#Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

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Tim Lim - Transcript REEE fiasco, Cash Grab fallout insanity (I still think that would have got $50k easy), trusting LNC and providing no good leaks in the process.

And despite his :autism:, he still managed to finish and deliver Trump Space Force while Ethan pushed back Cyberfrog to fucking March.
 
The best comparison to how Manga is structured and created would be American Newspaper Comic Strips. Creator controlled and owned, but distributed via an aggregate publisher.

And to answer @Jetpack Himmler question, the ownership with Manga will depend on the contracts between the creator and the publisher. But generally the creator holds a key piece of it. The point where the creator may lose creative control is when it is optioned for animeor film, and committee rule takes over. Manga is almost never a publisher hiring MangaKa as work for hire to create IP for the publisher in house. Rather Manga contracts with the creator to publish hisor her IP and work.
I actually think the best comparison to manga is the original Hellblazer run.

For those not in the know, Hellblazer was the John Constantine book. John originally appeared in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, but he proved popular enough to be spun off into his own book. It lasted for 300 issues, being moved over to DC’s Vertigo imprint (the original real Vertigo, not whatever Frankenstein abomination it is now) before issue 100. That meant John was more or less in his own seperate continuity and that if you wanted to follow his story, there was just one book you had to pick up every month. Sure it wasn’t all just one writer, but each new writer actually provided a new spin on the story, meaning it never got too stale. The Vertigo imprint allowed the story to feature mature elements, and basically allowed the writers to tackle whatever screwed-up shit they felt like.

The story actually advanced, too. Characters came into John’s life, and then moved out of it again. His girlfriends died and got damned to hell over and over again, and that actually weighed on him as a person. John faced consequences for his actions. When he got a scar on his face, it didn’t get removed, he just had a scar now. And most importantly, he actually aged as a character just like the readers did, going from a young Sting look-alike to a haggard middle-aged man. All of this made the story feel so much more real and impactful than pretty much any story of this length I had ever experienced.

Hellblazer was cancelled in 2013 as part of an effort to bring John Constantine into the main DC universe, and this was a huge turning point in my personal comics fandom. When John moved to the main universe again, he started having to play by the rules that everyone else did. He was reverted to his late-20s/early-30s, and he transformed from an evolving “real” character into an unchanging icon who could never change, just like Superman or Batman. He joined a Justice League spin-off team. And all the mature elements were stripped away to make sure John could be sold in books with that T for Teen lable.

John Constantine is more popular now than ever. He has his own on-again-off-again Hellblazer book in the mainline DC continuity, he’s starred in his own failed TV show and an animated movie, and you can catch him every week on the CW in Legends of Tomorrow. (God, what a fucking stupid name for a show) But I think it’s telling that in order to reach that popularity, Constantine had to be reduced from a developed mature character into a brand.
 
John Constantine is more popular now than ever. He has his own on-again-off-again Hellblazer book in the mainline DC continuity, he’s starred in his own failed TV show and an animated movie, and you can catch him every week on the CW in Legends of Tomorrow.

There was also the poorly regarded film with Keanu Reeves.
 
I think the show got the character right - unlike the movie, which changed almost everything about him. John smokes, drinks, uses British slang, and fucks both chicks and dudes.
But that's honestly kind of my point. Sure, they may get the surface characteristics right. Those are all things I'd use to describe him. But ultimately what was special about the character originally was how much deeper he was than those surface characteristics. I feel like a large part of the problem with comics is that the characters are these brands that are never truly allowed to grow or evolve too much without being snapped back to status quo, and that's the world John is in now. (I don't think manga is entirely devoid of this either)

I'll cop to not having seen Legends, maybe it really is a great show with great characterization. But what I saw of the Constantine TV show was very much what I was talking about. OG John was a slimy asshole who rarely used any flashy magic. TV John was a superhero out to protect the world by chucking fireballs, because that's what a bunch of executives thought would make people like him more.
There was also the poorly regarded film with Keanu Reeves.
I might lose some cred here, but I actually don't hate that movie, because I honestly just see it as a whole separate thing. Sure it doesn't care about the source material, but it doesn't pretend to. My problem with a lot of the modern stories are that they dress up the husk of the character in his old trappings (tan trenchcoat, British, smokes and drinks) and try to pretend it's the same thing. The 2005 movie shows from the beginning that it doesn't give a crap about acting like it's the same as the comics and I think it comes off as a more enjoyable product (to me, a huge Vertigo sperg) because of it.
 
Besides that, there's a very specific set of conditions that leads to an SJW incursion: a declining industry with a legacy of high cultural influence but low cash on hand and low numbers of people actually running the business. That's just not the case in manga.

I'm not sure about that. Games were on a high when SJWs started fucking everything up.

Manga has a much deeper sense of progression because the stories aren't meant to go on forever like in Comics. Naruto (a long series in it's own right) follows the titular character from boyhood to manhood, from fledgling ninja trainee to full on leader of the ninja clans. The "new" Naruto comic is centered around his son, Boruto having his own coming of age tale and will (likely) deal with living in the shadow of a great man. Dragonball has a similar progression; from a young Goku as an aspiring martial artist to a much older one training to become a demi-god. Though the series Goku also becomes a father (to Gohan) and a grandfather (to Pan). Vegeta goes through an arc as a villan, than an ally, then also becomes a father of his own.

It's a bit of a lose-lose situation. I remember when X-men Destiny came out, you had people who were interested in seeing what the X-men were doing all the years they'd been away, but there are people like me who grew up with the animated series that still think X-men should be that.

Manga and anime games get around this in various ways.

And to answer @Jetpack Himmler question, the ownership with Manga will depend on the contracts between the creator and the publisher. But generally the creator holds a key piece of it. The point where the creator may lose creative control is when it is optioned for animeor film, and committee rule takes over. Manga is almost never a publisher hiring MangaKa as work for hire to create IP for the publisher in house. Rather Manga contracts with the creator to publish hisor her IP and work.

I've seen mangas get into legal issues, but when that happens things just stop. This is good and bad. Good because it stops publisher running off with an IP and driving it into the ground, but bad because if something happens (like the author dying) you're left with an unresolved story. One of the more well known examples was High School of the Dead. Something happened (I think one of the 2 creators took ill) and the story ground to a halt.
 
I actually think the best comparison to manga is the original Hellblazer run.

For those not in the know, Hellblazer was the John Constantine book. John originally appeared in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, but he proved popular enough to be spun off into his own book. It lasted for 300 issues, being moved over to DC’s Vertigo imprint (the original real Vertigo, not whatever Frankenstein abomination it is now) before issue 100. That meant John was more or less in his own seperate continuity and that if you wanted to follow his story, there was just one book you had to pick up every month. Sure it wasn’t all just one writer, but each new writer actually provided a new spin on the story, meaning it never got too stale. The Vertigo imprint allowed the story to feature mature elements, and basically allowed the writers to tackle whatever screwed-up shit they felt like.

The story actually advanced, too. Characters came into John’s life, and then moved out of it again. His girlfriends died and got damned to hell over and over again, and that actually weighed on him as a person. John faced consequences for his actions. When he got a scar on his face, it didn’t get removed, he just had a scar now. And most importantly, he actually aged as a character just like the readers did, going from a young Sting look-alike to a haggard middle-aged man. All of this made the story feel so much more real and impactful than pretty much any story of this length I had ever experienced.
There is also James Robinson's Starman.
I've seen mangas get into legal issues, but when that happens things just stop. This is good and bad. Good because it stops publisher running off with an IP and driving it into the ground, but bad because if something happens (like the author dying) you're left with an unresolved story. One of the more well known examples was High School of the Dead. Something happened (I think one of the 2 creators took ill) and the story ground to a halt.
High School of The Dead's writer passed away a while back and the artist confirmed that it will remain unfinished.
 
I'll cop to not having seen Legends, maybe it really is a great show with great characterization. But what I saw of the Constantine TV show was very much what I was talking about. OG John was a slimy asshole who rarely used any flashy magic. TV John was a superhero out to protect the world by chucking fireballs, because that's what a bunch of executives thought would make people like him more.

I watch the show, and it's balls-out insane, in a good way. Constantine does use magic in a showy way, like the movie version of Doctor Strange, but it works on the show. He also gets a lot of characterization, especially this season, where he's in a lot of emotional conflict because he got tricked into giving his boyfriend's soul to Neron, who is the DCU version of the Devil.
 
Must be a slow news day in Florida. Look what the Miami Herald just published. (Archive)

Comicsgate: Alt-right fan boys go after women in world of comics

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.


  • It was an anodyne caption for an anodyne image. The response was anything but.

    “Can we just get off of feminism and social justice and actually print stories,” one person tweeted.

    Another dubbed the women “the creepiest collection of stereotypical SJWs anyone could possibly imagine,” using a right-wing acronym for “social justice warrior.”

    Still another tweeted “I would totally bang the girl in front” — Antos — to which someone else responded: “Better have her sign a consent form, she looks like the ‘false rape charge’ type.”

    Nor was that the worst of it. There were also rape threats and sexually explicit images. Antos was “doxed”; i.e., had personal documents released online. Her friends and colleagues were harassed. And she was stalked. At the height of the furor, she was receiving about a thousand notifications — positive and negative — per hour. Antos posted a series of distraught tweets that suggested the toll the harassment was taking.

    July 29 at 9:04 p.m..: “The internet is an awful, horrible, and disgusting place.”

    July 29 at 9:23 p.m.: “How dare I post a picture of my friends on the internet without expecting to be bullied, insulted, harassed and targeted.”

    July 30 at 8:03 a.m. “Woke up today to a slew of more garbage tweets and DMs. For being a woman. In comics. Who posted a selfie of her friends getting milkshakes.”

    And the harassment just didn’t stop. For days, then for weeks, then for months, the tweets kept pouring in from people infuriated at the idea that there are women in comics. Many carried a then-new hashtag: “Comicsgate.”

    As movements go, Comicsgate was loosely organized, but certainly its most visible figure was one Richard C. Meyer, a little known, self-published comics writer who acted as a kind of ringmaster, using the ironic handle, “DiversityAndCmx.” Antos, he once tweeted, “looks like a hooker from some random episode of STARSKY & HUTCH.”

    Antos finally left Marvel the following March. And Comicsgate was officially, as they say, a thing, an affiliation of alt-right comic book fan boys united by their hatred of women, themes of feminism or diversity in comics and by their willingness to bully and harass. Consider it a measure of their effectiveness that a handful of women who were targeted by Comicsgate were approached about participating in this article, but all either ignored the request or refused to be quoted, even anonymously. After calling Meyer and crew “knuckleheads,” the owner of one comics shop even asked that its name not be used here.

    If Comicsgate has not managed to “make comics great again” — one of its hashtags — it has certainly managed to make comics fearful again in a way arguably not seen since the anti-comics Congressional hearings of the 1950s. And if the tactics it employs sound familiar, that’s because they are.

    In 2014, the video game world was rocked by “Gamergate,” a campaign against female video game players, designers and critics. It rose after a free experimental game released by designer Zoe Quinn in 2013. Instead of centering on basketball or commando raids, “Depression Quest” dealt with, well...depression. In response, she started receiving menacing emails, her documents were released and message boards began to fill with threats like one that proposed gamers give Quinn “a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.”

    In 2016, there was a similar response to the reboot of the movie “Ghostbusters” with four female leads. Actress Leslie Jones, who is African-American, was a particular focus of the hatred. She reported repeatedly being called an “ape” and said someone even sent an image of her face streaked with semen. Jones briefly shut down her Twitter account, writing, “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie.”

    In 2017, when Kelly Marie Tran, who was born in San Diego to parents from Vietnam, starred in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” she was the target of online harassment that included someone rewriting a Wikipedia page for her character so that it read: “Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass f------ character Disney made and is a stupid, retarded, and autistic love interest... She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.”

    The comics industry got its first whiff of all this in 2016 after Mockingbird, a female superhero, was depicted wearing a T-shirt that said, “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda.” The bullying that followed was enough to drive the book’s author, novelist Chelsea Cain, off of Twitter. A year later, when writer Magdalene “Mags” Visaggio came out in defense of Antos, the bullies took special joy in ridiculing her as a transgender woman. Meyer dubbed her “a violent unstable man in a Party City wig.” As recently as August, when poet and academic Eve Ewing was announced as the writer of “Ironheart,” a new series whose protagonist is a black teenage girl, observers pronounced her “unqualified” and — again — an ”SJW.”

    In their world, apparently, there are few things worse than to be a warrior for social justice. Like, say, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem or Martin Luther King.

    Dr. Morten Bay of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism thinks what we are seeing here is a perfect storm of today’s angry political environment and the “amplification mechanism” of social media. Though it positions itself as a criticism of the work, movements like Comicsgate are actually more about who gets to have a voice than about artistic merit. That, at least, is what Bay found when he analyzed the Twitter feed of director Rian Johnson from the period when his film “The Last Jedi” was so heavily criticized for presenting an Asian-American woman as a hero.

    • It is worth noting that, Comicsgate ire aside, there has never been a time when comics did not address politics. Superman liberated a concentration camp during World War II. The Sub-Mariner has long campaigned against pollution. In 1974, at the height of Watergate, a disillusioned Captain America gave up his shield. Nor is feminism new to comics. Indeed, Wonder Woman — who debuted in 1941 — is a living embodiment of female aspiration and power.

      But all those characters were created — and mostly written — by men. Increasingly, however, women are showing up as creators or participators in what has been a male-dominated world. And some men have no idea how to handle it. One of the totems of geek culture, observes Bay, has been a sense of male ostracization. Even Stan Lee, during his heyday at Marvel, cannily played on the nerd herd’s sense of itself as an outsider culture. As he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003, “I wanted the reader to feel we were ... sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”

      But if being an outsider is a core part of your identity, what happens when that goes away? We live in a world where geek culture dominates pop culture, with Marvel Studios leading the way, delivering one billion-dollar franchise after another. What happens to that sense of exclusivity when the whole world — even women — knows the secret catch phrase or handshake?

      “So the community is changing,” says Bay, “and I think what you’re seeing is just a general reflection of the same thing that’s happening across the world, in terms of white male privilege being challenged. White males are resisting this, resisting the challenge to their dominant status.”

      University of Baltimore professor Dr. Bridget Blodgett. who, with Dr. Anastasia Salter of the University of Central Florida, analyzed the Gamergate phenomenon in their book, “Toxic Geek Masculinity and Media,” has reached much the same conclusion. We live now, she says, in an age where “everybody’s mom can play a video game and be a gamer.”

      ”But when everybody can do it, you kind of have simultaneously, geek culture is ascendant, everybody wants in because it’s this big thing with the Marvel movies and stuff, but at the same time” those who got there first no longer get to think of themselves as special.

      An argument can also be made that Marvel, in particular, brought much of this on itself. A few years ago, in an obvious effort to diversify and revivify its aging lineup of largely white, male characters, it began swapping many of them out for women and people of color. Suddenly, the Hulk was a Korean-American teenager. Thor and Wolverine were women. Captain America was an African-American man. Iron Man was a black teenage girl and Ms. Marvel was a Muslim teenager.

      As if that were not enough raw red meat to throw down before the right wing, there was also a now-notorious 2017 interview by David Gabriel, a Marvel executive, in which he addressed the issue of declining sales: “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”

      Gabriel would quickly walk those words back, and CBR.com, an authoritative online industry publication, would debunk the claim decisively under the headline: “No, Diversity Didn’t Kill Marvel’s Comic Sales.”

      But in a sense, the truth of it doesn’t matter. As veteran writer Mark Waid points out, the white male characters are almost all back now, as anyone who has read comic books longer than a year knew they would be. This, after all, isn’t the first time this has happened. Iron Man was a black man in the ‘80s. Bruce Wayne has occasionally stopped being Batman. Captain America has been dead at least five times.

      “My feeling,” says Waid, “has always been, if the claim is, ‘That’s what we were really after, that’s what we were upset about,’ well, you won. So shut the hell up.”

      “That’s the tell in their argument,” says writer Kwanza Osajyefo. “Any comics fan who had been a longtime reader is completely aware [that comics is cyclical]. Everything is temporary, and then you go back to the status quo.

      “The argument that’s coming from Comicsgate … has nothing to do with going back to classic characters or ‘making comics great again.’ It has everything to do with stamping down other voices.” Osajyefo notes that he’s not even working with “classic characters” — his series, “Black,” published after a Kickstarter campaign, posits a world where only black people have super powers — yet he is still getting abuse.

      Waid and Osajyefo are among a number of male creators — Mike Deodato, Jeff Lemire and Bill Sienkiewicz are others — who have spoken out in support of their female colleagues.

      The outspokenness has not come without a price. Waid is being sued by Meyer, who claims the writer somehow influenced retailers not to sell Meyer’s work. “I shut down Facebook for a while right after the kerfuffle that sparked the lawsuit because, again, it became such a funnel for hate. I couldn’t go on there and say, ‘Happy birthday, Grandma,’ without a hundred, ‘Die! Die! Die!’ responses.”

      Osajyefo says he has been called a thief, called the N-word and doxed. But he feels this was mild compared to what the women have endured.

      “I think they absolutely are more vulnerable to a lot of this crap. ... I consider as a male that there are so many things that just aren’t in my purview, that I don’t even think about that women think about all day. Like, I can walk away from a bar and not have to put a coaster on my beer. Why would I give that a second thought? It’s cool, it’s my beer, I’ll be back. But for a woman, it’s like, that could be the difference between her and a really bad situation.”

      Now that same fear comes to comics, previously a mellow nerd kingdom where the biggest disputes were along the lines of whether Wolverine could take Captain America in a fight. These days, the kingdom of nerds is, for some at least, a kingdom of fright.

      Chelsea Cain, who was attacked by Comicsgate before it even had that name, admits she was initially traumatized by what happened to her. “The thing that really will always haunt me,” she told The Daily Beast, “is this illustration of Mockingbird — and this was somebody with talent, like, it was drawn and inked, it looked professional: Mockingbird brutalized and raped, dead. Her costume all torn off, bloody, really violent. And she’s laying there, horribly murdered and bruised and it said, ‘Ask me about my feminist agenda.’”

      Cain kept quiet. Then Donald Trump was elected. She attended the Women’s March in Washington. And somewhere in there, as the Daily Beast puts it, “she got angry.”

      The result of that anger was a new Image Comics series called Man-eaters, a ferociously funny and fiercely feminist allegory, described by The Hollywood Reporter as a combination of “’The Handmaid’s Tale” and “’Cat People.” In it, the world is terrorized by a virus that strikes girls after their first menstrual period, turning them into killer cats. The second issue features a faux ad that seems to lift a single digit salute on behalf of every woman ever terrorized by Comicsgate:

      “Public Warning: This Comic May Attract Girls and Women. If you see a girl or woman in your area, remain calm. Girls and women may lash out if provoked.”
 
Do news orgs ever contemplate if it's a bad idea to publish fake news about shit that doesn't matter, I wonder? I mean, if you're going to reveal that you're a shill propaganda outlet, and completely destroy whatever trust people have in you, why get caught over some dumb shit?
 
Apparently Donny Cates was browbeaten by Anti-CG speds into denouncing CG after he disagreed with some shippers trying convince him to romantically ship Venom and Eddie Brock. Honestly looks like he did it just so they would stop pestering him.

(Still on twitter vacation, someone please cap/archive it)
 
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Consider it a measure of their effectiveness that a handful of women who were targeted by Comicsgate were approached about participating in this article, but all either ignored the request or refused to be quoted, even anonymously.

I find this incredibly hard to believe. I also note there was no "We attempted to reach out to Meyer for comment" in this article. Even that Comedy Central dork journalismed better than this.
 
I see the usual attention to facts is at work.

Waid is being sued by Meyer, who claims the writer somehow influenced retailers not to sell Meyer’s work.

No, there is no "somehow" about it, and no, retailers are not the cause of the complaint. It would be very easy to find out why since the complaint is publicly available.

Every document in the case is publicly available:
http://courtlistener.com/docket/7903402/meyer-v-waid/

So there is no excuse for lying about it.

The complaint is very clear about the "somehow," and it isn't some vague magic, and had nothing to do with retailers. He spiked the book by getting the publisher to cancel it.

A shithead in the so-called "free press" who depends on the First Amendment for his own livelihood sees no problem with this and whitewashes it with lies.

Later that day, Waid spoke by telephone with one of the owners of Antarctic Press, and convinced him that Antarctic Press should repudiate its contract with Meyer.

Frightened for its very survival by Waid’s threats, and primarily because of his unwelcome interference, Antarctic Press caved to Waid’s pressure, and issued the following statement:

After careful consideration, it is the decision of Antarctic Press to not release the comic series Jawbreakers. Antarctic Press is a staunch believer in Creator’s Rights and giving creators a chance to showcase their creation and allowing that creation to be judged on its merits.

Many forces, many of them should be viewed with great trepidation about our society acts, have led us to this decision. We do not take this decision lightly as we do believe that there should be separation between “ART” and the “ARTIST” and that separation has been blurred in our decision.

lmost immediately following Antarctic Press’s announcement, perhaps having been warned that his interference was actionable, Waid deactivated all of his theretofore quite active social network accounts without explanation.
 
Writing is really where the rubber meets the road. Even silly concepts can work in the hands of a skilled writer, while the coolest idea ever still turns to shit if you let some incompetent hack have at it.
The scale is so fucking bad right now, I'm going backwards and enjoying Earth-8311's animal toon nonsense with Spider-Ham because it's unironically better than what's being made today. Have some Iron Mouse:

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:story: I thought he was exaggerating:
Until I actually read the book for myself. They really hate subtlety:
RCO005.jpg

The Plot for those who care:
Harley Quinn has a cat allergy (inexplicably, even though she has 800 pets some of which are cats) and is helping her neighbor (a literal cat thief who uses highly trained cats to do his robberies) find a home for all his cats. After giving away some cats for free, angry white male pet store owners start attacking people antifa style because they got the cats FROM A WOMAN.

This is the best they could come up with for the evil men pet stores:

"Men O' Paws" :cringe:
RCO012.jpg

"Male Chauvinist Pigs" :roll:
RCO017 (1).jpg

"Mike's Rent-an-Animal" MRA! :O
RCO016.jpg
Not the whole comic just some samples:
RCO001 (10).jpg RCO012.jpg RCO013.jpg RCO015_w.jpg RCO016.jpg RCO017 (1).jpg RCO018 (1).jpg RCO019 (2).jpg RCO020 (1).jpg RCO022 (1).jpg RCO023.jpg

The staff look exactly what you'd think they look like:

Mark Russell - Writer
https://twitter.com/Manruss
http://www.comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=47765
Elio-1-2.jpg
Alex Antone - Editor
https://twitter.com/Alex_Antone
http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=37828
ext.jpg
Brian Cunningham - Group Editor
https://twitter.com/bcunningham71
http://comicbookdb.com/creator.php?ID=7778
3042628-brian+cun.jpg
 
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