Nah that's not what this is. Meyer talked up a big game for years. That if only the mainstream would listen to his proscriptions from on high, American comics could be saved. People who believed in what he said gave him two million dollars to do things his way and prove what he's saying is the real deal. Meyer then took that money and proceeded to farm out every aspect of his "lifelong dream" to contractors and his incompetent third-party fulfillment agency (Dynamite Comics, btw) while he fucked around in his backyard, taking the behavior he criticized and elevating it to new unprecedented levels. If Dan Slott used a blockbot to get rid of critics on twitter, Meyer would interact with social media one way, refusing all forms of interaction or even interviews in lieu of yelling at twitter screenshots on his youtube channel. If Marvel or DC editorial seemed unaccountable to fans or customers, Meyer wouldn't even disclose the name of the fulfillment agency actually handling their orders. If people felt DC or Marvel were mismanaging their characters and replacing them with unwanted politically charged garbage, Zack would kill off his flagship franchise at issue #3 and put out
Impossible Stars and
PANdemIC instead
. You get the picture.
Whenever any of this way pointed out, or how he was consistently unwilling to practice what he preached, the go to answer was some gay bullshit sob story about how "renfamous gave him PTSD that's why he does this" or whatever. If you think someone like that can do what Doug Ernst has done, I don't know what to tell you.
Faced with the increasingly undeniable sales reality encroaching through his endless baseless boomer blather, that you actually
do need to engage with your customers/fans, that customers
do expect what they paid for
when they were told they would get it, that building a fandom is an unavoidable fact of self-marketing in the 21st century instead of his dumbass "hot dog vendor" theory. That maybe some of his armchair quarterback theorycrafting of the comic book industry might just be wrong and that other people might actually have a better grasp of things than he does, his response was to lock himself up on a hugbox and then simply
quit.
Doesn't really seem like a "quixotic hero" to me.
Publicly, sure. In DMs though it seems to be a different story as
@Starscreams Cape noted earlier tonight with more one-way demanding of help without so much as a public acknowledgment. That's why I'd consider it a favor to Frog if Meyer just hopped over to Iconic Comics. It certainly wouldn't be a favor to Iconic Comics.
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