Profile: Tim Buckley

Some of you probably wonder why this took so long.

There are two reasons. At first, I was focusing on David Gonterman. But then someone pointed out, that's been covered. In depth. Repeatedly. Seriously, just Google the man, or go to the links in this hub.

So what did I choose instead? Someone who, like Gonterman, deletes everything they can about themselves which is negative. Unlike Daveykins, though, our next subject is an extreme bitch to source. So that was some fun delay. I apologize, folks, because on a lot of this, we're going to be hitting some information that wouldn't exactly fit Wikipedia standards.

Thank fuck I'm just some little punk blogging for drama, then, no?

Profile: Tim Buckley
Actual Name: Timothy Buckley? I'm pretty sure his ego keeps him from using an alias.
Aliases: Absath, something else I vaguely recall him going by in some MMO he quit abruptly
Reason(s) Listed: Is a bit of a hack and plagiarist, drama surrounds him like some sort of hurricane (mostly by his own fault), might be a pedophile.

Oh yes. I went there.

Let's start small, shall we? If I blow my drama-load early, how the hell can I keep you all coming back for the rest of the article? I mentioned that Buckley has a habit of deleting anything he can which casts him in a bad light. Well, buddy, there's so much of that that I'll end up sprinkling it throughout this article. Let's go with a little event. In December of 2005, he wrote a newspost about how it was "Webcomics Appreciation Day", but it's okay, because he had no need to be thanked. He did it for love of the comic, and if you wanted to thank him? Go right ahead and do so, but it's not required, no.

Look for that post in his news archives. Here's 2005. I'll give you a time-saving hint: it vanished. Is it because of shame that he turned an article on "Webcomics Appreciation Day" into a post fellating himself? Or because the day doesn't exist? (Hint: probably more the latter than the former.) Whatever the cause, it disappeared. I'm almost willing to bet the reason I can't find anything about it in his boards, for "webcomic" or "appreciation" might have something to do with this as well. No fans, ever, have mentioned it? Suspicious, that. It's huge, so I'll post the copy I found as a separate article later for the curious. It will, however, be the source of much commentary, because dear GOD it's a goldmine for a narcissistic personality diagnosis.

Shit, let's aim for one of those now. Buckley's a classic narcissist. From the DSM-IV:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

I'll just give you the text of an old e-mail to Jason Salsbury and you judge how many of these he fits. The message:

Fine, than go be bitter elsewhere that someone ten years younger than you is doing it bigger and better than you ever did, or ever will.

I don't know why you felt the need to come to my forums to try and cause shit. I didn't think people like you and that Straub punk could survive without your lips surgically grafted to Kurtz's cock.

In a single hour I get more email than you get in a week, so if you want to bitch and moan about me somewhere else, by all means, knock yourself out. But the instant you think you're going to come to my forums and tell me I'm lying, you'd better believe I'm going to ban your sorry ass.

Happy Webcomic Appreciation Day. I know you little webcomics love the attention.

-Tim

See? Some people DO keep proof of his stunts, like the aforementioned day that doesn't exist. And the context on that, for those wondering about the "come to my forums and tell me I'm lying" without wanting to click the link: Salsbury disagreed with the aforementioned newspost. About ten posts were made in a topic discussing it. In something that's become a trend on his boards, someone (probably Buckley, although I've heard his mods are similarly inclined) deleted it and banned anyone who had posted within.

Oh, you want proof of the trend? Well then, let's play another game. See how many references can be made to "the Rapscallions" on Tim's site. It's the guild he led in World of Warcraft, which, like a lot of other MMOs, he played briefly for all the fan sycophantry and then left. Unlike most smaller MMOs where he did this, though, the guild kept on when he vanished, with competent leaders still on board.

You won't find the Rapscallions (or the Raps, as I sometimes heard them called) mentioned much, aside from their creation (funnier because it was a giant "me too", trying to get in on the friendly feud PvP and Penny Arcade started. Nice piggyback). On Saturday, December 17th, 2005, a little over four months after their inception, Buckley logged in, possibly drunk, and begin to kick people from the guild, complaining about "[his] guild" and "[his] forums", before disbanding the group and taking down their board, hosted on his site. (Ironically, Scott Kurtz, who I'll probably have to get to in time for some of his own shenanigans, albeit nothing on Buckley's scale, would end up giving the Raps a forum again (look for "Hurricane Buckley") on his site for a time, just so they didn't all lose touch while deciding whether to reform or not.)

A lot of sources (including screenshots of the guild chat as this was going on) have vanished, but oh lord, there was lasting fallout which survived to this day. Aaand just to round out this bit of drama, something else I dug up while looking through newsposts: scroll down to "Yeah, Dark Iron" and watch as a story about the "tight-knit community" turns into "Man, I fucked them all up so bad, it was awesome".

I know I may be harping on the ego thing a bit here (perhaps I am jealous, and need to be told so... yeah, I'm just waiting for that), so let's focus on that "me too" thing I mentioned earlier. Specifically, Buckley's highly derivative of other gaming comics, in an almost painful manner. I'm not linking any strips specifically (because that would require looking through his archive, and good lord, my masochism has limits), but here's a quick overview of what he's ripped off, with the links being to where better cartoonists did it first: two gamers sitting on couches (go look at the first year or so of Penny Arcade, to the current day, or PvP's Jase and Robbie), starting an annual fanmeet/convention, a character making a robot, an abusive electronic device, exclusive "members-only" content (PA once had "the Club" or something similarly named, a pay-only chunk of the site with extra comics, before making those public/printing them in books instead), being named after a geeky term, making a comic book out of your webcomic... Christ, I could do this for hours if I looked through his archives. Hell, I seem to recall him developing two characters he just called "Player 1" and "Player 2" that were pretty transparent ripoffs of early, violence-fueled Penny Arcade strips.

However, it's Buckley at his most creative which is so sad, because those moments spawn terrible ideas man was not meant to see. Did you know he keeps trying to claim we need a gaming holiday, complete with carols and celebration? Or a church of gaming that was introduced in a storyline so painful it makes the most ham-handed atheist arguments look like Abraham Lincoln himself is orating them? (Hint: It involves major religions teaming up to combat the "threat" of new beliefs. I shit you not. I'm not giving him the traffic, but it's pretty fucking recent. Look in June or so in his archives if you want to see it.)

So now we come to the big part. He's a hack, a plagiarist, a bastard, and if some of his former forum members are to be believed? He showed (pictures of) his dick to a 14 year old girl. And when I say "former", I mean that because when this originally came up, he not only banned everyone who said it, he banned everyone who posted in threads about it (even his defenders), who ever made mention of having SEEN it, whether they believed it or not, he closed an entire chunk of forum completely over it... and not once did he ever say "No, I didn't show my penis to jailbait". This is the last known spot you can see the tale at, and while I will point out I cannot confirm this at all, I really, really wonder, to this day, why the hell he went to the extent he did instead of just saying "Fuck you I didn't do it" and banning the first person.

JDR's a bit loopy, but has good intentions and some talent. Tangent's a suck-up, but he's not an asshole, and manages to come up with something decent from time to time. Buckley is really one of those good old-fashioned trainwrecks that you expect out of the internet, though, the people who stay inside their own fantasies instead of actually interacting with the real world, smugly "looking down" upon anyone who doesn't give the appropriate amounts of worship to their e-penis. If there's anyone who might overreact to this blog and lose their shit, I'd assume it to be Buckley before anyone else I profile.

And since you read this far, let me reward you with some other various laughs that I couldn't fit into the rest of the article.


So, uh... Buckley uses templates for his characters. Interchangeable ones. Say what you will about sprite comics, but at least they copy and paste different sprites for each character. And yet he can only do three comics a week. C'mon, dude. At least put SOME effort into this. It's obviously not in the blurred-photo backgrounds you reuse. Shit, your own FAQ (which is updated recently enough to hawk books that came out this year) says you take 3-5 hours per strip. I could make one of these in less than one.

These three images are, in order from top left clockwise: a belt buckle from the old sci-fi series Red Dwarf (which predates CAD, let me tell you), the Avengers logo, and some idiot's tattoo of the CAD logo. Now, does anything look similar in these three items? Sort of like how one that followed the others by decades looks a lot like the others? This is made funnier when you consider Buckley (at one point, at least) hates fanart and tries pulling copyright/nuking all of it he can.

Finally, I just wanted to point out that this thing looks like ass. This is why so few robots are made into stuffed things, for the record: it just doesn't work. (And for the record, Buckley's not the only one to make the mistake of selling everything and the sink. I'm not making fun of that. I'm making fun of the warped limbs, fabric in random patterns, and the fact that this is the shot he uses to sell these.)

Next time: I post Buckley's "Webcomic Appreciation Day" post and rip into it, before going back to an easier target as I search for a new person to laugh at.