Blog: Me Of Today VS Me Of The Past

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At the weekend I became embroiled in a classic stand-off between Me Of The Past and Me Of Today, which ended in a STALEMATE.

Me Of Today was starting work on an Academic Paper what Me Of The Past had written a few months ago. It's basically a write-up of Slap-up feeds and class war, the talk I gave in Brussels last year and which I have stuck up online as a VIDEO. This was a round-up of Lessons Learnt from reading loads of comics for The Funny Comics Fan Club, delving into the massive amount of hunger, violence and class war that we were always pointing out.

This particular paper is hopefully going to end up as a CHAPTER in a BOOK, and the usual process there is that you send in a first draft, wait a few months for editorial amendments/suggestions and then a few months after THAT send in a second one, which is what Me Of Today was embarking upon. Usually a LARGE part of this draft is sorting out the references, as doing references properly is HARD, and this time it was even MORE so as it turns out the style they were using required PAGE NUMBERS in the citations i.e. I had to say EXACTLY where the thing I was quoting/relying on was in the book/article/comic, rather than just that it was in there somewhere.

The editorial had been Quite Apologetic about this as LOADS of my references are to specific strips in specific comics, and so I was going to have to go through every one and, in most cases, COUNT the pages to work out where it had appeared. However, it turns out that Me Of The Past had been extremely CONSCIENTIOUS about this and, for nearly all the comics we looked at, had scanned in the WHOLE THING and turned it into an easily accessible PDF version, so it was PEASY to just flip through and find the right one. Even for the early comics where I had not done this, Me Of The Past had kept them all in neat order in a BOX which I could get out and check through. Well done, Me Of The Past!

HOWEVER. Me Of The Past had been DISTINCTLY less conscientious when it came to some of the academic references, almost as if he had thought "Sod it, I'm pretty sure that point what I have made is backed up SOMEWHERE in that book I've got on the shelf, I'll just stick that in." This meant that Me Of Today had to spend SEVERAL FLIPPING HOURS on Sunday scanning through various books desperately trying to hunt down a sentence somewhere that backed up whatever statement I had blithely made so many months ago. BLOOMING HECK, Me Of The Past, you could have done that a bit better!

The nice thing about all of this though is that I have now completely learned my lesson, and so NEXT time I have to do any of this Me Of Today will DEFINITELY not do a bodge job but will put in the effort required so that Me Of The Future will have a much easier time of it. DEFINITELY! You can thank me later, Me Of The Future!

posted 28/9/2026 by MJ Hibbett

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