User:The Iconoclast

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[edit] == Origins and Inspiration ==

Jonathan M. Sweet, born September 13, 1975, in Chicago, is an American horror author. He credits as his influences Stephen King, Gelett Burgess, and Roger Hargreaves, as well as The Three Stooges, Tex Avery, He-Man, and the Whammy.
His screen name comes from a Pinky and the Brain short, "Puppet Rulers", in which Brain, posing as a kiddie-show host, called himself, "The Iconoclast, an unconventional eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drummer".

[edit] == The College Years ==

A graduate of Arkansas State University, he was a psychology and English major, a member of the honor society Pi Gamma Mu, and a staffer for The Herald. On February 5, 1997, he was accused by a copy editor for allegedly stealing column material for a piece he wrote on the TV ratings system, and summarily was terminated from his position. Sweet has never forgiven his old bosses, whom he has lambasted viciously in his writing.

The author on one of the local county roads. That black thing back there is a dead skunk.
The author on one of the local county roads. That black thing back there is a dead skunk.

[edit] == Post-College ==

Sweet currently lives in the Missouri Bootheel with his family, the pastoral Southern setting which inspires his work. Many of his stories are rooted in his experiences as a columnist and a college student, his personal relationships, and his psych studies, with an emphasis on severely disturbed characters. A theme his fiction frequently visits is the loss of a parent. This is not surprising, as his father died of a heart attack on December 17, 1997. Sweet's girlfriend Ashleigh Bainks dropped out of his life a few weeks later after he told her about his dad's death, owing to him unwittingly offending her Catholic beliefs about death. She came back to him, but their reconciliation was short-lived, and ultimately she left for good. This breakup was responsible for instilling in him much anger and a massive sense of guilt. He wrote a fictionalized account of it in "Smitten With Her" in 1999, and has stated in a 2004 interview that losing her "made me feel like less of a man". Several of Sweet's pieces express strong anti-Catholic and anti-rich sentiment, since Ashleigh was a member of both groups; many of his critics consider this a major flaw in his otherwise sparkling and well-written prose.
Other short stories--"Eve Bade Adam Eat", "The Kestron Lenses"--are set at college publications unapologetically based on The Herald.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Sweet's first commercial effort was "Beautiful Dreamer", about a successful Atlanta advertising executive named Albert Watson (inspired by the names of the psychologist and the patient in the famous Little Albert experiment). Watson credits his success to his very vivid dreams--he bases his commercials on what he sees.
After losing his job over plagiarism charges, he murders his boss and several members of a rival firm, but does not remember doing so. He is later diagnosed with disassociative fugue; however, he is ruled to be fully in control of himself, is found guilty, and sentenced to prison.
It is often hard to separate Sweet from his characters, and this story perfectly illustrates this. Watson's writing method is very much like Sweet's; he is an avowed Freudian who has credited his inspiration to dreams. The story was obviously a thinly-disguised telling of his own life story. It symbolically describes his problems with The Herald through the screen of a hapless protagonist persecuted for a crime that isn't his fault and a series of villains who are cardboard caricatures of certain people in power at ASU. It did not sell. Sweet later included it in a collection of other commercial failures called Almasheol, along with his bitter and unapologetically Catholic-bashing "Smitten With Her", which was written during the same period.

The following year Sweet wrote "Eve Bade Adam Eat", which was the first of several stories with flashback sequences set in a fictitious school in Clark, Missouri. A writer named Henry Church, fired for false plagiarism charges from a campus magazine, harbors a grudge against copy editor Philip Scottsborough (modeled after the man who got Sweet fired). Years later, Scottsborough, a successful lawyer in Buford, Missouri, meets a beautiful woman named Kimberly Mann, with whom he falls in love with and asks to move in with him. However, the details of her past are shadowy and full of worrisome inconsistencies. After some incriminating photos of a fellow lawyer running for a state government position turn up on his desk, Phil turns them in and, running on the swell of the scandal, runs for the seat himself.
It turns out that the photos are faked, and that Kimberly is really Henry, following a brain transplant in France, who has been waiting for his chance to get revenge on Phil for ruining his life nearly thirty years ago. Again, this very disturbing story is extremely close to Sweet's own, and it too appears in the Almasheol collection.

"The Kestron Lenses", another story that drew inspiration from Sweet's newspaper days, was the story of a writer at a fictitious college newspaper in Biloxi, Missouri who, due to his poor eyesight, requires glasses. Xavier Harold Stafford (the name is a pun on "ex-Herald staffer", a reference to the author himself) purchases a cheap pair from a man who sells them out of his garage on the mainland. However, the glass in them is possessed by ancient Chinese demons, and they grant the ability to see the future...provided the glass is annointed with a victim's blood. Every time Harry murders someone, the blood shows him a story, and he writes it and turns it in. Pretty soon he loses control...and to make it worse, Shadrach Hutch, the Champagne Island Dispatch's copy editor, has traced the killings to him and is blackmailing Stafford for a piece of his newfound success.
The story seems to be a caution about the perils of overambition and a parable about the journalist's willingness to do whatever it takes to get ahead, even murder. It is also notable that the copy editor is the only staffer cast in a negative light whose illicit behavior is not caused or assisted by supernatural objects; it isn't uncommon for the person holding this post, in Sweet's stories, to be drawn as immoral, conniving or insane.

Many other short stories followed over the years; many have been self-published by the author or in online magazines. Clark College was mentioned or was the main setting in two other pieces: a novel called Postcards of the Hanging, and Virago, another commercial failure later released by the author as an e-book.
Virago is the story of Jason Powell and Pamela Traff, two private detectives in the town of Clark who are investigating a series of strange deaths in the fictional Roosevelt, Missouri. Several women have died of mysterious power surges in their homes, and have been sent taunting messages on their computers by a person calling himself "Nemesis". Powell believes it is a revenge scheme, but other than their sex, the same last name and the m.o., they have nothing in common. This story is set a few years after the events of "Eve".
Postcards--which takes its name from the first line in Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row", one of the author's favorite songs--is the story of a teenage girl in the small town of Lemora, Missouri, and takes place mainly during the last autumn before she leaves home to attend school. Following a fight with her mom and storming out of the house, Jessy Gorving meets up with a boy from the nearby town of Canaan, 12-year-old Peter Knowles. The book deals with the two's growing but brief friendship admidst the turbulent background of the late eighties, encompassing a supernatural journey of self-discovery and the Vonnegutian device of non-linear chronology, or "time-skipping" to show periods later in the childrens' life; with them successful--him an author, she a school counselor-- and both in happy relationships.

Sweet's poem "When-One-and-Twenty (The Ballad of Aggie H.)" appeared in the Famous Poets On the Wings of Pegasus collection in 2002. The piece, dedicated to the copy editor who accused him of plagiarizing his TV ratings column, is an allegorical take on the incident and its aftermath. The Latin motto nemo me impune lacessit (no one hurts me without consequence) follows as a cryptic warning to this and all future enemies.

[edit] == What Next, Sir? ==

Sweet has recently completed his third book Tiresias, and is currently hard at work on a new novel, said to be set at Clark College and to deal with the trevails of a female journalist who works for The Explorer, their campus paper.
He also has a comic book in the works called The Belch Dimension. The series stars an eponymously-named hero, Jonathan Sweet, who wears a bright yellow cape, thick red-framed glasses,and a yellow baseball cap decorated with brightly-colored buttons. Though, oddly, he has no secret identity and wears his hero costume freely in public, Jon has superpowers that he conceals, for the most part, from those outside his friend-and-family circle. Jon is the leader of The Treehouse Warriors, whose secret headquarters are a treehouse located in the woods outside Jigaboo Junction. Jon's friends are an assortment of teenagers like himself--Joshua Cline; his best friend and technowiz, who builds the team's arsenal of gadgets and weapons; Angela Larkin, his best female friend; Jon's younger brother Ben, who speaks in a garbled spit-growl that only Jon and the others can seem to comprehend, has a preternatural sense of smell and a longer-than-normal tongue, and who fights by spinning around at top speed); Billy, Josh's brother, a kid who is perpetually unlucky; Larry Clayborn, the team's only black member, who is trained in hand-to-hand combat and acts as Jon's bodyguard; Flunger and Gort, two extraterrestrial refugees from the dead planet Flung, who now live on earth (the characters' designs were inspired heavily by both ALF and the Ben Hardaway-era Woody Woodpecker); Molina, the empath and seeress whose past and even last name is a mystery; and others. Many of the characters are based on kids Sweet knew growing up.

Jon with his lady friend Angela, from Belch Dimension #2.
Jon with his lady friend Angela, from Belch Dimension #2.

The superhero roster frequently rotates from mission to mission, though it almost always includes some combination of Jon, Josh, Ben and/or Angela at its core.

"Well, you can't win them all." Jon and Buddy graciously accept defeat in a local dog show (Belch Dimension #8)
"Well, you can't win them all." Jon and Buddy graciously accept defeat in a local dog show (Belch Dimension #8)

.

Major storylines in BDC focus on the continuing battle against evil, such as the megalomaniacal Snakeman, a.k.a. "Hiss Hole", leader of the Cobra Clan, and his cadre of goons (whose designs drew heavily from villains in the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons), or the machinations of the persistent--though rather incompetent--school bully Tony J. "Monty" Moneran. Other stories--often either issue filler or a group of several shorts linked together by a theme--involve a focus on a humorous sitution in Jon's domestic life (such as getting an after-school job or learning to drive), or may feature a minor character such as Jon's dog Buddy, or one of the Jigaboo Junction townsfolk.
Many of the plots are influenced by and make references to Sweet's favorite horror movies, classic cartoons, and Japanese anime. Tony Moneran's frequent schemes throughout the series to capture and embarass Jon (and sometimes Ben) are, for example, reminiscent of many of Wile E. Coyote's traps for the Roadrunner, both invariably backfiring on the setter of the trap with hilariously painful results. The stories spit out pop-culture references almost randomly--for example, in issue #1 Monty is struck by an Orinco truck, a reference to Stephen King's Pet Sematary and the menacing semis that forever cruised past the Creed home. However, this not intended to place Jigaboo Junction in the same geographical area as Ludlow, but is merely a funny sight gag.
The artwork is a stylized minimalist technique, with the major players rendered as stick figures. The first issue was hand-colored for the first two thirds using colored pencils, crayons, and markers; the third half and all issues from then forward were colored on a Hewlett-Packard computer with a Photoshop program, which gave each issue a smoother and more professional feel. Sweet frequently colors the comic under the pseudonym "Jack Staten Monahew", an anagram of his full name. Several stories are also credited as written exclusively by Monahew, or by Sweet and Monahew jointly, or done by a host of other names created by anagramming his name. The few scripts not by Sweet are songs and poems adapted from the public domain or are original scripts written by other authors. These writers are duly credited for their work.

Release dates are usually on the last Friday of the given month, unless otherwise stated.

[edit] == Quotes ==

  • I believe the key to good writing lies in suffering...The Sweetian hero is a man who is up against it all, who has lost everything he's cared about through no fault of his own. He's reduced to an animal fighting for scraps--for some tiny measure of what he had before. He's told he's a fool for fighting when he knows in his heart he'd be a fool not to." --from Almasheol (Author's Foreword)
  • ...[A]nyone who tells me "I have a liberal friend" really means: "I know a liberal who hasn't betrayed me yet." --a quote from Sweet's personal website
  • [A hammer is]...just a hunk of dumb wood and iron. In the hands of Bob Villa, it's a thing of beauty. Used by a maniac who likes to ritually bop open the heads of beautiful women, it's a murder weapon. -- a metaphor on writing, from an interview with Roselyne Gerazime, Sep 13, 2004
  • Money equals power, and power equals happiness. This is how the world works. --from a Stephen King message board
  • I'd tell you what I think of [any given issue/individual the author disagrees with/dislikes], but I don't have to fart right now.
  • In this life, if someone hurts you, I find it wise to hurt them back ten times over. "Eye for an eye" and "tooth for a tooth" just evens the score and gives them 32 more cracks at you. Crush someone hard enough the first time, and they aren't getting back up.
  • I don't consider liberals to be human beings.

[edit] == Bibliography ==

[edit] == BDC By Issue ==

A cover shot of the very first issue.
A cover shot of the very first issue.
Original artwork for the "Girls Behaving Badly" cover (Feb 2006).
Original artwork for the "Girls Behaving Badly" cover
(Feb 2006).


Original artwork for the "Broke Black Mountain" cover (June 2006).
Original artwork for the "Broke Black Mountain" cover
(June 2006).




[edit] == Filmography ==

[edit] == Awards and Honors ==

On July 14, 2006 Sweet's comic series was featured as the "Awful Link of the Day" at somethingawful.com.[1]

 "Belch Dimension Comics is a line of amateur comic books 

 with art so terrible that you will probably feel that shrinking

 chill of sympathetic embarrassment before the image I picked

 finishes loading".

(It's worthy to note the site incorrectly lists his school as Arizona State University.)
Of this honor Sweet said, "What can I say? It's like the Razzies, but for comics. I now join such estimable worthies as Bill Cosby's Leonard Part 6, Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered, and the guy who turned sweet innocent Jessie from Saved by the Bell into a total muff-diver in Showgirls. I have arrived. I am truly indispensible."

[edit] == External links ==

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