My Name Is Not Michael Keaton

March 15, 2013 11:44 AM

MichaelKeaton.net

is a collage/comic from John Campbell (pictures for sad children) who recently, briefly "caused an uproar" after posting a series of updates to the kickstarter for his latest book. He made a monument to it.

posted by StopMakingSense (29 comments total)

tumblr.txt:

Campbell seems to me like he’s in pain and in that pain has failed to account for the pain of others. He forgot that his kind of subject—a white, male, cis, (straight?) subject is not the only kind of subject that has to deal with depression. Other people get depressed, and we are very used to hearing, “Your illness does not exist” coming out of a body like Campbell’s.

So, to sum up: for me there’s a political failure here, but it’s a complicated one. The personal failure, on the other hand, is simple: he made bad art.

posted by boo_radley at 11:55 AM on March 15, 2013

I was wondering when this would get posted here.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:56 AM on March 15, 2013

eponisterical
posted by rebent at 11:56 AM on March 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

All I wanted was a word, a photograph to keep.

(My Name is) Michael Caine.
posted by chavenet at 12:00 PM on March 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Can someone like, summarize the tumblr drama? Because John Campbell is like, a personal comics hero of mine, and there was some kerfuffle over him joking about his depression?

What bad art did he make, boo_radley?
posted by pmv at 12:05 PM on March 15, 2013

This guy seems depressed.
posted by orme at 12:10 PM on March 15, 2013

So in the last link he's talking about himself in the third person?
posted by hyperizer at 12:21 PM on March 15, 2013

The last link is copypasta'd stuff from various people griping about him on Tumblr.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:22 PM on March 15, 2013

My Name Is Not Michael Keaton

I am Batman.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:25 PM on March 15, 2013

I'm making my way through the Stephen Soderbergh part of "Fish" and I think it's brilliant.
posted by Shepherd at 12:26 PM on March 15, 2013

I'm making my way through the Stephen Soderbergh part of "Fish" and I think it's brilliant.

Spoiler: How do you feel about the page if you refresh page 34?



I've never been happier for MetaFilter's [more inside] functionality ever. I viewed and enjoyed MichaelKeaton.net quite a bit before clicking through, but I found everything under the fold exhausting from all perspectives.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:35 PM on March 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

pmv: Can someone like, summarize the tumblr drama? Because John Campbell is like, a personal comics hero of mine, and there was some kerfuffle over him joking about his depression?

The tumblr drama was basically just the reaction to the first of the kickstarter updates. Campbell made a very sarcastic update to his kickstarter about how he'd been "pretending to be depressed" (possibly as an explanation for why he hadn't delivered on the products yet?). I'm certain that like almost everyone who suffers from depression, especially if that person is successful at doing what he loves, he has at some point been accused of faking his depression.

But again, the update was heavily sarcastic, and sarcasm does not always carry over in a textual form.
posted by capricorn at 12:38 PM on March 15, 2013

I don't understand most things.
posted by littlerobothead at 12:42 PM on March 15, 2013 [3 favorites]

This post is a little eponysterical for me.
posted by Think_Long at 12:49 PM on March 15, 2013

I first read the link's name as Michael McKean. Oh well.
posted by Melismata at 1:17 PM on March 15, 2013

pmv: "Can someone like, summarize the tumblr drama? Because John Campbell is like, a personal comics hero of mine, and there was some kerfuffle over him joking about his depression?

What bad art did he make, boo_radley?"

That's a tumblr-normative quote from the "made a monument" link. Sorry for the confusion.

Sorry.

Just

< (-_-) >

\ (-_-) /

_ (-_-) _

Sorry.
posted by boo_radley at 1:19 PM on March 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

I really liked The Fish. I want more of that.
posted by cthuljew at 1:20 PM on March 15, 2013

I'm lovin' it.
posted by mediated self at 1:29 PM on March 15, 2013

Man, that's some moonshine-quality trolling there. Folks really need to get over themselves.
posted by sensate at 1:45 PM on March 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Love it. The comic parts I mean. Everything else is united states of whatever.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:55 PM on March 15, 2013

I meant this to be about the comic parts but I also liked his essays and wanted to share them, so felt like I had to "put them in context." So, sorry if that ends up as a noisy sideshow to the main Michael Keaton-based event. I do like how he turned being the focus of Tumblr Outrage into more art, though.
posted by StopMakingSense at 3:03 PM on March 15, 2013

I've never been happier for MetaFilter's [more inside] functionality ever. I viewed and enjoyed MichaelKeaton.net quite a bit before clicking through, but I found everything under the fold exhausting from all perspectives.

Like so many things, this is best summarized by Campbell's A Brief History of Art.
posted by straight at 3:16 PM on March 15, 2013

The narrative in the first part suggests he started out pretending to be depressed and in the process became actually depressed. That seems pretty realistic, although there is that weird slide from contempt to mourning that's present in so much of his work. Is he the one claiming it was satire?
posted by LogicalDash at 4:04 PM on March 15, 2013

There 46 different fish names. Assuming that each fish's name is randomly selected from the available set, and that no two fish can have the same name, there are 91,080 possible combinations of fish names.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 5:08 PM on March 15, 2013

The narrative in the first part suggests he started out pretending to be depressed and in the process became actually depressed.

I'm a huge fan of Campbell's, and if you look back at a lot of his work--for instance, his hourly comics (the trend of which he started/popularized)--it's very obvious depression is a real part of his life. At a certain point he put up a page to sell the rest of his hoodies, and he took pictures of him wearing them and in each one he was pretty much crying or in a position of utter malaise.

I believe the kickstarter drama unfolded when his book hadn't come out yet and updates were scarce--people started accusing him of taking the money, pretending he had depression, and some combination of the two. He then made a satirical post, and several more, which are all worth reading, in my opinion, as is his comic. A lot of people, it seemed, didn't understand he was being satirical of his critics--so these people thought he was mocking depression (and them, by association).
posted by stresstwig at 6:40 PM on March 15, 2013

I went to college with John and we were filmmaking partners our senior year and roommates in Chicago after graduation, when he started doing his hourly comics. I'm not going to speak to his mental health (not being his doctor) but the in-a-crying-position/look-of-utter-malaise is a thing he does because it looks funny. John spends a lot of his life laughing and quoting The Simpsons and MST3K and caring very much about art and I certainly hope people don't get the impression from the title of his webcomics or the jokey-awkward-non-answer thing he does in interviews that he's some kind of yearning shutin whose only mode of communication other than wailing is stick figure comics.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:21 PM on March 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

Sorry-- I didn't mean to imply it was super serious. To clarify, I meant that it was more like, people who backed his kickstarter were probably familiar with all of this stuff, and it was kind of shocking to me to see so many people taken aback when he did the essays.
posted by stresstwig at 9:50 PM on March 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Drama aside, god damn but I loved all 41 or so pages of this. I have an occasional-binge relationship with Pictures For Sad Children and I'm always sort of taken aback by how good Campbell's quiet storytelling is.
posted by cortex at 1:32 PM on March 16, 2013

This is coming from someone who loved pictures for sad children, but this guy has disappeared so far up his own backside he's become the Ourobourass.
posted by SomaSoda at 5:58 PM on March 17, 2013