A response

The following is a letter I wrote to Mr. Timothy Callahan. Of Comic Book Resources.
The links to his original review, and article that addresses said review can be found here:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21809

And the original review of X-factor 44:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=1116



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To: Timothy Callahan
This is a response to your review of your X-Factor Review. While I appreciate your attempt to either defend yourself/your review or possibly just clarify your sentiments, however I had just a few small problems with it.

I am a type of reader who reads a month worth of books at a time due to a sub-service that I use; this leads me to look at reviews scores for the books that I know I'm getting, and read the review for the ones that I might not necessarily read otherwise. I find it important to get multiple perspectives on a given book so that I'm not simply receiving a single critics opinion but instead am getting a wider range of reviews. So rather than read just what IGN has to say, I also visit CBR and several other blogs whose writers have demonstrated good, well-written, and accurate reviews.

There are elements to your review style that are particularly off-tasting. that is to say that is always sounds like you are trying to be pretentious about your witting. Now it's possible you actually are pretentious in which case I'm sorry you can't see the insulting and condescending nature of it and worse that you fail to see that by phrasing your opinions in that manner that you are turning some potential audience members away. Part of this also comes from your overuse of [sic] to the point where it loses its value of being an indicator of the author, not the transcribers, error and instead sounds like your trying to point out that all of your quotes(or near all of them) have typos in them and that also comes across as rude. But that is simply where I come from.

You also go on to propose that you yourself are objective and can make an objective statement about the quality of book that is produced. This is of course complete and totally nonsense much akin to the idea that someone can be unbiased because what a single person experiences is going to be different than another and thus the way they approach anything is different to the point where even if both parties use the same method and standards, the varying degrees of such a standard(which, yes, defeats the purpose of a standard) that a given person approaches it with are going to vary. Now it's very likely your reading this going SHUT UP KID, I KNOW THIS. Maybe less angrily, but the idea is likely there I hope. I simply wanted to remind you of the concept briefly.

What I truly don't understand is how you can say that the art is good and that the witting is okay and still believe that it is on par with a story whose witting and art are horrible(read:Ultimatum).

Moreso, I found your almost personal attacks on David's sentiments to be in bad taste and imply that you could do better than David. Now I have no reason to believe otherwise on this, but based on the review I read and this article I find this hard to believe. You do a similar attack on another reviewer who wrote a positive review for the same thing. If being objective means you can attack other writters for writting a review, which while can be based on objectivity is more likely to be based on opinion because different opinions do exist.

So no, I don't think you have "the worst taste in comics ever" or any nonsense like that. I simply believe that the way you convey your opinions and your opinions that your opinions are fact or fact based, and not opinions based on facts, leads to a less successful reviewer and will make sure to check who writes the review before I read it and choose to not read your reviews.

Ultimately, what I said here has no barring on you. It won't affect you because what I've said isn't going to change your opinion. Its just me stating an opinion reviewing your opinion that is a review of your own review which is in turn your opinion.
Have a nice day.
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Why did I choose to post this? Because I felt the need to demonstrate an opinion and also a review of a review. I'll try and post a review online tommarow(or rather later today) that will give you a better idea of how I'm going to be writing comic reviews from now on.


ps: THIS IS AN OPINION.