I'm sorry, but I've never tried to run a comic book blog. I have, however, had nginx taken to its knees with the default configuration on a system that could trivially handle the load it was receiving, requiring modifications to the exact same parameters one has to reconfigure after doing an apt-get install apache2-mpm-event to get good performance.
Frankly, it seems like your real issue here is that no one told you to apt-get install apache2-mpm-event instead of apache2, and if anyone would be to blame regarding that it would be Debian/Ubuntu (you will note I specifically stated "if I were a conservative Debian-based distribution using apt-get", not "the Apache project").
Again: this isn't a problem with the default configuration, this is you installing the wrong thing. From my perspective you may as well be complaining that you typed "apt-get install apache" and got Apache 1.3 (yes, I know this doesn't actually happen on Ubuntu: it simply doesn't work), when that "should" have given you Apache 2.x.
Frankly, it seems like your real issue here is that no one told you to apt-get install apache2-mpm-event instead of apache2, and if anyone would be to blame regarding that it would be Debian/Ubuntu (you will note I specifically stated "if I were a conservative Debian-based distribution using apt-get", not "the Apache project").
Again: this isn't a problem with the default configuration, this is you installing the wrong thing. From my perspective you may as well be complaining that you typed "apt-get install apache" and got Apache 1.3 (yes, I know this doesn't actually happen on Ubuntu: it simply doesn't work), when that "should" have given you Apache 2.x.