Hi all. FyreHyde here. I’ve been assigned the duty of gathering webcomic news and posting about interesting things I read, stumble across, or lazily google upon. The brilliant minds behind the Scienteers seem to have faith in me despite my utter lack of clout in the comic world, so let’s hope they know what they’re doing, eh?

Today I thought I’d pick up on a reasonably hot topic right now, that being Tim Buckley’s latest controversial addition to his highly-followed series Ctrl Alt Del. CAD is one of those comic success stories most webcomic artists aspire to be like (We’re talking the level of success here, not the quality of the comic).

CAD is, and always has been, a comic revolving around video games and the people who play them. Buckley has, on many occassions, and to intense criticism, taken his comic off on tangents about one character or another, but only recently has he really started to seem taken aback by those criticisms. Usually he just ignores them.

The current controversy is stemming from his most recent storyline: the main character, Ethan, has gotten his spouse pregnant. This unplanned pregnancy has spawned several comics with serious tones and without jokes, punchlines, or gamer rhetoric, and the grand culmination of these pregnancy shenanigans can be seen here.

I have my own issues with the works of Tim Buckley, namely the overuse of copy-pasting and the addition of things he knows noone wants to read in the first place. I do side somewhat with Buckley, though in that I feel an author should tell the stories he or she WANTS to tell. However, when the fans of your comic, the people who (in this case) are paying your bills get upset about what you’re doing to their beloved series which is supposed to be FUNNY…it’s a different story altogether. Right?

Apparently Buckley doesn’t think so, and this is where I find his level of unprofessionalism to be quite disturbing. Don’t understand what I’m talking about? Read his newspost concerning the comic and his fans’ responses to it.

Is it just me, or is the man telling all of his loyal fans that they’re stupid and their opinions mean absolutely nothing to him? The post could pretty much have been summarized by the words “piss off I’ll do what I want” and it honestly would have come off as a lot less condescending. I mean…his fans are simply asking that he go back to some jokes.

Alas, such is the way of artists sometimes.

In other news it seems Hero By Night is having publishing issues. Apparently there are some financial troubles with the publisher being used for HBN. Their latest filler, entitled “H is for Hiatus,” is probably not an exciting sight for its readers. D.J. Coffman explained the predicament in one of his posts, not blaming Platinum Studios but instead a general lack of stable income being generated by the project. “I couldn’t in good faith keep going when behind the scenes I knew that there would be books solicited that would not be coming out on time,” he stated in his post yesterday.

That’s all for now, Scienteers. Be sure to swing by next time and catch me rambling about some other webcomic-related hullabaloo!

Fyre out.