So the other day Scott Kurtz posted an essay about why it’s wrong for people to think Jack Kirby should receive more credit for The Avengers, and his estate receive some remuneration from the great success of the film adaptation. Go read that post really quick, it’s not very long.
Then the next day, someone at a blog called Mighty God King posted this essay about Kurtz’s essay: I’m not sure who the someone is, but I’m guessing it’s Christopher Bird, so I’m going to refer to the writer as “Bird” just for clarity’s sake. Read that one too, it’s much longer, but you can do it.
First things first:
I find Scott Kurtz’s post appalling and repugnant. It’s filled with specious, lazy arguments and outright sophistry. It’s a preaching-to-the-choir argument aimed at Kurtz’s fans, which basically suggests that look, all that was a long time ago, the water is too tainted, I wish we could do something about it but it’s just too late, let’s just enjoy what we have anyway. It’s a similar argument to the ones people make against reparations, affirmative action, etc.: “well look *I* never oppressed anyone, that’s not my fault, hey man you’re bumming me out.“
The problem with anti-reparations arguments is they’re built on that solipsistic foundation that seems to refute that individuals are a part of a society, and thus have responsiblities to each other. That while your grandfather or great-grandfather was coming back from World War II and building a new life, using one of the most prosperous times in American (note I’m pretending you’re American here, sorry) history to amass some small wealth for his family and heirs, another person was returning to 25 years of Jim Crow laws, just a few generations removed from being An Actual Human Slave. So while it’s fine to say, “hey I never oppressed anyone,” there’s still a gross taint on the society you’re a part of. Being part of a society calls on us to build and improve that society, to lift up the people around us when we can; and even if we can’t fix every problem, surely we can do better than ignoring the very worst of them.
Now, Marvel not giving Jack Kirby enough credit for creating The Avengers–and probably 70% of the characters being featured in blockbuster Marvel movies lately–is in no way as serious a problem as reparations or affirmative action. But they’re related, because they’re both representative of a “me-first” approach to being a part of society, and they both demand willful ignorance of those problems. Scott Kurtz’s post seems to suggest that people wanting Jack Kirby to get more credit for his creations, and his estate revenue from those creations, are being cynical. Which, after a post filled with bad logic and rhetorical straw men, was an almost shocking line to stumble across near the end:
“That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.
Guys, learn from the Avengers movie. The real villains here are the cynics.”
I’m suspicious of demagogues online; I think being at the pinnacle of a pyramid of positive reinforcement and “you’re the best”s and “don’t listen to the haters” all day addles some people’s brains. Triply so online, and quadruply so for someone like Kurtz who has been SO popular and SO famously, histrionically contrarian over the years, and so has driven away most dissent, and then chosen to ignore the rest: “The worms who never had the courage to create anything themselves looking to forge an identity on the internet by getting in a good dig.” The worms! But when someone like Kurtz calls the effort to get Kirby more credit/revenue from the billion-dollar Avengers movie “cynical,” it’s the very height of cynicism itself, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Kirby’s rights to credit. As I said at the top of this post, it’s appalling and repugnant.
But second things second:
Christopher Bird, in his rebuttal to Kurtz’s essay, immediately takes a tone so unnecessarily insulting that when I first came across it I couldn’t even finish it. He attacks Kurtz himself, his work, and his career, over and over again, all the while indulging in the kind of snarky sentence-by-sentence quote-and-rebut format which is so popular on message boards, and other places where the substance of what someone says is less important than deconstructing each word they use to say it.
Why sink to that level? There are so many obvious flaws in Kurtz’s thinking, why sink to insults to make your point? When has insulting someone ever improved a discussion or pointed the way to a solution? It never does–insulting is only useful when you want to please the people who already agree with you. The people who will say “SICK BURN BRO!” and forward the link to their friends, subject line “PWNED.” In this case it marginalizes the actual point, i.e. “Scott Kurtz is either very wrong or very VERY right about what “cynicism” means,” in favor of the classic internet theatre of Pulling The Curtain Back On The Great Oz.
I said I didn’t initially finish Bird’s post. But then I got into a brief argument with Christopher Butcher on Twitter about my objections to it–without going into all the details, Christopher was very supportive of Bird’s post. I like Chris very much, and have more respect for him and his opinion–regardless of whether or not I agree with it–than almost anyone else online, so I went back and reread the entirety of Bird’s post, looking for value. I had originally gotten about halfway through, so when I read the rest I came across this gem:
“‘In the words of Darrell Hammond playing Sean Connery in “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches on Saturday Night Live: “Boy, I believe you may be functionally retarded.’”
Why? What does it add? Stuff like this drives me crazy. Taking a wrongheaded, somewhat offensive post online and retorting with your own wronghead offensiveness doesn’t do anyone any favors. What reasonable person is going to read this, nod sagely and say “yes, I see now, Scott Kurtz is functionally retarded, just like Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery said.” Is Bird arguing that Scott Kurtz is wrong about Kirby supporters, or that Bird is smarter/cleverer than Scott Kurtz? Because though it made me hate myself, all the way through his post all I could think about was Kurtz’s line “..By being the guy who got the awesome last word in.” I KNOW! Terrible, how could I even fall into that obvious rhetorical trap? But there you go.
The point of all these posts is whether or not Jack Kirby created or co-created the lion’s share of the characters and titles that Marvel–the company, the movie studio, the tradition, the universe–is built on, and whether or not he deserves to get some royalties, residuals, anything. That’s the point! The point is not Scott Kurtz, nor Christopher Bird, nor me. Chris Butcher told me to write my own rebuttal to the original Kurtz post if I didn’t like the Bird one so much, and I initially thought that would be a waste of time–just another internet-somebody making very VERY obvious points. Which, to me, always seems more like self-aggrandizement than an actual will to make a valuable argument; to add to the conversation, so to speak. Doubly, triply so from someone like me, who is so obviously an egomaniac and can’t stop talking about himself and what he thinks of everything.
But Chris Butcher made another really good point during our Twitter argument: that ignoring a post like Scott Kurtz’s, just because you think reasonable, thinking people will see it’s complete garbage, also amounts to shrugging your shoulders at Kurtz’s attempt to discredit Kirby-credit supporters. In Chris’s words
“I always want us to be better than our opponents, but I’m not willing to settle for silence if we can’t be.”
And since yesterday, I’ve come to agree with him more or less, and so decided to write something. But for me, and still, redressing a perceived wrong by sinking to its level not only never works, but is suspect in its motivation. And most importantly, drives away people like myself who would have agreed otherwise, who might have taken that message and spread it, gotten more people talking about it. Communication is always more valuable than zingers–it’s easy to take someone down on your own blog, deconstruct their sentences, call them retarded, etc., but it’s a short-term gain. Having some class, taking the high road, and most importantly actually engaging pays long-term dividends, both for you and for the point you wanted to make in the first place.
I was fine when Kurtz said that simply boycotting the Avengers movie was a ridiculous way to support the Kirby estate. I don’t think, however, that it makes sense to just say “Welp, since I personally can’t think of a way to support the effort for credit/compensation, nobody should and let’s all just move forward to the next thing.”
Yes–while I disagree with Scott on the little things, i.e. boycotts, or giving money to Hero Initiative in lieu of buying a ticket being right or wrong, or whatever, those are more subjective. And by “disagree” I mean, “barely, if it even matters.” Arguing stuff like that is closer to arguing “is Avengers a good movie or not,” and I wouldn’t hold anything against anyone who disagreed with me or Kurtz or whoever.
To me the real problem with his post is the painting of Kirby supporters as cynics, which of course seems like a very very cynical argument on his point. But I do feel like that’s an obvious problem with his post, or at least it was very obvious to me. It made the whole thing seem more like someone complaining at the dinner table, where you’re not watching whatever you say, making sure all your paragraphs are rhetorically strong, etc. Which for someone in Kurtz’s position, with an audience as large as his, can be problematic. I disagree more with Bird for coming at Kurtz’s arguments from such an insulting direction, which was just unnecessary. If there’s an obvious problem with an argument, calling someone “retarded” is a little over the line in rebutting that obvious problem.
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Thanks for writing this Dustin. Of course, I disagreed with Kurtz’s post, and was happy to see fellow Canadian Christopher Bird write a rebuttal, but both posts are marred by ad hominen attacks (“worms”, “asshole”, “retarded”) that really add nothing to the debate and obviously act as a turn-off to some readers.
My general position has always been that ALL creators should be compensated fairly by Marvel (and DC) and that a grandfathered system of royalties should be in place so that credit and compensation for all contributions can be apportioned. Because Kirby is the most visible person responsible for the lion’s share of successful, ongoing Marvel characters and storylines, and because historically his contributions have been slighted and under-compensated, through passive neglect, editorial fiat, and legal action by Marvel/Disney and its spokespeople, I feel that any movement towards changing the status quo has to start with addressing the Kirby issue.
All of which is just a way to plug the Kirby petition at change.org again, I guess. Signing the petition requires no boycott, nor does it mean that other Marvel comics creators should be slighted. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but the petition supporters, many of whom are successful comics professionals, are not cynical or self-aggrandizing. They simply would like to see justice done and Kirby’s legacy honoured.
As someone who reads the bulk of my comics on line and only really owns trade paperbacks, I feel like I’m missing some crucial data.
I understand giving credit to Jack Kirby. Having a 10 second image of “Thanks, Jack Kirby” at the beginning or end of the Avengers movie wouldn’t have taken ANY effort on Marvel’s part. Off the top of my head, maybe they don’t want to lend any legal credence to them owing anything to him since that seems to be a constant battle. I don’t know, that’s pure speculation on my part, but regardless the credit thing seems, on the face of it, pretty easy.
On the money part I’m especially confused. Wikipedia says that when he left Marvel in 1970 for DC “he was earning $35,000 a year”, which according to an inflation calculator I found online is a little more than $200,000 in 2012 dollars. That seems like a pretty reasonable sum to me.
So, as someone who is kind of on the outside of this, I was wondering if you could provide some sort of context, perspective, or information. I feel like this is one of the only reasonably toned writings on the whole kerfuffle, so that gives me hope of some well reasoned info.
Anyway, thanks for the well thought out post.
@Tristan: There’s all kind of facets to this debate – but in a nutshell *all* comics publishers (especially from the Golden and Silver ages) have very poor track records with their creators.
It’s pretty much a continuous record of treating creators as interchangeable cogs – so that they would be forced to sign whatever terms the publishers would deem fair (and lately that’s been that all created works for major publishers are usually corporate-owned IP’s). Marvel was especially shady during the periods when the very concept of “copyright” and “creators rights” started to become publically known. They were known for blacklisting writers and artists who tried to push for better deals, instituted policies such as putting disclaimers on the back of paycheques so that if someone wanted to get paid they’d literally have to sign away the rights to any work they’d ever done for the company, and they often held original artwork hostage until artists signed away rights to it (if they returned it at all.
As such both Marvel and DC find themselves in a number of high profile long-running lawsuits – they find themselves in a position that it’s impossible for them to give credit in the present (which would be completely easy to do) without weakening their legal position as to the value of that creators work.
Also, lest you think this is all entirely ancient history, try Googling to see how much Lowell Cunningham has received in royalties as the creator of “Men in Black”. I’ll give you a hint. It’s $0.
Dan,
I think the fundamental irony here is that you’re characterizing Bird’s response as “the substance of what someone says is less important than deconstructing each word they use to say it”, while YOU’RE simultaneously dismissing the substance of his argument because he called somebody names while making it.
“If you call people names, they’re not going to listen to you” is good advice, and I’ll agree that Bird went too far. But you’re engaging in false equivalence here. His argument was more thorough, cogent, and logical than Kurtz’s, regardless of how many times the word “asshole” appeared in it.
Thad–
I don’t think that’s actual irony.
I’m characterizing Bird’s *tactic* of deconstructing Kurtz’s entire post, paragraph by paragraph, as emblematic of a style of web discourse that prioritizes this kind of attention to niggling errors and turns-of-phrase, in order to form some sort of aggregate refutation of an entire argument. I don’t think pointing this out in any way robs me of the ability to find Bird’s insulting personal attacks distracting in the extreme from his actual disagreement with Kurtz.
To which: I definitely agree that Bird’s reasoning was sound. I agree with most of his post. I think Kurtz’s post was really easy to find fault with, so was even more surprised Bird chose to be so personal right from the start. It seemed… excessive.
Lastly: my name is Dustin.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/the-right-way-to-debate-someone-on-the-internet/257501/
There are those that disagree with your condemnation of the point-by-point, very recently it turns out.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing by itself.
“Christopher Bird, in his rebuttal to Kurtz’s essay, immediately takes a tone so unnecessarily insulting that when I first came across it I couldn’t even finish it.”
And your tiresome and cliched whining about argumentative aesthetics was pretty much impossible for me to read past the first sentence of it.
The first half of your article, re: Kurtz, was just sickeningly dull, so I’m really glad there’s someone like Christopher Bird to say basically the same thing except interestingly.
Right on, Dustin. So glad to hear someone else was repulsed by that tired old “you’re a cynic if you recognize problems” argument. It happens all the time in politics: voters rejected Carter’s “cynicism” he displayed by saying we needed to change our lifestyles and consume less energy and rely less on oil, embracing Reagan’s “optimistic” Cold War enemy-creating instead. We embrace what makes us feel good about ourselves instead of what might actually benefit us as a society.
Are people like Kurtz seriously saying that recognizing and honoring one of our greatest artists is a bad thing? What practical consequence arises from helping to heal a wound?
The Kurtz article was so damn infuriating that I was fine with Bird’s rhetoric (except for the “retarded” line, because that’s always a deal-breaker with me).
What I find so perplexing about Kurtz’s article isn’t just how wrong his stance is today- it’s that it directly goes against his previous stances. Heck, he used to sell a t-shirt about “keeping your Kirby hand strong” when the Kirby estate first sued Marvel.
http://pvponline.com/news/keep-your-kirby-hand-strong
The craziest part of his rant is this:
“Things have changed for the better, even when it comes to doing work-for-hire with the big two. I’m not saying we shouldn’t learn from this. I’m saying we’ve ALREADY learned from it. I have no doubt that we learned from it. The black and white creator-owned books of the 80s. The exodus of Marvel creators to form Image in the 90s. The indy comics movement now. Webcomics. Kickstarter. We’ve learned this lesson, folks. ”
So everyone’s learned the lesson…except for his friends at Penny Arcade, who almost sold the rights to PA…twice.
What you said about internet demagogues is spot on. They have, consciously or not, learned that they get attention and praise from their fans by attacking others, whether the attack is deserved or not.
And that is undeniably what has happened with Scott Kurtz. As you mentioned, Kurtz has a long-standing history of Internet Conflagration Syndrome and has repeatedly, over many years, refused to engage in honest and critical discourse. His logic is so flawed it’s often impossible to understand, his writing and grammar are atrocious, and he has a habit of denying he said what he just said or even acting personally hurt when someone criticizes him.
I think at some point a few years ago those of us familiar with Kurtz’s track record just threw up our hands and decided we might as well let out frustrations and hope to educate others on his history, because there is no use reasoning with him.
Your tolerance for trying to reason with the unreasonable is much higher than MGK’s, obviously, but there is more than a whiff of “and that makes me a better person” in your post. I don’t say that as an attack, because I don’t think you intended it at all.
But resorting to nasty insults against MGK — insults that seem to attack his entire being and morality — is pretty strong stuff. And all because he doesn’t employ the rhetorical tactics you approve of. Your rant doesn’t seem any more high-minded, dignified or morally sound than the exact behavior you just slammed MGK for.
For example, MGK said “because this is Scott Kurtz, it’s not terribly well written or intelligent.” You said you had to physically stop reading MGK’s post because it was so “unnecessarily insulting” and “snarky” and lacking of any “substance” or “value.”
Two different writers saying precisely the same things. MGK’s tone was exasperated and angry, while yours was all purtied up and filled with backhanded insults. See, you don’t flatly state MGK’s post had no value, instead you said you had to stop reading and then go back to search for the value. Still insulting, just with less uses of the word “asshole.”
Stacia, you make some great points. First of all, you’re right that my tone comes off holier than thou, and I think I leave out entirely that I agreed with almost everything Bird said that wasn’t an actual attack on Kurtz. He was right to rebut Kurtz’s post in the first place, and surprisingly few other people have done so. He made great points, just with a lot more personal negativity than I thought was necessary.
And two: I think the big difference, to me, is that Bird was immediately personal about Kurtz. For instance, “because this is Kurtz, it’s not terribly well-written or intelligent,” and that’s just an early instance among many. I definitely agree that Kurtz was wrong on nearly every level; but I also think that fighting the willfully, cynically wrongheadedness of Kurtz’s post with insults and personal attacks was a distraction from the more obvious flaws in Kurtz’s argument.
I’ve had some pushback from others as well–essentially mirroring what Bird said here, in his rebuttal to my rebuttal: http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2012/05/23/on-aggrandizement/ –that sometimes a wrong demands a passionate, LOUD response in order to communicate the severity of the wrong. Which frankly is hard to disagree with. But I think, especially online, things falls into certain patterns, and we decide to buy in to those patterns, then react to other patterns, until communication online becomes an endless matrix of references to previous threads and memes and personalities and so forth.
For instance, not your own reference to Kurtz’s prior behavior, and the kind of fatigue it inspires in a lot of people who are familiar with it, and choose to say “well that’s just Scott Kurtz being Scott Kurtz.” You’re right! He is known far and wide for that sort of thing, at least on our corner of the Internet. I’m certainly familiar with it, although probably not as much as a lot of people–the only time I see his blog is when someone is linking to something terrible he said.
But I think if we go into things like this with that attitude, we do two things (among probably others):
1) We do what Scott Kurtz wants. He isn’t stupid; he knows these things will get up people’s spines and drive them insane, and that’s what he wants. As other people have mentioned, in other climates he was a supporter of the exact things he’s complaining about in his posts. I think he’s an intelligent guy who’s cynical enough to do stuff like this just to be that guy, just to say the thing that’s opposite of what he’s bored with hearing other people say. He’s an internet demagogue who has an enormous audience, and has decided that people who disagree with him are just trying to “get that last awesome word in.” So all he hears is what he wants to hear, and I can’t imagine that’s healthy for one’s intellectual acuity or perspective.
Regardless, I think coming to a situation like this and starting with personal attacks just hamstrings the force of any real argument, and Bird had plenty of real, well-argued, valid argument in his post. But even as someone who largely agrees with him, the personal attacks just seem unnecessary, even childish. Like Chris Rock said, make fun of what people do, not what they are.
2) We raise the volume. One person’s dumb shouted diatribe can’t be shouted down, not online. It just makes it so the next person has to shout even louder, and so forth. Or at least this is what I generally think, although Bird’s assertion that sometimes things demand strident speech makes more sense with each day I think about it. For instance, if instead of saying, essentially, “Aw phooey, I’m tired of hearing about Kirby’s heirs, booo, Avengers was a great movie,” Kurtz made some sort of hugely sexist screed or some kind of veiled homophobic slander, I might have been much less sanguine, because those are issues I get more upset about–especially as the prevailing opinion among most people seems to be that yes, Kirby and his heirs deserve more credit and remunerations for his foundational work at Marvel. And that’s on me–maybe for Christopher Bird, this is the issue that touched off something angry in him. I don’t know.
Anyway. I do think I should have made it clearer that I agreed with most of Bird’s post. It’s just the personal thing that turned me off–I don’t at all mean to come off as snidely superior or anything. I just found his post to be nearly as off-putting as Kurtz’s original, terrible, cynical post was.
“…Being part of a society calls on us to build and improve that society, to lift up the people around us when we can; and even if we can’t fix every problem, surely we can do better than ignoring the very worst of them.”
Given that reparations and other keywords were mentioned before this, I take much of the above to mean the federal gov’t should do most of this societal fixing, which usually happens via progressive taxation.
A couple of questions:
-What is the difference between an individual and society, especially in the legal sense.
-Would the fixing mentioned above include that same fed gov’t using the people’s monies to extend the fairness (democracy, nation building, bailouts, etc) to foreign countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc.
-Would it then be fair to say that the “gross taint on the society you’re a part of” would include the actions of that gov’t abroad – or does this not apply when “good intentions to fix problems” is the reason for continued involvement in these countries.
Yeah this is pretty off topic, I’m sorry.