The Four Color Media Monitor

Another focus on the Meyer/Waid controversy topic at the Federalist, how it all came to be, but this is one all but a dissenting item, and has parts that can be disagreed upon, including the assertion he's a "professional troll" in the literal sense:

Meyer’s popularity needs to be traced back to his start, which began with Twitter spats with different creators, editors, and publishers, generally calling out shoddy work in books or whenever they’d post something political on Twitter. One quote his detractors regularly cite came from him calling an editor a “c-m dumpster” (original word modified).

His Twitter account generally launched attacks on Marvel editors, many of which are young women. While, yes, they were overwhelmingly progressives, attacking them online isn’t particularly a way to gain friends in the industry.

Focusing on female editors is also an offshoot of the “fake geek girl” phenomenon, where many a “fan” complains women in an industry are infiltrating to destroy it and don’t actually care or like the thing they’re working on. It’s hard to put any stock into this idea.

For heaven's sake, I don't agree with everything Meyer does, but for one thing, he's far from a troll in the negative sense, and he didn't solely go after women, young or old. There's also men like Mark Waid, Nick Spencer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dan Slott, Steve Orlando and the now former Marvel editor Axel Alonso. It was hardly a problem with women alone, feminist or not.

Later Meyer formed a YouTube channel based on his Twitter, where he’d discuss books, many of which he’d cherry-picked to incite outrage clicks. He’d take on a book like “Squirrel Girl,” complaining about it being written for a 12-year-old girl with a smattering of politically correct platitudes thrown in. But a book like that isn’t exactly highbrow critical thought, it’s a book written and made for tweens (or tween-brained adults), not dudes who’ve been reading superhero comics since the ‘80s.

Even if it is aimed at tweens, that doesn't make it any good. Back in the 80s, there were books like Power Pack that dealt with its cast of younger protagonists and the stories built around them seriously, and more intelligently than expected. The more recent offerings from Marvel suffer from overt social justice propaganda injections, far-left politics included, and that's no recipe for success. All that aside, why does the writer sound like he thinks today's male audience, depending who they are and what their viewpoint is, wouldn't make a great audience for a book like Squirrel Girl? A notable complaint by some observers is that there's little or no new audience coming in to buy and read these items, and without the right ingredients, the chances of getting them will continue to remain slim.

At least the article does admit leftist progressivism's gotten worse over the past several years, and so too has Marvel's ability to hire real talent:

Plenty of other talented individuals who worked at Marvel also packed up for greener pastures. Since then, Marvel has had a very hard time filling those shoes and much of the writing is done by either a few over-worked individuals (Charles Soule must be writing something like 10 monthly books) or the occasional headline-grab name like Ta-Neishi Coates.

None of these headline-grabbers come from comics, so their books tend to not be created with comics in mind. Thus they end up being talky treatises turned into narrative. Many writers fall onto using Twitter headlines of the day as muse, which is how a discussion about the pros and cons of brunch ends up in an X-Men book.

All that aside, what matters is that Marvel so far has failed to hire or rehire real talent who can avoid building outrage culture and alienating the readers. Worst is the blacklist still in place against Chuck Dixon and any other conservative the management deems unworthy of their time. Unless anybody starts campaigning seriously to end the blacklist, it'll continue and ultimately affect even the less conservative-minded.

The comics Twitter crowd is just as unhealthy and vile a community as any other Twitter crowd. It rewards outrage and denies taste or nuance. Many a comics controversy comes from a loud feign of outrage on Twitter—Howard Chaykin’s “Divided States of America” proved its title when the cover featured a man hung with a racist or homophobic slur written on him. The outrage proved the point Chaykin was making with the series—however, he anticipated the outrage to come from the Right, when it actually came from the Left.

Yes, that must've been quite a surprise for the creator of American Flagg. No less so, to be sure, was Image's caving and refusal to stand behind the cover illustration for Divided States of Hysteria, which the columnist forgot to specify.

Diversity & Comics and the people he attacks have a ton in common. Both want the other’s products and preferences removed from the marketplace, and neither will stop until the whole thing is burned down.

Sigh. No, this does not make sense either to draw up a moral equivalence. The difference is that Meyer wants better writers assigned to corporate-owned superhero books who don't put their leftism front-and-center, while his opponents want his products banned altogether. At worst, it risks sounding like some of the weakest writers for National Review, hardly a great bastion of conservatism today. If the columnist were to try and take up a similar career in commentary and get some of the worst editors/publishers like Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio out of comicdom, he could have a chance of bettering Meyer, if he thinks there's a valid cause in store. But that's not what he's doing, and it risks letting too many bad apples off the hook for the wrongs they've foisted upon famous creations.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, politics