Today’s dust-up involves one Jordan Burchette, who had some seemingly fantastic things to say about this past weekend’s New York Comic Con.

Comic book conventions are among the few remaining refuges of sincere, unaffected fun in an otherwise odious leisurescape of extreme binge drinking set to techno or gun claps. They’re enjoyed by people of literally every age, ethnicity and economic disadvantage in celebration of the stories and characters on which they were all raised. It’s a bully-free zone in which underwear is in no danger of violently wedgie-ing its wearer and freak flags are free to fly. Nowhere is this more evident than in the practice of costume play, or cosplay.

Having firmly described the convention as a “bully-free zone”, Burchette then retreats to the geographical and emotional safety of the Men’s Fitness website to (yes) bully unsuspecting cosplayers from afar through a dozen or so photographs.

Now, we’ve all seen cosplayers that made us wince. But most of us take the “no bullying” thing seriously, having grown up as the belittled, the berated, and the bullied. We keep it to ourselves.

I’m dying to know if Burchette’s recent tweet — “My girlfriend had to defend me on a message board today.” — is related to all of this, because if so I’m sure it won’t generate much sympathy.

For its part, Men’s Fitness itself has responded by reacting to a fairly tame criticism in perhaps the worst way possible: by whining, “Sheesh, you don’t have to be mean about it!”

As is so often the case, and as always demonstrated by a tone deaf hypocrisy, bullies can dish it out but can’t take it.

Update (October 20th, 2011)

Burchette finally explicitly weighed in on the criticism, by deflecting it. The truth, of course, is that some wingnut comparing him to Hitler doesn’t make the critical blowback wrong (or the critics “Internet alarmists”), or him right.

Meanwhile, in the post he links to, Men’s Fitness tries to preempt criticism by imploring people to “have a sense of humor”.

Update (October 20th, 2011)

For whatever it’s worth, the publisher of Men’s Fitness (American Media, Inc.) also is the publisher of, among other things, The National Enquirer.

Update (October 20th, 2011)

You probably won’t especially be surprised to learn the sort of pictures Burchette does like taking, while refraining from any sort of bullying in the process.