Diseased #Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

[Jetpack Himmler]

Strangely enough, outside of the whole Eddie Berganza fiasco, DC has largely tried to be "above it all" since Rebirth launched. Though given they also hired Mags Vissagio, well... we'll see.

I think they are going to keep her confined to the Young Animal imprint. Lord help us if they assign her to Wonder Woman...

 

[Jaimas]

All right. @neural and several others have asked me to chime in on this Autism-fest, and I do actually have some data to give, so break out the popcorn because it's longpost time.

The so-called Comicsgate incident is analogous to multiple similar things that have occurred in other hobbies and entertainment media (even the 41st Millenium hasn't been immune), and, indeed, may as well be a subsidiary continuation of Gamergate which proceeded it, because it's the exact same fucking thing in terms of how it happened: A bunch of entitled pricks who demonstrably aren't the customer-base moving in and bringing with them a culture war nobody fucking asked for. Because of this, you're gonna notice tons of overlap in terms of both the guilty parties (ideologues who want to change everything to suit the needs of a small but vocal minority, consequences and financial results be damned) vs the customer base (who recognizes that they don't care about the hobby they claim to want to help, and wants them to fuck off, stop ruining shit, and go the fuck away).

So let me get this shit out of the way now: If you're the kind of person who hates that these things keep fucking happening, who hates the fact that GG carried on for a year and we're still seeing the consequences now, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: This is only going to keep fucking happening until the ideologies responsible for them happening (read: Social Justice and identity politics) finally die off sufficiently. Now, there is some good news: That's already sort of happening. The problem is that this shit has years in 'em before they finally peter out completely, because companies still haven't learned that capitulating to these clowns is economic suicide. They do not support the products they whine for and they do not care about the franchises they subsume. This has been proven over and over again, whether it's Marvel's SJW branch bleeding the company white financially, the economic failure of titles like Sunset and similar in vidya, or that whole Ghostbusters 2016 thing. Social Justice Warriors are, at best, an infintessimally small minority - they're just really fucking good at being loud.

Now, If you're wondering why shit like this keeps happening, it's because the ideology responsible for it (again, Social Justice/extreme leftism) essentially centers around and encourages cronyism. There is a pathological state of systemic capture with these groups; one usually gets in, often via being a diversity hire or consultant, before appointing people of their own in order to achieve ideological hegemony over the leadership of a given organization. Once they've taken it over, they proceed to use it to proselytize about how cool and awesome they are - a sort of congratulatory wank-session/massive virtue signal salvo - before they begin using their new platform to push the same fucking horseshit (identity politics, crazypants feminism, troon/pedo acceptance, etc). Eventually the consumerbase rallies, and either boycotts until the company is forced to eject them for doing nothing but lose money (Marvel comics) or the companies they occupy eventually go under because nobody wants the shit they're selling (Bioware). Rinse, repeat.

This is going to keep happening. No fandom is immune, and no hobby is safe. Eventually, gods be thanked, this will stop, but not until you see dozens of these minor "Gamergate lite" incidents.

 

[NIGGO KILLA]

Anything to say about Dan slot?

I heard hes anti CG and a real big asshole

 

[Marsaudiac]

Does this mean they're done with video games? I don't care about comics so they can eat each other over there all they want.

 

[MrLobe]

Oh lordy, we got literal fedora-tipping neckbeard here. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some juicy behind-the-scenes stories about him.



Gary Groth revealed how much of a human train wreck Waid in the Oral History of Fantagraphic Books. Here's the source.

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That's a pretty textbook autistic meltdown, especially since it happens often enough that his colleagues just ignore it.

 

[Hummingbird]

All right. @neural and several others have asked me to chime in on this Autism-fest, and I do actually have some data to give, so break out the popcorn because it's longpost time.

The so-called Comicsgate incident is analogous to multiple similar things that have occurred in other hobbies and entertainment media (even the 41st Millenium hasn't been immune), and, indeed, may as well be a subsidiary continuation of Gamergate which proceeded it, because it's the exact same fucking thing in terms of how it happened: A bunch of entitled pricks who demonstrably aren't the customer-base moving in and bringing with them a culture war nobody fucking asked for. Because of this, you're gonna notice tons of overlap in terms of both the guilty parties (ideologues who want to change everything to suit the needs of a small but vocal minority, consequences and financial results be damned) vs the customer base (who recognizes that they don't care about the hobby they claim to want to help, and wants them to fuck off, stop ruining shit, and go the fuck away).

So let me get this shit out of the way now: If you're the kind of person who hates that these things keep fucking happening, who hates the fact that GG carried on for a year and we're still seeing the consequences now, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you: This is only going to keep fucking happening until the ideologies responsible for them happening (read: Social Justice and identity politics) finally die off sufficiently. Now, there is some good news: That's already sort of happening. The problem is that this shit has years in 'em before they finally peter out completely, because companies still haven't learned that capitulating to these clowns is economic suicide. They do not support the products they whine for and they do not care about the franchises they subsume. This has been proven over and over again, whether it's Marvel's SJW branch bleeding the company white financially, the economic failure of titles like Sunset and similar in vidya, or that whole Ghostbusters 2016 thing. Social Justice Warriors are, at best, an infintessimally small minority - they're just really fucking good at being loud.

Now, If you're wondering why shit like this keeps happening, it's because the ideology responsible for it (again, Social Justice/extreme leftism) essentially centers around and encourages cronyism. There is a pathological state of systemic capture with these groups; one usually gets in, often via being a diversity hire or consultant, before appointing people of their own in order to achieve ideological hegemony over the leadership of a given organization. Once they've taken it over, they proceed to use it to proselytize about how cool and awesome they are - a sort of congratulatory wank-session/massive virtue signal salvo - before they begin using their new platform to push the same fucking horseshit (identity politics, crazypants feminism, troon/pedo acceptance, etc). Eventually the consumerbase rallies, and either boycotts until the company is forced to eject them for doing nothing but lose money (Marvel comics) or the companies they occupy eventually go under because nobody wants the shit they're selling (Bioware). Rinse, repeat.

This is going to keep happening. No fandom is immune, and no hobby is safe. Eventually, gods be thanked, this will stop, but not until you see dozens of these minor "Gamergate lite" incidents.

I've noticed major entitlement issues with these people. They demand that the "privledged" do the buy and praising while they don't lift a finger. And then make excuses when asked what they're doing to support their demands.

 

[RockVolnutt]

I've noticed major entitlement issues with these people. They demand that the "privledged" do the buy and praising while they don't lift a finger. And then make excuses when asked what they're doing to support their demands.

I need to find the exact time where he says it but there's a weird moment in the Mark Waid interview on Ethan's channel where Waid insists he's "privileged" for being a 60 year old man with no one to look after and that's why he's big into Social Justice. It's also the reasoning behind his "THE STRONG MUST PROTECT THE WEAK" meme that blew up in his face. He was using that on Twitter and in his Captain America comics.

 

[DefunctChip]

I participated in that /co/ post to send that letter to the America editors. And like a lot of people, I can honestly say I was gobfucked that it actually got accepted. The Room isn't exactly an unknown meme, if anything its commonplace even among softer communities like SJW thanks to Doug Walker beating its dead horse corpse into oblivion. I can't fucking comprehend how it got through.

Anyhow, in the long run, Marvel and DC are basically just using desperation tactics. They have the same current problem that children's networks like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon have: kids are less and less interested in the physical product now that they can have instant entertainment on Youtube, so their sales/views from their initial target audience has plummeted. So they go the route of desperation and listen to the whiners who always bitched about their content because naturally if they FIX what the whiners don't like then the whiners will buy their products....right? Except not. It's a lame duck tactic in comics and animation that almost never pays off involving catering to the nostalgic and easily enraged adults who orbit comics and cartoons. Sure, they're happy now, but the majority of people in that bitchy audience nowadays will just pirate the comic or cartoon rather than buying it. So pleasing them rarely helps sales, and if anything, can be detrimental to them as its alienating to their actual existing fanbase.

I've never been too into western comics, I'll admit, but I've observed all this downfall in the past few years due to western animation boards almost always being lumped in with western comic boards. Some of the panels that this whole hubbub has created are truly astounding. Take a look at the thrilling and inspiring origin story of Black Iron Woman, aka 'universally agreed upon as probably more suited to being a villain backstory'.

They honestly could do with a complete rehaul of Marvel and DC, but once these kinds of attitudes towards art and writing get into a company they're very hard to get rid of. Personally I've never been enamored with the idea of superheroes but my idea about them was that they were fairly simplified concepts of crime versus justice. Sure, the villains could be sympathetic and the heroes occasionally despicable, but at the end of the day it was guys in spandex fighting people with wacky motifs. There's no need to make it more complicated with divisive shit like race, gender, and politics. And that's really what Comicsgate comes down to: a socio-political tug of war over existing properties that ultimately have jackshit to do with socio-politics.

 

[Bubsy]

Actually it's about ethics in superhero comics journalism.

 

[RockVolnutt]

Actually it's about ethics in superhero comics journalism.

 

[Slowboat to China]

Anything to say about Dan slot?

I heard hes anti CG and a real big asshole

He's gotten better of late, but he has a rep of using blockbots and being a bit of an asshat. They called him Slotto Blocktavius.

 

[Transvaalan]

Nothing about this is even remotely the shitstorm that GG was. Woopety do, Comics sales are in decline. The rest is culture war stuff.

 

[The Great Chandler]

It's just comics!

 

[Robotron]

I hope Comicsgate actually makes Marvel improve their shit. Aside from a few comic series, most of their new series have been complete and utter trash.

 

[CatParty]

Comics are for children. Read real books.

 

[Spellskite]

Despite how desperate certain people are for Comicgate, I don't see it happening. People have tried it before, but there hasn't been a rallying cause like the whole 5 Guys drama.

 

[Iamthatis]

what The fuck is this autism? I’m so confused.....

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

It's just comics!

Comics are a mistake

 

[The Iconoclast]

PREFACE:

Spoiler: Read This 1st!

I have to say, I am disappointed that we weren't interested in this thing enough, and I am most disappointed in myself for not making this thread earlier while some of the more exceptional drama was happening live, and as a result we lost some amazing content.

This OP will thus have to be as much of an excavation as it is a summation, so anticipate some 3rd-party videos whenever archives are absent, because I am trying to fill in as many gaps as possible. This will be a very dense post, and it will probably get denser if we (re)discover some stuff and have juicy updates.

I am also open to corrections of course. and will be proofreading and adding to this OP as we and the autism go on.

So what is #Comicsgate? This article (OG, Archive) seems to be a very good jumping-on point, with a brief, yet detailed overview of some of the players and initial events, plus it's in a very neutral and sane tone. It is a highly recommended read.

The basic gist of it #Comicsgate that the comics industry has been in a very hard slump, despite Superhero movies basically taking the place of the action blockbuster in terms of income and profits. The #Comicsgate movement contends that this is because of major companies (mostly Marvel) changing its flagship heroes to "Diverse" heroes, among other changes to pander to SJWs, and thus creating a material disconnect from the heroes that are raking in the cash for Marvel Studios, this has later expanded to nearly all other companies, with the exception of DC Comics so far.

This slump is also affecting smaller companies like IDW, which experienced a dizzying %91 drop in Q3/2017 revenue, citing "“industry cyclical downward pressure driven by market leaders” in a very thinly-veiled jab at Marvel. Comics stores are experiencing a %20 drop.

IDW REPORTS LOWER PUBLISHING REVENUES, PROFITS IN QUARTER
OUCH! COMICS DOWN OVER 20% IN COMIC STORES IN AUGUST

What I want to really focus on 1st is the key players in this autism war (spoiler: most of the prospective lolcows are on the Anti-CG side, similar to the other autism war we all know and love):
-------------------------------------


Pro-CG:

Mostly consisting of YouTubers, their typical style is to ruthlessly roast and dissect bad comicbooks (And praise good ones), with some other videos that are meant to reply, debunk, or comment on events that happen in the comics industry. Their outlooks are Conservative in nature, though I don't see any MRAs in the leading figures, but I wouldn't rule it out.

So far, with the exception of some sperginess and overreactions, they have been largely containing their autism, largely choosing to focus on their task and evading various attempts by Anti-CG figures to stifle their efforts. They have so far not developed a Vordrak or any similar kind of controversial figure. There has been one exception: The #MakeMineMilkshake controversy, in which some comic spergs REEed because Heather Antos and co took this photo:

Heather Antos claimed to be harassed (which I keep finding conflicting claims about), and a hashtag was born in support (#MakeMineMilkshake). Of course, the oh-so-harassed Heather Antos couldn't resist taking another photo, just to rile people up:

The #MakeMineMilkshake is considered the event that crystallized the Comicsgate movement after its previous build-up of complaints.

Amazingly, a reasonable portion of the ProCGers's roast videos tend to get vastly more views than the comics in question have sales, especially Diversity & Comics (A typical Diversity & Comics video will get anywhere between 2-to-10 times as much as the subject comic).

A word of advice is to be very wary when using your Burner Twitter accounts to follow these people, because some AntiCGers seem to have a blocklist going or something, I discovered that I was blocked by some of them, with no interaction whatsoever.

If you find any important Pro-CG spergs other than the ones below, then let me know and I will add them, especially if they have lolcow potential.


Diversity & Comics:

Initially introducing himself as "Zack", later doxed and revealed to be Richard C. Meyer, a former Marine in his late 30's-early 40's, he has been the leading voice and probably the de-facto leader for the Pro-CG, to the point where he was begrudgingly named as the #85 most powerful figure in comics this past year. He is by far the most aggressive and strategic of the Pro-CG figures,

Until recently, his videos have been pretty shit from a production values standpoint, typically recording during his lunch break from the middle of NYC, so it's not uncommon to hear wind noise or truck horns, he also tends to use his cellphone camera to record his videos, with awful shakey cam at times. However, he has lately learned how to use OBS and bought a better phone with a good camera, so this pain point is mostly resolved. Though he always coughs in his videos no matter what.

His Twitter account is also unbearable, as he loves to quote-reply his opponents and retweet supporters. But what makes his presence tolerable is that he is a funny guy (at least to me).

He also has his own comic, sponsored by his Patrons, and has allowed it to be roasted by other comic YouTubers.

There has been multiple efforts to harass and deplatform him by multiple parties, including a weird-ass "stalker" (keep reading), coordinated copyright strikes, and trying to take down his Patreon as well. There was also an exceptional plan leaked where multiple comic pros colluded to attempt provoking him @ NY Comic Con in order to get him escorted out, we covered that one here.

YouTube (1, 2).
Twitter
Patreon


Capn Cummings:

The self-styled "Supervillain of The Internet", he is attending Community College at the age of 33, has mentioned being in the Army at some point, and was recently banned from Twitter for reasons I don't know about yet. His videos in general have better production values than D&C's.

YT channel (Main, Livestreaming)
Patreon (contains some background in the 1st post)


Nerkish:

I don't know much about this one either, but he and D&C seem to have a playful back & forth on their YouTube videos and Twitter accounts. He is easily the biggest sperg I've seen from the Pro-CG people though.

Youtube
Tumblr
Twitter
-------------------------------------


Anti-CG:

Mostly SJW comic creators and industry reporters, not that I am leaning against them, but based purely on what I've seen, they are going to be the primary source of laughs, salt and drama in this autism saga. Some of them already have threads here, and some of them are very thread-worthy, with the best of them sadly eluding our grasp, as they have DFE.

Axel Alonso:

Former Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics, he's widely assumed to be the major force behind the controversial Marvel initiatives, starting in 2010, that brought about #Comicsgate. He was axed by Marvel in November 2017. And he continues to be very petty about it, liking tweets critical of his successor, C.B. Cebulski and Sana Amanat.

Twitter


Tom Brevoort:

Axel's 2nd in command and another asshole, who eventually got cucked by Marvel when they hired C.B. Cebulski ahead of him.

Twitter


Heather Antos:

If anyone ever gets to be the Zoe Quinn of this saga, it will definitely be Heather Antos, she is an associate editor at Marvel (which is largely a coffee fetching position) with much higher than average influence for her role in the company. She also loves shrieking about SJW issues and antagonizing comic fans on her Twitter account (Most famously with the #MakeMineMilkshake controversy), while doing no real work on her assigned series, infamously saying that she doesn't know the street date of an issue of one of her series..

She was also used as the visual and character basis for Gwenpool while she was on the job (still is), which feels like inappropiateness and nepotism on multiple levels if you ask me.

D&C also alleges that she runs the twitter account known as Gary Drama, which is one of the accounts that harasses him, she was also responsible for revealing D&C's dox on her Twitter account, for which she got a suspension (I think). He frequently and explicitly calls for her firing as a result of all this.

Twitter
Tumblr


Nick Spencer:

The man who made Captain America a nazi and was fake surprised when people hated it, I used to follow his account back in the day when I read another of his series (Morning Glories), and his Twitter was insufferable. It's basically all him arguing with people about politics, and almost nothing about comics themselves (This is a common trend btw).

For being a huge raging SJW, he's actually a former Republican who ran for Cincinnati City Counsel in 2005, with a staunchly Republican action plan compared to what he's pushing now. He failed of course.

He recently quit Twitter, I am working on finding why, but I assume he finally burned out from constantly sperging on Trump.

Archive of his Spencer 2005 Election Site
Bleeding Cool Article detailing his post-Hillary crash into slumber.
Archive of his Twitter.


Gabby Rivera:

A fat 30-something "Latinx" lesbian writer of America, which is easily the worst comic I've ever seen, and easily the most roasted comic on YouTube. She got a brand new series with no real writing experience

This comic had the unique distinction of being the 1st comic to get trolled by 4chan in its own questions section.

Like seriously, look at some samples:

Spoiler: America

She also went on a hilarious Twitter rant on the Holidays after her book was cancelled, D&C covers it here. Out of all the people mentioned here, she has the most capacity to be a sustainable lolcow.

Twitter


Mags Visaggio:

Mags already has a thread in our Rat King section.


Joe Glass:

Joe Glass is a SJW Bleeding Cool reporter, who is notorious for trying to bring false strikes to D&C's YouTube Channel (video). He also has a case of the Frank Wu photo face as well, just look at his Twitter avatar.

Twitter



Mark Waid:

Mark Waid is a talented writer with a lot of experience, famous for writing Kingdom Come, and I like a lot of his work on The Flash as well, however, he's EASILY one of the saltiest motherfuckers on the planet, especially on Twitter, now unfortunately, he just quit recently because of D&C, Mark Waid claims that D&C used audio from a call between them in this video, D&C says that it wasn't a recording, but him imitating Mark Waid's voice in the video.

Thankfully, @emspex has managed to salvage some of Mark Waid's angry tweets, if he ever gets back on Twitter, he very easily qualifies as a dramacow as it's not his 1st Twitter rage quit:

Spoiler: Mark Waid tweets

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D&C has also made quite a few videos on Mark Waid.


Melissa Morgue/Melissa Mendelbaum/Penelope Blood/Diversity & Porn/Gadd Ramone/JOHNDOXX15/Martin

This here is the fucking reason why I made this thread, we simply cannot afford to let a horrorcow/skitzocow like this get away without at least a mention, they have sadly managed to delete every trace of themselves from the internet, and I only have Ethan Van Sciver's videos and tweets on them, as well as a few archives of content.

The story as I understand it is that Melissa Morgue is a persona that appeared with a Twitter account (archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), claiming to be a woman who's planning to make a documentary about Comics and comicsgate. She made an article about Comicsgate (archive), created a Youtube channel called the Feminist Fangirl (archive), and started making videos in response to D&C, and quickly she began harassing and downright stalking D&C and Ethan Van Sciver, sending them creepy materials and claiming in videos that D&C doxed, harassed and stalked her and her family, and that Ethan is part of a conspiracy by Warner Bros. to destroy Marvel Comics because of their progressive values. I found another video where she masquerades as another persona called Diversity & Porn, but I don't know where those fit in the timeline.

Later, the same person who was behind the Melissa persona created a new sock called JOHNDOXX15 (Link is very NSFW!), which claimed to have killed Melissa "in the name of Comicsgate", and sent a picture of an actual murder victim with a decapitated head to both of them as "proof of Melissa's death" in an exceptional attempt to frame or implicate them as murderers or something. After he was found out, he tried claiming that the JohnDoxx persona was an alt of D&C's and not his.

This agitated D&C to the point where he completely freaked out and made a video claiming that he knows who this person is, that they are in fact a male using a female voice actress to make his Melissa Morgue videos, and that he's going to take the case to the FBI.

Eventually, Ethan made a series of tweets about this Melissa Morgue character, including sharing a private Twitter conversation with her. (Archive, read bottom-to-top)

Eventually, things came to a head, and a person named Gadd Ramone, who purportedly is the founder of a company called IronCloud Publishing apologized for the masquerade in a bizarre rant/apology/ruse reveal, and said that he was doing this to "make a statement". This is all in this video he made, and later deleted, the video is attached to this post (.MP4 ~34 MB).

Nobody believed him, because Ethan and D&C already had his dox (Which they still haven't fully released), and Ethan immediately revealed that Gadd Ramone and IronCloud Publishing are both figments of the imagination of this person, who was described as a "very large, imposing gentleman with tech training and a habit of posting threats and photos of murder victims under twitter aliases." (archived tweet):

View attachment 350215

Furthermore, Ethan posted more tweets about him (Link), revealing that Martin actually has a wife and kids, but is determined to LARP as an oppressed SJW female journalist, in addition to the other personas I mentioned.

This to date has been the best sum-up of this whole situation, though it misses out on some of the finer details.

And this is Ethan's final video about Melissa Morgue:

@RockVolnutt, I know you already made this post, but I am struggling to put its contents into context with the framework I have up there, kindly let me know if you see any inconsistencies or have any additions I missed.
-------------------------------------


Neutrals/Undecided:

Those are people who are either not explicitly supporting either side, or haven't stated any opinions abut #Comicsgate. Some of them do lean towards one side or another.


C.B. Cebulski:

Marvel's new Editor-in-Chief, who immediately began his reign in controversy, due to an old Japanese writing alias of his being outed within a week of him taking the role.

He also struck the 1st real blow to SJW Marvel by cancelling multiple low-selling series, most of them predictably being titles that pander to SJWs. This is covered here. However, his future plans for the comics publisher are yet unknown, and he hasn't announced any support to either side AFAIK.


Ethan Van Sciver:

God-tier artist working for DC Comics (Seriously, search for his art), he is a practicing Mormon, votes Republican and has conservative views, though to my knowledge he hasn't publicly supported #Comicsgate, though he is friendly with both sides, heavily leaning towards Pro-CG, and is widely criticized by SJWs for his political views. He is also on the record criticizing SJW culture.

He runs a channel called ComicArtistPro Secrets, in which he streams himself while working on his art, and discusses behind-the-scenes stuff, he is

He was also harassed extensively by Melissa Morgue and their various socks, and his tweets and videos about it have been my #1 source of info on "her".

Youtube
Twitter
-------------------------------------


I'm sorry for this long and autistic essay, but we have missed a lot of the action, and I am very peeved that I was too late to cap Melissa Morgue's stuff.

Pretty surprised Dan Slott, writer for Amazing Spider-Man, isn’t mentioned in the Anti side

 

[Scratch This Nut]

I hope Comicsgate actually makes Marvel improve their shit. Aside from a few comic series, most of their new series have been complete and utter trash.

Here's something I really don't get about their diversity push. Why are they replacing existing heroes (Lady Thor etc.) instead of creating new ones?