Scandal! Tothgate at the Onion A/V Club!

Just a little hyperbole to get your morning started. And mine. I don't often read the comic book coverage at the Onion A/V Club, but this morning one article jumped out at me: "An Apology from the A.V. Club." I thought it would be some smart-ass amusement, but it turned out to be sincere. Apparently, one of their correspondents wrote a Comics Panel review for Genius Isolated: The Life & Art Of Alex Toth, a book that won't be published until July, 2011.

Oops. Busted. Writing a review for a book that won't be published for another 8 months is either the most amazing example of clairvoyance the world has ever seen, or else someone's need to contribute and earn a little holiday cash overwhelmed his or her good sense. As A/V Club editor Keith Phipps writes in his apology:

I don't want to speculate on the writer's motivations, but I can say that in no way was the publisher of the book, IDW, involved. This sort of behavior is absolutely unacceptable, and we will not be working with the writer again in any capacity going forward.

In short, someone did something stupid and got fired for it, just in time for the holidays! Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison. That's what it means. One of us is going to jail - well, it's not gonna be me!

I just hope there's some sort of Christmas miracle in this person's future. Perhaps involving an angel second class and a life-affirming lesson about how a single person's existences touches that of many others, ending with all the Onion A/V Club writers joining in and singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" segueing into "Auld Lang Syne," while Zodiac MotherFucker counts up the monetary contributions.

Also, I want to take this time to reaffirm my own sense of journalistic integrity, even if this is merely the blog of an opinionated dumbass with too much time on his hands. I hereby renew my most sincere promise all my reviews will be of real comics I've actually read. Some of the reviews themselves may or may not be faked, but the comics will always be real already-published books and magazines you can buy (or illegally download, if that's your thing) for yourself. Actually, come to think of it, some of the comics may not even exist.

Furthermore, in the interest of full disclosure here, I don't even exist. I'm a fictional human created by a comics-loving collective of woodland creatures. Chipper field mice do the typing on this tossed-out laptop the animals found (put into working order by a brilliant but morally suspect rat), while a clever old owl does the thinking and dictates the words. There's a shy deer involved and several not-very-bright rabbits, but their contributions are as yet indistinct and hazy. Somewhere lurking in the mix is an evil old crocodile, so ancient his hate has been building in darkness for untold centuries...