What Was I Thinking?

When browsing the countless comic blogs out there, it is absolutely unavoidable that you will stumble upon literally dozens of blogs that make fun of comics from the mid-20th century.

It’s pretty easy to do. Comics then had a completely different tone and operated from a vastly different slang-set, so there are bound to be some laughs due to the cultural differences in a few decades of distance. All it really takes is the patience to flip through old comic books and scan them.

Then there’s the whole meme craze. You take a panel from an old comic book, white out the words, then let a whole bunch of comic bloggers who fancy themselves jokesmiths fill in the blank.

Well imagine paying $3.99 for a comic book full of that. That’s what I did, when I picked up Boom Studios’ What Were They Thinking: Go West Young Man. It’s a collection of old west comics with re-written dialog in the word balloons to make them funny. I thought it had promise. I don’t know why I thought that, considering how amused I am by the make-fun-of-old-comics craze.

The one thing that would have completed this comic blog reader’s trip to Hell would have been to see a cowboy say “I’m the goddamn Batman.”