Pardon me while I rant a bit.

One of the things I disliked about Warren Ellis’ “The Engine” forum, and his later “Whitechapel” forum (while he was running it) was the fact that anyone participating had to deal with his carefully crafted online persona as an asshole. It was intended to be a benevolent dictatorship, and a good way of dealing with trolls: Warren’s word was law, and objections would get you banned.

But it tended to get pretty elementary-school. Like the time I had the nerve to disagree with a popular artist about something, and one of the moderators (Warren only hired women for that, supposedly because they had better social skills, but seemed more to appeal to men who enjoy being dominated by assertive women) changed my password to “asshole” as punishment.

Which brings us to a certain remake/remodel challenge that Warren issued, to imagine what punk impresario Malcolm McLaren might have come up with if he’d been given a license to the Justice League. I posted what I considered a legitimate fulfillment of that. Warren deleted it as “a two-minute Photoshop job” … apparently missing the point that looking like a sloppy photocopy collage was part of the punk aesthetic (and that I’d spent about an hour on developing it).

And in his haste to delete what he didn’t understand, he missed the little reference I included to one of McLaren’s other projects: the one-hit wonder Jimmy the Hoover.