The Four Color Media Monitor

I once wrote about a writer named Kayden Phoenix, who was involved in a project titled A La Brava, which appears to be politically motivated. Now, as announced by the Hollywood Reporter, she's working on a spinoff of a comic called Night of the Cadillacs, titled Lip Stick Cliqa:

The vampire comic Night of the Cadillacs was plotted out years ago on bar napkins around California’s San Fernando Valley. So it’s fitting that the new spinoff, Lip Stick Cliqa, has its roots in the Valley, too.

Night of the Cadillacs co-creator Sean E Demott was driving around, and pulled into Galaxy Comics, a comic shop in the Valley he’d never before visited. He wanted to see if it carried Night of the Cadillacs, the 2021 book centering on star-crossed lovers, with a member of a supernatural gang breaking away from his crew to go on the run with a human young woman.

Inside the store, Kayden Phoenix was signing copies of her book A la Brava, which stars a Latina superhero team. “I was like, ‘Who are you and what are these cool books you’ve created ?,'” recalls Demott. “I spent a few months pitching her our crazy project and we were fortunate enough to collaborate with her.”

The result of that collaboration is Lip Stick Cliqa, a three-part series that centers on an all-female Vampire chola gang in the midst of a turf battle in which they must defend their neighborhood and avenge their family’s honor. The action leaves blood in its wake. Lip Stick Cliqa hails from Execution Posse, a publishing and IP holding company that styles itself as a punk rock Marvel.

“They had a clear vision of the Lip Stick Cliqa and fully supported me in honoring my Chicana culture,” says Phoenix, who wrote all three issues.

It's great to honor Latin American culture, but here, I think it's regrettable the project has to be built around the darkness cliche, which is no better than ultra-leftist agendas the creator previously worked on. What makes the vampire genre better than the comedy genre, which has sadly become very watered down and potentially kicked to the curb in the past decade, because of PC?

Since we're on the topic, I also found this CNBC article about a millennial, as they describe her (and I'd written about her creations 5 years ago), who didn't see diverse women represented in comicdom, so she produced one for that purpose, and some of the viewpoints she gives here are interesting:

Jazmin Truesdale has always loved reading comic books. But as she grew up, she noticed that female superheroes weren’t getting the same attention, storylines or film adaptations that male superheroes were. So she created her own diverse, all-women superhero universe — and it’s now her primary source of income. [...]

Though finding her place in the business and finance world was hard, Truesdale found joy in storytelling and being creative. So she decided to make a career out of it — and in 2013, Aza Comics was born. [...]

Truesdale’s book series, “The Keepers,” takes readers into the Aza Universe and the adventures of five diverse women heroes: Kala, Fenna, Ixchel, Adanna and Amaya. She drew inspiration for these characters from her own personal relationships and some of her favorite actresses, like Maria Felix, Janet Jackson, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and Dorothy Dandridge.

“I took bits and pieces of their personalities and put them together to create these characters. My friend circle is very diverse. I have a lot of Latina and South Asian friends. And I know if I want to see myself [in comics], they want to see themselves too,” Truesdale explains. “So I thought, why don’t I have a group of girls from different parts of the world, they come together, and they’re just kicking butt all day, every day, taking names and getting into shenanigans like women do.”

To better bring her stories to life, she taught herself skills like 3D art, photoshop and animation, as well as studied different genres of writing from comedy to mystery. [...]

Truesdale also explored a career in personal training and fitness — both themes that she’s now incorporating into her storytelling.

“Heart health is super important. That’s one of the main killers of women. So I’m trying to utilize my characters to inspire healthy habits and healthy lifestyles. I do superhero workouts, where you actually get to see, based on each character and maybe their power, a custom workout for that particular character that you can follow.” [...]

Furthermore, she says what makes her unique is her ability to empower women without putting down men.

“One thing that guys have said they found interesting with the comics is that I don’t man-bash. And I’m like, women are amazing. I don’t need to man-bash … it’s not necessary. And as much as I love writing about and supporting women, having men support as well is what helps us grow and that helps to reeducate them. Because being alongside a powerful woman is not emasculating, it only makes you stronger.”

Now certainly, if she avoids man-bashing, that's something to appreciate too, along with her belief in good health. But I took a look at the Aza site, and discovered that Truesdale is also, most unfortunately, a leftist who's attacked Donald Trump and even supports Black Lives Matter, the propaganda movement that caused only so much violence and urban riots 3 years ago, and even before all that, there was controversy over their platforms. Larry Elder's also taken issue with them, and how they've more harm than good. Yet Truesdale sees this as a movement worth backing? It should be noted BLM also recieved billions of dollars from corporations, including the now collapsing Silicon Valley Bank, yet nobody like Truesdale ever considers what phonies they really are.

Because of this, it's very difficult to fully support the lady's products, since she's oblivious to the dark side of leftism, and if anything, this forces one to have to take her work with a grain of salt. A real shame she's given her backing to charlatans who aren't the "heroes" they want everybody to think they are.

Labels: indie publishers, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, violence