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

[RodgerDodger]

Just an FYI, Nick looked at the request for delay documents. As expected it’s no big deal. Waid’s Texas Lawyer has a trial scheduled that conflicts with the original dates. Both sides agreed to shift the due dates to accommodate that.

 

[nosemouth]

The TL;DR? Jesus, there's no such thing, both the lore and spedery are deep on this one.... here's what I gather, but I'm open to correction since I'm vomiting this out from memory.

The anti's have been quiet lately which means, as usual, it's time for comicsgate to descend into factional infighting again.

Doug went full exceptional and started calling everybody SJW's (again? FFS Doug) over Indiecron's decision not to list Brad Ashworth's book 'The Handyman' on the site, thus re-igniting the whole 'gate-keeping controversy'.
Apparently Ashworth got some help setting up his indiegogo from a Warcampaign bete noir, Crypto comics:

Crypto Comics

The most ridiculous comic book reviews out there today!! Whether it's Marvel, DC, Image or Valiant, I'm never afraid to roast them or toast them!!

www.youtube.com

Ashworth's association with Crypto kept him off the site and this caused the ruckus.

The lore on that nonsense is thus, Warcampaign uber-sped 'Pan Boy' got in a spat with Crypto over the last split.
I gather that Crypto sided with Jon Del Aroz. JDA had threatened or implied that he'd be happy to use indigogo customer information to dox comicsgaters and Crypto implied he'd be happy to be a conduit for that. So all this stems from the JDA and Warcampaign feud.
Pan Boy threatened to call around and punch Crypto IRL to which Crypto responded with a video waving a couple of guns around and essentially telling him that would be a bad idea.

After Handyman got refused, Nassar boycotted Indiecron and didn't submit his new book to the site. Fair enough, that was his principled stand and he didn't make a big deal of it.
Doug however weighed in like a bull in a china shop and started shrieking SJW at everybody. Hollaring and beating his chest about loyalty and really laid into the Indiecron guys. Doug's attitude was that Ashworth was being attacked using guilt by association, which is a fair point, but it's not like the guys running the site have any obligation to platform somebody they don't like.
Doug really had a meltdown, climbed up on his cross and declared martyrdom for Ashworth and everybody that didn't support him heretical, which seems to have led some of those involved in the site to leave and Edwin Boyette has taken over managing the site.
Now Doug's in comicgate timeout while Ethan tries to work out how to rehab his image.


Reasonable Jon Malin goes through it with this stream:

YouTube

www.youtube.com

After reading this, I immediately got AIDS and died.

 

[Prompt Critical]

And why would any worthwhile writer do that? The comics should shape the movies. The movies should not shape the comics.

I don't actually agree with this. The movies reach a vastly larger audience and one of Zack's recurring criticisms of modern Marvel was their current continuity being so out of sync with the MCU that someone who picked up a comic book out of curiosity after seeing the latest movie would be totally lost (for example) because Thor is now a female cancer patient or whatever. Changing the comics to match the much more iconic and familiar MCU portrayals of those characters is in general probably a good idea.

Not that it'll fix the main reason no one is reading this shit (it's objectively terrible), but I don't think it hurts when they do it.

 

[Least Concern]

I think they could do it both ways. Have comics with the comic continuity where a woman has become Thor and continue exploring that storyline, but also have an "As Seen in Theaters" series or mini-series where the characters and plots will more closely align with what the theater-going plebs are seeing.

But this seems like such an obvious idea that I assume they've already considered and rejected this for whatever reason.

 

[LateNightComics]

The TL;DR? Jesus, there's no such thing, both the lore and spedery are deep on this one.... here's what I gather, but I'm open to correction since I'm vomiting this out from memory.

The anti's have been quiet lately which means, as usual, it's time for comicsgate to descend into factional infighting again.

Doug went full exceptional and started calling everybody SJW's (again? FFS Doug) over Indiecron's decision not to list Brad Ashworth's book 'The Handyman' on the site, thus re-igniting the whole 'gate-keeping controversy'.
Apparently Ashworth got some help setting up his indiegogo from a Warcampaign bete noir, Crypto comics:

Crypto Comics

The most ridiculous comic book reviews out there today!! Whether it's Marvel, DC, Image or Valiant, I'm never afraid to roast them or toast them!!

www.youtube.com

Ashworth's association with Crypto kept him off the site and this caused the ruckus.

The lore on that nonsense is thus, Warcampaign uber-sped 'Pan Boy' got in a spat with Crypto over the last split.
I gather that Crypto sided with Jon Del Aroz. JDA had threatened or implied that he'd be happy to use indigogo customer information to dox comicsgaters and Crypto implied he'd be happy to be a conduit for that. So all this stems from the JDA and Warcampaign feud.
Pan Boy threatened to call around and punch Crypto IRL to which Crypto responded with a video waving a couple of guns around and essentially telling him that would be a bad idea.

After Handyman got refused, Nassar boycotted Indiecron and didn't submit his new book to the site. Fair enough, that was his principled stand and he didn't make a big deal of it.
Doug however weighed in like a bull in a china shop and started shrieking SJW at everybody. Hollaring and beating his chest about loyalty and really laid into the Indiecron guys. Doug's attitude was that Ashworth was being attacked using guilt by association, which is a fair point, but it's not like the guys running the site have any obligation to platform somebody they don't like.
Doug really had a meltdown, climbed up on his cross and declared martyrdom for Ashworth and everybody that didn't support him heretical, which seems to have led some of those involved in the site to leave and Edwin Boyette has taken over managing the site.
Now Doug's in comicgate timeout while Ethan tries to work out how to rehab his image.


Reasonable Jon Malin goes through it with this stream:

YouTube

www.youtube.com

Nothing is going to save Ethan's image.
It's not true, JDA never doxed anyone and never shared his backer list with anyone. Ethan is mad that Chuck Dixon told him to get fucked while he was actively asking for work and writing for conservative creators.
Ethan has backstabbed every person he has ever asked for help it's no surprise that after he turned on his own fans he would turn on other creators.
Doug is one of the few people in that circle that has any integrity. If crucifying himself is the way he thinks he can escape Ethan's orbit more power to him.
Also the bird that be told me everyone warned Chuck, and he agreed, cyberfrog is a train wreck and faxing Dave Sim to save the book?

 

[Next Task]

But this seems like such an obvious idea that I assume they've already considered and rejected this for whatever reason.

I sperged about this in the other comics thread, but it's such an obvious idea that the fact they didn't do it I think is an appalling business decision. Considering they were already doing things like marginalising the mutants to push the Inhumans because of which studios owned the rights to the franchises, they were clearly already being influenced by the power games behind the movies. So it's not really that they can say they were trying to show that the comics were their own thing, or not alienate existing fans (something they've been actively trying to do for years now).

No, it really seems like that what they thought would happen was they'd make all their SJW changes, and so fans of the movies would come to the comics looking for Thor, or Spider-Man, or The Hulk, and find that they were now a woman, or a black kid, or Korean and smart while in Hulk form, and just ... go with it. That they could make them appreciate the new wokeness when they were just looking for more of what they'd seen onscreen. They didn't even just make the diversity already in the films more prominent in the stories, like focussing more on Black Widow in The Avengers or Pepper Potts and Rhodey in Iron Man - they shunted the old characters off to the side to try and get a very large, established fan base interested in their new characters, and it completely flopped.

Marvel, or at least the dangerhairs who won't shut up on Twitter, blame it on misogyny and racism. A lot of it comes down to the audience not getting what they came for, and not interested in anything so different and hard to get into. And of course, the one thing they'll never admit is that the other huge reason that none of the movie fans stuck around is because the comics being produced were either bad, overly complicated, or both. This built-in audience might have stuck around for these newer versions of the characters they now love if they were being done well, but with a few endlessly debatable exceptions, they were just bad comics that were in too many cases actively written to push away the 'wrong' type of customer.

It seems so simple an idea because it is. And I can't think of a good reason why they didn't just make another Ultimate-style universe to tie in with the MCU.

 

[Comicsgeist]

After reading this, I immediately got AIDS and died.

Well what the hell else did you expect to catch from their gayest op yet?

I sperged about this in the other comics thread, but it's such an obvious idea that the fact they didn't do it I think is an appalling business decision. Considering they were already doing things like marginalising the mutants to push the Inhumans because of which studios owned the rights to the franchises, they were clearly already being influenced by the power games behind the movies. So it's not really that they can say they were trying to show that the comics were their own thing, or not alienate existing fans (something they've been actively trying to do for years now).

No, it really seems like that what they thought would happen was they'd make all their SJW changes, and so fans of the movies would come to the comics looking for Thor, or Spider-Man, or The Hulk, and find that they were now a woman, or a black kid, or Korean and smart while in Hulk form, and just ... go with it. That they could make them appreciate the new wokeness when they were just looking for more of what they'd seen onscreen. They didn't even just make the diversity already in the films more prominent in the stories, like focussing more on Black Widow in The Avengers or Pepper Potts and Rhodey in Iron Man - they shunted the old characters off to the side to try and get a very large, established fan base interested in their new characters, and it completely flopped.

Marvel, or at least the dangerhairs who won't shut up on Twitter, blame it on misogyny and racism. A lot of it comes down to the audience not getting what they came for, and not interested in anything so different and hard to get into. And of course, the one thing they'll never admit is that the other huge reason that none of the movie fans stuck around is because the comics being produced were either bad, overly complicated, or both. This built-in audience might have stuck around for these newer versions of the characters they now love if they were being done well, but with a few endlessly debatable exceptions, they were just bad comics that were in too many cases actively written to push away the 'wrong' type of customer.

It seems so simple an idea because it is. And I can't think of a good reason why they didn't just make another Ultimate-style universe to tie in with the MCU.

It really does underline the staggering arrogance and incompetence of these people.
The most obvious thing in the world to do was relaunch an 'Ultimates' line. I remember reading Ultimate Spiderman when it came out and I remember it being pretty good, a very accessible comicbook for new readers.
All they had to do was launch a new character with each movie and tie the line in directly to the films, have the crossovers become the official movie adaption of the latest Avengers film and then the comics lines can fill in the gaps between Avengers films with story-lines that tie into the continuity of the series.
That might have hooked in some of that Marvel Studio's money but I suspect they resisted that for exactly the reasons you think.

 

[RockVolnutt]

I'd point out that Spider-Man has a bunch of issues due to trying to mimic his adaptations so there are things to consider there. Namely the fact adaptations keep going over his origin story which places him in high school which is only like....about the first 20 or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man? The "Teen superhero" gimmick is a drop of water in the ocean of Peter Parker stories. There's been multiple attempts to bring the character back to a status quo that he grew out of before his readers were even born.

 

[MirrorNoir]

It really does underline the staggering arrogance and incompetence of these people.
The most obvious thing in the world to do was relaunch an 'Ultimates' line. I remember reading Ultimate Spiderman when it came out and I remember it being pretty good, a very accessible comicbook for new readers.
All they had to do was launch a new character with each movie and tie the line in directly to the films, have the crossovers become the official movie adaption of the latest Avengers film and then the comics lines can fill in the gaps between Avengers films with story-lines that tie into the continuity of the series.
That might have hooked in some of that Marvel Studio's money but I suspect they resisted that for exactly the reasons you think.

Ultimate Marvel only happened because, due to Bob Harras and Mark Power's increasing power tripping and general micromanaging (along with hiring Claremont back and basically allowing him to engage in some of his worst excesses), they managed to derail the X-Men franchise line to the point that they saw zero sales bump from the first X-Men film. And with the Spider-Man movie coming up and sales of the Spider-Man line being similarly in the toilet, Harras was told to pitch a line of new reader friendly books for fans of the movies.

However, Joe Quesada was already angling for a coup and managed an angle to get control over the Ultimate line AND provide a final straw for getting rid of Harras. While Harras wanted to treat the books as throwaways and give them to his cronies (Terry Kavanaugh for Ultimate X-Men, Howard Mackie for Ultimate Spider-Man); Quesada pitched hiring Brian Bendis and Mark Millar (huge names at the time) for the books instead and for them being given a huge push, with TPB/HC releases and heavy promotional push in all of the fan magazines and online.

Also, the Ultimate line had huge problems: Spider-Man was super-decompressed (to the point that you had issues where NOTHING happened) and basically became Bendis's persona fiefdom, propped up solely by the fact that Bendis was allowed to use Mary Jane as Peter's girlfriend (and dumping her the moment the embargo on her was lifted in the main book, replacing her with his preferred love interest, Kitty Pryde), editorial interference (Green Goblin being a Hulk, Venom appearing) and the fact that it quickly became locked out to casual readers due to the serialized format.

Ultimate X-Men was tainted by Millar's super edginess and his treatment of Wolverine, making him a wholesale villain who due to editorial mandate was "good". Also, Ult X-Men varied from decompressed as hell and super rushed, and once Millar left, you had a cavalcade of writers each rushing to introduce their pet character and stories and no real stability. Not to mention the edginess (Nightcrawler holding Dazzler prisoner to make her love him, Longshot as a murderer who butchered a man for sleeping with his wife, Deadpool as a mutant hating bigot who's sole character trait was how much he loved slaughtering mutants). And Ultimates was handcuffed by Bryan Hitch being a lazy fuck with massive gaps between issues.

Within a couple of years, the Ultimate line was reduced to being Millar and Bendis's personal sandbox that they blocked all other writers from playing in, then leveraged their success to highjack the main books of the Marvel line. Millar eventually left the line, but Bendis then seized complete control: resulting in garbage like Peter Parker being murdered (because that was the best he could hope for, given the arc Bendis gave him where Fury found out his secret identity and gleefully proclaimed whenever they met, that once Peter turned 18, he would lose all rights and liberty and become the property of the US government via illegal enslavement with Fury sending him to kill and worse, for him) and replaced him with Miles.

Marvel DID realize that they fucked up and created the Marvel Adventure line, with Jeff Parker (a no-name at the time) as it's main writer. But no one cared about it save for giantess fetishists on 4chan, as Marvel refused to kill the Ultimate line to replace it outright nor did they give the Marvel Adventure line a proper promotional push (though they did acknowledge the fatal writing flaws of the Ultimate line, as the Marvel Adventure line was strictly one off stories and Parker explicitly instructed not to be edgy or worry about serialization in his work). But the Marvel Adventure line eventually petered out.

Also, doing explicit tie-ins for the movie is a no-go because Bendis poisoned relations between the movie and comic sides and because the movie people have made it clear they don't want the comic folks meddling inserting their own lore into the franchise. That is why the tie-ins are treated as dispossible fluff and only get released, once the finished film is completed and they know what they can and can't do. And even if they did, you don't know what things will look like between movies and the overall direction of the franchises (Transformers had a huge problem with this for the Michael Bay film tie-in comics; you had writers writing stuff, then having to pretty much retcon EVERYTHING they wrote once they found out the plot of the next film and how it invalidated everything they wrote beforehand).

I'd point out that Spider-Man has a bunch of issues due to trying to mimic his adaptations so there are things to consider there. Namely the fact adaptations keep going over his origin story which places him in high school which is only like....about the first 20 or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man? The "Teen superhero" gimmick is a drop of water in the ocean of Peter Parker stories. There's been multiple attempts to bring the character back to a status quo that he grew out of before his readers were even born.

It was actually around 32-33 issues.

And there are a huge number of asshats in the comic industry who believe, in spite of what fans feel, that moving Spider-Man out of high school was a huge mistake and that Stan Lee was mentally retarded for daring to do something like that to the character (IE aging Peter in real time).

 

[Jub-Jub]

Jesus Ethan, that money refuses to stop flowing for this man. The goods he delivers on this better be amazing or this ain't happening again. Hopefully he is aware of this fact.
View attachment 702001

He also finally gave a timeline, ~6 months late. Fairly typical for crowdfunded stuff, he should really get ahead on his next book before doing another one though.

I started paying attention to CG after this went down and didn't really give a shit about Jeffries. The aftermath of that "interview" did show me that Jim is just a piece of shit and that Zack is a weird, but entertaining guy. So at least one good thing came out of it

It did also give us that woke guy looking down the ladies dress. That was pretty funny.

 

[Water-T]

Also, the Ultimate line had huge problems: Spider-Man was super-decompressed (to the point that you had issues where NOTHING happened)

Amazing Fantasy #15 covered Peter's origin (spider bite, wrestling career, Uncle Ben dies, great power blah blah) in one issue. Ultimate Spider-Man took FIVE ISSUES to cover the same ground. While one could argue that the 1986 mini series Man of Steel did the same thing by spreading Supes' origin over 6 issues, at least it was ADDING to the mythos and redefining it from the original vague one page origin given in Action Comics #1. USM just regurgitated AF #15 with a "hip" early 2000s aesthetic. At least the Mark Bagley art looked good.

 

[MirrorNoir]

Man of Steel had the benefit of not going all in to reinvent the wheel. Basically it was a greatest hits deal: Post-Crisis origin, first Lex meeting, how Clark got his Daily Planet gig/first proper meeting with Lois socially, first Batman team-up, first Bizarro, and setting up Metallo's origin. As soon as it ended, Superman resumed already in progress instead of starting all over again from day one....

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

Ultimate X-Men was tainted by Millar's super edginess and his treatment of Wolverine, making him a wholesale villain who due to editorial mandate was "good". Also, Ult X-Men varied from decompressed as hell and super rushed, and once Millar left, you had a cavalcade of writers each rushing to introduce their pet character and stories and no real stability. Not to mention the edginess (Nightcrawler holding Dazzler prisoner to make her love him, Longshot as a murderer who butchered a man for sleeping with his wife, Deadpool as a mutant hating bigot who's sole character trait was how much he loved slaughtering mutants). And Ultimates was handcuffed by Bryan Hitch being a lazy fuck with massive gaps between issues.

I thought the Brian K. Vaughn run on UXM was decent (he was the one he turned Longshot into psychopath.) And I find it funny how that Bryan Hitch was able to complete twelve issues of Hawkman without a single delay in 2018-19 when Ultimates/Ultimates 2 saw multiple delays from 2002-6.

And there are a huge number of asshats in the comic industry who believe, in spite of what fans feel, that moving Spider-Man out of high school was a huge mistake and that Stan Lee was mentally exceptional for daring to do something like that to the character (IE aging Peter in real time).

I recall this webpage that stated that all of Marvel Comics progressed in real time until 1968 and all of the characters stopped "aging." Hell, did Peter ever age out of his 20s?

 

[RockVolnutt]

I recall this webpage that stated that all of Marvel Comics progressed in real time until 1968 and all of the characters stopped "aging." Hell, did Peter ever age out of his 20s?

No, Peter's still vaguely 26-ish as he's been for a while. The general rule of thumb is it's always been about a decade since the debut of the Fantastic Four and other "modern" superheroes. This creates some issues if you overthink it but it's a nice time frame where characters can be experienced but not really old.

The reason it's "about a decade" is because that's about how long it took for them to switch over from real time to "Marvel time", yeah.

 

[Water-T]

No, Peter's still vaguely 26-ish as he's been for a while. The general rule of thumb is it's always been about a decade since the debut of the Fantastic Four and other "modern" superheroes. This creates some issues if you overthink it but it's a nice time frame where characters can be experienced but not really old.

The reason it's "about a decade" is because that's about how long it took for them to switch over from real time to "Marvel time", yeah.

The "official time span" has been about 15 years. Spidey got his powers at 15, and is in his late 20s/early 30s. Also, Ben Grimm has been the Thing for at least 13 years, since he celebrated a second Bar Mitzvah to commemorate 13 years since he got stuck in his rocky form.

 

[GranDuke]

ZACK NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Holy shit, his taste in movies/tv is horrendous. I already knew but damn I didn’t think it was THIS bad.

Makes me think that he is smart internet guy who figured that there wasn't much quality content about comic books and started doing his videos to make a buck. After that he noticed that nobody from "alt" circles really does positive reviews of modern films/tv shows so he started doing that as well. I know that this is tin foil hat territory, but I can't really understand how someone could have such radically different opinions when it comes to comics and films/tv shows.

 

[Detrogen]

I’d rather Zack be honest with his opinions on movies than try to pretend he doesn’t like things everyone hates, even if I 100% disagree with him. I remember he got a lot of shit for his Last Jedi review and kind of got browbeat into acting like he hated it.

 

[GranDuke]

Sure, but I still find it weird considering what comics he bashes and what movies/tv shows he likes. And no, it is not really that tastes differ and all that, but large part of his comic book criticism is idealogical. Funny how he doesn't like same ideology fucking up comics, but likes it in movies?

And yes, he might be one weird dude and I might just sperging without any real reason.

 

[MirrorNoir]

I thought the Brian K. Vaughn run on UXM was decent (he was the one he turned Longshot into psychopath.) And I find it funny how that Bryan Hitch was able to complete twelve issues of Hawkman without a single delay in 2018-19 when Ultimates/Ultimates 2 saw multiple delays from 2002-6.

I recall this webpage that stated that all of Marvel Comics progressed in real time until 1968 and all of the characters stopped "aging." Hell, did Peter ever age out of his 20s?

Peter's actual current age has never been stated, though Mark Millar's run on Spider-Man had Peter going to his ten year high school reunion. At best he's in his late 20s, early 30s.

Also, Marvel still ages heroes in real time but it's way way more haphazard these days in how it's executed. And sometimes you have writers deliberately de-aging characters only for other writers to ignore it down the line: case in point: Claremont had Kitty go from 13-15/16 in Excalibur when he was writing it. Later writers had Kitty age in real time, so she was at least 21 years old by the time Excalibur ended. Warren Ellis in particular, was the first writer to explicitly state Kitty was now a legal adult; having her sleeping with Pete Wisdom and going out for a wild night of drinking at a bar in one particular issue. However, right before Claremont took over the X-Men again, Alan Davis's final story on the book had Kitty explicitly state that she was still underage (around 16-17 years old). It later came out, that Claremont rewrote parts of Davis's final story and inserted this into the script, because Claremont intended to explicitly ignore everything previous writers had done to Kitty in the 90s when he returned to the book. He later also retconned Kitty into being a virgin again, in X-Men Black Sun" (which was a mini-series that filled in some unseen narrative gap as Claremont's return had a "missing year" between the last Davis story and his first issue back, so Claremont could have his run open with new status quos for all of the X-Men without having to show it happen).

Makes me think that he is smart internet guy who figured that there wasn't much quality content about comic books and started doing his videos to make a buck. After that he noticed that nobody from "alt" circles really does positive reviews of modern films/tv shows so he started doing that as well. I know that this is tin foil hat territory, but I can't really understand how someone could have such radically different opinions when it comes to comics and films/tv shows.

I think Discovery's an interesting dumpster fire because there are SOME good things about it. The problem is that:

1. It's a prequel, not a direct continuation of the Main Trek timeline which is what people wanted or even a side story to the Reboot movies, which people would have been OK with since it would let them flesh out the Reboot ST universe and bring back old favorites like the Borg, Cardassians, Q, Ferenghi, The Founders/The Dominion etc and others we'll neve see in the movies because they all were introduced in the 80s-90s era Trek shows.
2. The main character, if they wanted to make her a legacy character, should have been related to Geordi, Uhura, or Sisco because then the push for a black lead would have been way more organic, as far as her continuing the legacy of said characters who are loved by everyone. Making her be Spock's adopted sister was too much, especially since it's a blatant retcon.
3. The Nu-Klingons. Everything with them was garbage but could have been salvaged if they had just made them a brand new race of aliens.

There is good in it, but at the same time, a lot of bad. Plus there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff (Bryan Fuller was the original show runner and he wanted to make it super dark and edgy, to take advantage of it airing online only) and rushed into production, because it was the selling point for CBS's streaming website* when, in all truth, they should have just started from scratch once Fuller left over creative direction and work out something coherent and that fans would love, not just the SJW mafia in Hollywood who were still butt-hurt Trump won.

*Even with their rushing, the show wasn't done on time for the launch of the streaming site. So they had to make do with "The Good Fight" as the launch title for CBS's streaming site.

 

[LateNightComics]

Hey look you can get kickstarter advice from Heather Antos! She knows a lot about crowdfunding considering she had to do it to raise the money to take a minimum wage editing job.
Heather's class.
Step 1. Become a Troon.
Step 2. Draw a shit comic.
Step 3. Sell it to ??? I dunno all the troons I see are always begging for money.
I'd rather take a course taught by Van Sciver at least that dumbass knows how to raise money.