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Wednesday, May 15, 2019 

Brian Vaughan's immigration propaganda

Public Radio International spoke with Brian Vaughan about his new graphic novel titled Barrier, a bilingual comic mixing the topic of illegal immigration with sci-fi elements. First though, let's take a look at what seems like an exaggerated boast:
“It was incredible,” Brian K. Vaughan said of the movie. “I love superheroes, but it's wild that superheroes, in particular, have become so mainstream.”

Vaughan said that’s because when he was young, comics were inexpensive and more about art. Vaughan was one of the people that made it more mainstream. He’s written comics that star Spider-Man, Captain America, Batman and the X-Men. His comic book series "Saga" is a huge hit, and there’s a movie in the works based on another series — "Y: The Last Man." For TV shows, Vaughan’s written for "Lost," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Marvel’s "Runaways."
Oh please. He may have written books starring some of these mainstream characters, but he's done anything but make comicdom proper more mainstream. They don't sell in millions, and if a huge chunk of the public never heard of Vaughan or his books, it actually figures. Insular marketing and failure to advertise in wide ranges is just part of the problem, along with his wretched politics. Now, let's turn to Barrier itself, and what his artist has to say, which is pretty eyebrow-raising:
“The biggest appeal to me was probably [that] we're gonna be able to alienate all the readers now,” said Marcos Martín, who illustrated the "Barrier" comic book series. “Having them speaking in their own languages was one of the best ways for the reader to understand that [alienation] feeling.”

Martín is a veteran of superhero comics like "Batgirl" and "Daredevil," and drew the "Barrier" stories in much the same style. He and Vaughan published them independently with their company, Panel Syndicate. Martín said at the time they didn’t think much about the politics of immigration.

“Donald Trump hadn’t even been elected yet,”
Martín said. “It wasn't, I think, as much a hot topic as it's become in the last couple of years or the last year even.”
He sure sounds pretty delighted at the notion their comic would supposedly echo the times. No less disturbing is that he finds it just as appealing they'd alienate audiences. What kind of people are these who don't care about an audience? Mainly because he doesn't seem to understand that anybody who can't read Spanish per se can consult a dictionary to learn what's written in the dialect and script.
In the first book of the "Barrier" series, US Border patrol officers descend on a caravan of migrants. A teenager from Honduras flees. He finds himself on a ranch, facing a lone American woman — a widow with a shotgun. She yells at him in English and points the gun. He tries to explain in Spanish, and they don’t understand each other. It looks like there’s going to be an ugly confrontation.

And then … wait for it … the aliens arrive. They’re both abducted.

“Once these people are on a spaceship we realize they have so much in common — more than anyone else in this section of the cosmos they've been dragged to,” Vaughan said.
I recall the ill-fated Vertigo title Border Town, written by the now disgraced Eric Esquivel, may have featured a vaguely similar plot involving space aliens. I just don't get what all this propaganda about "needing each other" is meant to do, other than make people think laws are irrelevant in real life when it comes to border interlopers on terra firma? And apart from being whisked away by space aliens, what do the two prime characters have in common other than one's a US rancher and the other's an illegal migrant from Honduras? This sounds like a blurring of the facts involved.
There’s a long tradition of comic books taking on political issues, said Rob Salkowitz, an author and comic book industry analyst. Superman, after all, was an immigrant.
Oh dear. I'm not sure if Salkowitz or the interviewer made that statement, but it's just a huge exaggeration to say the Man of Steel is an immigrant, rather than a refugee infant from a distant, destroyed planet, who was adopted by earth inhabitants to grow up and become a great hero. How long has this propaganda angle exploiting Superman been going on? I'd say almost a decade now, and those pushing it have got to cut it out. It's nothing more than attempts to blur the boundaries of science fiction and reality, and above all, it's exploitative of somebody else's sci-fi creation to bolster their heavy-handed agenda.
“When confronted with another language, it drives a lot of people crazy,” Vaughan said. “I guess I didn’t understand when I first released it exactly how political this story was going to be.”

The angriest complaints came from North America, he said.

“I think they were the people most expecting a sort of more conventional comic experience,” he said. “But everyone else I think was largely open to something new.”
Please. Anybody can consult a dictionary, even online, to translate what's written in Spanish, if not what's written in otherworldly dialects, and thus get an idea what's in discussion. And what if the complaints coming from the USA happened to be focused on the shoddy politics, rather than the bilingual scripting? There's quite a few writers these days who try to twist everything to suit their visions, and Vaughan's probably one of them. Whatever he'd brewed up here is just more dreadful leftism focused on cheap viewpoints and shows no interest in doing a comic based on research into more serious matters. These, sadly, are the kind of people running the asylum today.

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Brian Vaughan was sjw who was interested in propaganda from the very beginning of his career. Y the Last Man is nothing more than a feminist seperatist fantasy. For example, one woman in issue #50 complains that before the plague killed off the men she was just a "supporting character". She was just a girlfriend, a daughter who sat on the sidelines of life while men did the important stuff.

Vaughan and his peer have infiltrated comics and other industries while promoting a narrative very similar to this.
"Vaughan said that’s because when he was young, comics were inexpensive and more about art. Vaughan was one of the people that made it more mainstream."
Never mind how ahistorical and flat-out wrong this statement is. It is an example of progressives gloating about what they've done to the industry. So, before comics was more widely read and the art was a big draw, given that it was a visual medium but it wasn't mainstream. It did not get that much attention from mainstream and academia. Vaughan fixed that by ALIENATING ALL THE READERS by making work that wouldn't appeal to comic readers. Their work is not done, as always, so Vaughan is back to deliver another blow that he hopes will finish the job.

Contrary to what Vaughan and Martin said, this was not a project that was developed without any attention paid to politics. It was was developed to be political.

Marvel should bring in a bunch of Korean, Japanese, French and Mexican H1B artists and writers and let them do the job "Americans won't do". The quality would be superior to the present SJW crew and might even teach a few immature morons about how immigration actually works.

Marvel has been hiring Korean, Japanese, French and Mexican artists for decades. So have other publishers. They are some of the best and most admired in the business. They don't even have to come to the US; many of them send in the pages by email or, in the old days, by Federal Express.

To name only some of the best known and most prestigious:

Mexican - Sergio Aragones, Al Williamson
Korean - Sanho Kim, Jae Sung Lee and all the Avengers K artists (and Korean-Americans, like Frank Cho and Andy Pak)
French - Niko Henrichon, Moebius
Japanese - The Gurihiru sisters

Vaughan's work - Ex Machina, Y, Saga - is very popular with comic book readers and has attracted a lot of people who dont usually read comics to the medium. Saga is a persistent top-seller, extra-ordinarily successful for a book that is not part of the Marvel or DC communal universes.

The point of Y is that woman are not inherently nicer and more cooperative than men - the story shows that if you eliminate the men, woman will take over their roles, act just as bad as the men did, and create a society just as bad as the men did. Not exactly a feminist fantasy.

Avi, you have been lucky enough to have spent most of your life in a diverse vibrant multicultural multilinguistic state and speak read and write at least two languages fluently. Much of the population in Israel is first generation immigrants. America is different. There are a lot of people in the US who even take umbrage at just hearing a second language spoken in public.

When the artist talks about alienation, he is talking about helping the reader understand what it is like to feel alien in America, to feel like an immigrant from another country.

"And apart from being whisked away by space aliens, what do the two prime characters have in common other than one's a US rancher and the other's an illegal migrant from Honduras? This sounds like a blurring of the facts involved."

When you are the only two people of your race and species on a shipload of space aliens, differences of language stop seeming that important. A bit PSA, but a universal truth nonetheless.

"Vaughan's work - Ex Machina, Y, Saga - is very popular with comic book readers and has attracted a lot of people who dont usually read comics to the medium. Saga is a persistent top-seller,"

You must be a paid shill.
First off, Vaughn has not attracted a large group of people who aren't already into comics.

Librarians ordering his graphic novels because they like the political/social undertones in his work does not mean he attracted a large number of new readers to comics and graphic novels. The same sort of thing was said by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, yet the general public is less and less aware that comic books are still made.





"The point of Y is that woman are not inherently nicer and more cooperative than men - the story shows that if you eliminate the men, woman will take over their roles, act just as bad as the men did, and create a society just as bad as the men did. Not exactly a feminist fantasy."
The societies that the women who survived managed to make were often worse than what the men created in terms of quality of life. I'm willing to bet that the dystopian situation was blamed on men screwing up things by some of the women. I'm willing to bet that many females in the series still believed women would run the world better if they were not burdened with the mess the men made.

Feminist fiction often isn't about showing women being nicer and more cooperative than men. It often shows women acting like men, swearing a lot, being aggressive and less agreeable. They show these things to prove that gender is a a social construct and that there is no biological difference in behavior between the two sexes.


"Avi, you have been lucky enough to have spent most of your life in a diverse vibrant multicultural multilinguistic state and speak read and write at least two languages fluently."
Enough with the Jew worship.

Israel regularly turns away African "migrants" because they might compromise the ethnic character of Israeli society.


"Israel is fairly multicultural, however the predominate ethnicity, Jews keep all the other ethnic groups or cultures in check because they want to retain power and keep Israel a Jewish state.

Many people say Israel is a democracy while I feel it’s more of a ethnocracy. Israel identifies as a Jewish state, belonging to the Jewish people."(Salwa Halabia
https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-Israel-more-multicultural)

Truly multi-cultural societies tend to be very fragmented societies where various groups are bitterly fighting over every little thing. I'm not sure why some dimwits see this as an ideal to work towards. Cultural clashes are not pretty.

"The societies that the women who survived managed to make were often worse than what the men created in terms of quality of life. I'm willing to bet that the dystopian situation was blamed on men screwing up things by some of the women. I'm willing to bet that many females in the series still believed women would run the world better if they were not burdened with the mess the men made."
If you read the books, you would see that your guess about this is totally wrong.

"Israel regularly turns away African "migrants" because they might compromise the ethnic character of Israeli society." Not quite. Israel has turned away African refugees or migrants trying to sneak over the border through Egypt, but it has also airlifted in a lot of Jewish Ethiopians (Falashas) and other African Jews. If by ethnicity you mean race, the 'ethnic character of Israeli society' was 'compromised' a few generations back.

Salwa Halabia is entitled to his opinion, but if you actually go to that quora discussion strand, you will find that most people on it disagree with him.

There are a lot of different ethnicities in Israel, many of them Jewish. Hebrew is the lingua franca, but over a fifth of the population has Arabic as a mother tongue (including many first generation Jewish refugees and immigrants from Arab lands), many Orthodox Jews speak Yiddish as a mother tongue, there are a lot of Russian and English speakers, an increasing number of French speakers; some religious and some secular. It is the world headquarters of the Bahai religion, because Bahai are not tolerated in their state of origin, Iran. Israel is more culturally diverse than most regions of the US.

Cultural clash tends to promote creativity and innovation; it causes people to think for themselves instead of accepting the dominant orthodoxy. It also brings a lot more knowledge and experience to the table. Multicultural regions and cities tend to be economically more prosperous than monocultures: the diversity promotes innovation and the prosperity attracts a more diverse population. The bitter infighting you talk about is characteristic of people who want to eliminate other cultures and destroy multiculturalism, not people who accept being part of a modern society. People in culturally homogenous societies still find lots of things to fight and kill each other over, just like the women in Y The Last Man still find lots to fight about even without men.

Super smooth liar Mike said: "Librarians ordering his graphic novels because they like the political/social undertones in his work does not mean he attracted a large number of new readers to comics and graphic novels. The same sort of thing was said by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, yet the general public is less and less aware that comic books are still made."

What is it with this librarian fetish? Did one shush you too angrily when you were a child or something? Are political and social undertones something exclusive to librarians?

At any rate, Moore and Gaiman were decades ago. Watchmen and Sandman did bring in a lot of new readers to the medium and still sell well as graphic novels, but that does not necessarily translate into coming to the comics shop every week. It did help greatly enlarge graphics novel sections in the bookstores and promote better sales there.



Paid industry shill writes "At any rate, Moore and Gaiman were decades ago. Watchmen and Sandman did bring in a lot of new readers to the medium and still sell well as graphic novels, but that does not necessarily translate into coming to the comics shop every week. It did help greatly enlarge graphics novel sections in the bookstores and promote better sales there"


No, Moore and Gaiman did not. Getting on best-seller lists has nothing to do with lots of people reading their work. It has more to do with academia (critics) recommending the books they like and getting every modern bookstore and library to stock a copy. You also failed to mention that the fact that comics have become the subject of classes in colleges--classes from art to" English"



https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/16/college-student-campaigns-to-get-sandman-y-the-last-man-and-more-banned-from-english-course


and how that might impact the sale of graphic novels. People reading graphic novels for a class doesn't mean they are "new readers" anymore than someone who tries a product one time and never purchases it on their own.

How many non sjws and fanboys read graphic novels regularly because of graphic novels like Sandman they were introduced to in college or on shelves of bookstores? Probably a very small number since DC cancelled its Vertigo line and brought it back as a smaller imprint.



The conflict in Y the Last Man was not made up women in culturally homogeneous cultures fighting over small differences. It was made up of women with DIFFERENCES of opinion of how to do things. Nothing you have posted disproves what Salwa Halabia said: Israel is multicultural but it is hierarchical--which mean the non-Ashkenazi Jewish population is kept at a minimum level so it does not replace Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardi / Mizrahi Jews. Ethiopian Jews comprise of 1% of the population. https://cija.ca/resource/israel-the-basics/demographics-of-israel/


Paid industry shill writes " there are a lot of Russian and English speakers, an increasing number of French speakers; some religious and some secular." A funny thing about all these secular people there is they have less and less influence in Israeli politics. Israeli politics has become more right-wing since the 1970s...they regularly turn away lots of Ethiopian Jews.
Israeli's policies are the policies of an ethnostate. Its behavior is not mulitcultural.

"Multicultural regions and cities tend to be economically more prosperous than monocultures"
Israel's general wealth or stability is what attracts non-Jews, not its diversity.


". It also brings a lot more knowledge and experience to the table." In what way? If we look at the economic contributions in Isreal , it seems that Ashkenazi Jews are responsible for the majority of its wealth creation, just like whites and Jews are responsible for the majority of the innovation in the U.S. Black people contribute very little, whereas Arabs and Asians make smaller but growing contributions.


" The bitter infighting you talk about is characteristic of people who want to eliminate other cultures and destroy multiculturalism" Or groups who never wanted to share power with a group who they have sharp disagreements with like Iraq...country where imperialists imposed a multicultural society on tribes that were historically rivals.

Significant wealth is the only thing that keeps diverse people together.Otherwise, you have a situations where different groups are fighting over resources.

As we see even in wealthy countries,wealth if it is not evenly distributed, i.e., everyone making good money, is a source of conflict. The solution frequently touted, of course, is to make everyone the same because no one likes being a minority or the nail that sticks out.

" Getting on best-seller lists has nothing to do with lots of people reading their work. It has more to do with academia (critics) recommending the books they like and getting every modern bookstore and library to stock a copy."

Best seller lists are based on sales to customers, not how many copies are stocked on the shelves. Books stocked and returned to the publisher don't count. Most best seller lists are based on book store sales, so that sales to libraries do not even show up on the list. Amazon best sellers are sales on Amazon; so if librarians ordered through Amazon, they might show up there, but that is not generally the way libraries order books.

Generally, a book sold to a library will have more readers than a book sold to an individual. if I buy a book, I will read it and, rarely, a friend or family member also. A library paperback can be checked out by seven or more people before it starts to fall apart.

Critics are not academia; they are journalists who write for newspapers or for the fan press and fan sites.

"Israel is multicultural but it is hierarchical--which mean the non-Ashkenazi Jewish population is kept at a minimum level so it does not replace Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardi / Mizrahi Jews."

there isn't a country on the planet that isn't hierarchical. But keeping the non-Ashk population at a minimum? is this done through their secret selective breeding program, or? This sounds more like the fanatic fantasies of American white supremacists, and their chants of "Jews will not replace us", than it does with anything happening in Israel.

Granted, it is hard to know what you are talking about here; you don't make it clear whether the non-Ashk pop you are talking about is the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, or other groups,, and what you have written can be read either way. But it does sound more like an American white supremacist viewpoint than like anything you would find in Israel.

"A funny thing about all these secular people there is they have less and less influence in Israeli politics. Israeli politics has become more right-wing since the 1970s..." Come to think of it, so has American, British, Russian and Chinese politics! But some of the rightwingers are secular; this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Israel has not turned away Ethiopian Jews. There has been controversy over which Ethiopians should be considered Jewish, with some Israellis arguing for broader definitions.

Generally, one of the ways groups maintain group identity is by finding an outsider against whom they can define themselves. Christians define themselves as being different from Muslims; Protestants define themselves as being different from Catholics; Methodists define themselves against the Congregationalists; and if everyone is Presbyterian, you can be sure a church schism is in the offing. The Irish and the English were separate races until the blacks showed up. Making everyone the same goes against human nature and never lasts for long.

The nature of diversity is that everyone brings something different to the table. Contact with other ideas and other cultures is what sparks innovation; the West would still be in the Middle Ages if not for the advances in science and medicine that came over from the Muslim world, and it would still be pagan if not for the religion that came over from the Middle East. American culture would be pretty sad if not for the contributions of blacks and immigrant communities.


there isn't a country on the planet that isn't hierarchical. But keeping the non-Ashk population at a minimum? is this done through their secret selective breeding program, or? This sounds more like the fanatic fantasies of American white supremacists, and their chants of "Jews will not replace us"

Secular Jews DO want to replace whites in most Western countries.
They think the very idea of any whites wanting to preserve their culture is literally fascism.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jl-OJJVAEg


Meanwhile, in Israel, ....


https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/07/why-ethiopian-jews-israel-face-discrimination-racism-police-brutality-502697.html




"A funny thing about all these secular people there is they have less and less influence in Israeli politics. Israeli politics has become more right-wing since the 1970s..." Come to think of it, so has American, British, Russian and Chinese politics! But some of the rightwingers are secular; this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Secular people tend to have no loyalty to traditional forms of identity, such as religion, culture, or race and try to encourage others to let go of these traditional forms of identity--usually whites.Non-whites are never told they need to let go of their identity or take up less space. China will never be asked to take in refugees. Secular people will never confront Chinese "nationalism" or confront black men and Muslims about homophobia.
Jews are very well represented in secular culture. Over-represented.
Noel Ignatiev, Ruth Frankenberg, Ricky Marcuse, and Terry Berman are all secular Jews that made major contributions to what the intersectional-white-men-are-the-worst- worldview.

As described in a post on this site a few days ago, Patrick Zircher calumnified comixgate by saying that all the comixgate people who wrote to him were loon-tune white supremacists.

Wonder how he got a silly idea like that?

"Non-whites are never told they need to let go of their identity or take up less space."

Don't know what country Mike lives in, but it sure ain't America. In the US, blacks are always told (and with some truth) that they have to talk in Northeastern white dialect if they want to get a decent job, people who want to get ahead are wary of acting too ghetto, and black woman force themselves to hold their tongue for fear of being labeled an Angry Black Woman. Foreign immigrants can be hassled if they speak their own language to each other in public. There is public opposition to building mosques in places, and Hassidic Jews in New Jersey are being attacked for asserting their identity in local politics. I realize that in the competition for victimhood white males started off slow and have to work hard and talk louder than anyone else to assert themselves in the race, but this is exaggerated beyond poetic licence.

"They think the very idea of any whites wanting to preserve their culture is literally fascism.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jl-OJJVAEg"

The video does not actually say anything much like this; it doesn't mention fascism and doesn't talk at all about white culture.

Different whites have different cultures; this idea of creating some kind of pan-European white supremacist culture is actually code for destroying individual national and local cultures of Europe and America and replacing them with something uglier and entirely different.

"his idea of creating some kind of pan-European white supremacist culture "
Can you cite the white supremacist who wants to that?
At most, they want to revive the idea of Christiandom.
Christiandom is no different than the idea of the Muslim world.

I haven't seen any proposal for destroying individual national and local cultures of Europe and America and replacing them with something uglier and entirely different from anyone on the Right but I've seen plenty on of calls from progressives on the Left who want whites and their various ethnic cultures to disappear in Europe and America.


"d black woman force themselves to hold their tongue for fear of being labeled an Angry Black Woman" You come in contact with very few black women. Most black women, particularly, African American black women, are too low inhibition to avoid talking someone off. They do not care about being seen as angry.

" Hassidic Jews in New Jersey are being attacked for asserting their identity in local politics" Jews are not oppressed in this day and age in America. Stop lying.
No one's buying it. Not even other religious minorities, like Muslims. Go peddle that lie somewhere else.


"As described in a post on this site a few days ago, Patrick Zircher calumnified comixgate by saying that all the comixgate people who wrote to him were loon-tune white supremacists."

You don't have to be a white supremacist to admit that multiculturalism and diversity create more problems than they solve.
There are plenty of people on the Left who want separate spaces for blacks, jews, and women. There are feminists who want spaces for women where not even gay men are allowed.

Seperatism doesn't always mean you think your group is part of a "master race" or "chosen people" who are destined to rule over everyone else.

Sometimes, the best way to preserve diversity is to keep different cultures separate.

20 years ago, one of the chief complaints about globalization that it was homogenizing regions and destroying local cultures. Progressives saw that as a good thing at some point and realize they could use transnational organizations to advance their political goals. Can't have major "social change" and "socialist' revolutions without destroying cultures, I mean, "subverting" them.


<< " Hassidic Jews in New Jersey are being attacked for asserting their identity in local politics" Jews are not oppressed in this day and age in America. Stop lying.>>

On Non-secular Jews in Jew Jersey:

https://nypost.com/2014/09/09/village-trying-to-prevent-hasidic-jews-from-relocating-there-suit/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/jewish-boundary-markers-stir-tension-even-in-diverse-n-j-town

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/quiet-village-braces-for-an-influx-of-hasidim.html?module=inline

https://nationalvanguard.org/2018/06/parts-of-new-jersey-new-york-a-pressure-cooker-as-hasidic-jews-take-over/

Mik? Said: "Most black women, particularly, African American black women, are too low inhibition to avoid talking someone off. They do not care about being seen as angry"

Unfortunately Mik, too few black women havé your degree of inhibitions or your obvious concern about how others might mistakenly perceive you as angry. On the other hand, I can understand why all these black women you say you come into contact with might feel justified in telling you off.

What are libraries where you live like Mike?

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  • From Jerusalem, Israel
  • I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best.
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