Word: rall
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...circumstances that drew these and many other cartoonists to Hellman's aid may strike anyone outside the comix community as surprisingly weird and petty. Hellman has been sued for libel by another cartoonist, Ted Rall, because of a prank played on him by Hellman. The imbroglio began when Rall, author of the weekly syndicated strip "Search and Destroy" and an occasional contributor to TIME magazine, wrote a cover story for the August 3, 1999 "Village Voice," headlined "The King of Comix." It presented Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer-winning "Maus," as a kind of New York cartooning Nero - made...
...form of backlash was an email sent to about thirty people, written by Danny Hellman, another New York cartoonist, posing as Rall, encouraging the recipients to send in their comments on the Spiegelman piece to a lewd email address. Hellman then began spoofing outraged responses by New York print media powerhouses both real and fictional. The artless prank was exposed within days, but like a pair of schoolyard bullies the two continued to escalate the matter until Rall brought suit against Hellman for $1.5 million in damages. So to support the legal fees Hellman has put together this "Legal Action...
...While awkward transitions make for difficult reading (a kind of language violation that Orwell politicized in "1984") the bizarre thematic violations make the book feel false and even hypocritical. One of Rall's consistent objects of parody, the use of irony as a disaffecting, unempathic "attitude," is embodied in the "2024" catchphrase, "Yes. No. Whatever." Yet Rall's entire book reads like an exercise in ironic detachment. He even uses it for gags, as when Winston rebelliously listens to the two-hit 1980s group Quiet Riot. We never care about the characters because Rall doesn't want...
...enjoy some of the ideas of "2024." Rall is smart and intuitive in a vicious sort of way. His running gag of business minutiae as the new entertainment feels dead on. Likewise it's funny when Winston reacts to Channel 101 being "the worst thing in the world," with that meaningless, fully-corpratized hipster catchphrase, "That's cool." But the book lacks the central values of human decency which made it matter that Winston Smith of "1984" came to scrawl "2+2=5" into the dust of his cafe table...
...Perhaps these inconstancies are part of the book's Art - an attempt to discombobulate the audience with extreme contradictions just as the characters live in a state of perpetual untruth and obfuscation. But I doubt Rall thought about it that much. Or if he did, he failed, because "2024," unlike its inspiration, never gives you the feeling of being in the grips of a narrative master and certainly never makes you think more than a second about your own life...