10:18pm: Fear and Loathing on the Comic Convention Circuit
I belong to a couple of comic creator communities, and about a week ago,
planetmatt aka Matt Busch, quite a talented artist, started posting-- some might say spamming-- to some of these communities the sad, lurid tale of Steve Niles, a comic book writer (apparently of some renown, though I've never heard of him) who told Matt he wanted to collaborate on a graphic novel only as a ruse to get closer to Matt's girlfriend Sarah. To add insult to injury, not only did Niles "steal" Sarah from Matt, but according to Matt, also left several threatening messages telling him not to show his face at any comic cons. This is a truncated version of Matt's post, which he left on several LJ communities...
hyah and
hyah and
hyah and
hyah.And hyah.Annnd hyah. And very possibly more places, but this guy belongs to over 100 LJ comms so I'm not going to check them all out. You get the point. He posted this all over the place.
Anyway, he obviously also
posted it in his own LJ and this is where the wank actually occurs. The first page is nothing special; pretty much the same sympathetic murmurings he received in the various comms, though with a lot more anonymous "She was a SLUT" and "Steve Niles SUX" than he got elsewhere.
Then, on
the second page, the wank starts to break out, as it turns out part of the reason the comments have been so overwhelmingly supportive of Matt is because
Matt's been deleting anyone who doesn't give him full support. The anons really come out to play at this point, as "The Philly Flash"
says Matt's been haunting his ex-girlfriend's LJ and
someone unsigned assures Matt that the world Needs To Know This Story.Even LucasFilm is sent word of this earth-shattering experience, because uh. I'm not sure. Apparently Matt's done some artwork for them in the past or something.
Of course many people come out in support of Matt as well, some of whom like to
call ex-girlfriend Sarah's character into question and some of whom
may or may not be Matt himself, though Matt is noticeably absent, as he doesn't seem to be replying to any of these comments.
Then there's
this lovely asshole, spreading a little bit of woman-hate as he goes.Also,
in a comment in a previous post from ex-girlfriend Sarah (AKA kudgoddess), it appears Matt may not have been telling the entire truth about the breakup. Also, apparently she's deleted several posts from the past few days, as she was getting some anonymous comments calling her "slut" and "whore"-- sorry, "h0r".
Oh, and as full disclosure-- I did leave a
comment each on two of the LJ community posts (I'm Dwinghy on LJ) but since neither of them garnered any responses or otherwise caused wank I'm not putting this in i_wank. Okay?
Interestingly, he has yet to answer the $64 question of why he hasn't called the cops on this guy.
EDIT:Matt has a NEW entry with a link to a Quicktime file of some of Steve's abusive phone messages. I don't have Quicktime but happily Matt provided us with a partial transcript, in which the word "faggot" is used a lot. He also provides a link to some other guy who says he's had problems with Steve Niles. Also, apparently he is posting this on the internet to "protect" himself. No word yet on why the internet is better protection than phoning the cops though.