#Comicsgate - The Culture Wars Hit The Funny Books!

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Least Concern said:
Oh, of course. These people can justify stealing anything, can't they?
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I found it an intriguing, all-too-brief look into Lauren's mind, where a man's labor is completely divorced from the profits of said labor. She sincerely enjoys Mike Nelson's work and deeply cherishes the memories of watching decades of MST3K/Rifftrax, but would unhesitatingly support Mike Nelson dying impoverished in a cardboard box under a bridge for simply hosting Doug TenNapel on a podcast. Money is used exclusively as a means to support ideology, and all other things, including the arts or even basic morality, take a backseat to that.


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Frog had some interesting insights a few months ago into his detractors and how they were all children who grew up in affluence, and that they don't value money because they've never had to go without it, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. Where perceived self-worth does not match up to objective material worth, which is cultivated to form a twisted, ascetic ideology that is then aggressively enforced upon others.
 
Mister Dongs said:
I found it an intriguing, all-too-brief look into Lauren's mind, where a man's labor is completely divorced from the profits of said labor. She sincerely enjoys Mike Nelson's work and deeply cherishes the memories of watching decades of MST3K/Rifftrax, but would unhesitatingly support Mike Nelson dying impoverished in a cardboard box under a bridge for simply hosting Doug TenNapel on a podcast. Money is used exclusively as a means to support ideology, and all other things, including the arts or even basic morality, take a backseat to that.


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Frog had some interesting insights a few months ago into his detractors and how they were all children who grew up in affluence, and that they don't value money because they've never had to go without it, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. Where perceived self-worth does not match up to objective material worth, which is cultivated to form a twisted, ascetic ideology that is then aggressively enforced upon others.
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I believe SJWs and cancel culture are an extreme form of Ethical consumerism, aka paying extra to a white-owned businesses so you can have your white guilt waived away.

Instead of just supporting businesses they deem fair and ethical (while, for instance, Marvel treats editors of colour worse than slaves in a cotton farm in the 1800's, because slaves had a home and food there, and Kickstarter has smashed down on the unionized workers and then danced on their graves) they are out to make the businesses that do not meet their standard go out of business.

This is why many businesses virtue signal, to placate those lunatics, while driving away paying customers.
The moment it is cheaper to wipe off a smear campaign by twitter activism, they will stop giving a fuck about them.

And yes, this is why SJWs are mostly middle class white people and many blue collar people are getting alienated with the American Left. Minorities will be the next to go, once they and their upper class white allies start cancelling eachother.
 
Mister Dongs said:
I found it an intriguing, all-too-brief look into Lauren's mind, where a man's labor is completely divorced from the profits of said labor. She sincerely enjoys Mike Nelson's work and deeply cherishes the memories of watching decades of MST3K/Rifftrax, but would unhesitatingly support Mike Nelson dying impoverished in a cardboard box under a bridge for simply hosting Doug TenNapel on a podcast. Money is used exclusively as a means to support ideology, and all other things, including the arts or even basic morality, take a backseat to that.


View attachment 1577805View attachment 1577815

Frog had some interesting insights a few months ago into his detractors and how they were all children who grew up in affluence, and that they don't value money because they've never had to go without it, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. Where perceived self-worth does not match up to objective material worth, which is cultivated to form a twisted, ascetic ideology that is then aggressively enforced upon others.
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I think boredom plays a role. Did anyone get the feeling that these people are ridiculously bored? Who has time to sit on twitter 10 plus hours a day, livestream, and obsesses. Its one thing if its your job to do that. But supposedly these losers have jobs have families.

CapeKnight said:
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I gotta say, I do enjoy the salt. And the idea that we now live in this SJW's mind, rent free.
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I'll have him know I had my lights on when I read his dox, thank you.
 
Time for yet another Comicsgate News Update.

First I must apologize, I've hit the character limit so this one will be a double post.
FROM KICKSTARTER AND INDIEGOGO

The latest crowdfunder setting the interwebs on fire is the kickstarter campaign BRZRKR, co-created by Keanu Reeves. The campaign is undoubtedly already a massive success raising $682,226 from 6,434 backers (as of writing).
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The comic has received a mixed reception from various elements of the internet, with SJWs decrying a Hollywood actor and mainstream comic company utilizing the crowdfunding model which they believe should be reserved for unemployed talentless hacks indie creators while Comicsgaters seem rather enthusiastic about the project. The enthusiasm Comicsgate creators might be feeling could be premature, as if this trend continues it will increase competition in an area which many of the creators had previously dominated. BRZRK offers three graphic novels at 400 pages (including 16 page bonus stretch goal) for $50, which works out to be a price/page rate of 0.125 one of the lowest rates currently in my spreadsheet. One caveat that should be mentioned however is the price of shipping, especially international, which is quite expensive due to the books being shipped individually as they are completed as opposed to in one shipment.

Still that has not prevented the campaign from being a massive success in it's first week, with 23 days to go it is projected to make anywhere between 922K to 2 million US dollars with an average trending forecast of 1.4 million.
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Another recent launch was eternal ship jumper Jon Del Arroz, also known as Jon of the Rice, or @TheCosmicWarrior here on the farms. Jon recently launched the fourth installment in his Flying Sparks series, which is doing surprisingly well compared to previous campaigns. Whether the success is from kickstarter, him leaving twitter or his recent bread-breaking with the Comicsgate splinter faction Warcampaign, Jon's campaign has experienced an uptick from the likes of Robo Toad: Rekt Manlet. Currently raising $7,868 from 162 backers in several days, this reporter hopes Jon might consider ditching his amphibian, automatron parody book and focus on something with wider appeal. Speaking of appeal, there's nothing more appealing than a Miss Sashi variant cover...
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Compared to the recent offerings on Kickstarter from the likes of Doug TenNapel, Brian Pullido, Scott Snyder, Tim Lim and now Keanu Reeve's Indiegogo seems rather quiet in terms of new Comicsgate books. Fear not humble reader because fresh from her debut with her notorious Bratz doll Vampirella cover, That Star Wars Girl (Anna) has got you covered. From the face who launched 1000 rainbow dildo shaped ships towards various Comicsgate twitter profiles, triggering a schism in Comicsgate never seen before, Anna of Troy is launching her next secret project.
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www.indiegogo.com

Anna's New Secret Project...Find Out Here First!

It’s a secret, but you’ll be the first to know if you sign up…
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The new project raises questions, whether it shall be another variant cover or a full book? Will Dynamite be the option to publish and fulfill after the dramatic parting of ways between the mainstream company and Comicsgate? Will the project actually be worth acquiring and what methods of marketing will she utilize?

We may never truly know.
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:oops:
FROM THE TWITTERVERSE

Our top story on twitter tonight which will be covered in an exclusive segment below is the ongoing controversy surrounding Mitch Breitweiser and Red Rooster. It would appear Red Rooster's comment section isn't the only place to find disgruntled Comicsgaters, an Arkansas Times articles on the Breitweisers success during the covid pandemic has been making the rounds on twitter. It would appear that not everyone is happy for them.
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🐺 LahKem Amiyr (L.A.) El+Lay 🐺 on Twitter: "I'm not new but this wa…

archived 8 Sep 2020 10:12:12 UTC
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Edwin (THE ACE mailing list is LIVE!) Acevedo on Twitter: "#comicsgat…

archived 8 Sep 2020 10:13:21 UTC
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The article itself is dated from the 27th of August, however given that the Breitweisers have largely fled social media, it appears to only have been discovered recently. The entire article will be spoilered below, so as not to disrupt the flow of our regularly scheduled News Update.

Also from Twitter Liam Gray recently recently reached out to CWC about the possibility of a Sonichu/Xenotype variant cover. On a now deleted livestream, Gray claimed that he had always been fascinated by "chanology" and has been following the saga of CWC for some time. Chris-chan appears to have not replied which is rather sad, as the idea of two lolcows getting together to do a variant cover of their respective properties is somewhat heart warming. This reporter will update the situation as it develops.
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Liam Gray - Writer for Xenotype on Twitter: "Hello @CPU_CWCSonichu! A…

archived 6 Sep 2020 18:12:17 UTC
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Next up is the recent accusations made against Comicsgate hooker and batshit insane conspiracy theorist Sheila Allen who has reportedly false flagged DA Talks mirrored video about her. For those familiar with Sheila Allen's thread, she originally filed a privacy violation against the videos creator Kiwifarms own @VIkkiVerse. Youtube decided to rule in favor of Vikki and squashed the claim, however probably emboldened by the recent success of Liam Gray false flagging the SWC brothers, she decided to try her luck a second time. As criticism of the actions of Comicsgaters mount, we can probably expect to see more behavior like this from them in future.
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And finally we sadly have a case of friendly fire within the ranks of Comicsgate itself, resident nutjob and possible crypto SJW infiltrator Piper (co-creator of Peregrine) appears to have denigrated one of her customers over... a meme.
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The meme by one Kep Wilcox with a massive 54 followers received mixed reception from the Comicsgate community, however none was more vocal with negativity than Piper herself.
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TLDR: The guy made a meme putting the heads of prominent Comicsgate creators on the bodies of the Seven from the Boys tv show decent show btw, check it out. While some questioned it since they were villain's and optically it wasn't a "good look", Piper proceeded to sperg out at not only a customer of her book, but a guy she accused of being a Warcampaign troll, even after he produced evidence of himself defending her, Mandy and Charlies London from WC.

Even having a mocking Panboy in the tweets wasn't enough to convince Piper she was acting fucking retarded.
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But Karen Piper wasn't done yet.
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It would appear however, not everyone is a critic.
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You know if she wasn't a crazy, false flagging prostitute, Sheila Allen might have been the best girl of Comicsgate.
FROM YOUTUBE
DA Talks and VikkiVerse have partnered up to produce a new show called "CG Shorts", quick videos discussing current drama within Comicsgate that might not warrant an entire livestream. The first video titled "Micah Makes EVS Cry" covers Micah's recent critique of Ethan's dialogue choice in Cyberfrog Rekt Planet and can be found on VikkiVerse's channel below.

The second episode of the series covers Warcampaign's recent acts of sending flashing gifs to former member Testefy-HD in an attempt to trigger a seizure. The second episode titled "From Dildo's to Seizures" can be found on DA Talks channel below.

The amazing, spectacular, terrific, the great one, the peoples champion, your host - The Hut has recently made a video giving his opinion on the recent Breitweiser article (which will be our top story below).

Everybodies favorite carpark ranting best boi Zack declares the Comic Book Industry dead for the gorrillionth time.

Yellowflash produced a video several days ago reporting that broke comic pro's are attacking Keanu Reeve's and are vowing to get BRZRKR cancelled.

And lastly your ole buddy Rorshach recently did a stream covering the week in comics, going over the latest releases from Marvel, DC and the Indies.
Continued below due to character limit.
 
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Continuing from above.

And finally our top story tonight the exclusive news article reporting on the Breitweisers success during the covid outbreak, which is causing quite the ruckus within comicsgate. I've included the entire article but will bold and enlarge the part about Comicsgate for people who wish to skip through without reading the entire thing.
Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser launch Allegiance Arts comics
By Sam Eifling on August 27th 2020 6:54pm

For a hot minute this spring, a couple of Harding University art-school grads and their Arkansas-based publishing startup were the only company in America distributing comic books. And as a twist: Those comics were going to Walmart stores, which hadn’t carried comic books in more than 20 years. A total of 3,384 Walmarts, to be exact.

In a year in which supply-chain breakdowns changed the fate of the country, comic books wouldn’t seem to rise to the level of news. But you have to admire that at its May launch Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser’s Allegiance Arts, the country’s youngest indie comic publisher, was the only one shipping books for a couple of weeks. The industry had to stop and stare.

Consider what it took for the Little Rock couple to launch a company that began its life as the only business in town — any town, pick your town.

First: They enjoyed long careers illustrating (Mitch) and coloring (Elizabeth) for the biggest publishers and titles in the industry. He grew up in Benton; she, in Beebe. When he graduated from Harding in 2000, he moved to New Jersey and had a view of the Twin Towers (for a few months), painting signs for banks and industrial parks and knocking on doors till he got his break at Marvel Comics, with a contract to redesign Drax the Destroyer. He met Elizabeth the old-fashioned way, through MySpace, when he later logged on to see how his old art department was doing. “I had a good feeling,” he says now. “She had a quote from my favorite professor — and he wasn’t exactly the most liked guy. I figured if she also liked this professor who made other people cry, there might be something there.”

Because it’s a small state, Mitch naturally already had met her family; he’d once given her brother a ride to a comics convention in Chicago after meeting their mom in a pottery class. After Elizabeth graduated from Harding in 2005 she taught art at Central Arkansas Christian in North Little Rock. When she and Mitch met, he was illustrating a Captain America title, and she got into digital coloring. “I colored up a few pages to show them and get feedback for a portfolio,” she says now. The feedback came back: a job offer. Mitch and Elizabeth got married in 2007 and today live in the Heights neighborhood of Little Rock.

Second: They got tired of working on other people’s stuff. This happens. You wake up one day and realize working on other people’s stuff is a double bummer: They tell you what to do, and then they keep most of the money and credit. Even if the stuff you’re working on is the likes of Captain America, the Young Avengers and the Sub-Mariner (Mitch); and the Hulk, Batman and Outcast (Elizabeth), at some point, you gotta do you.

Third: They crowdfunded almost $200,000 to prove an audience existed for a title called “Red Rooster,” a title Mitch likens to Batman in a barn. They connected with Little Rock lawyer and businessman David Martin, whose Rolodex led them to a corporate recruiter in Bentonville named Cameron Smith, who knows approximately everyone in Northwest Arkansas.

Fourth: They made a killer “Shark Tank”-style pitch to Smith and then again when he assembled some Walmart-fluent folks. They got in front of Walmart, a company that hadn’t carried comic books in a generation, and made the sell there, too. “Nobody,” Smith says, “gets to start out with Walmart. The presentations blew me away and blew away the people I brought into that meeting. It was show-and-tell — it wasn’t just a bunch of words. They had these characters outlined and drawn and colorful and bigger than life.”

Fifth: They recruited talent to write and draw and letter their original titles: “Norah’s Saga,” “The Futurists,” “Red Rooster” and, notably for Arkansans, “Bass Reeves.” It follows the legendary ex-slave-turned-U.S.-marshal whom Fort Smith’s “Hanging” Judge Isaac Parker hired in 1889 to collect fugitives from Indian Country in what would later become Oklahoma. The writer, Kevin Grevioux, is known for gothic pulp-horror titles like “Underworld” and “I, Frankenstein.”

That real-life tall tale convinced Hunter Haynes, a Fayetteville commercial real estate maven, to invest in Allegiance Arts. “The right hand of the guy dealing out this justice is this badass Black guy?” Haynes says now. “He’s ‘Django Unchained’? This is awesome.”

Blake Northcott, the Toronto-based writer on “Norah’s Saga,” says the diversity of the whole portfolio enticed her into the fold. That, and freedom for her to really own the story: “Mitch and Elizabeth were both so generous creatively,” she says. “Anytime someone is willing to hand over the reins and give you creative freedom, it makes a project infinitely more fun.”

And finally, as one does: The Breitweisers launched in the world’s largest retailer, during a pandemic, amid a wave of social unrest.

The moment felt wrong for an ad blitz, but they’re printing and distributing 140,000 combined copies of the books across the four titles, says Patrick Stiles, Allegiance Arts’ COO and an art department classmate of Mitch’s at Harding. They pushed it on Facebook and YouTube and held their breath. To date, about 100,000 copies have been sold at Walmart at $4.98 per comic. Audiences had spoken. The gambles worked. Pandemic or no, Allegiance Arts is a thing.

“Walmart shoots a lot of bottle rockets in the air and only a few stay up,” Smith says. “Just because they launch it doesn’t mean you’ll be one of the few that stay up. But it was a good start. It looks like it’s really got some traction.”

It’s too early to call Allegiance Arts a runaway success or to declare that it has changed the fundamentals of an ailing industry. In films and video games, comic characters have taken over the world. Comic books are literally a different story. They’re a much smaller group these days, and its creators tend to be a tight tribe. The benefits are obvious when a group of entrepreneurs successfully launch a new venture with so much upside, especially for Arkansas.

Meanwhile, one subplot remains a bit more ticklish. The Breitweisers worry some people in the comics world because of their friendliness with comics creators who have fostered a toxic subculture within comics. In a shrinking industry where most creators publicly cheer new ventures, some of their peers are so wary of the culture fight, they declined to comment for this story.

The Breitweisers are adamant that they’re building an inclusive, nonpolitical platform, and that they don’t support those who would pick on others in the comics community. To examine that tension requires asking the sneakily heavy question of who comics are for. Allegiance Arts is decidedly widening that audience. But the whole picture is more complicated.

The O.G. comics expert in Little Rock is Michael Tierney, who since the 1980s has run two comics specialty shops: Collectors Edition, in North Little Rock, and the Comic Book Store, in Little Rock. He’s weathered changing tastes and business models, and as a brick-and-mortar guy till the end (or, rather, till the pandemic shut his doors for him in June, chasing him onto online-only) he can answer the question of why comic books have all but cratered in America. It boils down, essentially, to changing customer tastes and industry missteps.

The former is easy to see. Comics were a dominant pop art before they had to compete with the likes of MTV, Super Mario Bros. and AOL Instant Messenger, let alone Instagram, TikTok, Minecraft and Fortnite. The movies and television series are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they’re better now than ever, and bigger. The 23 films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have grossed, on average, a billion dollars apiece. DC’s eight films have grossed another $5.5 billion. The dozen X-Men films have added $6 billion. Then: all the dang video games, Halloween costumes, amusement park rides, knickknacks. The business of comics characters is bigger than ever without a kid needing to pester a parent for a single thin comic book.

As readers became viewers and players, the publishing industry did itself no favors. Publishers sell comics mostly through hobby or specialty stores. Like so many bookstores, Amazon et al. have put the hurt on them over the years. Tierney says an industry that used to be 15,000 stores strong a generation ago is probably down to a thousand or so, maybe double that if you count gas stations and bait shops that still stock a spinner rack. In the mid-’90s, Marvel and then DC bought their own comics distributors, hoping to cut out the companies that served as middlemen to retailers. Starving other distributors into oblivion led to an effective duopoly that prevented indie comics from even making it to market. When those distributors (Heroes World for Marvel, Diamond for DC) faltered in their deliveries, in Tierney’s view, it landed on the retailers, who had no options for better service. “Retailers got caught in the crunch,” he says. “The industry has been constantly shrinking. Used to be if a Marvel print run got below 90,000 copies, they’d cancel it. Now print runs are 10,000. They’re down to some 5,000 runs. We used to call those ‘limited editions.’ ”

As the print industry shrank, it also started turning out less kid-friendly fare. The phrase “gritty reboot” is almost a punchline among comics films, but the trend started years before as the PG heroes of days past matured, not always in a good way. The crossover success of the dystopia-tinged “Watchmen” and of Frank Miller’s oeuvre — the “Dark Knight” Batman storyline, “Sin City,” “300” — helped steer comics into a darker, more explicit period that brought the lurid stories and images of pulp paperbacks into a medium that had long belonged to kids.

If you were a certain kind of kid, the turn toward R-rated fare was and probably still is totally awesome. If you are a certain kind of parent, not so much. Tierney felt a 2001 Nick Fury comic jumped the shark when it depicted the one-eyed Marvel spy smoking a stogie and carrying a glass, robe half-open, surrounded by a half-dozen nude women begging him “please … no more” with smiles on their faces. He had to fight on two fronts. Over the years he tried to explain to publishers that gratuitous sex and violence weren’t growing their readership, while also railing against Act 858, a proposed 2003 law that would’ve given practically anyone in Arkansas the authority to declare a comic book or magazine obscene, and unlawful to display. “Comics got trashy,” he says. “You don’t want to freak out the parents. ‘Oh my god, what are you showing my kid? Punching somebody’s kidney out with an I-beam?’ ”

The skirmishes continue over who, exactly, is the audience for comics. Behold the 2018 Vox headline, “Batman’s penis is in a comic book for the first time ever — but not for long,” about a single panel in DC’s Black Label storyline that gives new meaning to the phrase comic strip. The parents, they freak out. So do the aunties and uncles, including the Breitweisers. It says something when a former color artist on Batman would feel uncomfortable leaving a comic out for their five nieces and two nephews to browse.

“The stories were not what we were necessarily into,” Elizabeth Breitweiser says of her and her husband’s time at big publishers. “We wanted to work on something universal and family-friendly.”

Allegiance Arts, at least at launch, is mindful of these deeper trends, good and bad. Working with a single printer and a single distributor to stock thousands of comics at a single massive retailer seems, for the moment, to eliminate a bevy of headaches. Overnight they’re being sold in more physical stores than probably any other title in America, reaching readers who’ve never even seen a hobby store. “For some kid in Lufton, Texas, there’s no way he’s going to discover comic books randomly,” Mitch Breitweiser says. “You may enjoy the movies, but the experience of picking up that four-color paper product that has that magic to it is just not available.”

The themes and action in the books are intense without veering into the grotesque or lurid, perfect for that film-and-TV-ready PG-13 sweet spot. Whereas other comics are serialized by volume and issue, Allegiance titles arrive as 24-page “episodes” in six-book “seasons.” They’re laying the groundwork to be adapted, expanded, universed. Comics are a natural segue into other visual media. More than novels or even screenplays, they make natural storyboards. As you read issues of “Bass Reeves,” it plays like a Western in your head. “Norah’s Saga” plunges an angsty Canadian teen back to the time of the Vikings. “Red Rooster,” Mitch’s baby, feels like a “Rocketeer”-sized Depression-era blockbuster on the page. They’re big, mythical stories, built for big audiences.

So here’s the condensed version of how a rift came between these stories and so many of the writers, artists and readers who would otherwise be cheering their success. In November 2016, Mitch Breitweiser sent what in another era might be considered a benign tweet, complete with illustration, of the U.S. president-elect standing with a sword and a halo, evoking a medieval knight, with a message: “Congratulations President-elect @realDonaldTrump. I wish you the very best in your effort to Make America Great Again for ALL Americans.” (The original tweet exists only in screenshots; Mitch has since deleted his account.)

You could read it as ironic or you could read it as flattering, but either way, he rolled that into a Twittersphere still sore from Election Night and, more broadly, always itching to scrap over the broader questions of inclusivity in the comics industry. You can guess what happened next. “Captain America Artist Wonders Why He Is Losing Friends Over His Patriotism,” a Bleeding Cool headline read.

Mitch’s tweet activated two factions. Some people lobbed at them the sort of insults they’d like to send to the president; meanwhile, people inclined to support the president stood up for him. Acrimony simmered. Then, the following summer, some in the more conservative faction tagged harassing tweets aimed at feminists and trans people and young women in the industry with #Comicsgate. Some fans and creators lumped the Breitweisers in with the faction that was hurling abuses at people. Things came to a head in 2018, when the Breitweisers canceled a scheduled appearance at a comic convention over what they said were safety concerns.

Like other internet movements marked by harassment, Comicsgate thrives on vagueness. One of its proponents, a comics artist named Ethan Van Sciver, described it on a YouTube channel called Comics Artist Pro in 2018 as “a community for dispossessed right-wing and moderate comic book professionals who can no longer get work in this blacklisted, disgusting, politically oppressed industry, as it’s become.” A rational person would prefer to steer clear of its blast zone. Irrational people, trying to understand comics in 2020, instead might open dozens of browser tabs, watch hours of YouTube, and reach out to comics creators who reply by saying they don’t want their names in a story that touches on Comicsgate. (As a for-instance, from one writer: “I would rather not furnish a quote because [Comicsgate] people just destroy people’s lives and I wouldn’t go near them with a barge pole.”)

But a deep dive turns up little to impugn the Breitweisers. The perception that they’re aligned with Comicsgate seems to rest largely on their being polite to creators other people find abhorrent. It’s not hard to see why they’d try to be diplomatic. For one, they’re not publicly political, a certain tweet notwithstanding. For another, they’ve been running crowdfunding campaigns and trying to draw broad support from fans and investors, and they’ve tried not to take sides. It’s a tightrope they’ve been walking.

Today, they would very much prefer to focus on a business they say will give writers and artists the freedom and resources to do eclectic, ambitious, best-in-class work. And so far they’ve backed that up.

Says Mitch: “I want to think we took bad energy and turned it into good energy. It’s not fun to transmute bad energy into good energy, but sometimes that’s the only way forward.”

Says Elizabeth: “We want to make a safe haven for creators. It’s been my worst nightmare to be labeled all of these things that have nothing to do with me.”

In July of this year, on the online show “Live From the Bunker,” Mitch was asked about how he navigated “cancel culture” on the way to his successful crowdfunding and the Walmart launch. He said he was hopeful that other creators would find room at the table, even if they weren’t ideologically aligned with the industry mainstream, which tends to tilt left.

“Nobody should have to go through what we went through,” he said. “It sucks, it’s horrible. But it also hardened us to a degree. We probably wouldn’t be here doing what we’re doing now if we weren’t sharpened on a hard stone.”

And perhaps there’s one Easter egg folks can find on the stands at the end of a Walmart book aisle. At the end of the first “Red Rooster” episode, you’ll find tucked away a little note setting up the world of the hero: “Motion pictures and radio plays catapulted the once secretive Order of the Dawn into the spotlight of celebrity, potentially to catastrophic effect — a risk we all navigate in the era of social media.”

For what it’s worth, anyone you talk to who meets the Breitweisers tends to really like them. They’re friendly and soft-spoken and genuine and hard-working. It’s not for nothing they wowed multiple successful investors — Martin, Smith, Haynes — who hadn’t exactly been sitting around waiting for a comic book opportunity, of all ideas, to come waltzing into their offices.

“It’s not only investing in this business idea,” Haynes says. “Ultimately you’re investing in Mitch and Elizabeth. What I’ve been able to experience is, they’re in it to win it. This isn’t a game. They’re heart and soul.”

They’re betting that comics can be for everyone, which it turns out is pretty close to the truth. That question of who comics are for is and always has been readers. Readers may be considered an endangered species, but they walk among the rest of society, blending in only for as long as they need to get hold of the next book or magazine or graphic novel or zine. They’re discerning and yet ravenous. They can be young or old, Black or white, possessed of rainbows’ worth of sexual identities, broke or loaded, jazzed to see Bruce Wayne drop trou or perfectly satisfied to see heroes keep their tights on. Readers are a big tent, and it’s a pity that screens are trying to capture them all.

As for who comics are by, the answer is, the best ones have always been by marginalized artists, even outcasts. They’re an American art form that resonates with American audiences because Americans don’t know how to square two perpendicular wants: to be a world power, and to be a scrappy underdog. That paradox absolutely stokes modern conservatism, which can’t decide whether America is unassailably mighty or whether people who reject a gender binary might just collapse society; whether we’re a shining light on a hill or whether we’re being quicksanded into the dark ages by desperate immigrants who believe our hype; whether we’re a nation of Christian values or one that can be ably led by a lifelong financial and sexual predator who has never been able to recall a single Bible verse when asked to cite one near to his alleged heart.

We all live amid that confusion this year. Wedge that conflicted ideology into a supposed underdog art and of course you get trench warfare.

And yet there’s also got to be room for vivid stories that kids and their parents can enjoy on the same couch together. Never mind launching a new company during a pandemic, as millions of ordinary Americans stand toe-to-toe and tell police to quit their jobs. When the history of this 2020 culture moment is written, it will marvel (ha) at the idea of trying to engage America writ large when the country can’t decide whether to be hero or heel.

Comics, at least, have historically helped offer clarity on this point. It helped that they were the invention of genuine outsiders.

“Our industry was created by a bunch of Jews who had nothing in front of them but starving,” says Fabrice Sapolsky, a French Jewish immigrant and comics creator whose brainchild Spider-Man Noir you might recognize as the black-and-white Spidey from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” “It was like, ‘We have to do something because we can’t pay for study — we can’t be doctors, we can’t be lawyers. We have to eat.’ To me, hate groups as a whole are a betrayal of who we are as an industry. We are the children of Bob Kane, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who were Jews who came from nowhere.”

Sapolsky moved to New York and later to Los Angeles because he loves comics and because he wanted to make them in America. He spent a decade and five figures getting a visa and a green card. He’s in the States because he loves this American art form; he gets to close this story because he doesn’t really have a dog in this fight but cares deeply nonetheless that the art stays strong.

Asked to play an expert in a conversation about where the culture and industry of comics is going, and how Allegiance Arts fits into it, he takes an aerial view. America has always been split, so controversy shouldn’t surprise anyone. Immigrants like him sympathize with launching your own company if you feel isolated. Talent eventually wins out. And the future belongs to people who can find an audience because audiences don’t lie. They either buy your stuff, or they don’t.

“One of the beautiful things in this industry,” he says, “is 99 percent of creators support other creators. We may have lost a bit of the community because politics are gangrene on our industry. We’re still a fraternity. We’re still a place of good.”
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The comments section while small, doesn't seem to be having any of it.
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arktimes.com

Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser launch Allegiance Arts comics - Arkansas Times

For a pandemic moment, the duo's startup was the only comic book distributor in the U.S.
arktimes.com arktimes.com
Well that was quite the update and took far longer than I expected. Originally I was only going to cover the Breitweiser article but it seems like a lot has been happening around CG at the moment. Obviously the other big news right now is the ongoing feud between the SWC brothers and Liam Gray as the latter has false flagged several of their videos criticizing his comic book, but as others have reported on it already and so far we have no resolution or updates, I'll save it for another time.

I'd like to take a moment and express complete and utter dismay at what Comicsgate 2020 has become. The fact that a movement itself that was built from youtubers criticizing what they felt were terrible comics have now turned to flagging negative reviews of their own books is not only hypocritical but completely and utterly pathetic. Liam Gray in all honesty shouldn't hear the end of it, if Mundane Matt and Kraut and Tea still have to live with the consequences of their actions I don't see why this fat, piss baby, pussy should be exempt. Now it would appear since his actions have gone without criticism, in fact rather celebrated in the Comicsgate community, others now feel they too have the right.
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Couple this with Piper's treatment of not only someone who previously defended her, but is a backer of her product, it would appear that "The Customer comes first" mantra of Comicsgate is also dead. Comicsgate was a movement that defined itself by principles "free-speech, expression, respect for the customers, honest reviews" each single founding principle is dead and buried and this corpse of a movement shuffles on fueled by a screeching horde of brain-dead paypigs.

At this point I'm surprised any of them are kicking up a stink about Red Rooster, Detective Dead, Sovereign or Brutus the Badass. Comicsgate at this point is nothing more than an empty husk of broken promises and failed ideals. So I guess I should say it for them, since pretty soon they won't be able to say it themselves.

#ShouldHaveListenedToSWC :bluelabel:
 
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Fantastic work as always, @Smug Freiza!

I find it funny that Richard Meyer working with Sylvester Stallone might have started a trend and Keanu Reeves' project is the latest in that trend.
If I were an Indie comic book artist, I'd be keeping an eye out for any well-known names wanting to tell a story.
Can you imagine if guys like Jean Claude Van Damme or Bruce Willis want to make a comic? If the story is interesting enough and they get some really talented artists to work with, they'll get backers by the thousands.

As for the Breitweisers, they've soured their goodwill with those that backed Red Rooster. They'll never live that down.
As for @Tyne, the irony of him behaving like the very people the ComicsGate movement was founded in protesting against does not escape me.
Die a critic, or live enough to be a flagging faggot.
 
Smug Freiza said:
And finally our top story tonight the exclusive news article reporting on the Breitweisers success during the covid outbreak, which is causing quite the ruckus within comicsgate. I've included the entire article but will bold and enlarge the part about Comicsgate for people who wish to skip through without reading the entire thing.
The comments section while small, doesn't seem to be having any of it.
View attachment 1579990
arktimes.com

Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser launch Allegiance Arts comics - Arkansas Times

For a pandemic moment, the duo's startup was the only comic book distributor in the U.S.
arktimes.com arktimes.com
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A couple of choice quotes from the totally objective journalist who couldn't even do a fucking "local boy does good" story without the SJW slant & an outbreak of TDS. You can never hate journalists as much as they deserve!
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Over on FB, Mitch is implying "the truth has yet to come out" about Allegiance. He sounds desperate (but not as desperate as Smiller, who @FROG thinks is cozying up to them looking for work. Allegiance recently posted a call for submissions, so they can't be doing that badly.)
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Mitch. Duuude:
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The third issues being delayed until November isn't making anybody think you're not a scammer, Mitch....
 
It looks like the pasting in of the article got botched above. Here's the CG-relevant or overly-political bits that I found.

So here’s the condensed version of how a rift came between these stories and so many of the writers, artists and readers who would otherwise be cheering their success. In November 2016, Mitch Breitweiser sent what in another era might be considered a benign tweet, complete with illustration, of the U.S. president-elect standing with a sword and a halo, evoking a medieval knight, with a message: “Congratulations President-elect @realDonaldTrump. I wish you the very best in your effort to Make America Great Again for ALL Americans.” (The original tweet exists only in screenshots; Mitch has since deleted his account.)

You could read it as ironic or you could read it as flattering, but either way, he rolled that into a Twittersphere still sore from Election Night and, more broadly, always itching to scrap over the broader questions of inclusivity in the comics industry. You can guess what happened next. “Captain America Artist Wonders Why He Is Losing Friends Over His Patriotism,” a Bleeding Cool headline read.

Mitch’s tweet activated two factions. Some people lobbed at them the sort of insults they’d like to send to the president; meanwhile, people inclined to support the president stood up for him. Acrimony simmered. Then, the following summer, some in the more conservative faction tagged harassing tweets aimed at feminists and trans people and young women in the industry with #Comicsgate. Some fans and creators lumped the Breitweisers in with the faction that was hurling abuses at people. Things came to a head in 2018, when the Breitweisers canceled a scheduled appearance at a comic convention over what they said were safety concerns.

Like other internet movements marked by harassment, Comicsgate thrives on vagueness. One of its proponents, a comics artist named Ethan Van Sciver, described it on a YouTube channel called Comics Artist Pro in 2018 as “a community for dispossessed right-wing and moderate comic book professionals who can no longer get work in this blacklisted, disgusting, politically oppressed industry, as it’s become.” A rational person would prefer to steer clear of its blast zone. Irrational people, trying to understand comics in 2020, instead might open dozens of browser tabs, watch hours of YouTube, and reach out to comics creators who reply by saying they don’t want their names in a story that touches on Comicsgate. (As a for-instance, from one writer: “I would rather not furnish a quote because [Comicsgate] people just destroy people’s lives and I wouldn’t go near them with a barge pole.”)

But a deep dive turns up little to impugn the Breitweisers. The perception that they’re aligned with Comicsgate seems to rest largely on their being polite to creators other people find abhorrent. It’s not hard to see why they’d try to be diplomatic. For one, they’re not publicly political, a certain tweet notwithstanding. For another, they’ve been running crowdfunding campaigns and trying to draw broad support from fans and investors, and they’ve tried not to take sides. It’s a tightrope they’ve been walking.

[…]

As for who comics are by, the answer is, the best ones have always been by marginalized artists, even outcasts. They’re an American art form that resonates with American audiences because Americans don’t know how to square two perpendicular wants: to be a world power, and to be a scrappy underdog. That paradox absolutely stokes modern conservatism, which can’t decide whether America is unassailably mighty or whether people who reject a gender binary might just collapse society; whether we’re a shining light on a hill or whether we’re being quicksanded into the dark ages by desperate immigrants who believe our hype; whether we’re a nation of Christian values or one that can be ably led by a lifelong financial and sexual predator who has never been able to recall a single Bible verse when asked to cite one near to his alleged heart.
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The article in general is more masturbatory for the writer than the Breitweisers, IMO, so I can't totally fault them on it. But I guess the important part is that the media is now reporting that ComicsGate is a far right wing hate movement so that any future Wikipedia articles will be able to cite it as a source (see the GamerGate article which literally has the words "harassment campaign" in the first fucking sentence).
 
Smug Freiza said:
Everybodies favorite carpark ranting best boi Zack declares the Comic Book Industry dead for the gorrillionth time.
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According to Frog's impromptu livestream, Bill Willingham has reached out to him to ask how to get in on crowdfunding.
Fables won fourteen Eisners, so it's certainly something if Willingham can be persuaded to be associated with CG.
 
Mister Dongs said:

According to Frog's impromptu livestream, Bill Willingham has reached out to him to ask how to get in on crowdfunding.
Fables won fourteen Eisners, so it's certainly something if Willingham can be persuaded to be associated with CG.
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That's huge if true. CG needs that badly after losing its most prolific creatives. I'm curious if Wormie doesn't try to pour poison. He apparently admits he discouraged Dan Fraga from joining.

As for Bill Willingham, he's definitely done in the mainstream..

He's a conservative, though a well liked one. Is he arguably the second most prolific conservative in comics sans maybe Chuck Dixon or if you count him Jim Steranko? Fables and elementals.
 
5t3n0g0ph3r said:
Fantastic work as always, @Smug Freiza!

I find it funny that Richard Meyer working with Sylvester Stallone might have started a trend and Keanu Reeves' project is the latest in that trend.
If I were an Indie comic book artist, I'd be keeping an eye out for any well-known names wanting to tell a story.
Can you imagine if guys like Jean Claude Van Damme or Bruce Willis want to make a comic? If the story is interesting enough and they get some really talented artists to work with, they'll get backers by the thousands.

As for the Breitweisers, they've soured their goodwill with those that backed Red Rooster. They'll never live that down.
As for @Tyne, the irony of him behaving like the very people the ComicsGate movement was founded in protesting against does not escape me.
Die a critic, or live enough to be a flagging faggot.
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I would legit back any comic book Jean Claude Van Damme makes. That would be so fucking awesome.

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