It's very easy to judge people. Celebrities moreso. People do it all the time, and for some reason this is a bit part of the webcomic community. There are a lot of small webcomics, like this one, operated by people in their spare time. And when you're writing, or drawing, or coming up with ideas in your spare time it's very easy to hold a grudge against people who do it for a living.

I know this because I used to be fairly active on the BuzzComix forum and the number of people who harboured a deeply-rooted hatred of Penny Arcade was surreal. There are people on BCX who go out of their way to constantly slam the comic and the people who made it. They make claims such as "It's not even funny!" and "the artwork isn't great!" but what it basically boils down to is a jealously of the success that the webcomic has earnt; that Gabe and Tycho earn a living off of their creative work. Yeah, it's not always funny, and okay, the artwork is occasionally patchy. But the same can be said of Dilbert, of Diesel Sweeties, of Calvin & Hobbes, of the webcomic you produce. Of the webcomic we produce here. And Penny Arcade is consistently funny and well-drawn and brilliant. But that hatred those people harbour blinds them. They can only see gabe and Tycho, the people who make that webcomic. They don't see Mike and Jerry, the people who make that webcomic.

I don't know why I'm dwelling on Penny Arcade here, because this has nothing to do with them at all. It is instead to do with Scott Kurtz of the utterly superb PvP. Yesterday, Scott wrote on the PvP blog that an artist and good friend of his, Mike Wieringo, passed away. He wasn't in the frame of mind to go into further detail, about how he felt, and that was a very human thing for him to do. For the first time I saw Scott not as some guy who makes a webcomic, but as some guy. A person. A human being like you or me..

He wrote on his blog again today. He wrote about past experiences. He wrote about friendship. He wrote about acceptance, and he wrote about loss. And by the time I'd finished reading it, I was welling up. Tears began to form. I hadn't heard of Mike before Scott mentioned he had died, and I felt somehow guilty about that. I felt sorry for Scott (and I mean that not in the apparently modern sense of pity, but instead in the sense of offering condolence). I wanted to leave a comment. I couldn't - Scott's disabled comments on his blog. Rightly so.

So I'm writing this instead, here. He's probably never going to see it, but even still I'm writing it because... well, what Scott Kurtz wrote on the PvP blog today touched me. It's left a mark. Not about webcomics, forget webcomics. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things. But he's left a mark, as a human feeling human emotions, and expressing those as only humans can. And I responded to that on an emotional level.

I don't know how to properly finish this entry. I don't think it's actually possible to do so.