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<HEAD><TITLE>DFC: The Elegy</TITLE></HEAD>
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<IMG Align=Top SRC="process.gif"><H3>DFC: The Stories</H3>
<A HREF="spinn.html">[Horselover Fat's Page o' SpinnStuff]</A>
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The DFC is dead. And when something dies, we want to tell its
story, to find the coherent narrative which makes some sense
of it, and of our loss. But so far it's refused to
settle down into just one story; there are at least five.
<h4>Story of The Man</h4>
When Greg posted the Scary Lawyer Letter, this was the story
that imposed itself. Here we were, one page among 60 million,
turning a tired old comic into one
of the funniest sites on the web. And evil lawyers came by
to stomp on our fun.
<p>The first reaction, of course, was for everybody to pull out
their armchair law degrees. I can't count the number of people
who told us to check out the parody defense, sometimes attributing it
directly to the Constitution, if not the Ten Commandments.
Others pointed us to various valiant victims who'd fought and won,
or who'd ignored the letters and survived.
<p>People were imagining, I think, a little Monopoly-like
Parody Exception card you could send back to the lawyers. You can
make a case for parody-- but you have to make it in court...
or rather you have to pay lawyers to do so. It's nice to be in the right
when you play that game, but having deep pockets is nicer.
<p>In alt.fan.spinnwebe and other SpinnWebe hangouts, there
was a good deal of speculation on the source, timing, and
purpose of the letter. We had even heard that Bil Keane knew about
the DFC, and didn't really mind it.
The consensus was that Bil had
nothing to do with it, and the real purpose was probably to
eliminate competition for the new FC website.
<p>As Steve Outing of <a href="http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stop/st092299.htm"><i>Editor & Publisher News</i></a> pointed out,
none of this is necessarily sensible behavior on King Features'
part.
<ul>
<li>It's bad publicity: Big syndicate goes after a bunch of
geeks and their web page.
<li>There is no way that
the DFC harms Keane's franchise-- on the contrary, the DFC has
aroused enough interest for some of us to buy FC books.
<li>The idea of the DFC cannot be eradicated; the crackdown
only means that any number of disgruntled DFCers will create
versions of their own elsewhere on the web.
</ul>
One character on a.f.sw even nattered darkly about corporate
fascists and AmeriKKKa. You don't have to swallow that to
get depressed about the sort of Web we'll have if King Features has
its way-- sanitized of all non-corporate voices, of all
individuality, quirkiness, and subversive comedy.
<h4>The Ballad of Greg and Bil</h4>
And then the story changed. We started getting news coverage,
and the reporters had managed to contact Bil Keane. Turns out
it wasn't the lawyers' initiative; it was Bil. He had known
about the DFC for years; but he thought it was getting "more
dastardly." People were complaining to him, and he had to
do something. He didn't mind satire, he said, but he did
mind the "blue" material. "It just shouldn't be allowed."
<p>Some people would just take this as noise, and hit the
accelerator. But Greg didn't; it bugged him.
<p>He continued consulting with lawyers, and even drafted a
response to King Features, enclosing the Parody Exception card.
As he says, he ran the DFC because it was fun-- and he'd
heard that Keane wasn't too bothered by parodies.
"But knowing now that he's upset about it, I had to think:
what say this did go to court, and what say I did win.
Would it still be fun for me? I don't think so."
<p>Here's where he really left the script: he decided to give Bil
Keane a phone call. He ended up talking with him for an hour and
a half.
<p>Bil turns out to be a likeable guy, with a sense of humor.
He had seen the DFC-- he doesn't have a modem, but his
daughter Gayle (the model for Dolly! is this surreal or
what?) used to print out DFC pages for him, and he'd laugh.
He and Greg even chatted about other ideas for parody sites.
<p>Now, in the Hollywood tearjerker this seems destined to
become, Bil would have his own epiphany at this point, and
send Greg on his way with his blessings-- perhaps even
contribute a few sly gags to DFC #523.
<p>Instead Greg decided to end the DFC-- and take down the
archive. After talking with Bil, he just didn't have the
stomach to fight him in court for the right to make jokes
about his drug-dealing, incest, and stupidity.
<p>As Raven put it, in a moment of emotion, suddenly it
felt like "taking a decent man's lifework and ruining it for
him. SUDDENLY, IT'S NOT ABOUT HARMLESS FUN ANY MORE."
<h4>The Paradox of Parody</h4>
This story provides closure for Greg; I'm not sure it does for me.
<p>Keane told one reporter he wouldn't mind the DFC
"if it was kept clean and within the parameters of my intentions."
Ah yes. If only we'd avoided the offensive captions, and
just kept the funny ones.
<p>Only that's not how parody works. Parody is brutal. Check
out Harvey Kurtzman's '50s <i>Mad</i> sometime--
say, the portrait of Archie as a brutal teenage
gangster (to say nothing of Sherlock Holmes as a clueless lech,
or Mickey Mouse as an unshaven, jealousy-ridden freak,
or Batman as a murderous vampire. DC sued over that one).
<p>It shouldn't be allowed? I beg to disagree. Forget the legal
or moral arguments-- Kurtzman's <i>Mad</i> was hilarious, and
so is the DFC. I'd hate to not be able to read those '50s
<i>Mad</i>s, and it's a shame that the DFC won't be around
to similarly bend minds and contribute to the fall of Western Civilization.
<p>The raunch charge bothers me in part because I helped edit
the DFC, and struggled with the issue on many a caption.
We were not trying, as Keane alleged, to "come up with the
raunchiest and most disgusting captions". Believe me, Bil,
we got a lot of those; and we dumped their sorry asses.
Every caption in the DFC is there because one of the editors
thought it was funny. Sometimes it was innocent fun; sometimes
it was rather mean; sometimes the meanness was an essential part
of the humor. And sometimes the readers or even the other editors
wouldn't like it. But the point was always the wit.
<p>Admittedly there's some fun in making Bil's wholesome
creatures swear and get sexual. But it gets old fast. Other
incarnations of the DFC contain little but this kind of humor--
stuff we'd reject outright, or display in the "red zone", the
hall of shame for captions that invite mockery of the captioneer
rather than the comic.
<p>Take a look at <a href="dfc467.htm">a typical DFC page</a>--
the Keanes arriving home from a wedding, with Dolly and
Thel looking totally wiped... one of those pictures you can
hardly believe Bil really drew. (The cat with its head in
the toilet is another.)
I can't say which captions would be acceptable to Bil;
but some of my favorites are impossible to tone down:
<ul>
<li>Bil was jealous. <i>He'd</i> never been able to drain the
batteries of his Stepford Babes. --Ken
<li>Th' best part was when the priest looked over at us and said, "There is no God." --The Boy
<li>I didn't even know they <i>could</i> excommunicate us
from a wedding. --Helder
<li>Now THAT was a FART! --Tie Boy
<li>That, my man, is the difference between <i>fucking</i>
and <i>having sex</i>. --Lt. Dan
<li>I finally did it! All ten commandments in one day! --Mr. ?
</ul>
<p>That isn't to say that we can't have clean, intellectual,
absurdist captions... in fact, those are some of my favorites
too. But I don't want Bil Keane drawing the (dotted) line; no matter
how wicked a sense of humor he has in private, he's going to
draw it a lot closer than I would. It can't be kept within
the "parameters of his intentions"... the whole point of
parody is to be able to step <i>out</i> of the author's
parameters and subject them to criticism.
<p>Is this because we're evil people? Well, no. I've met or
corresponded with quite a few DFC regulars, and if I had
to generalize, I'd say they're intelligent, geekish, and
likely to have their vices in check. A good skeptical mind
doesn't waste itself on drugs or ideology, and prefers to
break the rules in our minds, in the form of humor,
rather than in real life.
<h4>The Tale of the Editor</h4>
My own DFC story starts one day in rec.arts.comics.strips,
where someone posted the URL and mentioned, as a selling point,
that if you submitted something really stupid it'd end up
in the shameful red asterisk. That impressed me for some
reason-- when I submitted my first caption, for DFC #11,
I was terrified that this could happen to me.
<p>That's why I used an alias, by the way. If you're
wondering, "Horselover Fat" is a character in a Philip K.
Dick novel. <a href="http://www.zompist.com/langfaq.html">
As a linguist</a>, I'm filled with admiration of that name.
It sounds completely weird; and yet it's just a translation
of his name into English. <i>Philippos</i> is Greek for
'horselover', and <i>Dick</i> is German for 'fat'.
<p>It was like at first sight, but it turned into love when that
caption was accepted. A positive first experience is a
powerful thing, as movie directors and drug dealers know;
the same thing happened to me with Usenet, when my very
first posting ever got an e-mail response from Marvin Minsky.
<p>Not that I've ever been one of the most prolific captioneers.
I've got something over a hundred captions in-- not even
in the top 25.
<p>One day in June 1996, however, I got an e-mail from
Greg. Basically, he liked the captions that Craig and I
were submitting, and asked us to help edit. So far as I
was concerned, this was like David Letterman calling up
and asking me to look over the Top Ten lists for him.
I negotiated a six-figure
salary, and never looked back.
<p>OK, so the salary was about six figures less. It's
almost always been a blast. (The "almost always" refers
to the jerk factor among our contributors... people who
send in abusive captions, people who whined about not
getting in, people who accused us of playing favorites.
Get a life, folks.)
<p>Ever since then, every couple of days I'd log in and
plow through a mass of raw captionage. The mass has
grown steadily larger; at the start we'd get a couple hundred
captions per cartoon; then we'd get the occasional thousand;
then a thousand became routine. We've gotten as many as 1800
(not counting the last DFC, which is a special case).
<p>Curiously, the quality has only grown. We used to
get lots of red-zoners, abuse, or people playing with the
interface-- which was at least easy to reject. Now, almost
all those thousand submissions are at least respectable
attempts at a real caption. We reject the majority for
the two great sins:
<ul>
<li>It's a joke we've seen too many times
before. After reading about 100,000 captions, someone's
brilliant thought that Billy's gay or the evening meal is
Barfy doesn't seem so original. Or there was that
Bil-and-Billy-on-the-beach cartoon... 25 <i>From Here to
Eternity</i> captions. I began to understand why the sf
magazines send out letters pleading with authors not to
send in Adam-and-Eve-in-space stories.<p>
<li>Or, it's just not boffo.
</ul>
It amazes me that some people still don't realize that humor
is subjective. With the DFC this usually means someone's
griping that although their captions just slay their immediate
circle of friends, we reject them in favor of this pissant
milkwater that just isn't funny-- probably, it's implied,
because we're accepting sexual favors from the submitters.
<p>Whoa! Don't tell me I've missed out on yet <i>another </i>
opportunity for casual, soulless sex!
<p>Nothing is objectively funny-- unless you take "funny"
as meaning "amusing millions of people", in which case
Bil Keane, with his 1500 papers, <i>is</i> funny, by definition.
When I posted <a href="dfc404.htm">a peek into the DFC slush pile</a>,
some people figured that my choices were arbitrary.
Not exactly-- my choices were just my choices. The DFC
reflected my sense of humor and that of the other editors,
and ultimately Greg's, since he chose us. A lot of people
liked that mix; if you didn't, you could always read something
else, or start your own DFC.
<p>And now the gig is over... <snif>...
<h4>The DFC Myth</h4>
<p>I don't know how much longer it could have lasted, really.
Cheap art goes on forever, but great comedy blazes and dies.
Like MST3K, the DFC accumulated quite a lore of in-jokes.
And all the easy jokes had been done. In DFC #1, you could
get in with "Does Daddy know you're a lesbian?"
In #462 you had to be more sophisticated: "It's not that
I'm averse to working it out in trade... but are <i>all</i>
your sales clerks male?"
<p>Ideally the DFC would end while it's hot, and the archives
would remain on-line. The DFC would be
remembered, and discovered by new generations of cybernauts,
as a classic of comedy.
<p>Instead, now the DFC becomes myth.
<p>No matter what the lawyers do, the archives aren't going
to disappear. That's not how the Web works. The Web allows
anyone with a browser, anywhere in the world,
to download content from your server. Mostly that content
gets erased by new content; but people aren't stupid. People
have made copies of the DFC.
<p>Ironically, by singling out
this one website, King's lawyers have ensured that physical
copies of the DFC have multiplied. It's gone underground,
and it will continue to circulate forever by cybersamizdat.
<p>And the DFC meme has been exposed to thousands of new
hosts. (When the shutdown was in the news, traffic to the
site increased threefold.) There will be imitations. (And
some of them won't share Greg's scruples, and <i>will</i>
fight off Keane's lawyers.)
<p>Greg's version will be hard to top, however. I've seen
a few of the other DFCs out there; with all due respect,
most of their captions would barely rate the yellow zone
("okay, but could be improved").
<p>What Greg added to the meme was a bit of technology-- some
solid cgi scripts for picking and displaying multiple captions--
and a bit of cachet: <i>his</i> version was edited.
<p>No one likes seeing their babies rejected; but the
editing made the DFC, in several ways.
<ul>
<li>It increased overall
quality-- most of the Sturgeonian crap was removed.
(You might think you'd really like to see all the submissions,
and judge for yourself... but trust me, you'd get bored fast.
Reading fifty good captions can be side-splitting; finding
them amid a thousand lame ones is not. Whenever we loosened up
a little, we'd get complaints.)<p>
<li>It increased the challenge. Fear of rejection is a
powerful incentive to write the best caption you can.
And because acceptance was difficult, it was also rewarding.<p>
<li>And yet it wasn't a contest. <a href="http://prometheus.frii.com/~soren/buildmeat/">The Red Meat Construction Kit</a>
is a lot of fun, but submitters can vote on each other's
cartoons.... I'd rather be rejected outright than learn that
my caption was awared a 4.12 out of 10 by my rivals.
And though Scott McCloud's <a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/carl/3b/cyoc.html">on-line collaborative Carl comic</a>
is fascinating, the fact that there's only one winner is
ultimately demotivating. (Though I did win on <a href="http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/carl/3b/cyoc-1/x02y12.html">the very first panel</a>.)
</ul>
<hr>
So, SpinnWebe/DFC, <i>ave atque vale oing</i>. Thanks to
Greg for running the site, letting me edit, and becoming
a friend. Thanks to the other editors, despite the fact
that they were the ones who accepted all the <i>bad</i> captions:
Craig, Vice Pope Doug, Raven, and Ken. And thanks above
all to that wiggy, groovy crowd, the DFC submitters.
In a better world they'd have offered us <a href="http://www.spinnoff.com/swhc/FF-Show.html">a talk show</a>,
at the very least.
<p>Don't go away, folks. There's always <a href="http://www.spinnwebe.com/iadl/">
the IADL</a>... and the <b>next</b> SpinnWebe project....
<i>The Hello Kitty Appreciation Page</i>!
<p>Hey, I was just kidding! Come back!
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