoolyard Haunts

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Something I’ve always wondered about was where the supplemental lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came from. I never hear them on TV (that doesn’t mean they’ve never been on TV), but I’ve been hearing them since I was too little to remember. Nowadays, you can’t sing “You would even say it glows” without someone appearing out of nowhere and adding, “Like a light bulb!” Where did it come from? How do I hear it from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Northern Virginia with few differences? And even if there are slight differences, the tune and rhythm is the same. I think this would be a better documentary than another one about Ted Bundy, so Netflix, call me.

However, that’s not why I gathered you all here. You are here because a chat conversation today revealed to me just how weird this schoolyard song was, and that it, from what I can tell, did not leave Woodall Elementary in rural Oklahoma. I’m calling upon you because, if you can identify the song, you would put to rest a mystery I’ve been living with for over thirty-five years.

The song, and I am not making any of this up, goes like this:

Yo momma, yo daddy, yo greaaaaaaaasy granny!

You got a hole in your pants, you got a big behind, like Frankenstein

You’re gonna beat beat beat down Sesame Street.

It was sung to me as kind of an acapella funk rap. The part where you’re introducing your relatives goes pretty slowly, like a train warming up. The rest of it chugs along at top speed.

I have no idea what this is. When the class clown who taught it to me was confronted by a teacher who said, “Where did you get that song, mister?” his answer was “Sesame Street.” Which is funny, but it is probably not accurate.

I don’t even know why I remember it, but I do. Is it from a song? That’s a possibility because I was not up on music in the eighties, unless it was by “Weird Al” Yankovic. And yet, I’ve never heard this song. Is it just a weird schoolyard thing? I have not heard it in any schoolyard I’ve been to, and anyone I’ve asked about it has usually given me a concerned look.

If I had the finances, I’d do a documentary about this, as well, but it would probably be lots of shots of people being puzzled by me singing to them. I’d be asking questions that would baffle them, such as, “How do you respond to the allegations that your granny is greaaaaaaasy?” Or, “Do you believe that this alleged hole in your pants might be related to your behind matching Frankenstein’s in size?”

Anyway, that’s why you’re here: does this ring any bells? Is this a song I’m not familiar with? I recently found out that accusing someone of having a “big ol’ butt” came from a song. I hope you have some answers.

There’s one possibility I hadn’t considered, and that’s that the class clown made it up whole cloth. Somehow, that would be the best origin for this strange little rhyme.

Live in on the Edge

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The guy renting out the room in his apartment in Jersey City had double-booked a roommate interview. Unemployed, I sat on a couch next to a professional (a doctor, if I can remember back twenty-five years) who was well groomed, while I looked like I had just rolled out of bed. Things were grim, until I saw his bookshelf.

See, televangelist Pat Robertson had written a “novel.” I am by no means a fundamentalist Christian, or even a Christian at all, but I had actually read this book. (I’d accuse it of being ghost-written, but ghost-writers are professionals, and this book was not.) The late nineties were the End Times, and I was getting a kick out of people being freaked out about it. Ironically, I read every book I could find about the coming apocalypse. All the fiction books had a henpecked president and his lesbian, Satanist wife, who may or may not be the Beast. They got old after a while.  

I pointed at the book and said, “I’ve read that!”

The guy looking for the roommate said, “What did you think about the ending?”

I said, “It was a great twist!”

The room was mine.

I lived there six years, then another four years in the home Kate had purchased before I moved in, and the next five years in a series of private and corporate apartments that Kate took care of, until the government took care of everything and set us up in a compound in Doha, Qatar. From there, we bought a condo with my father-in-law’s money.

After that, I lived in the apartment Nicole had been renting out for years, until we moved together to a two-bedroom. Even though we are both on the lease, Nicole did most of the work. It’s privately owned by a single landlord. We paid an application fee, a security deposit, a month’s rent, and a small pet fee. It couldn’t have been easier.


My new apartment, owned by a corporation and subsidized by HUD, requires proof of employment and a month of pay stubs, a signed twenty-five-page lease, Newcastle’s photo and medical records, an account with the electric company, two lease addendums, a loading-dock reservation, one month’s rent (pro-rated), an amenities fee, a pet fee, a security deposit, a pinch of paprika, and renter’s insurance (but not the policy I already have).

I turn forty-eight this year, and I’ve never lived alone. I’ve been insulated from this process, so I had no idea what a hassle it was. I move on Friday, but I can’t pack until Tuesday. It’s okay, everything here belongs to Nicole. I left my marriage with my clothes, my note-, sketch-, comic, and just plain books and some art supplies. I’ve acquired some furniture and some organizational equipment that had one job and failed, and a huge number of toys, mostly Doctor Who related. That’s it. It will take ma a day to pack. And then, it will be Newcastle, me, and a pile of stuff to sort through. Finally, I’ll be able to start MortalMan.

This is a pretty huge adventure I’m embarking on. I feel like, after all this time, I’m finally a grownup.

Creativity Is My Co-Pilot

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In high school, Pilot Precise pens were the Cadillac of writing instruments. They were hard (for us) to find, but they were as close to fountain pens that we’d get at that age. The most exciting thing was to get a new color. Black and blue were great, but there was also red. Red was pedestrian compared to green. Or freaking purple. When I was journaling back then, I collected pens to represent the rainbow, substituting black for yellow, and finding an orange felt-tipped pen. Those were the days.

In 2010, long after I’d learned to draw, I found a four-pack of Pilot Precise pens at the Government Printing Office, where I was temping. I swiped them out of instinct, but I wasn’t sure what I would use them for. I didn’t journal—I didn’t do much writing in general, and when I did, it was with real fountain pens. I put them in the Box of Misfit Writing and Art supplies.

Along the way, Nicole bought me a set of thirty Stabilo Art Pens. They were regular pens, not brushes, so I tried a little cross-hatching. After a few tries, I was able to create works of art like this:

My mind returned to the Pilots. I only had four colors: black, blue, red, and green, but even with a limited palette, I knew I could create art. Best of all, I had a character I’d never get tired of drawing, and red, green, and blue were her colors. I have a dozen of these drawings, and some of them are really awful (most of my drawings are awful—you’re only seeing the good ones), but here are a few of the best.

(I did this one yesterday)

Concerned that the four-pack was going to run out of ink (it’s not even close), I splurged on a ten-pack. In addition to black, green, blue, and red, it has magenta, purple, light blue, light green, yellow, and orange. I took them for a spin.

It’s been good to stretch myself out after working so solidly with watercolors while making Polterguys. These pens are indulgent, but they’re a lot of fun. It brings me back to the school days when Severian and I would hang out in the back of class, writing all over our notebooks, and being unbridled in our creativity.

Big Wheel Keep on Turnin’

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Sometimes a bad day doesn’t have to be a bad day forever. New Year’s Eve started really poorly, the kind of poorly that could have carried over into the new year. I won’t get into any specifics because they’re none of your business, but my life is going to change drastically, possibly as soon as this month.

I spent the afternoon kind of shock, but one of my oldest friends got my stunned text and helped talk me through it over the phone. I’ve worried that I don’t have many friends anymore because everybody has a life, and many of them were pushed out of my life while I was married. However, everybody I reached out to got back to me as soon as they read their texts, and I was able to process the events of the day.

The reason I didn’t have a bad day was because I got to hang out with the Nerdy Couple, a husband-and-wife duo I can trace back to Bloomington, Indiana. They had with them their Delightfully Weird Friend and another friend I could only describe as unhinged.

I told them all about my morning while trying not to editorialize (while editorializing), and after that twenty-minute conversation, we talked about Star Trek, the Star-Trek-adjacent fic I’ve been posting on AO3, but haven’t updated since October. We talked a lot about Star Trek. Nerdy Husband told me that there is a novel with some information on how Sarek and Amanda Grayson got together (a question that’s been plaguing me for a while), and we all agreed that the Kirk of the original series is actually a thoughtful, diplomatic man and not the horny cowboy everybody remembers him as (thanks, in no small part, to the JJ Abrams movies).

From there we gorged ourselves on sushi, cupcakes, and (for me anyway) Adderall and coffee before playing Cards against Humanity and observing ourselves becoming horrible people. I shared my favorite pick-up line (“You remind me of my pinkie toe: you’re small, cute, and I’m probably going to bang you on my coffee table later.”) which matched the tone perfectly. My bedtime is 8:00, though closer to 7:30 lately, so by ten o’clock I was feeling loopy, which only helped me win a few rounds. Taking breaks to show each other TikTok videos and to share horrifying medical stories, we wrapped it up in time for the ball drop. Delightfully Weird Friend dominated, followed by Nerdy Husband. The rest of us weren’t even close.

That’s how I’m going to remember New Year’s Eve 2023. It was the year I became an artist again and illustrated two-and-a-half comics. I saw Romania, which was awesome, and I kicked my marijuana habit. Newcastle came down with hyperthyroidism and arthritis, but once we put him on treatment, he’s incredibly healthy (for a cat who has those ailments plus kidney disease and cardiac failure). I finally made a new friend, at work, and we text each other all the time when we’re not being productive or going out to coffee. I lost the hearing in one of my ears, but yesterday it came back. I did put on a lot of weight, which I’m not happy about.

This year I’m going to illustrate the MortalMan story I’ve been dreaming about since 2000. I even picked up a new art board to do it with. At some point, I’m going to move to a new apartment, and I’ll be living solo for the first time in my entire life. I have a plan to take my weight off. Other than that, my year will be wide open.

This has been a very matter-of-fact post, but that’s because I’m probably going to hop back into bed shortly. Once upon a time I spent New Year’s Day nursing a hangover, treating myself to a greasy breakfast, and watching bad TV, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes with my sister, and sometimes alone. This year I’ve spend most of my morning in my pajamas, drifting in and out of sleep and reviewing my first round of proofs while Newcastle cuddled me. I cannot be happier at this moment. Twenty-four hours ago should have ruined me, but it failed. I’m filled with as much chill and hope as I’ve ever had.

May your year fill you with chill and hope.

The Best Things in Life Are Free, You Can Keep ‘Em

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I uncovered even more jobs I did (mostly) for money, including, Big Face Records in 2012, a rap label that never took off.

Wish Slap from 2010, a truly terrible idea for a TV show where you paid money to have someone slap your favorite celebrity.

The cover (actually used) for the 2014 fantasy noir anthology, Fae Fatales, where I was first published.

And finally, Li’l Dicky from a Bush Administration parody comic I pitched to the Unemployed Philosopher’s in 2004, rejected because “There’s no way Bush will ever get a second term.” This is the worst reason I was rejected.

i did a lot more commissioned work than I realize. There’s more to come.

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIII Will Always Love Yule

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I stopped celebrating Christmas a long time ago, around the time my parents stopped paying my airplane ticket home. After I moved to New York-adjacent, I had a lot of family in New Jersey, but I am a terrible long-distance relative, and I didn’t know any of them well enough to spend the holiday with them, except once, and that was awkward.

The second year I was there, my uncle Larry invited me to Linden, New Jersey, in mid-December, along with the extended families of himself and my aunt Christine. Christine is my mother’s sister, but I adored everyone there, even the kids and grandkids of Larry’s brother, Phil. Even though I was out of touch, Uncle Larry welcomed me into his home on Ainsworth Street as if I had always been there, and I visited them frequently on weekends.

I only saw Larry’s family once a year, though, and I watched the children grow up as I kept them occupied while Mommy and Daddy got drunk. Whenever my smoker’s lungs couldn’t keep up with them, we played the heart-attack game, which was me falling to the ground and all of them tried to revive me using their rudimentary understanding of CPR. My other favorite game was the monster game, where I’d chase them to a hiding place, safe from me, and then I went and had a beer. Eventually, they’d find me, then I’d just roar, and they split.

But that left the actual day, when my extended family celebrated with just themselves, and my found families all went home. You’d think that would be depressing, but it really wasn’t. You see, on December 25, I had plans.

My day would start out late, and I’d head into the city for brunch with Joshua. As this was Christmas, our options were limited. One or two years, he had a girlfriend from China, and she took us to a real Chinese restaurant, which was a lot like that racist dining scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Chicken with broccoli was not on the menu, but something horrible being done to a crab was.

From there, we’d see a movie, which was reminiscent of what my family would do when I was a kid, and we ran out of things to unwrap. For the latter, the movie I remember most was Home Alone. As for the former, the one that became my Christmas movie is Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. (All you Die Hard people are so cute.) And from there we’d go to work.

Working at The New York Post on Christmas was absolutely wonderful. Everyone there was Jewish, or without family, or hiding from their family. None of the hardcore news editors were there, so everyone was relaxed. Year-round, the sport we played at The Post was to make each other laugh, and never was it more competitive than it was on Christmas. Even though I saw them every week, there was something especially heartwarming about seeing Mike and Rob and Dom and my auxiliary dad, Barry, as well as everyone else. The magic of Christmas in New York is such a cliché, but when you pass by the tree at the Rockefeller Center and glance into the ice-skating rink on your way to an office with a sodium-heavy buffet and affectionate shouting from some of your favorite people, you believe.

I have no memory of the thirteen Christmases I spent with Kate because we treated them like normal days. Usually we’d spend the weekend before with her (but never my) family, and her family didn’t get me, so they had no idea what to do with me. The actual day was just like any other, except everything was closed. It’s not as special when you’re not waking up and unwrapping presents.

With Nicole, she has a side-hustle sitting pets, and Christmas is a lucrative day, so we’ve spent it apart, except for once, during quarantine, when we watched that smoking turd, Wonder Woman 1984. This year, she woke up at home, and we unwrapped presents together and went our separate ways, her making a dessert and me taking the new sketchbooks and expensive paintbrushes Mom and Dad got me out for a spin. Zooming with them and my sisters and my niece and my nephew-in-law was pure chaos.

Christmas is just a day. Sure everything’s closed, and there’s nothing good on TV, but the sun rises and falls, just as it always does. You need to eat lunch, you need to take the dogs for a walk. It’s okay not to do anything just because someone else is. If you really need to find meaning on December 25, you can find it. I found mine on a loud news floor, trying to think of a clever headline. (The best one I ever came up with had to do with a computer screw-up that cost New York teachers their December 24 paycheck: “The glitch that stole X-mas.”) And it’s okay to feel lonely. Boxing Day is just around the corner.

I used to be a humbug, including during my time at the paper before I realized what a holiday it was. Nowadays, I am by no means a Tiny Tim or post-ghost Scrooge. I still have a problem with how shallow this holiday is (i.e. the Black Fridays that last well into December) and how I lost the goddamned Wham! game on Christmas Freaking Eve! But even at my loneliest, I looked forward to this day, even if it is just a day.

(This essay has no thesis, it’s just a bunch of random and contradictory thoughts pouring out.)

I Got YouTube under my Skin

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Well, I’ve found myself deep in the YouTube hole. I’m not exactly sure how I got here. While I work on my art, I have TV on, but nothing scripted was holding my interest. I tried a few documentaries, especially anything about the Fyre Festival because that was such a delightful mess. Even though I shouldn’t, I can’t help but find joy in people wealthy enough to afford tickets costing thousands of dollars, finding themselves treated like refugees.

From there, I turned into a woman and started listening to True Crime podcasts. Actually, it’s just been one, and she had a YouTube channel. Even more so than her podcast, her videos were perfect to listen to while I was doing something else. When you log into YouTube, it gives you videos that you know you want to see, and many of them are the opposite of the kinds of views you have. For me, it’s a lot of videos about how Disney/Marvel is really doomed this time. These videos are curated to make me angry because anger keeps people glued to the screen—it’s Facebook’s entire business model. I don’t click on anyone I don’t know.

I knew Todd in the Shadows from his music criticism, and he’s generally on my side, so when he posted a video “fact-checking the WORST YouTuber,” I had to look. This referred to James Somerton, a smug essayist who champions the LGBT crowd, all while alienating both straight and gay women, as well as asexuals. Todd proves that Somerton doesn’t know what he’s talking about, using (as they say on YouTube) receipts. But it was so much worse than that.

A gaming YouTuber named hbomberguy released a four-hour video the day before about plagiarism, and two of those hours were dedicated to Somerton. He doesn’t just steal ideas, he literally reads pages from books like the legendary Celluloid Closet, as well as works from LGBT authors and documentarians who don’t have half the exposure he has. He has made a lot of money off of these people. On the rare occasion he uses his own material, it is misogynist, ace-denying, and misleading.

This isn’t the first time he’s been accused of plagiarism. He actually stole from one of his donors, and when she called him out on it, he claimed he was scared for his life and turned his rabid fans against her. He got away from that one scott free. After hbomberguy, though, he closed all of his accounts and went into hiding, only emerging weeks later with an insincere, crocodile-tear apology.

The rush of justice intoxicated me, and I checked out more hbomberguy stuff. The algorithm pointed me to reaction videos by a variety of skeptics, as well as a YouTube-hosted podcast by an asexual couple who claim Jessica Rabbit as an ace icon.

My desire to see more petards hoisting some assholes led me to Creepshow Art. The star of the channel draws pictures while she serves up (as they say on YouTube) tea about her fellow YouTubers. I didn’t watch any of her videos, but through the takedowns, I heard enough of her petty, self-righteous trash-talking that I never will. She was a popular subject for reasons I won’t go into here because they’re convoluted, like a vast spider web of brazen internet fuckery.

I know nothing about YouTube celebrities, but they exist, earning millions of views and dollars for whatever they broadcast. Some people do the art and gossip of Creepshow Art; some people tell stories; some people share essays; some people create documentaries; and some people just trash talk. It’s a community, there are conventions, and there are beefs. Most of them know each other. All of them make a really good living being personalities, and most, from what I can tell, are terrible people.

This leads me to Gabbie Hanna. She started out on Vine (Does anyone remember Vine?) doing short-form sketches. When Vine collapsed, she moved to YouTube and later to TikTok, as a storyteller who occasionally starred in sketches with other YouTubers. She started a music and acting career and published some bestselling books. She is YouTube royalty, and she is truly awful.

She and Donald J. Trump tie for the thinnest skin. When someone “passed” on her during a game of “Smash or Pass” (please don’t make me say what this game is about), she hunted him down at a convention and harassed him until he broke her phone. (This guy is really awful too.) She is a master projectionist, and if you took a shot whenever she used words like “manipulative,” “gaslighting,” “abusive,” and “narcissistic” in a video, you’d be dead. She did things like tell a guy who was about to hook up with her friend that she heard a rumor said friend had an STI, and then Gabbie demanded apology from her. Gabbie’s behavior on the set of a TV show another friend cast her in got her character, and that relationship, killed off. None of it is her fault. If she admits to anything, it’s fragile mental health.

One by one, her friends abandoned her, and in 2022, she dropped out of the spotlight for a while. When she came back in the beginning of 2023, she posted 170 TikTok videos in twenty-four hours which were, for lack of a better word, unhinged. I don’t mean trash-talking her friends or getting really drunk or high at a party. I mean calling herself the Second Coming, obsessively discussing simulation theory, inviting strangers into her home, and screaming. She was having a full-blown manic episode, and her fans were calling in welfare checks. I had been reveling in this toxic human being’s downfall, but now I was genuinely concerned about her health.

After that, she disappeared until a few months ago, when she gave interviews. No one asked her about what happened, only what she was up to. She talked about how she was at peace, and she found God. (He has his own channel, but not as many followers as her.) This is the reason for this blog post: she said she was deciding who she was. Was she a musician, an author, or a painter?

Even the most critical of “tea” dispensers said that some of her songs were bangers, and she sold out large venues, but she can’t sing. She’s as bad as the untrained actors in the ubiquitous musical episodes of our beloved TV shows. Her poetry books are New York Times bestsellers, but they read like Shel Silverstein as a fifteen-year-old goth girl in the early 2000s. I haven’t seen her paintings, but most celebrity paintings are really bad.

This woman rose to fame first by being goofy, then being a goddamned nightmare. And she’s got more than one bestselling book, huge concerts, and a cultish fan base. What has she done to earn this? For starters, she’s good at being goofy. She works hard—you have to to be a YouTube celebrity, and that means being on. You develop a character, and even when you grow out of it, you’re expected to behave the same. People say that she hasn’t evolved her content to fit in with the times, but every single temper tantrum got views, and you have to wonder how much of that is calculated and how much is mental health. Her dream has always been singing, and she leveraged her clout to do just that. Same with her “poetry.” She went into seclusion because she wanted to. She’s even used the word “retirement.” She’s thirty.

Was her meltdown an act? I doubt it. I’ve seen that kind of thing before.

Why do I care? I’m asking myself this as I watch any Gabbie-Hanna-related video that the algorithm throws at me. Is it because I want to see her punished? I do. I want to see her brought down low because she became successful by being the most hated person on the Internet. I don’t personally hate her, I just want to see her get justice. But justice is an imaginary thing, and her large fan base is real.

I don’t have the right to tell people what they can and can’t spend their money on, and I don’t read minds. Maybe they feel like her poetry speaks to them. Maybe she sings their anthem. Or they could be like me, obsessively clicking on every Gabbie Hanna link to watch this horrifying train wreck.

I’m currently writing the script for MortalMan and running some of these ideas past some friends. I came up with a brilliant gag based on Adam West/Burt Ward Batman fights. I’ve got Christmas presents to unwrap on Monday. I’m going to start illustrating soon, and I cannot wait to get to page 7. She may or may not have earned that massive Los Angeles house, but that self-absorbed loudmouth has nothing to do with me and my definition of success.