The Four Color Media Monitor

Leave it to one of the UK's worst newspapers, the Guardian, to write up the latest falsehoods about the Comicsgate campaign, penned by J.A. Michelinie, whom I vaguely recall as a feminist apologist for the bad side of the industry. And the most hilarious part is her likening it to Brexit. Her article contains the byline:

Unless comics creators adopt a zero tolerance approach to racism and misogyny, this abuse of power by ‘fans’ will never end

Translation: She doesn't give a damn if the very hatemongering she speaks of is taking place right within the industry and its story output proper. If all she cares about are fans supposedly engaging in what she accuses of, then the chances she's concerned about the same when creators are guilty are very slim.

For those who haven’t been following the latest front of the ongoing culture wars, Comicsgate is, well, exactly what it sounds like: Gamergate but comics. In 2014, the Washington Post described Gamergate as “a proxy war for a greater cultural battle over who belongs to the mainstream”, and that description, four years later, remains perfectly adequate to describe its comics iteration.

Many will tell you that the movement began with the 2017 rise of Richard C Meyer, a Twitter user who amassed a platform largely based on denouncement, derision and disrespect of marginalised industry professionals, as well as their advocates – typically by co-opting marginalised rhetoric to reposition himself and others like him as victims.

Yep, here we go. It's boo-hoo, whine-whine-whine in favor of the poor "marginalized" pseudo-professionals, no matter what wrongs they committed, because in Michinlinie's narrow mind, POC and LGBT can do no wrong whatsoever, and the offensive incitement that was committed by some is all swept under the rug. And Meyer, in her mind, was never a victim of white victimologist Mark Waid, who's making it hard to appreciate whatever good work he once did, and has since trashed.

“The issue with trans [people],” Meyer said in April to the Daily Beast, “is that I believe there’s people who have basically weaponised their status and they’ve been put to this gatekeeper position because they’re unassailable because of their trans status.” Of course, months earlier, Meyer and his thousands of followers had made it their mission to virulently misgender and personally insult trans creators and critics on the grounds of their being trans.

And people like the clowns who wrote this piece have made it their mission to normalize the abnormal, and hammer home the belief all LGBT are privileged status, save for those who may happen to agree with Meyer about the transgender writers who're being hired only because of their lifestyle choices and not because they're talented.

It’s a boring but familiar tactic, one that draws a through-line from the relatively small western comics industry to the national and international stage. The results of both the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election relied heavily (if not, solely) on the narrative of white loss and the tears of the white working class – while conveniently eliding the needs of working-class people of colour and what they stood to lose.

How can such events be combated? How can they be undone? But these are the wrong questions. Merely combating or undoing Comicsgate, Brexit, and the flourishing of American fascism is not enough.

A shutdown of Meyer’s Twitter account – and the account of his accomplice, former DC Comics artist Ethan Van Sciver – would not prevent some new equivalent arising in their stead any more than either a soft Brexit or an outright cancellation would prevent some new iteration taking its place. It is all well and good to impeach (and imprison) Donald Trump, but his mere removal from office would not dismantle that which allowed him to exist. We must ask how we undo or outright destroy the conditions that permitted these outcomes in the first place; we must ask and subsequently address how we arrived here.

Imagine that. Using Comicsgate as a cheap excuse to villify Brexit by extension! And worse, to make calls for censorship and even imprison Donald Trump.

While Comicsgate in its current form may be attributed to Meyer and Van Sciver, the movement has largely been given leave to exist for years by the very same people who have seen fit to decry its actions in recent weeks. Despite what the latest flood of Twitter statements from white male comics creators would have you believe, when it comes to issues of marginalisation, their preferred tactic is silence, and a hope that this will all just blow over.

Uh oh, what's this? I think the writer's just thrown away her own squeaky argument by condemning white men, and if it's men today, white women will be next tomorrow. Point is, the white men she speaks of did make the voices heard, regardless of how ill-informed and vile some of them were, yet it's not enough for the Perpetually Unsatisfied who obviously doesn't even like them in the first place. When will some of the leftist idiots who're propping up these ingrates realize they'll only betray them in the end? Probably never. This lethargic hit piece is just a taste of how awful the UK Guardian really is, and what "values" they uphold.

Even the pretentious writer Noah Berlatsky got in on the act at the Wash. Post, repeating a prominent lie straight out of the gate:

In 2016, the comics writer Chelsea Cain found herself drowning in abusive tweets. She’d made the mistake of penning an issue of Marvel’s Mockingbird series that featured an image of its heroine wearing a shirt saying, “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda.” In the words in which one representative attack put it, she was “ruining my favorite character with your feminist crap.” As many others have in similar circumstances, Cain temporarily deleted her account.

Cain’s experience was one of the most important precursors of Comicsgate, the latest in a series of reactionary movements and harassment campaigns centered on nerd fandoms. Like Gamergate in games and the Sad Puppies in literary science-fiction, Comicsgate claims to be fighting against censorship and the politicized groupthink of leftist social justice warriors (SJWs) — anti-racists, feminists and marginalized people whom the right characterizes as oppressors. But again, like those other movements, Comicsgate participants in fact work to silence opinions they dislike and voices they deem malignant. The left is often accused of intolerance and antipathy to the First Amendment. The most serious new threat to free speech, however, is the use of free speech as a cover for an ongoing online assault on the enemies of the right.

Tell us about it, please. There was no shipload of screenshots of those alleged nasty tweets ever presented, and the worst part is that it all obscured the most valid issues of all: the book she wrote was boring and retconned a point in Mockingbird's history to make her look bad. Which goes to show how much Berlatsky really loves superhero comics.

But maybe what's most hilarious of all is that this is coming out at a time when Marvel cancelled a planned Vision miniseries Cain was writing before it even debuted, and it looks like she's mad at them now for doing it, accusing them of asking her to keep quiet about it. In that case, shouldn't Berlatsky's complaints be directed at Marvel for not following through? I gotta ask though, would they have been willing to do the same with the Iceman miniseries Sina Grace wrote, or does that get a pass because of the homosexuality theme? If so, that means Marvel threw out Cain's project because women are apparently the easier target in their ultra-leftist minds. And if that's the case, when will it ever sink in to her that she was betrayed by the very social justice advocates she's upheld in the past?

Let's got back to the Berlatsky tripe now:

Among those joining in the attacks was Richard C. Meyer, who uses the ironic twitter and YouTube handle Diversity & Comics. Meyer became a ringleader of Comicsgate, which rallied around the argument that female, POC and LGBT characters and creators were ruining comic books, and pushing out the views and voices of authentic fans. DC writer Magdalene Visaggio, a trans woman, was a special target; Meyer misgendered her and claimed she was mentally ill. In a private video posted in 2017 and obtained by the Daily Beast, Meyer railed against one female Marvel editor using gendered slurs and attacked others for supposedly exchanging sexual favors for career advancement. More recently, Comicsgate proponents have been arguing that celebrated poet and playwright Eve Ewing, who will be writing the new Ironheart series at Marvel, is unqualified or undeserving.

So Visaggio's not a man in drag? And he didn't post comments about cisgender white men deserving to be beaten with baseball bats? Okay, we get it, Berlatsky's just not interested, as he went into this whole subject with a closed mind, predetermined positions. Which gets worse in the following:

Darryl Ayo, an indie comic creator and critic, told me about one instance in which Comicsgate targeted him for speaking out. Ayo had criticized Malin’s claim that SJWs were Nazis. That night after midnight, popular comics penciler, outspoken right-winger and Comicsgate leader Ethan Van Sciver challenged him to appear on his podcast to debate Malin. “Darryl, come on my show right now and say what you have to say,” Van Sciver tweeted.

Ayo didn’t know Van Sciver and refused the offer. Van Sciver continued to demand that he appear on the show. For anyone who uses Twitter, the result was, predictably, months of insults and harassment. The day before we spoke, eight months after the original confrontation, someone had posted multiple messages on Ayo’s Facebook page to denigrate his art, referencing his conflict with Van Sciver.

Van Sciver framed himself as a proponent of debate and the healthy exchange of ideas. But in fact, he was demanding that Ayo deferentially follow his orders in the middle of the night or be labeled as unreasonable and a justifiable target for abuse. A free speech frame became a way to go after someone for saying things Van Sciver didn’t like — and for putting others on notice that their tweets or comments could make them the next target.

So this Ayo, basically a nobody who doesn't like conservatives no matter how much they may service a liberal agenda in the employ of the Big Two, "told him". Okay, we get it. And Van Sciver, whom young master Berlatsky clearly didn't exchange any word with to get his side of the story, "demanded" that a morally bankrupt leftist who labels right-wingers "nazis" all for the sake of it come onto his podcasts, rather than invite him. Well it doesn't take much to figure Berlatsky already made up his mind where he actually stands, or else he'd at least get Van Sciver's side of the tale. I think there's grounds for suing for defamation here.

The article also mentions a pretentious editor named Jay Edidin:

“I think they’ve successfully made the stakes of being a female or black or queer or trans comics creator feel a lot higher,” said Jay Edidin, a comics writer, editor and critic. Comicsgate put marginalized creators and fans on notice that some people in comics didn’t want them there and would come after them. It’s impossible to know how many people that discouraged, but there’s little doubt that the intent was to discourage. “I obviously can’t look at numbers and say, ‘Well, this many people would have been here making comics if it weren’t for Comicsgate,’” Edidin said. “But I absolutely believe it has had an effect.”

Part of the reason the effect may be hard to measure is that there are also people working, despite Comicsgate’s best efforts, to make comics more welcoming. Earlier this year, Edidin himself helped lead a successful campaign to get Dark Horse Comics to cover trans health care under its insurance policy. Many comics pros have also recently begun to speak out against Comicsgate, which may help to reduce the movement’s influence. Comics may yet become more open to different viewpoints, different experiences and different creators. If it does, though, it will be despite right-wing “free speech” warriors, not because of them.

Forget it, the movement's influence is only building up, and this very article will see to it that continues. Besides, it's already clear that even Edidin doesn't give a damn about the POC who were targeted for wrongthink like Alterna's publisher, Peter Simeti. It goes without saying Edidin's standings are victimology at its worst, and if healthcare costs for transvestism is such a big deal, maybe they should just work for it themselves and not demand any and every company cater to such narrow beliefs bordering on socialism. It's these precise liberal agendas and shoving them down everyone's throats that's ruining the entertainment business as a whole.

The clowns writing for the Guardian and Washington Post can victimologize all they like, but they won't be able to fool everyone with their efforts to obscure valid issues concerning story merit and sincerity of contributors, to say nothing of entitled, selfish individuals who believe products they never created are somehow their personal playgrounds ripe for the picking, and turning inside out into something they were never intended to be. Their very propaganda pieces are just why the movement's turning out to be a success, and the opponents practically prove in their own writings that they're not the champions of freedom they claim to be.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, Europe and Asia, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, women of marvel