Electronic Tigers (Guest Starring The Ponz)

When leveraged properly, a popular webcomic can provide an ample source of income. A healthy mixture of donation incentives, merchandise, and publication can turn a successful hobby into a successful business venture. With enough spit, gumption, determination and elbow grease (spunk and grit don't hurt either), a skilled webcartoonist can turn their talents into a supplemental or even primary income. Thankfully, I'm not here to talk about people doing things the right way, but rather to lambaste someone for doing things in exactly the wrong way.

The Wrong Way to turn your comic into a cash fountain involves, among other qualities, impatience. Being impatient can lead an otherwise capable cartoonist down a path of failure, misery, and greed. I am talking in the general sense, of course; I wouldn't want to imply that the cartoonist behind Electronic Tigers is capable. Electronic Tigers is the worst kind of garbage: A gaming comic infused with heavily skewed political 'humor', mired in racism, fueled entirely by an asian with enormous bazongas. This 'hot azn' loudly and obnoxiously declares herself a virgin, solely for the economic benefits rather than her moral beliefs. These economic benefits extend to the creators, because for some bizarre reason, horny nerds find virginity to be infinitely more attractive than sexual experience. Therefore, Mika's virginity can be exploited in a myriad of ways to net cash dollars for her owners.

The average ET strip is really actually not very funny. The author fails so often to construct anything resembling a joke, and even when he comes close, the punchline often fails to be amusing. Instead the humor tries to spawn from "crazy situations" and "wacky character behavior" despite neither of these being taken to enough of an extreme that it approaches Chuckleville, much less Guffawston. It would also probably be funnier if it wasn't so incredibly racist.

As unfunny as the original Electronic Tigers was, it was decided a few months back that it just wasn't political enough. So once a week the ET brain trust releases a political comic known as Right Left Center or RLC, where the 'right' is represented as a calm, intelligent elephant, while the left is portrayed by a braying jack-ass of a strawman, which effectively reduces the viability of the 'right' viewpoint provided by the association. The strawmannery and flawed logical arguments were always a part of ET, but by separating the political commentary from the gaming comic, the creators hoped to make ET look less retarded. This didn't really work at all.

Recently, one of the Electronic Tiger handlers has fallen on hard financial times. Rather than putting his miserable comic on hiatus to find a job, and sparing me the discomfort associated with the mere knowledge of its existence, he has decided to prostitute his characters to feed his family. As his 'situation' continues, his political views become more and more vehement and vitriolic, as well as no relevance to reality, and instead of seeking employment, decides to argue his political opinion with his readers at length.

In an act of desperation, this creator has signed up with a company employing a Ponzi Pyramid Scheme (more commonly known as an MLM business) and actually has the gall to ask his few readers to throw their cash in under him. If any bite, then it will surely bite him when they can't even recoup their 'initial investment'. He then took some offense to Something Awful for flooding the comment page with arguments against MLM schemes (For some odd reason, SA users have an intense hatred for pyramid schemes, searching them out to quash them in their infancy) and also for registering their dislike for the comic while they were there. Retaliating against a massive readership spike simply because they were being negative is a great way to alienate them. Instead of insulting a group by referring to them as 'e-thugs' or 'cyberbullies' or 'digi-hooligans', an enterprising webcartoonist could easily find a way to turn a negative into a positive, and convert the haters into continued readers.

Converting a webcomic from a hobby to a job is not something that can happen overnight. It is a gradual process that takes careful planning and severe dedication. In desperation, resorting to exploitation, prostitution and pyramid schemes might turn a quick buck, but you'll end up shooting yourself in the foot in the long run. More self-destructive is a comic is created for the sole purpose of exploitation, prostitution, and pyramid schemes, as is the case of Electronic Tigers. If you want to see a decent gaming comic, there are plenty of better ones out there. If you want to see a decent conservative political comic, there are plenty of better ones out there. If you want to see pornographic, racist, or simply unfunny comics, again, there are plenty of better ones out there. Electronic Tigers is simply an abomination upon all of these genres, and serves no greater purpose other than the generation of easy money.