It's been a minute. I had to pull myself out of the Comicsgate hole for a bit because phew-boy it was getting suffocating in there.
What's been going on? What very important victories or defeats have I missed?
2021 opened with massive amounts of low-level Comicsgaters (with 50+ simultaneous campaigns all through March to May) launching campaigns without much thought as to how to sell them, leading to a complete saturation of the market amid all-time low backer confidence due to late campaigns from leading figures Meyer, Cecil, RGE, Fraga, etc with no end in sight.
Ever since the great Thot Wars of 2020 came to an end, Comicsgate has been slowing down since the frenetic activity of last year when COVID hit and everyone was locked in their homes with nothing to do but mail order comics during to an industry-wide shutdown. There a number of possible factors for the slowdown, like comic shops reopening, less discretionary income from covid bucks, backer disillusionment from dozens of unfulfilled books over the years as well as reality falling short of the utopian promises made in the beginning, fatigue from hearing boilerplate anti-SJW bromides from prospective creators, and is probably some combination of the above.
All that said, there have been creators who have grown in this time thanks to active campaigning and/or regular, timely fulfillment of what was was promised, with unexpected winners like
Shane Davis, Graham Nolan, Mark Poulton and
Mandy Summers. Along with those there have also been those who were prominent names of yesteryear that are rapidly dropping off like
Mitch Breitweiser, Antonio Brice, Gat Hanzo and
Richard C Meyer.
Smiller and
Doug TenNapel by contrast have left traditional comics altogether (at least for now) for a very brief career filling in the demand for banned QAnon youtubers before being cracked down on by YouTube jannies themselves (Doug being permabanned) and are currently making bank cranking out NFTs while the trend is hot.
Preston Poulter's online persona as a "Comicsgate exposer" collapsed some time mid-last year, shortly after his public exposure as an actor and producer of various pegging & cuckold porn videos, and he now spends most of his time litigating or discussing litigation against
DA Talks, VikkiVerse and Frog for describing an teenage erotic thriller comic he was producing as "child pornography".
Frog's had a mixed number of wins and losses lately, the biggest I'd argue would be the successful crowdfunding to develop a Cyberfrog toy line to the tune of $400K in September. On the L column would be the severance relations with the pop culture complainer crew formerly called Fandom Menace like Nerdrotic, HeelsVsBabyface, Midnight's Edge etc. and their lucrative paypig faucet after Az demanded Frog kowtow to him after speaking his mind on the "zeroes" hanging off of Nerdrotic's platform while under the influence of THC-laced candy. Frog retaliated by speaking more of his mind about how people that complain about pop culture while not promoting an alternative are ultimately just empty youtubers in it for the grift, effectively burning that bridge forever.
All this puts
TSWG Anna in a difficult position, walking a tightrope between maintaining her connections with her fellow pop culture complainers in the Fandom Menace while being tightly connected to her JACK show buddies and other Comicsgaters who now officially disdain empty pop culture reactors (other than the inclusion of Anna's name, Herogeek's twitter screed was indistinguishable from mainline Comicsgate's opinion on post-Snyder TFM). As always, Anna goes about this delicate work by sperging incoherently at the slightest provocation. Right now Anna is showing she can create her own alternative to the Disney woke capeshit mainstream b
y launching a crowdfund for a calendar of herself in cosplay.
The biggest development lately has been with conservative creators who in the past declined to step into the Comicsgate morass and preferred to associate in Mike and Doug's circles, like
Aaron Lopresti and
Gabe Eltaeb, turning towards Frog and a nowadays less circus-like Comicsgate as the only conservative counter-culture left in town. DC Comics put a lot of stock in their "Superman is gay" announcement getting media headlines only for Eltaeb, the colorist for their gay storyline to publicly denounce the decision and declare himself Comicsgate and talk mad shit on Frog's show, effectively piggybacking on DC's media cycle and CG gaining some mainstream interest for the first time in a long time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...orist-quits-DC-making-Man-Steel-bisexual.html
Will this actually translate into renewed interest? We'll have to wait and see.
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