Tuesday, December 4, 2007

THE SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN #41

WTF?, just WTF? I am at a total loss of words....

The sad tale of the Gurumonkeys!

Why were the last few reviews different from the Whoa/Huh/WTF scale?

What the hell is a Gurumonkey?

Where the hell have I been for the last month?

All those questions (Well, except for the last one) are finally ready to be answered!

It all started right here...
www.gurumonkeys.com

This was to be an all-around entertainment site focusing on comics, video, games, and what have you. I was to be the main writer/editor, and my friend Allen Freeman was to do the web design and upkeep on the site.

Some of you might know Allen as the Editor of long running small press anthology Slam Bang. Allen and I have, in the past, worked on comic book projects. I even wrote an issue of his title Morgana X back in the '90's. Don't bother looking it up, it was definitely a "WTF?"

Now after what happened with Morgana X (This was no fault of Allen's), and other projects I have attempted to launch, I quite simply cannot bring myself to write comic book scripts anymore. I have a severe block and no real desire to do anything about it.

Every so often Allen and I get back in touch and eventually Allen starts talking projects. So I begged off the new Morgana X (Which is a good thing, as new writer Christopher Moshier is doing great things with the character. Order his novel here), as well as some other stuff. But I like Allen and wanted to do something fun. But what?

Now I don't know if any of you noticed but a lot of websites are pretty damn crappy anymore. They are either ran by raving fanboys, or greedy fucks who will completely sell their integrity for a buck or thousand. *Cough* anititcoolnews *Cough* newsarama *Cough*

For those of you who don't know me, I am quite opinionated. Some might say to a fault. So I thought (partially inspired by The Savage Critic.) Why not do a brutally honest review site, but not just for comics but for anything we could lay our fool hands on? Hell, we couldn't do any worse than most.

I threw the idea at Allen and he seemed to love it! We brainstormed on the name, but couldn't settle on one, so we just went to a domain search engine and came up with gurumonkeys. This was July.

In August, Allen lost a member of his family, so i backed off for a month to give him time. In September we began again, I started hitting publishers for stuff to review. Allen showed me a rough of the site. Everything was sailing right? Wrong! Allen kept disappearing off and on. He claimed he was interested, i bought the domain name, and that still didn't get him moving.

October came and went, we went into November, books were in, people were upset about the lack of reviews. Then after weeks of silence, Allen e-mails me out of the blue and claims I stole the reviews I wrote. No explanation just raving. I e-mailed him back , very upset, to no response. i called him, he kept dogging me. I finally got him to pick up the phone and he hung up on me! It would seem Allen flaked or changed his mind I don't know. Many more calls and e-mails were fired off to no response.

So I made a deal with the devil (much like Spider-Man and Mephisto) I got a site I used to write for (See: raving fanboys) to post the reviews. I left the site under less than good circumstances that were partially my fault honestly. I felt awful, but I felt like I owed these people that trusted me. SO the reviews were posted. All was "good".

After having fun on the Savage Critic I, as a joke, started this blog. And what about Allen? I finally heard from him again. I got a nice joke forwarded to me. A joke. When i contacted Allen, via e-mail, he claimed he never got any calls or e-mails. Even though he acknowledged me and hung up on me that one time. Sheesh! But what can you do? Well, how about I take this blog seriously?

The scale is as follows; "Woah!" is good to great, "Huh?" is fair to I don't understand, and "WTF?" is What the fuck did I just read? Why did I waste time and money on this?

So if anyone out there in the world is reading this stuff, leave a comment and let me know you're out there.

Oh, and for the record, the reviews posted were from gurumonkeys. I wote over 2 dozen. These were the comic book ones. That is why the format was different.

Allen Freeman has been sent a link to this so he can respond equally.