The Four Color Media Monitor

Presumably wanting to avoid the unnecessary prospect of facing a lawsuit for defamation, CBR was finally willing to give Alterna chairman Peter Simeti the chance to tell his side of the story:

To my knowledge, in our entire history, no one under contract at Alterna has ever been harassed or threatened and if they were, I certainly was never made aware of any such occurrences. When I received messages from twelve readers that Micah [Myers] was blocking them without ever interacting with them, I approached project manager Dave Swartz about the situation and briefed him on the fact that Micah may be using a block list to block potentially thousands of people he’d never interacted with. When Dave approached Micah about this, he found this was in fact the truth. In order to avoid any further unwanted drama on the situation, I offered a solution to not include Micah on twitter promotions of the title and to not tag his twitter handle. He would still remain on the book, of course and would still have received cover credit and interior credit on the book.

At that point, I was told by Dave that Micah understood that the book would most likely be affected by the potential drama of having him associated with it, as we would most likely come across more potential readers that had been blocked by him. By utilizing this block list to “avoid harassment” for himself, Micah’s block list opened up potential harassment for his creative team and myself, as we would be forced to answer questions about Micah’s choice to block people who he never interacted with in the first place. Because of this, I was told that Micah stepped down as letterer and Dave had then hired another letterer to re-letter the entire series.

I do not hire or fire freelancers at Alterna. I did not push for the firing of Micah, nor did I threaten the cancellation of the book, as claimed by Micah in his series of tweets. I have the necessary evidence that counters his claims and I hope that in good faith, Micah does the right thing here.

In other words, the primary writer of the book can work on picking the other creatives who can do their share of development, and the publisher isn't the one in charge of that. I'd say Myers owes an apology for trying to defame his former employer and causing them so much trouble over peanuts. If that's how he's going to act, I'd say he's otherwise unreliable for working with on anything.

In related news, the following was also revealed:

On his live stream where he announced Gods and Gears, Simeti also revealed he received five death threats and that people declared him a Nazi.

This is absolutely chilling, and should be reported to the police/FBI. If any industry insiders were behind the threats the poor guy received, they have disgraced their profession and medium, and should be banished from the industry altogether after serving jail time for breaking the law.

I hope Simeti's doing well, and wish him the best in developing Alterna as a publisher. And it'll be even greater if all working for him now and many more folks wishing to specialize in the medium give him their full backing with current and future projects to write/illustrate under the company banner. Who knows, maybe in the future, they can even acquire licenses for writing comics based on merchandise, not unlike Dark Horse!

Labels: indie publishers, msm propaganda, politics, technology