Tales of the Questor: Note

[packbat]

A few months ago there was a post on snarkoleptics where a guy announced he was not going to read Tales of the Questor any more because of the heavy-handed Hard Onions comics being run on the same site. I didn't see it as a big deal – yeah, HO was kinda over the top in Christian/Republicanist propagandizing, but so were several of his other strips. Whereas TotQ, perhaps because it was explicitly set in a fantasy world, escaped the problems of R. H. Junior's biases.

Yeah, yeah, I'll admit intellectually that I'm likely biased as well, but still.

In any case, while I found the HO strips running on the TotQ site annoying, I still stuck around. (And, as you may have noticed, the comics are all separated out now. I heartily approve.) And I'm still sticking around now.

But for the record, if TotQ spirals into a pit of strawman-flaying stupidity, I bet this will be the starting point.

Comments

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Are those Hard Onions strips meant to be taken seriously, or not? That crack about the French Revolution shows a startling lack of knowledge about history.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, he's exactly the person you'd think of four years ago if I said "Bushie". Nip & Tuck (http://www.rhjunior.com/NT/), Goblin Hollow (http://www.rhjunior.com/GH/), and Camp Calomine (http://www.rhjunior.com/CC/) have all three included what I would call heavy-handed, negative, and stereotypical portrayals of (a) liberals, (b) ... actually, mostly liberals, now that I think on it. His forum (at least, when I went on it) probably included more instances of "Dumbocrat" than "Democrat". Last time I checked his Livejournal, he had some argument against evolution based on a linear extrapolation of the current rate of lengthening of the day into the past.

He's smart, and he's a good cartoonist. I wouldn't read Tales of the Questor otherwise. But yes, Hard Onions is meant to be taken seriously.