RIP Weekly World News

RIP HOT SHEET

WHAT??!? NO!! WWN was a tradition in my family every time we took a trip to our grandpa's cabin :-/ WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO BATBOY???

The content jumped the shark about 4 years ago, following a few years of really being on top of their game. RIP all the same.

xpost. Batboy's still in Iraq, last time I checked.

Damn, that's too bad. Haven't read it in years and years, but it was always a kick. Hope Ed Anger can get a gig with Fox or something.

He died and was replaced by a lame imitator who wasn't very angry and liked the Beatles.

And Dotty was replaced by a lookalike called Dolly who actually gave proper advice. You see why it folded?

this is really fucking sad

As any longtime comics fan kno, Paul Kupperberg ruins anything he touches.

i hate to say it but it really had gone downhill post-clontz - "hi dolly" was a pisspoor substitute for "dear dotti" for instance

that said, this is really, really sad. one of my favorite mags ever.

when they replaced Bat Boy with Wiffle Boy the writing was on the wall

Remember when Serena Sabak got trapped fighting evil in astral plane and her column got taken over by her valley girl twin sister? THOSE were the days.

Thanks, Everything. Got it.

xposts there, actually

This isn't surprising but sad all the same. Towards the end it was all half truths and unreliable sources.

I'm pig biting mad about this

man life sucks.

I had a subscription to WWN a couple of years ago (a gift). It was kinda astonishing how many 80s comics folks (and 60s comics injokes) were inside. Also, it would not come for a couple of weeks, and then I'd have like 3 or 4 crammed in my mailbox.

What am I going to laugh at in the grocery store check out line now?! RIP

A favourite WWN classic of yore: "Tedium Breaks Monotony Of Excitement - Experts".

LOLCATS KILLED THE WWN

YOU KNOW THAT'S THE TRUTH

MAN GETS SEX CHANGE IMPREGNATES SELF

As any longtime comics fan kno, Paul Kupperberg ruins anything he touches.

Paul Kupperberg is a first cousin of mine! (His mom = my dad's sister)

Still my favorite double entendre headline...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1405/918610086_2851fb3155.jpg

(rescued from Ned's old garage!)

So terribly sad about this. The Bigfoot crossword was excellent. Me and my mom were making up headlines & stories over the phone & she thinks I should start a new one. I don't know.

Yeah, Peter Bagge & lotsa others had comics in there. Kinda surprising!

major bummer!

I didn't know Ed Anger was dead even.

I don't think there was an RIP ED ANGER thread on ILX.

I'm madder than General George Patton at a peace rally because Ed Anger is dead!

The Economist ran a terrific obituary for WWN editor (and Ed Anger creator) Eddie Clontz back when he died in 2004. My favorite bit of it:

Sheer chance seemed to bring Mr Clontz to this strange outpost of journalism. After dropping out of school at 16 and trying his luck as a scallop fisherman, he became a copy boy on his local paper in North Carolina. He moved next to a Florida paper, and from there to the disreputable corner office in the Enquirer building, in a run-down resort near Palm Beach, from which he was to entertain and terrify America.

His own politics were mysterious. Under the pseudonym “Ed Anger”, he wrote a News column so vitriolically right-wing that it possibly came from the left. Anger hated foreigners, yoga, whales, speed limits and pineapple on pizza; he liked flogging, electrocutions and beer. No, Mr Clontz would say, he had no idea who Anger really was. But he was “about as close to him as any human being.”

Mr Clontz also always denied that his staff made the stories up. It was subtler than that. Many tips came from “freelance correspondents” who called in; their stories were “checked”, but never past the point where they might disintegrate. (”We don’t know whether stories are true,” said Mr Clontz, “and we really don’t care.”) The staff also read dozens of respectable newspapers and magazines, antennae alert for the daft and the bizarre. When a nugget was found, Mr Clontz would order them to run away with it, urging them to greater imaginative heights by squirting them with a giant water-pistol.

Yet he also showed care for authenticity. If a story resisted tracking down, he would give it the dateline “Bolivia”. If it relied on “scientific research”, he would make sure the scientists were Bulgarian. Writers who made up the names of Georgia natives terrorised by giant chickens would be asked to check in the telephone book to make sure they did not exist. Loving editorial attention was given to the face of Satan when he appeared in a cloud formation over New York.

haha that is awesome

(rescued from Ned's old garage!)

Oh man, the legend.

Big ol Washington Post story on the demise and the legend, including this:

It all began in Lantana, Fla., in 1979, when the National Enquirer, America's premier tabloid, bought new color presses to replace its old black-and-white presses. The Enquirer's owner, a former CIA agent named Generoso Pope, couldn't bear to leave the old presses idle, so he founded Weekly World News as a sort of poor man's Enquirer, running celebrity gossip and UFO sightings that didn't quite meet the Enquirer's high standards.

A CIA PLOT AFTER ALL.

Oh man, and this:

They worked in an office in the back of the National Enquirer newsroom, behind a partition installed because Eddie Clontz's yelling disturbed the serious journalists at the Enquirer.

Great article...plus holy shit! Bob Lind wrote for them!!

From behind the curtain!

Once I was "in," I often described my job, without a hint of exaggeration, as "thinking of the stupidest shit possible." I once pitched a story positing that the U.S. government had data confirming that the one commonality linking all mass killers, including the Columbine shooters, was that they never masturbated. Rather than issue this report, which would save lives but promote onanism, the government preferred to let occasional slaughters take place. My editor rejected it on the grounds that it was "too plausible."

Donald Rumsfeld: "Rumsfeld Changes His Name to Rumsfeldstiltskin and Tells Rogue Nations 'Guess My New Name or We'll Invade You,'"

wow, this is really, really good