,
01/05/2022 - PERCH COMICS - SEAN GORDON MURPHY: WHITE KNIGHT, SPOILERS, THE FUTURE AND EVERYTHING ELSE
Sean Gordon Murphy opens the interview by just directly stating his reasons for going on: he needs somewhere to get exposure for his comic
Batman: Beyond the White Knight (unstated: because he feels he is not getting enough support by DC).
For those who don't follow this sort of thing,
BBtWK is a sequel to his critically acclaimed
Batman: White Knight, a miniseries best described as a creative re-imagining of the Batman: The Animated Series of the 1990s set in its own separate universe. Widely regarded as one of the closest thing there is to Frank Miller's iconic
Dark Knight Returns in this, the fimbulvinter of mainstream comics, Murphy has had a few brushes with CG-adjacency in the past, like when he was going to draw a cover for Doug TenNapel's
Bigfoot Bill 2, which according to TenNapel (presumably told to him in DMs with SGM) resulted in pressure from DC executives for Murphy to terminate any sort of association with TenNapel, to which he caved. Another was his dalliance with crowdfunding in his creator-owned comic
The Plot Holes on IndieGogo (which he coined the "Murphy Method" of self publishing), that alone being a grievous offense in indie comic scene circles due to the platform's willingness to host Comicsgate campaigns.
Curiously, Perch, Murphy and the other guy follow the complaints about DC's lack of support by touting all the gestures Murphy has made towards diversity and inclusion to get coverage from comic book news sites, the most recent being his press release that in his comic
Terry McGuiness is officially half-asian. His reasoning: in the cartoon Terry had black hair and knew karate, so kid Murphy assumed he was asian. And now he is in Murphy's book. The point being, Murphy emphasizes, is that everyone clapped at Sean's bold "planting the flag" (his words) on behalf of asian people. And that it wasn't just done to "trigger the customers" (again, his words). Not like the time he pushed for DC to make a black version of Robin.
Black Robin, Sean Gordon Murphy explains with his best Todd MacFarlane "Why I made Spawn black" impression:
And when I pushed for Robin to be black 10 years ago, it was because I was woke. And I'm like, "There's too many white people. It's about time we had a black person, let's just fucking make him black." And finally, I was able to do that in my own book.
The clout rush was apparently shorter lived than Sean would have liked; DC's talent manager contacted Sean the next day to inform him that he was to use the term
African American Robin, not "Black Robin", the total span of SGM's journey from "great inclusivator of black people" to "language policed cis white shitlord" consisting of a total less than of 24 hours. His friend and woke cancel culture kingpin Scott Snyder tried to make Black Robin a thing on Sean's behalf for around 5 years but given Snyder's mediocre abilities he could only do so much. At some point between then and now, Sean seems to have changed his mind and would now like to make money from customers instead of deliberately pissing them off.
But enough revisiting the past, what can
Beyond the White Knight buyers look forward to in the upcoming series? Murphy begins to share exclusive spoilers on Perch's channel, that what he's planning on doing is new and there hasn't been anything like that. You see, the Joker died but his consciousness was backed up in a Mad Hatter card and now Batman has the Joker
living in his head. This will blow people's mind- unfortunately, Perch's cohost cuts him off to tel him the Batman video game
Arkham Knight, voiced by Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill and written by Geoff Johns, had Batman with a disembodied Joker consciousness living in mind way back in 2015 to an audience of tens of millions. "It's
relatively new ground" says Perch. Somewhat unplussed at this immediate deflation of his reveal, Murphy asks if Geoff Johns' storyline had anything like
this:
21:00 - Sean Gordon Murphy
So Bruce starts to trust [Joker]. And then you know, there's this sort of strange relationship with Bruce and Harley, that's also who we're revisiting. [Joker] has this weird, like, he's sad that he's dead. He wishes he could be there for Harley, but he can't, and he's really glad that Bruce is there for her. And [Joker] is totally pushing the Bruce/Harley romance and trying to pull the strings, like he always does. Like even though he's a good guy. And he's [Joker], he's still can't help but try to be manipulative, you know?
It's safe to say that Geoff Johns didn't think to have the Joker masterminding his own cucking by Batman with Harley Quinn like SGM has, true. Murphy also adds:
But it's also fun because Bruce, you know, insists on doing things alone and [Joker] being with him gives him someone to talk to and there is totally this like bromance buddy cop vibe that starts taking over and I found myself really, really enjoying the interaction between the two of them. It's not a comedy but there's a lot of like, you know, when the Joker leans into talk to Bruce he purposely leans into close who like boop I'm on the nose every now and then and it's just stuff that drives Bruce up the wall but, I feel like the people that are shipping, that you know a lot of fanfic deals with Joker and Jack and Bruce Wayne and Harley and all that stuff, I feel like people that are into gay romance with Bruce and Joker are gonna have a lot to play with here.
Even Perch, who as an interviewer can be normally expected to provide as much resistance to a celebrity guest as a roofied college student dipped in astroglide, is at a loss for for words at Sean Gordon Murphy touting how well his upcoming series will serve as homosexual masturbation fodder and the upcoming Cuck Joker arc. Quickly Perch scrambles to divert the topic of conversation to opinionizing about the impact of spoilers on sales figures and how retailers feel about spoilers for twenty grueling minutes until the subject unexpectedly drifts from Murphy complaining about his low pay as well as his YA author wife outselling his Batman comics, a character known to billions, to the non-profit
X-Men: Elsewhen comics currently being made by John Byrne:
Sean Gordon Murphy: 52:38
Yeah, actually sold issue three complete already. Oh, my God. Honestly, I make more money on original art than I do Batman, than on royalties. In theory I should, even if DC totally sinks, I should still be making Batman books for free just because I can sell the artwork. So it's a privileged position I'm in but that's-
Perch: 52:59
You could do a John Byrne kind of thing, the-
Sean Gordon Murphy:
What's that?
Perch: 53:03
Yeah. And well, I don't know. I don't think he's selling it though. I mean, he's just continued the X Men on as if he was still on it from way back when Claremont was originally continued. And it's actually great. It's, it's just free. You go to his message, he's posting it up on an old school message board, which is the most bizarre format you've ever seen in your life. It's like you've traveled back in time to early days AOL, and there's the art just up there for you to look at and comment on. It's crazy.
Sean Gordon Murphy: 53:28
Wait wait wait? He's currently working on pages?
Perch: 53:32
Yes.
Sean Gordon Murphy: 53:34
For free?
Perch: 53:39
For free. He's just putting that stuff up there for fun.
The idea that John Byrne, a living legend who was once considered by many the successor/usurper to Jack Kirby himself, that (along with Chris Claremont) took a failed Doom Patrol-clone in the X-Men and turned it into a billion dollar franchise, is in his 70s writing, drawing and publishing online fanfic X-Men
for free while the franchise itself has been in the toilet after two decades of blatant mismanagement, is met with Murphy with poorly disguised horror. He asks Perch several times if he heard correctly. Perch assures him he did, distracted with basking in the warm smugness of having his criticisms affirmed to consider how a comics professional might interpret this as opposed to a fan/critic. Because for all I wrote before about the high regard Murphy and his art are held in, it's unlikely even the top artist of the current generation will reach the career heights that Byrne reached in his prime prior to his cancellation in the early 90s, and he knows it.
That John Byrne could be spending his forced retirement making unpaid comics in obscurity as the actual X-Men have floundered for decades in a void of creative vision or talent cannot but raise questions in Murphy's head about how much all his "groundbreaking" innovations like Batman Beyond Terriot Rodgers, Black Robin and Cuck Joker are
really worth. Maybe 20 years from now Sean will be where Byrne is now, uploading "Murphyverse" comics for free while 2042 Batman fights on behalf of MAP acceptance or whatever. Assuming his passion for the character and the medium hasn't been completely snuffed out at that point.
Murphy, apropos "nothing" starts talking about how he's holding onto a lot of his best pieces like his Batman cover art as a retirement fund for when he hits 70 and avoid the mistakes his peers made; adding that mobsters, Saudi princes and other money launderers will always be a good source of customers for original artwork. He has a few questions for Perch and his supposed expertise:
- What is the age limit of for someone who wants to do a career change. Murphy sees all these middle-aged wannabe artist in their 40s asking them to review his portfolio and it just depresses him. But.. like... let's say, an artist wants to become a writer? (lol) Answer: Perch doesn't get what Murphy is obviously getting at here and talks about the age limit for software engineers lmao
- How long until Marvel vacates New York? SGM says the legendary Marvel bullpen in reality is just an ancient sweatshop from the 60s that stinks. Answer: three years tops
- "Do you feel if comics was fixed 20% it would be fixed enough for us fix the rest of it ourselves, or have we crossed a critical threshold for cascade failure. Answer: Perch thinks if people would just listen to his sage advice regarding fixing "a few fundamental things" it would start a cascade reform and suddenly Marvel and DC will be competing with manga and Dav Pilkey or some shit in no time (lol)
- Finally:
Sean Gordon Murphy 1:20:58
There's this theory going around right now the writers have. Writers who are over 40, who were writers in like, the 80s, to the 90s. There's no way to describe this without getting into the culture war shit, and Comicsgate's about to love what I'm about to say, but there are a lot of old school, so called Old School writers who feel like they've been pushed out of the industry who say they know what they're doing. And I think that they do. And they're looking at the new group of so called "woke writers" who are being hired for whatever reasons, and they're looking at this as a mess. And a lot of these old school writers are just waiting to take the stage back. Like some young asshole grabbed the microphone, and singing and screaming and the crowd seems to be into it, but reallu the sales are going down. So there's this phenomenon with a lot of writers who are sort of waiting this out, and they're excited for when publishers realize that these new guys and girls aren't all they're cracked up to be. They can be pushed out, pushed off the stage, and then these old school writers can reclaim. Have you ever heard this theory?
That DC and Marvel employees are whispering millenarian prophecies to each other about being saved by industry legends is staggering, but Perch crushes this hope of salvation within seconds using cold, unassailable logic; (correctly) pointing out that the current institution is an arrangement between substandard editors networked with substandard creators in a mutualistic, self-reinforcing system of croynism. For the editors to rehire the proven commodities, Perch says, they would have to explain their error to their bosses of forcing out the competent writers for their friends in the first place and that just is not a realistic possibility. Maybe we'll see Walt Simonson drawing G. Willow Wilson's scripts, but in all likelihood the old school writers and artists are going to stay gone, forever.
Sean even asks "can I finally tell you my side of the whole Mags fiasco where she accused me of love bombing?", referring to the time insane lolcow and DC Comics writer
Magdalene Visaggio tried to cancel him
with allegations that Sean tried to "lovebomb" him in the hopes of using Mags as a trans human shield against twitter mobs. Perch, as self-described individualist speaker of truth to power, bravely says "hey man just to be clear, you're saying this not me" but can't help but oblige his guest, or refrain from asking the question everyone has - did Sean Gordon Murphy really try to get up in Mags' bussy? Murphy answers "no" and weaves the timeless tale of the tranny scorpion hitching a ride on the the woke frog. As Murphy relates the tale, he felt it was part of his
noblesse oblige as a comic industry elite to reach out and help someone in the community being bullied by chuds who were calling them a deranged retard.
Sean went so far as to loan Mags Visaggio thousands of dollars for its wedding and also various SRS-related surgeries to own the Comicsgaters. But it turned out Mags in fact was a deranged retard and, in a move forseeable to everyone except Sean, began to furiously stab him in the back the moment he presented it to Mags. Perch and the other co-host that stutters trade their own stories about brushing with cancellation themselves, which amounts to accusations from the twitter left that they are secretly Comicsgate.
At an hour and 50 minutes, SGM rails about wanting to sue Rich Johnston after running a piece on Bleeding Cool about how previous issues of
White Knight can only be found on eBay at severe markups but Perch isn't so much interested in that and instead continues to seethe about CG and the constant attempts from the mainstream to hang that stigma upon him (and face
actual persecution).
Perch's main issue with CG is that his criticisms against the mainstream, or any crticisms of the establishment in general, are quickly dismissed as "Comicsgate talking points". What Perch doesn't realize is that the application of the label has always been the go to tactic for dealing with individual critics of the comic book industry, until it reached a point where likeminded individuals reached out and actually did form a group.
Sean Gordon Murphy's joins in and begins to list his grievances with Comicsgate, which are of a more personal kind, bristling against the people who declare themselves CG in person when at conventions and he doesn't like being pressed like that with their "black and white morality". The worst though was when a Comicsgater backed the $500 dollar "Have dinner with Sean" tier and proceeded to get staggeringly drunk in SGM's home and "weird" and they had to phone a cab and get him out of there. Not because he was CG, Sean is careful to emphasize, but all of the other shit. I'm currently looking for the culprit responsible in slumtown CG but so far have not turned up anything. Perch closes the CG struggle session by giving the most Gen-X lament imaginable by asking when did it stop being cool to be the guy impotently commenting from the sidelines, like a disembodied Joker.
Finally, Sean closes the stream by dropping that there's an ongoing deadpool between mainstream pros on which new creator is going to burn out next, with Donny Cates mentioned by name. Sleep tight Donny!
tl;dr
- Perch got an interview with Batman artist/creator Sean Gordon Murphy
- Sean Gordon Murphy is mad that DC is neither marketing his work or even printing it in sufficient quantities and has decided to take matter into his own hands by going on Perch's show.
- SGM does this by spoiling that his series is going have an arc where a disembodied Joker in Batman's mind is 4D chessing the railing of Harley by Batman as well as pandering to creators of Joker/Batman slashfic.
- John Byrne currently making dozens of X-Men comics for zero money rattles Sean and shakes his confidence in the upcoming Cuck Joker arc.
- DC and Marvel creators, according to Sean, are exchanging prophecies among themselves that the Old Guard are biding their time until the new breed of woke trash burn out and they can return and restore comics as a profitable profession.
- SGM loaned thousands of dollars to Mags Visaggio to own the chuds, who then tried to cancel him as a form of repayment.
- A currently unidentified Comicsgater paid $500 to get trashed and thrown out of Sean Gordon Murphy's house and these along with other CG actions at conventions have left him with an antipathy towards the movement.
- Donny Cates is next on the official comic book pro death pool
