Poopgate...

By Tony Lee

Okay. Let's talk about the elephant in the room, the thing that everyone keeps talking to me about. The letter.

The story itself is quite simple, you know. A couple of weeks back on a Wednesday, I got a call from someone I used to live with. It could be my family, it could be my friends. I'm not saying, mainly so I don't add jollies to whoever was involved with the letter. Suffice to say that it wasn't my address. Anyway, they called to tell me I'd received this letter, and that they'd opened it to check whether it wasn't something important. Although I've not lived there for several years, I still get the occasional piece of mail sent to me there and often it's a bill, or something else I usually have to reply to quite quickly. And therefore pretty much all the people I've lived with, be they family or friends usually call me when I've had post.

Anyway. Person X phones me up and informs me in a tone akin to someone buggered by pixies that I've ‘had a letter'. Now, all I know about this letter is what's been stated and from the tone? It sounds like it's a bad one. I start to wonder if it's a red bill I've forgotten, maybe it's a summons... It could be anything. But you know what? I couldn't even be close to considering what really had been sent.

And slowly, line by line, the letter was read to me down the phone.

Now, let me start by giving some back story to this. I currently write a serialised story in 2000 A.D. called "Stalag 666". It's a POW jailbreak type story, set on a futuristic jungle world. It's the Great Escape if it was set in space. The Nazis? Well, they're snakes. And it was fun to write. And Matt Smith, editor of 2000 A.D. liked it enough to run with it.

True, occasionally my script and Jon Davies-Hunt's art haven't totally meshed, but the general consensus has been overall quite positive. Well, apart from a couple of forums where I've been slated quite a lot. But I'm a writer. I don't expect everyone to like my stuff. If you worry about being liked? Never work in something where people deal with you. Because there will always be someone who hates your work and more importantly – hates you. I hate a variety of movies, books, TV shows etc and I've stated this opinion, so why should I get pissy when someone states similar about me? I can't. I just hope that I don't get that ripped apart when they start to type.

Amusingly, the first episode of "Stalag 666" came out the same week that the first issue of Doctor Who: The Forgotten came out in the States, and I don't think I've ever had a more extreme swingometer, from Doctor Who reviews saying it was the best Doctor Who comic ever written, down to "Stalag 666" reviews wondering whether I was mentally impaired somehow.

But over the weeks I do feel I've won a few of them over – sure, it's not a set the world on fire story – but I do think it's a solid story and by the end I think I've won more battles than I've lost.

But then we come back to the letter. It's no secret that anyone with a couple of hours, hell minutes on Google can find anyone's address online and someone obviously did, albeit getting the wrong, out of date address. Now over the last few weeks I've had anonymous people post cut-and-pasted negative reviews of "Stalag 666" from the 2000 A.D. online board and the 2000 A.D. Review as comments to my blog posts, usually pretty much every time I post something positive on my blog. And I live with it. It's a price I pay. But anyway, the letter...

"Dear Scumbag writer of shit stories." It started. And this is pretty much word for word, read down the phone to me. "Why don't you f*ck off back to whatever crap you were writing before you blackmailed Tharg into allowing your retarded w*nkstains to be printed. And I hear you've got more coming out? Give up. You're shit. "

It then proceeded to give a cut and paste of EVERY negative review. It gave me the ones from 2000 A.D. online, it gave me the ones from 2000 A.D. Review - including every review bar the most recent one. Not a single positive one, and I know I've had a couple of those - but every single ‘WE HATE THIS STORY' ONE. It was three A4 sheets.

Okay, I get it. There are people out there who hate this bloody story. But then Person X read the kicker out to me.

"get the message? " It continued. "F*ck off out of comics. Go back to working in KFC or wherever you threw up from. I can shit better scripts than you can write. "

And the following page? THEY HAD WIPED THEIR ARSE ON A SHEET OF PAPER. They had wiped excrement all over it. It stank.

AND THEN THEY HAD POSTED IT TO ME.

What the f*ck? I mean, SERIOUSLY, what the hell is f*cking wrong with you if you'd hate a story so much you'd shit on a piece of photocopy paper and send it to a writer as a protest?

And so I sat on the end of a phone, stunned as to this terrible act. I told them to burn the letter. I know, I should have kept it for DNA and all that – and if it'd been sent it to me, I would have. But this wasn't me, they didn't deserve this and I sure as hell wasn't going to make them keep it. (But I did contact the police and inform them of this.) But it really shook me.

I posted on the 2000 A.D. online forum, explaining my thoughts, and I have to say, for a forum that I was convinced hated me in the main, I've never been made to feel like ‘one of the guys' more. They took this act as a personal affront – someone had sent poo to one of ‘their' writers – and I received posts and private emails of support. And then it ballooned. I found that other blogs had picked this up. Suddenly I was getting emails from U.S. editors voicing their support to me, which was nice – but by this point? I'd really wanted to move on. Not because I'm shallow or callous, but because it hurt too much to dwell on. Getting told that a story that you're actually quite proud of (as I was with "Stalag 666") is tedious and boring and the worst thing ever? It hurts like hell. It's worse than ever being the last on the line picked in games, and having been on this end of it; I'll never bitch about a book or film again. But as I've said countless times I wouldn't have it any other way because
without people like the 2000 A.D. fans who have the balls to say what they think, I wouldn't grow as a writer.

But if you truly think that sending me faeces in the post is a valid argument? Then matey? You're totally f*cked up in the head.

But at the risk of giving this guy something to crow about, he/she/it did manage to get under my skin. And for a large chunk of the last couple of weeks I've not been able to write anything worth shit. Every line I write I've agonised about, written and re-written and deleted – and it took until this weekend to get it totally out of my system. Because people say to me ‘Hey man, look at it this way – at least you're being noticed due to this. Look at the exposure. ' Liam Sharp joked last week that from the amount of positive PR I got from this, I should have thought of this myself and sent myself a shit-bomb years ago. And I can't fault him for the idea. But the problem is that yeah, I got US editors emailing me. And yeah, many of them are editors I'd love to work with and I'd love to think that this might somehow get me closer to a couple of US titles...

But.

Let's be honest here. Are they really thinking ‘poor bastard' – or are they thinking ‘Jesus, this guy's writing is so terrible that people are sending him shit! Why the hell would we hire him? '

Yeah. You see? It's not the best PR to have.

In the end, it took a weekend at the MCM Expo and the surrounding days for me to finally realise that one utterly mental fan's state of mind did not make me a terrible writer. And once I realised this, I was able to start working on pitches again. And this weekend I've had my wonderful fiancée Tracy bolstering my flagging ego, reminding me that actually? I'm not that bad. And this week? I'm back to the grindstone. If anything, this entire situation has made me a better writer. Because I'll make damned sure I don't get something like this again.

But every day now, when I check my mail, when I open a letter – I have a little twinge of fear. And I think I will for a very long time.

DC and Marvel editors - feel free to offer me work, though...

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Other news now – obviously last week I talked about the MCM Expo, complete with pictures. But what I wasn't able to show were two pictures taken on the Sunday, directly after the convention closed of myself, Ben Templesmith, Dan Boultwood and Emma Vieceli. Until this weekend past that is when the photographer, the incredibly talented Svetlana Chmakova sent them to us...

And so, without further adieu, I present what Svetlana calls 'The League of Extraordinary Comickers...'

First, the 'serious arty pose' one...

Tony, Ben, Dan, Emma.

And then, the 'as they really are' one...

Tony, Ben, Dan, Emma... As they really are.

Larger pictures can be seen on my Livejournal page...

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Other news – apparently Larry Young announced Dodge & Twist at this weekend's APE convention. I know I've spoken about it a lot, but this is the first official word from AiT/PlanetLar. And, even better than that, Larry has provided all interested people with a link to the unedited nineteen page PDF we put together for the Birmingham Comic Show.

Obviously the stupidly talented Paul Peart-Smith is still hard at work to finish this, and we're hoping for a late 2009 release, but I think you'll agree that this could be one of the best things I've ever written. Make up your own mind by clicking on the PDF link at the AiT/PlanetLar site HERE.

All I hope is that if people don't like it, they tell me by email, and don't resort to sending me more specialised letters...

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Discuss this column at the Only A Forum forum.
© 2008, Tony Lee

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