The Four Color Media Monitor

I noticed writer Jim Zub annouce the following for Image's 30th anniversary:

Happy 30th Anniversary, @ImageComics!

The creator-owned books I have at Image opened doors I never imagined possible, started incredible friendships I cherish, and changed the course of my creative career.

Thank you! pic.twitter.com/XIJ5SlKZvU

— Jim Zub (@JimZub) February 1, 2022

Hmm, by any chance, is he aware that Image now has a problem with an alleged workers' union whose real goal seems to be more about censorship and narrative control than about entertainment value and winning over an audience? Because if he's hoping they'll continue to publish his works without setting up dictates out of nowhere that could hurt his artistry, he might want to consider the likelihood this CBWU will get his writings thrown out over an Orwellian Thoughtcrime. Nobody's safe from such worrisome people. Based on this recent development, Zub's not doing himself a favor by overlooking that. What if he finds himself on the receiving end when his next project produced under their auspices is ready for publication? Will he show appreciation then?

Since we're on the topic of Image's saddling with a union whose only true interest appears to be controlling narratives, I also thought to take a look at a very long 2021 commentary by Howard Chaykin, the veteran writer who once experienced censorship 5 years back over a cover illustration for a miniseries he wrote titled Divided States of Hysteria, where, while he does voice displeasure, he still seems to really despise the right-wing, and if conservative-leaning scribes ever offered him help, he seems to shun it till the bitter end. Which is a shame, because he does make some valid points:

…Mainstream comic books, which were once a medium, have now become a genre, this to a certain extent as a result of the financial collapse of the material’s commercial value in its actual form, and what some might describe as the unexpected and duly monstrous explosion of that selfsame subject matter and its billion-dollar value in other media.

So, as mainstream genre comics continue to march toward extinction, one of the very things that contributed to that endgame maintains the tradition of the junk content that infantilized comic books and the audience for the medium over a century ago in the first place.

I mean, let’s face it. Hollywood swarms with just the sort of people who gave us shit for reading comics as kids. These mountebanks now make bank off this stuff. Who says irony is dead, right?

No argument there. I've never thought geeks and nerds truly conquered Hollywood or convinced the wider public to recognize their favorite pastimes as legitimate products for everybody's enjoyment, that could, at one time, even offer material to make you think. These days, it's only far-left lectures they're willing to offer.

And then, Chaykin gives a hint of his political leanings:

Ultimately, that adjustment in my skillsets led me to leave comic books for a few years, at the behest of the then Editor in Chief at one of the two major houses, who I made the classic mistake of despising before everybody else did. Like Republicans, who can only identify problems when they impact on them personally, my colleagues dismissed my distaste until his awfulness caught up with them, too, at which point distaste for this person became universally acceptable.

So Republicans will only care if it affects them, and Democrats never act that way? Gee, that's being pretty conclusive alright. And just shows we have here somebody who's been taught to be a leftist till the bitter end of time, and never consider whether conservatives have anything positive to offer. And then, here's where he gets to the topic of his Divided States of Hysteria, produced some time after he'd resumed comics writing after working in TV shows during the 1990s:

I continued to work, and was happy with that work, nothing of which was setting the world on commercial fire, and then, with all innocence, I created a project entitled THE DIVIDED STATES OF HYSTERIA. This dystopic fiction was produced at a time when it was clearly understood by any serious adult that Hillary Clinton was certainly going to be the 45th president, an administration that many of us believed would generate violent reaction among the simmering and nascent American Reich which anyone who was paying attention knew was out there, just waiting for the fuse to be lit.

Who knew, right?

The book’s narrative arc detailed the aftermath of the next successful massive terrorist attack on the United States. In short order, I was accused of Islamophobia, racism, and transphobia—this last the most damning, and the most oddly comical—as the trans character in question became the moral center of the narrative, not to mention the romantic interest of the hero of the book.

Of course, this character arc occurred organically and logically over the six issues of the series, but those who wanted my head on a pike didn’t follow this narrative…and many of those never actually read the book at all, simply presuming that just like all comic book characters, there would be no development of character to speak of, or charged me with that modern day classic, that I had no right to include a transgender character in any narrative at all, defined as I was by that cultural damnation, heteronormative cisgender white male.

This was my first experience, but hardly the last, of being threatened with banal condemnation for not staying in my own lane. [...]

And so, phrases such as “I’m all for artistic freedom but…” and “I don’t have to read it to know it’s shit” were the order of the day, most hurtfully from fellow professionals. I was dubbed, poetically to be sure, by an outraged no talent apparently desperate for attention, “A demon in a human skin suit.” This on the same day as some rightwing shithead came up with “Neutered butler of the SJWs.”

More on the latter in a moment.

I thus found myself in a position that many others like me already or would soon occupy—an enemy of the people who had come to own, and, through the triple threat of progressive wokeness, performative morality and critical theory, now dictate, administrate and govern that side of the trough which I have long called home.

All this, to be noted, in reaction to a six issue comic book series with a distinctly left wing bent, not to mention as noted above, a trans woman heroine equipped with that modern classic cultural bullet point check mark of “agency,” who finds love with a heteronormative cisgender white male, to coin a phrase.

Entre nous, I was schooled in regard to the concept and value of agency in a spirited discussion pointing to that idea as the defining reason for the superiority of “WAP” to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Give me strength.

All this led to boycotts, censorship and permanent damage to my career, my good name, my reputation and my legacy—much of this spearheaded by progressive woke colleagues, at least one of whom has been identified as a sexual predator, a loathsome, opportunist, morally performative little prick who of course has been driven away into the desert by the denunciation of former friends, anxious to distance themselves from such contagious toxicity.

One more indication that irony had not entirely disappeared from this American life.

For me, the finest of that irony came about when many of the more censorious of those colleagues participated in a variant cover tribute to Banned Books month, bringing opportunism, hypocrisy and performative morality to a new height of gloss in their rush to self-congratulation for the support of artistic freedom, for which, they were, as noted above, “All for…” while they did everything in their power to censor my book.

So Chaykin was blacklisted, it would seem, by the very political side he remains stuck on, and won't abandon, no matter how much they darken the horizon. Certainly, irony reigns supreme in this case, yet Chaykin acts as though it's not "his" left that's at fault here, when there's only so many like him who practically enabled it at universities and such. He goes on to at least acknowledge what the left's become consumed by nowadays, but continued to make clear he despises conservatives:

And yet, while the fade continues, there’s an ongoing cultural war being fought, between the woke left and reactionary right of comics enthusiasts, over who owns the soul and spirit of comic book superheroes.

Really. [...]

And then, about a year after that shitstorm, I was enlisted, to be sure strongly encouraged, by a self-designated spokesperson for the left side of the trough, to denounce a number of professionals who were on my “friends” list, whose politics were to the right. This was, to be clear, my first true awareness of this contretemps between these two camps of comic book enthusiasts.

I did some research on what I soon learned was an ongoing war for the heart and soul of mainstream comics, and yes, these fellows’ political beliefs were extreme, and in some cases verging on the almost comically vile. I unfriended them, and did the same for the fellow who insisted I denounce these people. I leave denunciations to the sort of fair-weather apparatchiks who threw the grooming little creep under the bus a few paragraphs back. There was a wealth of irony in that the descriptions of these right-wing talent that surfaced to support my requested denunciation were almost verbatim those thrown at me a year earlier. Make of that what you will. I remain bemused, if not amused.

Sounds like Chaykin was drawing moral equivalence between left and right, but again, it sounds like he refuses to see any difference between the "woke left" and the right as a whole, and worst, wants to believe conservatives are all irredeemably evil. He continued:

So, I found myself in the grayest of gray areas, caught between the woke left, with its Eloi moral superiority on one side, and the reactionary right, with its Morlock Just Kidding cruelty on the other. Yes, the cultural war taking place in real life was also being fought in proxy in my little corner of the world.

[...] Just to be clear—I am not now, nor have I ever been a relativist in the real world. I come from a long line of Democratic Socialists—see above in regard to Premature Anti-Fascism. In that regard, and, or maybe but, for the didactic among you, I am also an iconoclast, with a contrarian aversion to cant and canon, with a suspicion of critical theory and the absurdist overreach of intersectionality in its inhumane misunderstanding of humanity and human nature.

[...] In the real world in which I live, I reserve my true loathing for the right and all it stands for. This claque is the clear and present danger to everything I hold dear. I despise its sexism, its racism, its homophobia, its selfishness, its nationalism, its xenophobia, its armed violence, its willful ignorance, its rejection of democracy at the cost of its own well-being, that last just as long as those they’ve been trained to hate and fear by their masters don’t get anything, either.

Come to think of it, maybe he's not so morally equivalent after all. And his adherence to socialism, if anything, is utterly dismaying, when you consider he was capitalizing on the indie market in the 1980s. Maybe most chilling about his accusations the right engages in "armed violence" is that, what if he wants to be that way? And all the while, Chaykin ignores, deliberately or otherwise, cases of leftists committing armed violence. This virtue-signaling will not improve fortunes for his comics, no matter the political angle. Oh, and here's another something where Chaykin brings up Comicsgate, and wouldn't you know it, he's just as hostile here:

And that’s when my dinner companion inadvertently handed me my way out. This acquaintance of mine said I wouldn’t have to worry about scripts—I’d be providing artwork for one of this hilarious—which, having read some of this Comicsgate guy’s work, was apparently just another word for “sexist,” “misogynist,” and downright “troglodytic”—publishers’ scripts.

I made it politely but abundantly clear that this was a nonstarter, that at this late stage in my career I wasn’t going to work with another writer, let alone this idiotic talent free amateur undeserving of time or attention, mine or anyone else’s.

And this whole absurd rant is a nonstarter to boot. I have no idea whether he's talking about Ethan Van Sciver offering him a job, but Chaykin sure is making a terrible mistake to shun a movement that was supposed to be about opposition to censorship, and a call for improved artistic quality.

It's a terrible shame Chaykin remains such a boilerplate leftist, because as a result, some people are bound to wonder whether we should feel sorry for him after the censorship and cancel culture incidents he encountered, because being divisive will not change anything, and only make things worse. What a pity Chaykin won't understand any of that. Goodness knows what'll happen to Image now that they're on the verge of becoming such a farce in more ways than one.

Labels: censorship issues, golden calf of LGBT, history, indie publishers, moonbat writers, politics, violence