I suppose I could have brought up the new Kickstarter outreach officer
Jamila Rowser blockbotting most of Comicsgate like it was 2017, since that's doing the rounds on CG streams as well as fodder for a fresh round of anti-Kickstarter rhetoric supporting boycott. For some reason though I thought covering the impending tardfight between the FNT grifters, inheritors of the dead Fandom Menace movement versus Comicsgate would be more interesting.
Right now Frog is launching
Wraith of God (not a typo, I promise)
, the debut project by CG newcomer/30 year industry veteran
Aaron Lopresti. There's a showing of cameraderie among similar former mainstream comic professionals like Art Thibert, Andy Smith, Dan Fraga, Graham Nolan, Billy Tucci and uh, Shane Davis' wife.
Wraith of God joins other CG comics
Bonds: The Drive,
War Party, Viking Wolf, Magic Cop, Sovereign Wolf, Magna: The Last Pantheon and
Alisa Dark: Werewolves and Bampots, as a werewolf action thriller. For whatever reason, Comicsgate's fascination with werewolf-related material is seemingly limitless.
Richard C. Meyer took some time out of his busy day of mowing his lawn and "seeking inner peace" to sperg at this screencap of Ron Marz retweeting a quote of Heidi McDonald relating comic book shop owner/semi-official industry statistician
Brian Hibbs saying 2020 was one of the strongest years for comics ever
according to data received from BookScan. In a bit of synchronicity that I did not know, Brian Hibbs was actually the person who bought
Nerdrotic's mythical comic book shop he owned once. Meyer describes Hibbs as "basically the comic book guy from the simpsons" and everything he writes "is like ten thousand words" and takes forever to get the point, all those words Hibbs writes relating to the comic book industry makey Simple Zack brain hurty. Please keep your findings in bite-sized tweet form for Richie.
Brian Hibbs
says the BookScan numbers paint a positive picture, but if that's so why is the direct market doing so bad? Proof the direct market is bad - Brian Hibbs shut down his second comic book shop because his employees quit and he couldn't train new ones. That makes no sense in a growing market, therefore the logical conclusion is that Brian Hibbs is a liar, peddling propaganda for no other reason then to gaslight the haters.
- BookScan tracks all book sales in the United States except the direct market aka Diamond distribution sales figures (the two are combined to compile the annual Comichron reports). The stats Hibbs posted are irrelevant concerning the health of a local comic book shop, a detail Hibbs mentions in his report that was too long for Meyer to read.
- Brian Hibbs suffered a major heart attack in March 2020. Might this have effected his decision on choosing to shut down a secondary comic shop instead of retraining a full staff? No. The only reason he could have shut it down was because of declining sales.
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Was this all part of an elaborate attempt to gaslight comic book industry followers regarding the state of the industry? Who knows.