#Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

[Newman's Lovechild]

I have a stack of no less than 20 CG books I've received in the past few months that are just sitting on a shelf, unread. CG reignited my passion for comics a few years ago and then promptly obliterated that same passion.

Amen to that.

I think I got up to about four. But one of them was The Littlest Umbrella. That counts as much as seventeen shitty comicsgate books, right?

 

[Ike Aim]

The Sator Square disagrees.

Arguably, maybe. Just seems like intuitively that you should have Mass Media researched in your tech tree before Cultural Memetics opens up lest it feels like a retcon to me.

Do you think it's narcissism or insecurity that makes people yell over their opponents when they're losing an argument?

It could have gotten so much worse more entertaining.

Oh, well. I'm sure the budding fictional universe entrepreneur has said his peace and is off to nurter more hype (for whatever...). Moving on...

Jack Show​

Much improved JACK Show intro by Kelsey. Very fitting stinger that adequately calibrates the viewer's expectations for whats about to take place. Judging by Cecil and Jon's objectitions, I'm sure half-hour over-produced (relative to the "show" itself) intros will be back next week. I can't help but think JACK Show needs to learn how to be fake if they're going to keep calling themselves a "show".

That is, except for Anna. She can keep it real.

*Credit to me for the Neil Sedaka clip, which they should probably just go ahead and use for her walk-on music anyway...

Once Ethan left, Cecil took up his Anna simping. Here he is trying to trick Anna into talking about whatever sex toys she may/may not own and looking like a drunken creep. Kelsey then returns and speaks for all of us.

...But Cecil persists. He then picks it up again 10 minutes later and is ignored. Way to go, Cecil.

The rest of the show was marginally less rambling, despite EVS vacating. It's clear they've figured out how to drag-out their meager "show prep" until deeper into the stream. Still, they could cut this shit down by half and have a much tighter show that wastes less time. It's not like they're raking in the SuperChats, at least not as far as I could tell.

 

[Pilule Noire]

Happy page 1776, everyone!
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And a belated Happy Australia Day to all of those bastards as well.

I have a stack of no less than 20 CG books I've received in the past few months that are just sitting on a shelf, unread. CG reignited my passion for comics a few years ago and then promptly obliterated that same passion. I still follow some creators and will continue to buy their books, but goddamn the vast, vast majority of what comes out of CG is absolute dreck. I've learned my lesson by dropping too much money on too many unproven creators. Exercise caution, people.

Let's all enjoy this clip of Liam stumbling over the word 'sumptuously':

...while reminding ourselves that all it takes to be a writer on the internet, is simply to say you are a writer and have some stupid people believe you.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

And a belated Happy Australia Day to all of those bastards as well.


Let's all enjoy this clip of Liam stumbling over the word 'sumptuously':

...while reminding ourselves that all it takes to be a writer on the internet, is simply to say you are a writer and have some stupid people believe you.

To my knowledge Liam has never claimed to be able to read, just write.

 

[fampersand]

Ideas Man has an Big Ideas. That's great and all, but I'll believe it when I see it. This has been a lot of hype and talk from/about a guy (that to my knowledge hasn't done much of anything other than be black and give an opinion) talking about what his all-powerful IP / fictional universe is going to be.
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Did I miss something even remotely close that he's done before? Previous comic? Anything narrative-related? Maybe I'm deficient in my Eric July lore but apart from having political opinions that make center-right white people swoon and swell with hope for mankind, he's done nothing other than be a based black guy with a YT channel and a rock band (I'm noticing a pattern here). Has he even made a concept album? Do his songs have plots? Cool artwork even? I've heard his music and it's pretty unremarkable hardcore that was all the rage 20 years ago. Not saying that his "universe" won't be great or shouldn't be great or that creative people shouldn't have ideas (obviously) and dreams and plans, but goddamn it stop talking about them ahead of time before you've proven you can actually pull it off and if you're a fan, stop putting pressure on this guy to be the savior of genre fiction. FFS is everyone trying to jinx him? Is he trying to jinx himself?


Rule #1 of starting a fictional universe is never announce you're about to start a fictional universe. Just do it and let the fans figure it out organically (assuming you actually earn fans). Did no one learn anything from the entirely-preventable blunder that was the Dark Universe? Looks like this dark man has a universe of his own to peddle. Who the fuck goes around telling people they're about to launch a comic book franchise named after themselves when they've never done anything like that before? Answer: people who've been told one too many times that they're important and "good for America" and everything they make is really amazing.

Somebody correct me and inform me that I'm wrong and he in fact has a respectable track record for producing related content that he is just now synthesizing into a greater project so I can believe that this reasonably presumably talented and ambitious man is not in fact a deluded fool surrounded by sycophants cheering him to soar higher towards the sun.

Hope this is legal for him to do. Would suck to have a successful comic book universe only to have it get taken down by the IRS.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

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Hope this is legal for him to do. Would suck to have a successful comic book universe only to have it get taken down by the IRS.

It's legal. Why wouldn't it be?

 

[NasserRabadi13]

I still follow some creators and will continue to buy their books, but goddamn the vast, vast majority of what comes out of CG is absolute dreck. I've learned my lesson by dropping too much money on too many unproven creators. Exercise caution, people.

I don't know if he's CG or not but I just got Wulf and Batsy issues 1 and 2 from Alterna last night, written and drawn by Bryan Baugh.

I guess they're reprints of a series he's been self publishing since 1999/2000. But those first two issues are really fun. Fast paced, great art, a story that made me want to read the next issue.

 

[Absurdity]

The problem here is obvious: Eric is not a Comic Pro, he is a YouTube Pro. By naming this whole thing "Rippaverse" it will have no life outside of being a mild offering for fans of his channel. If he is dead serious about breaking through and if he really has something unique to say, he will ignore the early failures and press on. Every pro has to work through initial rejections and failures, but let's not pretend that if this is going to be a success it's for any reason other than being an extension of the YoungRippa/SciverfrogJr brand. He might get his foot in the door initially and be spared from taking a financial loss at first, but if this is merely a vanity project/self insert, it's going to turn into a net loss eventually.

I like Eric's takes generally, but I think we've learned that making even a pedestrian comic book requires career's worth of dedication. What I don't want to see is Eric blaming the "trolls" or the farms if this fails.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

The problem here is obvious: Eric is not a Comic Pro, he is a YouTube Pro. By naming this whole thing "Rippaverse" it will have no life outside of being a mild offering for fans of his channel. If he is dead serious about breaking through and if he really has something unique to say, he will ignore the early failures and press on. Every pro has to work through initial rejections and failures, but let's not pretend that if this is going to be a success it's for any reason other than being an extension of the YoungRippa/SciverfrogJr brand. He might get his foot in the door initially and be spared from taking a financial loss at first, but if this is merely a vanity project/self insert, it's going to turn into a net loss eventually.

I like Eric's takes generally, but I think we've learned that making even a pedestrian comic book requires career's worth of dedication. What I don't want to see is Eric blaming the "trolls" or the farms if this fails.

The FM still eclipses Frog's well of paypigs so I suspect that's the real target audience but otherwise I agree. Frog's audience are the table-scraps. Props for pursuing their dollars too though.

 

[Absurdity]

The FM still eclipses Frog's well of paypigs so I suspect that's the real target audience but otherwise I agree. Frog's audience are the table-scraps. Props for pursuing their dollars too though.

FM is bigger, but what I'm seeing in those three characters fits more inline with Scivergate-adjacent. I doubt that a majority of FM would be into capeshit stuff, especially overpriced and underdelivered capeshit. Hope Eric did his research while he was over here regarding the good ol' CG track-record train wreck.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

FM is bigger, but what I'm seeing in those three characters fits more inline with Scivergate-adjacent. I doubt that a majority of FM would be into capeshit stuff, especially overpriced and underdelivered capeshit. Hope Eric did his research while he was over here regarding the good ol' CG track-record train wreck.

The FM guys will promote the absolute shit out of it across all their streams though. He checks all the right boxes. Frog just doesn't have that reach - he was on his way there until he blew it all to be lazy.

 

[Absurdity]

It will be an interesting case study for sure.

 

[A nameless trool]

The FM guys will promote the absolute shit out of it across all their streams though. He checks all the right boxes. Frog just doesn't have that reach - he was on his way there until he blew it all to be lazy.

Some of you will surely press "dumb" but Frog needed no comicgate to make cyberfrog a success. He could have as well lay low, do a KS of Bloodhoney and get funded.
He has the name, the following and the artwork to make it fund to low six digits.
Then he could do milquetoast youtube videos about making comics and behind the scenes of the issues he made. Maybe that RCM guy who was a fan talk about his campaigns on his hated youtube show, but fans are fans I guess...

CG is him hitting seven figures crowdfunding and having an army of paypigs supporting him with superchats so he does not have to publish a new Cyberfrog comicbook every six months or do commissions.
Same applies to most of the pros of CG, who mostly are hasbeens (Art Thibert, Graham Nolan) or litteralywhos (like Jon Malin)

The FM guys are just that, the FM guys and they have nothing of value to offer but their youtube grift. People like EVS or, hell, even Mike S. Miller do have marketable skills to offer but they would rather be youtubers.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

Some of you will surely press "dumb" but Frog needed no comicgate to make cyberfrog a success. He could have as well lay low, do a KS of Bloodhoney and get funded.
He has the name, the following and the artwork to make it fund to low six digits.
Then he could do milquetoast youtube videos about making comics and behind the scenes of the issues he made. Maybe that RCM guy who was a fan talk about his campaigns on his hated youtube show, but fans are fans I guess...

CG is him hitting seven figures crowdfunding and having an army of paypigs supporting him with superchats so he does not have to publish a new Cyberfrog comicbook every six months or do commissions.
Same applies to most of the pros of CG, who mostly are hasbeens (Art Thibert, Graham Nolan) or litteralywhos (like Jon Malin)

The FM guys are just that, the FM guys and they have nothing of value to offer but their youtube grift. People like EVS or, hell, even Mike S. Miller do have marketable skills to offer but they would rather be youtubers.

I strongly disagree. Would you have ever been aware of Cyberfrog if not for the bullshit about him being fired for voting for Trump and then starting the Comcisgate grift? What audience would he have sold it to without that victim narrative? Go back and watch his pre-CG videos when he was speaking in Mr. Rodgers-like monotone and ask yourself if that guy would've sold several $million in Cyberfrog product (that people are still waiting for a year+ late - again) without the politics stuff.

He was in the right place at the right time. Lots of people were being canceled for their politics and hell he might've even believed that's why he was canned. Denial and a lack of self-awareness could even explain it instead of him setting out to capitalize on that trend (and thats me still giving him the benefit of the doubt). All I know is that when the people he was "at war" with all said it was his laziness and inability to meet a deadline that got him fired - and not his politics - that seemed like a weak, slanderous excuse from absolute awful human beings given the circumstances. Turns out all those blue-haired jannies were telling the truth after all (for once maybe).

He's done real damage now that goes beyond comic books.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

I strongly disagree. Would you have ever been aware of Cyberfrog if not for the bullshit about him being fired for voting for Trump and then starting the Comcisgate grift? What audience would he have sold it to without that victim narrative? Go back and watch his pre-CG videos when he was speaking in Mr. Rodgers-like monotone and ask yourself if that guy would've sold several $million in Cyberfrog product (that people are still waiting for a year+ late - again) without the politics stuff.

He was in the right place at the right time. Lots of people were being canceled for their politics and hell he might've even believed that's why he was canned. Denial and a lack of self-awareness could even explain it instead of him setting out to capitalize on that trend (and thats me still giving him the benefit of the doubt). All I know is that when the people he was "at war" with all said it was his laziness and inability to meet a deadline that got him fired - and not his politics - that seemed like a weak, slanderous excuse from absolute awful human beings given the circumstances. Turns out all those blue-haired jannies were telling the truth after all (for once maybe).

He's done real damage now that goes beyond comic books.

Yeah double-post but justified in response to the rainbow-flag Frog just gave my post. "Optimistic"? Did you even know what that emote meant or did you just see a rainbow and think you would jedi hand-wave it away with the gay? Lazy bitch.

You know you fucked up, that's why you're glued to this board.

For posterity:

 

[Mister Dongs]

Oh god it was off by miles

I am scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through here, which only lists currently funding or funded campaigns, no failures. and at my current estimate, going from “Sensational G-Girl #7” on December 28th all the way back to “Fist of Justice: Monkey Business” on January 1st about 180 or so pages later, there’s got to be like 2300 in the single year of 2021, all funded or funding.

Now that is annoying. After going through the full 160MB csv files allegedly containing every crowdfund created, "Fist of Justice" couldn't be found. So at some point I'll just have to make my own scraper if I want to use kickstarter data. It may not be worth the trouble.

The problem here is obvious: Eric is not a Comic Pro, he is a YouTube Pro. By naming this whole thing "Rippaverse" it will have no life outside of being a mild offering for fans of his channel. If he is dead serious about breaking through and if he really has something unique to say, he will ignore the early failures and press on. Every pro has to work through initial rejections and failures, but let's not pretend that if this is going to be a success it's for any reason other than being an extension of the YoungRippa/SciverfrogJr brand

It may be good, it may be bad; the end quality of the work will largely depend on the quality of the artists and editors Eric July has gathered. But since he's not talking about that in this tour among comics people, the entirety of the book's hype, and therefore its financial success or failure, will be carried completely by his personal brand. It's a stronger brand right now than anything else involved with Comicsgate so I don't doubt it will succeed, but whether it will appeal to people outside of his personal following and draw in general comic customers remains to be seen.

Having control over one's sales platform makes sense as a libertarian, removing as many points of failure as possible like having the book done already makes sense as a businessman. What doesn't really make sense to me is having gatekeepers to keep the "narcissists and bad actors" out, as if those aren't exactly the sort of people attracted to such a position in the first place. Especially while espousing a political philosophy expressly opposed to all forms of hierarchy. On the plus side, Sketch Therapy (naturally an avowed anarcho-capitalist himself) has pledged himself as the human cudgel for the Rippaverse fandom so at least there's a silver lining here.

In recent news Richard C. Meyer put out this touching love letter to Tim Lim and Mark Pellegrini's Kamen America franchise, starry-eyed at their ability to raise 96,000 in a single day, a feat that once upon a time Meyer himself was able to do. More interesting is the mental contortions Simple Zack gets into to explain the phenomenon of Kamen America fans actively promoting and selling the comic, something second nature to comic fans since Stan Lee and Roy Thomas were stoking fan enthusiasm off of letter columns and mailing lists in the early 1960s. Zack, unable to reconcile his personal theories regarding the industry (that deny the existence of fandoms in favor of 'customers') with ubiquitous proven practices within comics for six decades, decides to coin the neologism crowdselling; prognosticating to whoever still listens to him that 'crowdfunding is turning into crowdselling', When will customers start crowdselling hit characters like that Pandemic girl or one of the shitty 499 doodle blobs the way that they do Carly Vickers remains an open question though. Continuuing the Jawbreakers franchise doesn't seem to interest him, much to Frog's chagrin, and we all know how the attempt to base his work off of "customer service" went.

In other news, what at first promised to be an unremarkable Flashcast, with host Yellowflash discussing the du jour anti-SJW fare of the week (the G4 fiasco involving woke hostess Frosk) with luminaries like Anna TSWG and video editor for the Quartering "LoftiPixels", took an unexpected turn when Frog disavowed TheQuartering's having Frosk on for a prerecorded interview. This, argued Frog, was watching the Zack Snyder incident repeat itself once again and that in the face of a chud denouncing Jeremy Hambley will just cuckishly stare at the floor like so much Jeremy from Geeks and Gamers and then play victim later. Frog will take the higher road and not subject his fans to such treatment. However, this did not go without notice, with Jeremy in the chat going so far as to say Yellowflash's chat is exactly what the G4 woman accuses gamers of being:

Undeterred, Frog predicted that the mentally unwell lesbian gaming show host "is going to annihilate the Quartering and we get to learn the same lesson again", not showing a lot of confidence for his anti-woke brother in arms. Yellowflash, thoroughly intoxicated, belligerently called upon Jeremy to come on his stream and defend his plaforming of the G4 woman, levelling charges that Hambley was a mere carpetbagger in the culture war, peppered with taunts of him being a "pussy-ass bitch". Quartering however appeared content to issue his replies from the chat as well as Twitter (now erased) that Yellowflash was just jealous that his invitation extended to Frosk was rebuffed. "Sensing that Jeremy would be too scared to come on" if he was there, Frog then offered to leave the stream.

Five minutes or so after Frog left, Jeremy, also extremely drunk, sloshed onto the stream to do battle with Yellowflash. Nobly defending himself by calling Yellowflash a pussy ass bitch in turn, this dialectic between the two culture warriors was cut short when, after calling Frog a pussy ass bitch as well and vowing to destroy him in his own livestream, Frog returned to the channel, cutting the confrontation short as Jeremy said he's not afraid of Frog and if he'd be so kind as to leave him with Yellowflash, because he'll be around to fuck him up... later and left. For those interested in a more long-form exploration of this meeting between two minds, Frog went on to patronize the channel of Jon del Arroz, one of the people with the biggest axes to grind against the Quartering within Comicsgate , for an in-depth efap of the stream.

 

[SaidNoOneEver]

Damage-control stream. Don't worry Frog, I doubt your paypigs read this place.

EDIT: "This channel is my main source of income" - Ethan Van Sciver, 2022

 

[Sex Cannon Lupa]

WTF? Are those Fauci-approved booster shots fucking with his head or something?

And what's with all the drinking? There was a Shane Davis stream recently where he was sloshed out of his mind and barely conscious and kept talking about jizzing on titties while working up the courage to sexually harass poor Mandy who apparently pulled the short straw and was forced to tard wrangle him until Anna and some others showed up to rescue her. Then just a couple days before that there was the most embarrassing stream I've ever seen from EVS where he and Cecil drunkenly perved on some fitness model for like an hour straight before tracking down her old porn so they could, in graphic detail, marvel at her dildo abilities. Christ's sake, you're old men who sell comic books you faggots.

update: EVS is efapping the stream right now and drunk Shane was asking Mandy about hillbillies blowing loads on her face.

 

[Least Concern]

@SaidNoOneEver

Frog disavowed TheQuartering's having Frosk on for a prerecorded interview.

What about that did he object to? Hambly was a GGer so I don't see why Frog thinks he's going to go soft on her or anything. God, this shit is turning into a circular firing squad.

Then just a couple days before that there was the most embarrassing stream I've ever seen from EVS where he and Cecil drunkenly perved on some fitness model for like an hour straight before tracking down her old porn so they could, in graphic detail, marvel at her dildo abilities. Christ's sake, you're old men who sell comic books you faggots.

IIRC, EVS is also a crisiskanger, isn't he? Shameful display.

 

[Potatoherder]

What about that did he object to? Hambly was a GGer so I don't see why Frog thinks he's going to go soft on her or anything. God, this shit is turning into a circular firing squad.

His objection being that she insulted the fans and it will go down just like the synder/G&G shit went down. You obviously didn't see his DSP interview if you think he will go hard on anyone.