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[pmcd9]

Also, some of the vocabulary is too advanced for a five year old which lends creedence to LFM's postulation that it's fake.

[wombat]

I don't think it's a fake at all. My point was that now that there are dozens of shows like "American Idol," it's a brave new world where every five year old knows what an audition is.

I can't imagine why anyone would think it was a fake. There are millions of five year olds in the world, full of ideas like these. It's a lot easier to find a five year old and pick his brain than it is to make up stuff that sounds like a five year old. Why do extra work when you can get child labor to do it for you?

[littlefallsmets]

I am of the opinion that if an unusual claim is made on the internet, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim not on the person calling "bullshit".

Bullshit until proven not bullshit. This has served me well for the 14 years I have had the webtubes in my wordbox.

I am trying to be a less cynical man but skepticism, if it does not bleed into cynicism, is a more useful tool than ever these days.

Those are concepts that are beyond most five year olds and function with a complexity that is beyond most five year olds with a conception of popular culture that is much more that of a child of the Seventies or Eighties than a child of The Final Century.

A five year old having these ideas is faintly possible but hardly likely so, for me, it is bullshit until I see a LOT of evidence to the contrary.

[jay-ell]

I haven't looked at the site in question yet, but as the parent of a nearly-five-year-old who is, by all accounts, noticeably behind other five-year-olds in verbal skillls and social/cultural awareness, I am still consistently surprised by how much he is able to interpret the world around him and creatively express new ideas which build on things that, when it comes right down to it, he has no business knowing.

[wombat]

Of course I totally agree with your position on unusual claims on the internet, but I don't see what's unusual about the claim. Have you ever known a five year old? These are exactly five year old sorts of stories. He has a simplistic notion of story form that obviously derives from the kind of stuff that little boys watch. He has an vague grasp of the concepts used in the same sort of stories - for example, he gets that that improbable abilities are superpowers but doesn't understand what kind of improbable abilities make sense - that shooting socks out of your hands is not actually a useful weapon. He has seen a bunch of shows where people audition for things and kind of sort of followed the adult explanation of them. He has a lot of imagination but little enough real-world knowledge so none of it adds up to anything that makes any sense.

He doesn't claim that they're verbatim, by the way - he obviously does some editing, like anyone who interviews people for a living. It's a cute idea and he's a good artist, so it works, for a little while at least. If we started to get some long story arcs with subplots and character development, sure, that would call for skepticism. But I don't see any particular complexity in these stories that makes this hard to believe.

[littlefallsmets]

I guess that much of my beef/doubt is with the cultural concepts being put forth.

The general conception of a police officer, of a superhero, of a vigilante, what they do and how they interact... it feels like these are the ways someone of my age, give or take five years, would have seen them as a child, not so much a child of now. The television influences, especially.

The idea of what a cop is in this strip is assuredly that of a child growing up in the 80s watching syndicated cop shows from the 70s, the idea of what a superhero is and how they come together to fight is veddy veddy Superfriends-era cartoon show as opposed to superhero cartoons today. The way the sidekick cop just keeps changing into whatever he touches feels entirely like the early Ninja Turtles cartoon logic of how people get superpowers, a cartoon show that was just at the end of my childhood and right in the wheelhouse of my younger brother.

The way the heroes turn out to be brothers that forgot they are brothers is very much in the vein of that "everyone knows everyone" logic of... He-Man and She-Ra being siblings, the Joker has to have killed Bruce Wayne's parents... kind of fantastic story telling of the middle 80s through the early 90s.

It all just kind of smacks of the cliches and storyforms of a child who grew up on the independent superstations playing reruns of 70s television, underproduced cartoons selling cereals unashamed to be bad for you and... like... profoundly dumb syndicated fare like "Small Wonder" and "Out of This World". WPIX, WWOR, WSBK, WGN, WTBS, before they were all slowly absorbed by failed 5th Network experiments and lost their individual flair over the course of the 1990s.

[pmcd9]

I don't think it's fake per se, but there were bits of dialog that seemed too advanced for a five year old.  So maybe the ideas were the kids, but he was given help expressing them.

I'd give you specific examples, but that would take too long waiting for the page to load.

Edit:  Okay, I just saw there was another post where you explained there was some editing involved so nevermind.

[pmcd9]

Anyway, my original complaint was and is, if this was written by an adult I think we all would agree it was trash.

[littlefallsmets]

Yeah, that's the ultimate problem, isn't it?

The more constructed it turns out to be, the less charming it is.

Even if there's a grain of truth in there, like, there is an actual kid saying "okay, now he's an avocado and... now he's a dinosaur" and giving him very rough ideas while there's someone else beating those swords into a ploughshare of a story, it is somehow a lot less interesting than if there really was a dude just taking dictation and drawing comic strips from said dictation.

It bothers the HELL out of me, actually, how much the "real-life" backstory of the creator and the creative process can affect my appreciation of the resulting work but often it does. I don't WANT it to, it's not really intellectually honest to let it affect my perception but it does.

Jay Leno is becomes even less funny as we discover more and more what a weasel he is.

Brett Favre's constant regular season successes and last-second failings become more entertaining as we discover more and more what a cartoonish narcissist he is.

[Choop]

you people could overthink a plate of beans

[wombat]

I'm sure the kid makes up a lot of the dialogue. Seriously, LFM, have you never played with a five year old even for a little while ever? You ought to try it sometime. Also while we are at it, you do know that when you read something in the newspaper presented as a Q&A format, it's not a verbatim transcript, right? And that 'reality' shows are edited from a zillion hours of tape so that they look like there is a story?

And Paul, you are right, but the point is that we know it's a five year old so it's cute. No one is pretending he is a literary genius. 

[littlefallsmets]

you people could overthink a plate of beans

We talkin' ranch-style? Boston-style?

Campbells or Bush's? Heinz? We talkin' vegetarian without such as the little clot of bacon-fat to serve as the queen bean?

We talkin' Canuck-style with maple syrup as opposed to the New England molasses or Southern brown sugar traditions?

What are we talkin' about here?

[wombat]

naah, beans are better served in a bowl.

[pmcd9]

And Paul, you are right, but the point is that we know it's a five year old so it's cute. No one is pretending he is a literary genius. 

I don't know about that.  I think it's being presented as an accomplished work.  They are selling merchandise and everything.  And since that's the way it's being presented, that's the way I am being forced to judge it.  

[pmcd9]

you people could overthink a plate of beans

A good pot of beans requires some thought.