User:The Iconoclast

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 acerbic and often darkly comedic writing has been likened to that of Robert Bloch and Joe Lansdale.
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".

		The Editor's Barnstar
		Awarded to The Iconoclast by Wikidudeman on (talk) 06:05, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

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.

Sweet currently lives in the Missouri Bootheel with his family, the pastoral Southern setting which inspires his work.

== The Belch Dimension Comics ==

The Belch Dimension is a web-distributed comic book that Sweet has been writing and drawing since high school, though it has only been actively distributed since April 2005. 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. The series released its 65th issue on October 15, 2010.

(List of The Belch Dimension titles and release dates)

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

 "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."
Sweet also called the author of the article "your typical liberal moron who talks out of both sides of his mouth and basically says 'Well, I sort of liked this guy until I figured out a way to stuff him into my Party-approved, pre-pressed leftist template for a conservative, and then that made it okay for me to hate him.' "
Images from the covers of #8, #10, and #14 were used in the article ("without my permission", the artist notes).

== Bibliography ==

• 2002 Almasheol (anthology) (ISBN 1401078206)
• 2003 Postcards of the Hanging (ISBN 1413436218)
• 2004 "The Kestron Lenses", Bewildering Stories, #111-116 (serialized)
• 2004 North County Road 857 (free for download at official site)
• 2005 "The Second Mrs. Pecker", Ascent Magazine, Vol. 9, No 1, Feb
• 2005 Virago (free for download at official site)
• 2005 "Dog's Breakfast", Amateur Writerz, posted May 10
• 2005 La Corneta del Juicio (free for download at official site)
• 2007 Tiresias (Ramble House)
• 2008 Window, (Amazon Kindle)

== 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 have three rules about liberals: if they want it, it's bad; if they believe it, it's a lie, and they are not human beings.
• ...[L]iberals don't have anything new to offer. They haven't seriously updated their playbook in over thirty years. It's worn-out, tattered, stained, and has the name "NIXON" crossed out and "DUBYA" written over it in crayon...It takes something beautiful and then chokes it and twists it and turns it to something hideous. Liberals may be smiling and personable, but they simply cannot be trusted. They are disgusting, soulless creatures with no integrity, no moral compass. Betrayal pounds in their substandard brains like a heartbeat. All they have to offer is a diseased gospel Karl Marx penned a hundred years ago, which was failed and outdated even then...and which was then spread by its prophets Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, who dipped the Party Bible in blood. Its emphasis on the culture of victimhood, dependancy, and entitlement programs keeps us down. It survives by killing any sort of desire for self-improvement in people. --excerpt from the AJM Studios interview,Jun 2007

== External links ==

• The Smoking Cat Productions website, the nerve center of Sweet's campaign to rebuild his shattered life
• The Belchwiki
• The Belchblog