Well, let's not get ridiculous here.
Ethan is not wrong when he says "John Del Arroz doesn't believe any of this stuff. John Del Arroz is trying to saddle up to anyone who will put him in the best position to sell his comics."
It's hard not to see this as anything other than a rat leaving a sinking ship. It makes sense for the rat to leave the sinking ship, but you're still dealing with a rat. My biggest issue with JDA is that he pretends he has principles, but seemingly doesn't. Everything is in service of a grift with him, it seems.
If he wants to do something that would actually be impressive for once, try disavowing Vedo.
I know it's retarded to respond on here, but whatever.
I never understood this line of rationale when it came to me. It seems like cope from really unintelligent people who don't have any vision, of which you have consistently shown you are, Captain Manning the Vikki Simp. I, by contrast, have consistently taken paths that are the morally and culture war relevant correct ones for the cause to my financial detriment (or at least not to partake in obvious gains) in this sphere. Most recently, I turned down a salaried position at bounding into comics because I didn't want to be censored about wokeism in the comic book industry. I instead moved to make my own news site that isn't making me revenue and likely won't pay me anything near what Bounding was offering me for years, if ever.
I never pushed to go on Ethan's show all the time to try to sell the books over the last few years. I don't have any problem with Ethan and think we stream well together, but I've consistently just worked to build my own platform rather than rely on someone else because I see how the results are when it comes to creator spats if there' ends up a conflict. The money, even though the internet is the Wild West, people view it as a "this is my slice of the pie!" and it leads to conflicts everywhere.
I spend most of my time writing and working on news stories, and then I have a hard rule to get off the internet around 5 PM to spend time with the family (which is prime time stream for $ or going on streams to get some e-clout time). Books-wise, I don't even write to market either -- meaning I see what this general audience sphere wants, which is a Liefeld/Jim Lee 90s-style superhero team book. I may do that in the future because that's what the audience wants, but if you notice my trends in writing, I am far more interested in doing my own little artsy projects like building out an in-depth steampunk world or creating a 1950s retro-sci-fi universe because I find the golden/silver age and European comics to have more creative depth than a lot of the 90s stuff. No sweat if you like the 90s stuff, but I am not sacrificing my own artistic vision for a few bucks because the whole point is to be independent. As long as my art costs are covered so I can maintain that artistic vision, I'm content.
To make some short term money for the "rat on the sinking ship", going on the anti-Rippa train seems to be the way to do so. I've seen a lot of channels go way up in revenue while mine's way down because just focusing on the culture war doesn't inspire a lot of superchats from people looking to egg on e-drama. It is just superchats which are down revenue wise too, everything else is just steadily growing from views, to ads, to subs and twitter follows. Not super fast, just steady because the people who get the vision come in a little more slowly than when you just do something to go viral.
Taking the opposite stance on Rippaverse isn't likely to financially benefit me, and i know this and am OK with it. Eric doesn't really have guests on his shows to promote outside of people who had Marvel/DC experience, if you didn't notice. It's not like I'm going to "coattail ride" there and get anything out of it. You are missing the obvious -- that I've talked to Eric, I think he's a good guy, and I just genuinely like him and especially Carrow Brown over at Rippaverse. She's a great person.
The person I've maintained my best friendship with to my financial detriment is Vox Day. And I still am closest with him. It would have made me a lot of money quickly to throw him under the bus, but I didn't because of loyalty and, again, artistic vision in the culture war.
I'm not complaining, either. I'm perfectly happy and will continue to work hard on both the books and the news and mostly ignore the nonsense. Got like 3 graphic novels in the pipeline and hopefully can get a couple more prose novels (those are comics without pictures for more intelligent people) in the next year as well. Though the news website is nearly a full time job, a lot more hours than I thought, and is slowing me down a bit on that front.
Cheers, buds.
