I think he just likes Sean. As for public domain characters, I believe Zack is fascinated with the idea of taking these established characters and being able to do something new with them. Should just use those ideas on his own shit, but I understand the allure of being able to write your own Batman story without being tied down to a company or eating a lawsuit.
If that were true, why hasn't Zack ever used characters that are currently in the public domain?
Zorro, Sherlock Holmes, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Fables, etc.
Alan Moore made the whole
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series based off of 19th century public domain characters decades ago.
I strongly suspect the truth is Meyer simply dreams about latching himself onto the perceived brand value and customer appeal of Superman and Batman for his personal benefit, not grasping that said value is from the decades of DC Comics cultivating a brand identity around these characters, a transmedia publishing canon, as well as millions marketing their private intellectual property. The second it becomes public domain and anyone can make stories about those characters, all that becomes valueless. At which point Zack will start rubbing his hands about the day when Spider-Man is declared public domain in 2045 or whatever. At least PTP went ahead and made a Zorro comic instead of just jerking himself off about the idea for years on youtube.
Things like Bill Willingham putting
Fables into public domain, or John Byrne creating his own alternate X-Men canon
Elsewhen by publishing it as non-profit 1A protected fanfiction, are far more significant actions in the contest over mass culture than anything Zack or Comicsgate would ever dare attempt.
I don't think this is appropriately located, but I can't find anyone else talking about the Jon Del Arroz drama Vox Day is stepping in to defend Arroz over.
https://voxday.net/2023/10/03/the-baen-brigade-keeps-biting-ankles/
Is anyone covering this at all?
That all can fall under Teddy's lolcow thread or the
Sad Puppies thread, which was made in 2015 then died at Page 2 due to lack of interest. They have even less to do with CG than the Masterson-July feud.
Of greater interest was
JDA's interview with former VP and co-publisher of DC Comics, Dan DiDio. DiDio is a pivotal figure in Comicsgate mythology, being the man to personally fire
@FROG and was present at a number of board room meetings that Comicsgaters only have with Frog and other freelance contractors' patchwork anecdotes, second-hand testimony and vague guesstimations of what exactly happened behind the scenes from the man who was in the driver's seat when DC 'became woke'.
Of course, he isn't representing any mainstream publisher these days, but instead as the capacity as the man in charge of Frank Miller's personal indie press,
Frank Miller Presents, as well as a few persona side projects like his self-authored comic
Ancient Enemies as well as an upcoming Svengoolie graphic novel. Things start genially enough, after a brief synopsis of Dan's career and comic, Jon in turn imparting to Dan his role in JDA's own (megagay) Comicsgate origin story: DiDio was the man who greenlit the death of Spoiler/Stephanie Brown in Batman comics, feeling that the lighthearted adventure comic of Robin's girlfriend would be better served as the captive of the villain Black Mask and then be subjected to sexually charged gratuitous torture porn over a long storyarc before finally perishing from her injuries. This
outraged many comic book feminists at the time with accusations of '
fridging' as well as apparently JDA, a Spoiler fan who was upset at the loss of his waifu. This was the catalyst for Jon to break into comics (before this he was exclusively a prose writer).
Spoiler (left) vs Meta-Girl (right)
The more you know.
After introductions, Jon set about building a repoire with DiDio with dry technical discussion on preferred format of the medium and craft, making strides by providing detailed commentary about the comic Didio is there to sell and proving he actually read the man's work, along with a few setback like when he went off on his spiel about how he wants 'comics to be fun escapism again' before remembering that
Ancient Enemies apparently a thinly-disguised 9/11 allegory. But overall the efforts proved fruitful. Beneath his avuncular, gregarious professional spokesman exterior, DiDio comes across as biting his tongue on nearly every sentence. Even Jon, who normally keeps his interviews with industry professionals as sanitized as possible so as to lull his subjects into a false sense of security of being seen with him, can't help but mildly prod DiDio, and is rewarded with a deluge of barely censored thoughts regarding DC and the political schism in comics fandom.
DAN DIDIO 0:29:38
That's all I gotta say. After working for companies for over 40 years, trust me, you can't help but write about a corporation that screws people.
JON DEL ARROZ 0:29:48
Yeah, right. And that touched me too. I definitely relate to corporations screwing people. So, good stuff-
DAN DIDIO 0:29:59
But yeah. I used to use an expression that I actually put in the book, which I used to say: "Corporations don't have values, Corporations have profits." So, you know, the only time they have values is if they think it's gonna add to their profits. So when people start to talk about 'what a company stands for'? A company stands for money. That's all they ever do. And if you ever think anything more than that, you're misguided. You know, they present themselves differently. And what I like to do is pull back that veneer just to make sure that when we see the people inside the company, while they're talking quietly amongst themselves, they understand exactly what their purpose is, even if everybody else is seeing it for something else.
JON DEL ARROZ 0:30:31
Well, there's a lot of hoo-ba-loo about that. And there's so much like political culture war crap going on in comics now too, with finger pointing and all. Would you attribute most of that on the corporate level then to like incompetence when stuff starts to slide in that direction? Like it's not intentional? Or are there just a few people who are really loud and they get the attention?
DAN DIDIO 0:30:53
Yeah, I think it's just a few people loud and a lot of people chasing something that they don't know. The one thing you find out in the corporate world very quickly is most of the people that work and produce things don't know anything about what they produce, okay? They're not consumers of their own- I know it sounds stupid, but it's the truth.
JON DEL ARROZ 0:31:11
They're not consumers of their own product.
DAN DIDIO 0:31:13
So where do they get their information on how their product is succeeding or failing? They go online now. They're pulling information from these websites and conversations. So what you have now is you have them picking up the most dichotomous points of view and ultimately aligning with then which they want to believe the most. And then using that sense to basically validate the choices they're making inside the product, whether it needs it or not.
JON DEL ARROZ 0:31:37
Wow, that's a lot of mental gymnastics right there. Jeez.
DAN DIDIO 0:31:49
It is, but that's, you ask how things are made, that's how things are made.
Fascinating stuff coming from the former VP of DC Comics. I was
dying to hear the reaction of one such person to hearing this from Didio, however any possible moment of satori, of self-awareness, was shattered on account of his interjecting and yelling mid-statement. Sad.
After this was another long stretch of discussion about
Ancient Enemies and comic book production, which pleased Didio. Then after that were the long-awaited superchats to pelt Didio with tomatoes for his long stretch of controversial decisions during his tenure as DC Comics head honcho. One such superchat was from YellowFlash:
Dan begins answering this question by telling an anecdote about how he once sperged out like a retard at Dan Juergens at a convention because he hated Booster Gold. Then, later when he was part of DC Comics, he sheepishly brought up the incident to Juergens only to find the writer had completely forgotten the retarded fan interaction like water off a duck's back. Yellowflash doesn't quite grasp how this relates to his question, but OK.
DiDio however then goes on to answer the question in earnest, outlying how Jon Kent was a lynchpin in realizing his grand, ambitious vision for the DCU. It would seek to solve the problem of narratively exhausted, continuity-laden and stifled superheroes that has set DC Comics in an endless cycle of navel gazing reboots and crises for the past 40 years, by placing characters like Superman with a beginning and end rooted in real world time. Superman for example would have landed in a Kansas farm at some time around 1914, emerged in Metropolis in 1939 and then stepped away for the next generation some time decades later. New Superman stories could be created, but they'd be set at some point within that time period. Jon Kent's role was to be brought into the distant future and trained by the Legion of Superheroes to defeat his aged father that had succumbed to the temptation of authoritarianism and take on the symbol of Superman for himself. I'm not so convinced this introduction of set chronological time into DC canon would have fixed everything, but it definitely was the boldest thing proposed for the DCU for the past 50 years.
This was apparently a step too far, resulting in a creator-led coup spearheaded by head DC writer mediocrity Scott Snyder to stop the Nazi Didio and his vision of "fascist Superman" like some sort of reincarnation of Marvel's
Secret Empire, of which one consequence was Comicsgate itself. No one outside the cabal really knows exactly what was said or how it went down. Superman was supposed to stand for hope and goodness (and leftism), and DC executive brass apparently listened, ousting Didio. Grant Morrison (
who blogged about this on his substack) was brought in to sweep up Didio's grimdark nonsense. Tom Taylor 'salvaged' Didio's Jon Kent storyarc by repurposing his aging up to go from saving the world as a symbol of youth, hope and freedom against tyranny into making Jon Kent a gay guy that take dicks in the ass and eats cum. And Snyder himself set about 'proving his worth' by taking DC's most valuable property - Batman- and creating the edgelord Dark Metal multiuniverse replete with evil Batman and evil-Batman-versions of every DC superhero and supervillain, a move that had about as much creative flair as putting a five dollar bill in a photocopier.
Dan DiDio reflects on the jeers from the chat, reflecting bitterly how that in comics, every creative success is received as a triumph of the creators while every failure is laid upon the shoulders of the editors and the executive. Still, he'll defend his legacy against anyone, promisng that he'll "engage in any argument about any character at any time. I love that shit because that's what comics do. That's what comics do." "Be careful what you wish for" responds a cryptic JDA with a shiteating grin...
The reaction to the interview was predictable to everyone (except DiDio). Bounding Into Comics
wrote an article about the dogpiling on the former VP once word of the interview got out (minus Renfamous tweet). In typical Comicsgate fashion, headlines were churned out about how Dan DiDio was 'blacklisted' and 'cancelled' for the interview with del Arroz, apparently failing to realize that the trajectory of the man who went from "Publisher of DC Comics" to "writer of Dark Metal: Metal Men paired with a dumb asshole none of the writers wanted to work with" to "semi-retired publisher of senile septuagenarian Frank Miller's indie press who must tour on youtube livestreams like Robert Willing and JDA to promote his comic" within three years was the actual cancellation, and not the public shitting on the grave of his career afterwards.
Still, that so much was gathered out of Didio so effortlessly was truly surprising. It's a shame that so few are interested in actually discussing what he had to say.
