Shredded
Moose had been resting in relative peace for four years, when in 2013 this
abomination started making the rounds on the net:
This is
supposed to be feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian being sold by Brew to a racist caricature of Sinfest creator Tatsuya Ishida. As for the third guy, Dave Cheung: do not, for the love
of God, google image his name. Some of the pictures that come up in your
browser may be illegal. That is not a joke.
The strip
is signed “Brian Krümm & Chris Hall”, which is a blatant lie. To explain
the origins of this comic, I must unfortunately make you aware of the existence
of a blog called Shitty Webcomics. While
that sounds like a clone of Bad Webcomics Wiki with added profanity, the reality
is much, much more stupid.
SW did
start out as a critical webcomic review, but soon degenerated to a rambling
mess where no more than 15% of the content is actually about webcomics. Out of
the remaining posts, 75% are angry rants about women, feminists and “SJWs” or
“social justice warriors” (a slur against liberals and leftists). The rest is porn.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to make an accurate breakdown of the content, since there’s
lot of overlap between those three categories.
The
following image, which was posted on SW without any comment or explanation illustrates the state of their sanity fairly well:
 |
| I think they’re trying to say something about ethics in gaming journalism |
Shitty
Webcomics also has an obsessive hate-crush on Sinfest and its creator Tatsuya Ishida. Back in 2011, Ishida shifted Sinfest from being
a comedy strip that kicked in all directions, to an anviliciously feminist action/drama
series. Yes, cerebus syndrome is a common affliction among webcomic creators.
Many
Sinfest fans were disappointed, but a certain type of fan really freaked the
fuck out: those who had never understood what Ishida felt about certain things,
not until he now spelled it out for them in letters you could read from the
Moon. These were the kind of people who
had never realized that the dynamic between Monique and Slick had always been supposed
to mainly make fun of the latter.
 |
| "Nope. Still not seeing it." |
To the fans who never saw it coming, Sinfest’s “turn to feminism” was a shock, and they didn’t cope well. It seems the guys at Shitty Webcomics belonged to this camp, because they never forgave Ishida and have been whining incessantly about him ever since.
One of the
blog’s vilest moments - that says a lot,
by the way - was when the mods sent out the following offer to its readers:
the first person to draw and send them a picture of Monique getting raped by
the Shitty Webcomics avatar (a crudely drawn stick-figure) would be given mod
status. Well, that happened and they published the drawing. No, I’m not linking
to it. No way in Hell.
Anyway, these
were the guys who suddenly stumbled upon a mother lode of Shredded Moose
strips.
Where did
it come from? Chris Hall had tried to erase all memory of his doomed comic from
the internet, but apparently several different readers had copied down “choice”
strips back before he went on his deletion spree. For some reason all of these
readers waited four years to release their copies on the web, so that in 2013 several
slightly different archives appeared almost simultaneously.
For obvious
reasons SW were not offended by what they found. Frankly it seems like the kind
of thing they ought to enjoy over there. In fact, Shitty Webcomics is so fucked
up that people have speculated the blog is run by Chris Hall. SW vehemently denies
that,
and claim to not even like Shredded Moose.
 |
| Main problem: Not enough nudity. |
And yet, sometimes
you find them questioning if perhaps Shredded Moose was intentionally bad,
and arguing that if it was, that would somehow make the comic deserve praise.
 |
| Silly rabbit, “genius” and “troll” are opposites. Oh, and good job shoehorning Sinfest in there. |
How something
stupid and horrible suddenly becomes admirable if you secretly didn’t mean it
is beyond me.
Anyway,
these guys didn’t find much reason to hate Shredded Moose. After a while they also, apparently,
began to be concerned that the strip had suffered “censorship” and it really got them spooked when they learnt that the Moose-hunting
reviewer at Your Webcomic Is Bad called herself “Lillith Ester”.
 |
| “OMG, you guys, Jewish feminazi SJW conspiracy!” |
Not long after SW found the Shredded Moose copies and started posting about the comic, they were contacted by a person who, for some inexplicable reason, wanted to draw a Shredded Moose “revival” strip. Due to an acute lack of imagination, said person wanted the SW guys to give them a script. They jumped at the chance, and the comic above is the sad end product.
I want to
make a brief webcomic review of my own at this point: “Shredded Moose 2.0” is really
disappointing.
I’m not
talking about the art. The anonymous artist does a decent job. For Brian Krümm’s sake,
I really hope it isn’t him. It would be nice if one of the SM creators had
managed to outgrow this sort of thing.
No, the
fault lies entirely with Shitty Webcomics. The Original “Brew” would have
forced “Trip” to actually draw that woman being sawn in half by Ishida and
Cheung. SW’s decision to not insist on that feels like a cowardly cop-out.
The
resulting product is a comic strip that preserves the sexism of the original -
and cranks up the racism - but leaves out the visual shocks that were the only
thing making Shredded Moose sorta interesting.
In its own,
deplorable way, that is.
