Mr. J. Natural: Jason X (James Isaac, 2001)
All you gotta do is to want the fun of it.
Today's the day! Dead Teenagers #3 is officially on sale at your local comic shop and the usual digital retailers. Put in a pre-order for Issue #4 when you pick it up – FOC is this Monday, 5/25.
Speaking of comics: DC Pride 2025 is nominated for a Best Anthology Eisner! I wrote one story and co-wrote another with Josh Trujillo and head writer Tim Sheridan, so I have something like 1/32nd of an Eisner nomination. Congratulations to Mr. Sheridan, editors Andrea Shea and Jillian Grant, and all the many geniuses who edited and drew and lettered and colored and wrote the thing.
Celebrate my newfound awards-adjacency by preordering Clayface: Celebrity Dirt, due out July 8.
Like a lot of the dorks you meet on the Internet, my teenage sense of humor — and culture writ large — was formed by watching MST3K, the cable-TV puppet show where comedians made fun of old B-movies. My mother found a description of it in a TV Guide when I was about eleven years old, and she thought, based on my liking science fiction and/or the Muppets, that it sounded like “your kind of thing.”
It was. It was so much my kind of thing, in fact, that I have a massive stack of VHS tapes, a childhood memory of skipping various family dinners to watch the Turkey Day marathon, a history of activism to save the show every single one of the 900 times it was on the verge of cancellation, an opening-night ticket to MST3K: The Movie (and commemorative Crow T. Robot t-shirt, on sale at Best Buy!) and the deep bitterness of someone who has met his idols, because the truth is, I had about the worst fan experience with MST3K that anyone could expect to have.
It didn’t start out bad. I used to be followed by about half of the cast on Twitter (see, again: deep, unrelenting, continuing-into-adulthood buying-the-collectibles defending-the-show-every-time-it-became-a-topic-of-discourse fandom) and, unfortunately, this somehow led to me being followed by Bill “Replacement Crow” Corbett.
I was thrilled, at first. I used to like Bill Corbett quite a lot, because he was associated with something I loved, and because I projected all the virtues of that thing— warmth, intelligence, a broad appreciation of both high and pop culture, a sense of community, an endearing punk-slash-geek DIY ethos — onto him. I had all sorts of Bill Corbett facts I could relate: He started out as a playwright! He wrote the Eddie Murphy vehicle Meet Dave! He is connected to my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, having once worked with the Thurber House, where I interned!
Another fun Bill Corbett fact is that he’s a huge jerk, which I found out during the 2016 primary, where he supported Bernie Sanders and I supported Hillary Clinton. Despite my not saying one single word to or about Bill Corbett, regarding our differences on this matter, he went all-fucking-in, until, eventually, he was posting memes about how funny it was that I was abused by my violent drunk of a father while growing up.
To be fair: When Bill Corbett was doing this, he thought I was a woman, a group of people the Internet famously likes yelling at. He also thought I was a moderate Democrat — he was at least as wrong about this as he was about me being female, but that’s another story — and thus, further to the right than himself. Surely, a committed leftist like Bill Corbett has not only a right but a responsibility to viciously mock and repudiate anyone who is even a few centimeters to the right of him; surely, I cannot fault a man for acting on his deep and inalterable moral convictions.
Surely not. But unfortunately, you’ve stumbled upon a man with a lot of MST3K facts, because here’s the part where I tell you that Mike Nelson — head writer of MST3K and founder of Rifftrax, where Bill Corbett is one of the core cast members — is a proud conservative Christian and Republican, and that Mike Nelson has been open about this since 2004, when he famously told a fan chat, and I quote:
“I read the National Review[1] cover to cover. Check in at Townhall . com[2] every day. Check the Washington Times[3] daily. Listen to Dennis Prager[4] and Michael Medved[5] on a regular basis. Read Mark Steyn[6] with regularity. Read the Weekly Standard[7]. So, yes, I do vote Republican.[8]"
You may not know all those names. So here are a few of the most basic, uncontroversial facts you can find by Googling them: