Things that cheese me off (part the first)

Final Edit: (Hopefully) Mark Waid confirms "foot-in-mouth" on his part. He says it was a "botched joke", so there you go.

Another Edit: Graeme McMillan confirms that the original CBR story was edited to fix some misquotes and that the blog entry was likewise altered. The commenter "Matter Eater-Blog" also confirms that the quote was as I have it below, so this post stands. Again, I don't know if the interviewer misquoted Waid or if Waid asked for his comment to be taken off the record -- and I don't care. Regardless of why a posted story is changed there should at a minimum be an indication that the story has been edited if it is altered after publication.

Edit: Okay, now the quote is gone from the blog and from the linked interview. I cut and pasted this directly from the Blog@Newsarama post after confirming that it was in the original interview, and now it's gone. There's no indication that either post has been edited after the fact, but the quote is gone. I know that I cut and pasted it directly from the interview here, but apparently it's fallen into the Internet black hole. This is another thing that cheeses me off - folks who edit stories after they're posted without indicating that they've changed it.

The new quote reads:

Ralph's resolution was my favorite thing in "52." The scene with the "ghost detectives" was what we were always building to with Ralph. Based on his history, his personality and his character, there were only two possible payoffs for Ralph: he could have lived, but been miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. But simply killing him to be gratuitous didn't feel right. Killing a character that's been around since before you were born is, generally, a thoughtless and convenient path to take as a writer, and I've learned that the hard way.

via ComicBookResources

I'm cheesed off here because if you need to print a retraction, print a retraction. If you need to edit the post and drop a quote because someone realized they had "foot-in-mouth" disease, or because you misquoted them, at least put in a note to say that the story had been changed.

I'm leaving the rest of this post up for posterity, though whether the quote is legit or not, or conveys an accurate view of reality or not, is left as an exercise to the reader.

From a recent interview with Mark Waid (regarding the now finished 52 miniseries):

Ralph was my favorite thing in it. The scene with the ghost was what we were always building to with Ralph. There is only one resolution for Ralph: he could be miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. And Dan was pushing very hard to kill the character because Dan hates him.

But it didn’t feel right. It just felt gratuitous on top of everything else.

The "Dan" in this case is Dan Didio, high-mucky-muck of DC Comics. He's like Joe Quesada's evil twin (or would be, if Quesada himself weren't someone's evil twin - why do we get the universe with all of the evil twins in it, anyway?). The "Ralph" in this case is Ralph Dibny, the DC Comics character known as the Elongated Man, who recently had a happy ending to his story in the last issue of 52.

Kill Ralph "because Dan hates him." WTF? What kind of a whiny fanboy is Dan Didio? This isn't about killing the character for story reasons, or dramatic reasons, or just to shake things up. Sometimes those are excusable under the right circumstances. Instead, kill him because "I don't like him". Why? Because he's goofy? Because he's a fun character who hearkens back to a day when comics weren't so oppresively dark all of the time? Because Didio hates detectives? Because Ralph Dibny once kicked Didio's dog? Why would anyone "hate" a character like the Elongated Man anyway? Who has that kind of energy? It's not like he's Lobo or Wolverine or something. Didio was probably the kind of kid who broke his action figures in the sandbox too, just because he didn't want any other kids to play with them.

This has been the first in what is likely to be a long-running series of "Things That Cheese Me Off". Or, alternatively, "Rantings From An Old Man That Are Not About Kids Playing On His Lawn"...