Comicvine sucks.
January 14th, 2016
While I may be a nerd, I try to be a thorough nerd. As such, when I decide to tackle a project for my nerd site, I would be quite remiss if I didn't give the components of a project I dislike as much attention as the ones I enjoy. This is why a small portion of Technohol 13 features the few characters from Kickers, Inc. that at all mattered. Of course, you most likely haven't got a clue who Kickers, Inc. were.
Allow me to ruin your day.
In Marvel Comics' New Universe imprint, back in the late 1980s, the basic concept was that the world featured in their stories was exactly like that which existed outside your window. At least it was, anyway, until an inexplicable astronomical phenomenon bathed the world in mutagenic energies, and a respectable percentage of humanity was rendered... different. This may sound familiar.
While the New Universe wasn't the first fictional body to take this idea for a test drive, it's been done numerous times ever since, to varying degrees of success. Mind you, the New Universe itself wasn't all that much of a hit, though a select few nerds (watch me frantically wave my hands, like a forlorn child in class the teacher just won't call on any longer) enjoyed most of the stories set there. Most, anyway.
One of the series from that line of comics that I despised with every fiber of my being was Kickers, Inc. Kickers, Inc. was the story of one guy, a quarterback for the Smashers, a fictional NFL team based in New York City. Even though, uh, the City already had an NFL team. I suppose New York is a pretty big place, and can support more than one professional football team. It works with baseball, yeah?
Anyway. When the White Event (that aforementioned astronomical whatchamacallit) occurred, the Smashers' head quarterback, who'd already won the genetic lottery, became super strong and somewhat bullet resistant, too. Bored with the game after he almost single-handedly won the Super Bowl for the Smashers with his overwhelming capability, quarterback Jack Magniconte decided that he wanted to help others.
But he was just one guy, and thus recruited his wife and some football player buddies to help him go on a string of adventures that each had a distressing similarity to those undertaken by Scooby Doo and the gang. Heck, the Kickers even wore ascots! This went on for a year, before the quarter bins of comic book stores nationwide could no longer hold the volume of these unsold books, and the series was cancelled.
But like a bad penny, Jack keeps turning up.
Since I (shoddily) maintain a news page in my New Universe reference to cover recent events concerning the characters and concepts from that line of comics, I had to do research on Jack, as a few variant reality versions of him have turned up during Marvel's latest 'Secret Wars' event. Which brought me to this document, the main content of which irks me to no end.
This is because, if you compare and contrast the actual text used there with this document, which I wrote way back in 2000 (a subsequent proofreading or two aside), you'll find some striking similarities. Wait, no, they lifted my material wholesale for their janky Wikipedia wannabe site. And if you were reading my gibberings yesterday, you probably already know how I feel about them.
Don't get me wrong. I know I'm one of the few humans still alive who actually knows anything detailed about some of these comic books, aside from 'they sucked'. I'm in an even smaller club when you consider that almost no one has ever written anything comprehensive about them that didn't involve being given lots of money and alcohol first. So I figure my stuff just might get referenced now and then, sure.
But folks could at least have the common decency to credit me when rampantly plagiarizing my work. I used to get oodles of traffic on my Nerdy McNerd site, strangely enough, but now that's slowed to a dull trickle. And this is thanks to plagiarist sites like Wikipedia and their own rip-offs who just love to lift material on obscure topics wherever they can find it, and rarely bother to list or link to their sources.
The moral of the story is that Comicvine sucks. Furthermore, Wikipedia sucks. And, most importantly, any web site that has Wikia in the domain name is to be avoided at all costs. Not even counting the rampant instance of malware they want to deliver to your pristine, innocent computer that has never been to an adult web site. No, the material written there, when not stolen from others, is nigh-incomprehensible.
As if English was, perhaps, the author's fourth or fifth language.
As an aside, someone else found a new use for at least Jack himself, if not some of his related, Kickers, Inc. baggage, which really couldn't be any worse than what they've got now. But my opinion about the use of the term 'Redskins' is another matter entirely. And I'm sure I'll gibber about that soon enough. I have a tendency to do that, after all.