The Four Color Media Monitor

The Outhousers reports Waid's become the latest comic book writer to seemingly quit using a Twitter account, after possibly facing backlash from a nasty comment he made about one of their contributors, who also writes for Bleeding Cool. Apparently, Waid implied Jude Terror be assaulted for reporting what Marvel's marketing director David Gabriel said in his recent interviews about their sales receipts. Here's the comment Waid wrote before putting his account into deep freeze status:

It is to David Gabriel's enormous credit that he somehow chooses, every day, not to put his fist through Jude Terror's smug-ass face.

— Waid Wondercon F-5 (@MarkWaid) April 2, 2017

The link doesn't work now, as his account's gone. He may not have advocated doing it per se, but the damage was done, and Tom Brevoort didn't help with the following:

@MarkWaid There's a reason that guy uses a pseudonym. I assume it's because even he doesn't want to take credit for the drivel he says.

— Tom Brevoort (@TomBrevoort) April 2, 2017

Yep, Brevoort is that thin skinned, I guess. Comics Beat actually followed up on this story, and while checking the comments list, I noticed Fabian Nicieza acting as an apologist:

Except Waid never threatened to punch anyone in the face in that tweet and he also didn’t advocate punching anyone in the face.
When you say it is to someone’s “credit” that they resist doing something, that’s not the same as saying they should be doing that, it’s an extreme (and childish) form of complimenting someone’s character.
Clearly Waid was trying to speak in support of Gabriel and against “Jude Terror” (stupidity stays in quotation makes until I know whether it’s his REAL name or not).
And honestly, Heidi, IMO this kind of thing is nothing more than clickbait bullshit and you are better than that.

"Better"? Oh I don't think so. Even if this subject is valid, MacDonald's acted as an apologist herself in other situations before, parroted phony news and spoken out of three sides of her mouth. Some of her contributors to the site also made disturbing comments to boot and she's apparently never disciplined them. If anything matters in this whole affair, it's that Waid's choice of words were in very poor taste, and not all that far removed from some of his political commentaries of yore. But did MacDonald ever take him to task for that? Not to my knowledge. She's never complained that some of the stuff he said about conservatives or his profanity gave comicdom a bad name, and all the apologists for Waid in the comments section at her site weren't improving the situation at all.

I guess the question now, after some writers/artists have briefly erased their Twitter accounts, is how long will it be until Waid decides to reactivate or create a new one? I suppose he'll eventually decide to come back, but I think it'd be better if he didn't; social media's not bringing out the best in some comic creators of his ilk. If he comes back, he'll probably renege on any remorse for what he's said to the detriment of the medium, and soon boomerang back to badness, much like quite a few of his fellow leftist brethren. It'd be a lot better if Waid remained afar from social media for a few years, but he'll probably be back pretty quickly and continuing his embarrassing streak, learning nothing in the process.

Labels: bad editors, marvel comics, moonbat writers, sales, technology, violence