Ethan Van Sciver runs afoul of the left
There are strange people on twitter who are pretending to believe that I am a ‘white supremacist’ or a ‘Nazi’ because I’m a rare thing in comics: a Republican. It’s intolerable. It’s ridiculous to have to even declare that I’m none of these things.Well, I guess we can all understand now why Twitter's use is in decline. The weird thing is, Van Sciver at least once came off sounding like a liberal apologist for Islam, but obviously, there's quite a few leftists out there who'll never care, never be satisfied and surely aren't buying his products no matter what left-wing scriptwriter is crafting the story he's illustrating.
To me, white supremacists are villains from movies. They aren’t me, they aren’t my family, and I deeply resent these calculated efforts to make me feel unwelcome in the industry that I’ve given my life to, and by the way, which has profited greatly from my work. This industry isn’t them or me. It’s us.
Their evidence is some ridiculous out of context images from a decade ago, when we were all much more friendly. Being called a ‘Nazi’ by a fellow creator then was quite different, like me calling someone a commie. It was meant in fun. But occasionally, some truly weird people would make a claim that my little diamond logo was a swastika (oh?? HOW? It’s based on the Iron Maiden logo). and a friend would satirize it by making it look like one. For laughs. Because it’s absurd.
Around the same time, I decided that I’d make my sketch books look like extremist political tracts. One was called MANIFESTO and contained communist dogma, with backward letters to look like Russian language. The other one was called ‘MY STRUGGLE’ and contained my earliest work on Cyberfrog up to my recent work. The cover was SINESTRO, who we’d redesigned that year to resemble Hitler, and with the fact that most people knew I leaned right, this was a JOKE. Made self-effacingly to my peers who I considered my friends.
These people who spread these images and claim that I’m a ‘Nazi’ are liars. They are lying. Flat out. They are liars who wish this industry wasn’t tolerant of people who do not share their partisan political views. That may include you. It may not. But I’ll lay out my career and the work that I’ve done against theirs. This is MY industry too. And lying liars with a dishonest agenda cannot change that.
I’ve chosen to avoid Twitter. It is a toxic wasteland of negativity. I’ve chosen to avoid discussing politics, for this very reason. But I won’t stand by and let these creeps continue to go unanswered.
And neither should you.
If you see this, please, as a fan, CORRECT IT.
It is evil.
Thank you.
I checked his Twitter page, and indeed, he doesn't seem to have updated it for 3 years. He's honestly doing the right thing to avoid such a social network (though he'll be doing even more of the right thing not to make embarrassing statements that sound like leftist apologia), because it really has become a toxic environment, with some of his leftist counterparts in comicdom only compounding the situation there. One of the worst things about Twitter is that there's quite a few SJWs running amok whom Marvel, if anyone, has been caving to with their demands drop certain coverscans that are far from the worst thing they could come up with. And even if they are in poor taste, that doesn't mean we have to buy the books in question. Marvel and others have to figure out for themselves what makes a tasteful drawing or not. In any event, the stories they've been publishing for more than a decade are awful, clogged with leftism and company wide crossovers, so it makes little difference what's on the cover to start with.
And I think Van Sciver would do well to avoid making comments in the future that sound like he's trying to pander to liberals, because in the end, it just won't work, and SJWs will never care.
Labels: politics, technology
Irony is the most easily misunderstood type of satire, whether it's a sketch book that resembles "Mein Kampf," or Jonathan Swift proposing that poor Irish babies be sold to the British for meat, or Randy Newman singing that "short people got no reason to live."
Posted by Anonymous | 8:25 AM
The people who always say that we can't blame all Muslims for terrorism, and that terrorism has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, are the same people who say that all political conservatives are Nazis and racists.
Posted by Anonymous | 8:30 AM