As I remember, Tycho/Holkins was super ignorant about McCloud’s intentions and the man in general. But after a very earnest rebuttal, a nice phone call, and (apparently) a lot of people telling him how wrong he was, he changed his mind and admitted it in the next blog post.
As a fan of the writing of both comic artists, I found it a strangely satisfying bit of early internet drama to see unfolding at the time. You don’t see this kind of resolution very often nowadays, I think. Looking back it feels like an artifact of a quainter, simpler early virtual superhighway cyber-surfing culture.
Of course, now I just feel old.
To be fair, with the fifteen-year hindsight I think McCloud was ultimately proven very, very wrong about micropayments being the salvation for the “people don’t want to pay for content in the internet so creators don’t get paid” problem. That’s far from solved, no?
All I’m saying is that the ideas in Reinventing Comics didn’t age very well at all compared to the ones in Understanding Comics, which are genius and eternal as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, but as far as I know only in the ironically very Penny-Arcade-fodder-ish context of videogames designed to rip people off, either via questionable downloadable content or the odious “free to play” model. Did I miss anything?
