Alright time to right this ship.
It's a bit of a mistake to think they haven't realized comics were on the decline - they reached that conclusion way back when Marvel declared bankruptcy at the end of the 1990s. Try to distinguish any of this rhetoric from 2018, coming from Sam Humphries, Matt Fraction or Heidi MacDonald describing the comic book industry in 2000, from how Richard Meyer or any number of early CG commentator describing the industry's then-current decline in 2018.
https://web.archive.org/web/2018122...oral-history-of-the-warren-ellis-forum-part-i
The major divergence between this movement and the much later Comicsgate movement were, for one, the assigned cause of the decline. They blamed the overrepresentation of the superhero genre for stunting the industry and the medium as a whole, a topic regularly discussed on Ellis' newsletters (Avatar Press actually printed compilations of these online posts as
Bad Signal). Another difference was the proposed remedy: adopting
Trotskyite-inspired tactics of entryism and clandestinely elevating one another into positions within the comics industry, and from that position, introducing in existing properties a new wave of comics where angry 20-somethings smoke and espouse technobabble and progressive liberal values. Unshackled from the yoke that is the superhero genre, comics as a medium would reach
all demographics instead of being held captive by the loathed "comic book reader" that they held themselves above.
View attachment 2558501
Bad Signal, 2001
Time has not born this theory on the cause of the 90s collapse out. Starting with the Nolan Batman Franchise and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the superhero genre has grown to become the dominant genre in not just comics, but global media as a whole. Meanwhile Warren Ellis, over a career of three decades, has failed to secure a major adaptation of any his increasingly dated, adolescent cringe properties of chainsmoking hardasses giving exposition on how owning a smartphone = superpowers. Crunchyroll was going to do an adaptation of one of his webcomics, but this is in limbo after his decade of jacking off to fat chicks on 640x480p came to light. Far from being lauded as genre and medium liberators, the subversion attempted in the mainstream brands was largely panned as hackwork by untalented but connected people with no genuine appreciation of the character or world that they were handed. Suddenly, conforming to genre became a matter of keeping their means of employment and the thought of subverting anything faded into the background. Nick Spencer and Chip Zdarsky were eventually beaten into shape with extremely negative fan reaction to become serviceable cape comic writers and it is all Kelly Sue DeConnick can do to and try to appeal to existing Aquaman readers. Most just got a chain of thirst DMs from Warren Ellis for their trouble.
So they were called hacks and they became hacks. Small wonder that being told by Comicsgaters that the problems they formed in reaction to had only gotten worse since they started and their original ideas were completely backwards in the face of economic reality wasn't received well.