Online Identities, Part 2

Originally published April 18, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1222

(Editor’s note: Last week, Peter shared his online run-in with Flash Gordon and Wonder Girl, their online names changed to protect them from further embarrassment. This week: More online anecdotes.)

I was on America Online late one night. It has been a bit easier to get on recently, perhaps because so many people have given up on the service that it’s made some more room.

I ran into one of the actors from Babylon 5, hiding under a fake name. He ID’d himself to me since he knows my online name, and suggested we head over to the Babylon 5 chat room to see if there were any fans of the show there. (I say “he” for convenience’s sake; it wasn’t necessarily a he.)

So we went over to the chat room and, sure enough, there were about a dozen B5 fans there.

They wouldn’t respond to us.

They were completely involved in some sort of online role playing game in which they were pretending to be B5 characters. Try as we might, we could not get their attention at all. After about five minutes of talking to them and getting no response, we gave up and left.

Of course, they didn’t know it was us. They didn’t necessarily have any reason to, although my screen name is generally known (God knows I get enough “Instant Message” hails whenever I log on) and his was easy enough to figure out if one gave it any thought. But the fans were too busy with pretending they were B5 characters to care about two intruders.

So I consider that amusingly ironic. A roomful of fans who were so caught up in their own version of Babylon 5 that they never knew two people connected with the real item were there.

* * *

Presented for your consideration: The bizarre and strange case of “Jews Harp” (not his real name, but actually amusingly close.)

Jews Harp, a college student, has garnered a reputation for himself on the net—particularly rec.arts.comics.marvel—of being a die-hard Rob Liefeld fan.

If I were Liefeld, Harp would be exactly the sort of fan I wouldn’t want, because as he elevates Liefeld with one hand, Harp also attempts to tear down, destroy and insult everything and anything that does not fawn over Liefeld or over Harp himself.

He’s: burned more bridges than Irwin Allen; insulted a score of writers and artists (including myself) in all manner of ways; considered all opinions to be merely opinions and subject to argument—except his own, which were indisputable fact by dint of being his opinions; and heaped vitriol on fans with such abandon that he even accused one female fan of routinely performing sex acts upon pros while, at the same time, holding himself up as a bastion of considerate behavior towards women.

Harp was so over-the-top, so disagreeable, so “out there,” as it were, that it was difficult to believe he could even be real.

And then it began to get interesting.

Because someone on the Internet (also going under a fake name, which we’ll call Tiberius) announced that, in fact, Jews Harp was a complete hoax.

According to Tiberius, there was a genuine Harp, all right. He was a college student, as was generally known. But ostensibly he had little-to-no interest in comics whatsoever. Tiberius stated that he and three other people fabricated a persona for Harp, with his cooperation. The persona was to consist of the ultimate “fan geek,” an obnoxious troll who considered Rob Liefeld God and everyone else cannon fodder. He’d be belligerent, insulting, and nigh-impossible to deal with. The group of four took turns writing responses, and the real Harp would post them through his account so there would be consistency.

But Tiberius claimed that he’d had enough. The hoax had gone too far, and he had watched, appalled, as others in his group had become far more vitriolic and nauseating in their conduct than the initial gag had ever intended to be. And he was taking it upon himself to shut it down, blow the whistle on it so that no more people would be hurt. The Jews Harp personality which had been assailing everyone for a year was not real, said Tiberius. It was just an amalgam, an incarnation of every nightmare fanboy anyone had ever encountered, all rolled into one: Sidney Mellon’s idiot cousin.

Tiberius’ confession seemed to explain so much. Harp had been such a yutz, it was easy to believe that he had been a pastiche. Furthermore, Harp’s own biography as related in various posts seemed to contradict itself from time to time; the notion that four people were contributing to it would explain those conflicting statements. Some fans were outraged, some amused, still others suspicious. Nonetheless, it seemed to be over.

It wasn’t.

Because Jews Harp came roaring back, stating that Tiberius was, in fact, the one perpetrating the hoax. That Harp himself was perfectly legit and not a quartet at all. That his opinions were entirely his own, that no one was feeding him information, and that Tiberius was trying to undercut him out of spite and nastiness.

This prompted counter postings from Tiberius, who addressed Harp by another name entirely and told him to knock it off, that it was over.

At that point no one knew what to think. Was Jews Harp real, a genuine insult-artist and Liefeld fan-geek extraordinaire? Or was he a fake, a figment of a quartet of pranksters? Was Tiberius a genuinely apologetic participant in a prank that had gotten out of hand? Or was he a master hoaxer himself, so fed up with Harp’s tirades that he decided to try to undercut Harp’s very existence?

The answer is: Beats the hell out of me. If Tiberius is on the level, then it must be very frustrating for him to try and cleanse his conscience only to have fans so enamored of the fraud that they refused to believe the truth. And if Tiberius did fabricate his “confession,” then it’s an absolutely masterful gag—because he convinced some people, at least, that one of the most irritating personalities on the net does not, in fact, exist.

As they say in bad SF movies: There may be some things that man is simply not meant to know.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to the old-fashioned way at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)