Issue 169

News/ Review: Billy the White Nationalist.
I have recently been a big reader of a website called the Bad Webcomics Wiki (I have linked to it a few Issues ago). It, as the title implies, is a catalog of reviews of some of the worst webcomics in existence. Ranging from genuinely awful works (like Shredded Moose), to works that are not so much awful as polarizing (like Megatokyo [a successful, if sentimental, webcomic] or Concession, that webcomic about the mouse who is made to think that he is molesting children due to a brain tumor, which I think is okay if you're in the market for something as insane as, say, All-Star Batman and Robin), and a few works which barely qualify as webcomics (from a series of photos of a guy with a chalkboard, to the collected works of Jack Chick.) What is generally considered to be the single worst webcomic around the web is a series called Billy The Heretic. What would you guess it's about from that title? A boy criticizing the Christian society around him, like Moral Orel, except more overt? Well, no. The blurb for it states that it is about the author's life as a Christian boy raised by Jewish parents. So you'd think that a comic like that would be shamelessly sentimental, and that's the reason it's so reviled, right? No. It is, in fact, blatant Anti-Semitic propoganda. I mean, sure, there's one or two strips in its archive (Surprisingly, the comic seems to have been around from time immemorial, but with less than 50 strips total) that will appeal to people who don't sleep with a copy of Mein Kampf under their pillows, but the vast majority of the strips seem like the kind of thing that Eric Cartman would have written. In fact, in the second strip, he calls his sister Mona (the only character besides Billy to have a name), a "rat with glasses." Yeah, that's right. He's recycling the characterization by the Nazis of the Jews as vermin. In fact, the entire point of the comic can be summarized as "Jews are evil", with a few strips of quibbling about points of the Holocaust as a substitutes for jokes (Yes, we know that Auschwitz is in Poland. It's still accurate to refer to it as "German" because it was operated by the Nazi government at a time when the state of Poland didn't even exist.) The characters are flat, and don't even have names, except for the sister, the art is atrocious, But the real kicker is his FAQ page, in which Billy states that he is sympathetic to the white nationalist movement. Now, let me explain why the idea of White Nationalism is idiotic; We shall set aside, for the moment, that the term is, simply put, an attempt by Racists to look more respectable, and like "Intelligent Design", it fools nobody. The fact is, that, simply put, White people do not constitute one nation; they occupy several nations that have a long history of quarreling with each other, and have several different languages, and even a few separate alphabets. If a people cannot at least share a common alphabet, they cease to be considered an ethnicity. For the record, It is worth noting that there was some debate as to which ethnicities counted as white a little over a century ago. In fact, the Irish and Italians were often counted as "not white" at the turn of the previous century. In short, as attempted PR makeovers go, it is as obvious as they come.

Band Name of the Day: n/a.

Film Idea of the Day: A woman finds that she is beginning to develop some sort of Precognition towards the life of her increasingly effeminate son. In the end, after some DNA tests, it turns out that the mother and child are actually one and the same. This is apparently possible due to time travel and fully-effective sex changes.

Quote of the Day: Well; this.

Link of the Day: More on action Park