Matthew Inman's site, The Oatmeal , is one of the biggest comics on the Web. Why the “envy of nearly every cartoonist” is suddenly under siege.
Source: stewtopia
Matthew Inman boasts that his site, The Oatmeal, has received over a billion page views since he launched it in 2009, making it one of most widely read comics in the world. But Inman bears little relation to his lumpy everyman profile on the site, and the disconnect between that cheerful profile and his actual identity — an edgy comic and unapologetic online operator — collided this week after a rape joke made its way into his typically safe comic.
In this comic, Inman described the role of different keys on the keyboard. F5, he said, was the "rape victim" of the group. "I MUST VIOLATE YOU OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!" a rapist blob monster said to the F5 key as it ran away crying.
Inman quickly found that he's now too big to jest about sexual violence in the language of Reddit. The Internet was quick to trash the comic.
His own fans quickly took him to task on The Oatmeal's Facebook page. "Really, in your awesomeness and creativity, you couldn't come up with something better than a rape 'joke'?" one asked. "I expected more from you."
At first Inman ignored the criticism, but by Tuesday, he felt enough heat to remove the panel with the rape joke. But he added a comment at the bottom complaining that comedians like himself are no longer allowed to say the word “rape.” Defensively, Inman said he’s previously “donated $1,000 of my own money to a battered women’s group.”
The removed panel from Inman's comic
Source: theoatmeal.com / via: elevatorgate.wordpress.com
“To all those who complained: thank you for censoring me,” he wrote. “It worked.”
He had to walk that sneering response back, too, writing on Twitter that both the comic and the comment were “fucking stupid.” He finally said he was sorry, then quit Twitter for the day. The comic is no longer listed on his website's homepage, though it remains accessible with the last panel removed.
Inman is finding what big American businesses have known for decades: Keeping your mouth shut is generally better for business. Inman embodies a generation of online publishing entrepreneurs who came up as independent figures, with a touch of the outlaw. On one hand, Inman sees himself as a comedian, an artist who has to answer to nobody, a guy who works for himself and is thus finally free to mock people who dislike his work. But on the other hand, The Oatmeal has always been first and foremost a business, designed by a formula to be as popular and inoffensive as possible to the social-media-sharing Internet public.
And making rape jokes is bad for business.