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| Description: Cover for the book "The Animated Brain: An Anthology of Mental Health Experiences In The Animation & Comics Industries" |
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| Description: A panel from a Captain America story from the 1970s, As superhero Falcon looks on,Captain America walks off dejectedly. Caption reads: "This man is now crushed inside. Like other Americans, each in his own way he has seen his trust mocked. And this man is Captain America." |
Per Cincinnati CityBeat, Spencer's 2005 campaign blog called on the mayor of Cincinnati to use eminent domain against Mary Magdalene House (a homeless shelter) and the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.
Here's Spencer: "It's time to stop playing around and get tough here. ... The city must use all of its powers to protect the civic and financial investments that have been made in the area. The glut of social services that encourage panhandling in the district must be addressed."
You read that correctly. Nick Spencer described organizations dedicated to helping homeless people as a "glut of social services that encourage panhandling."He also worked for John McCain's campaign. Some may argue that Spencer is just running on a platform similar to many Republicans, so it's not so unusual, right? He's just echoing an official party platform! You might be able to say that about his policy ideas... but not so much about his racist blogging about black people as thugs, drug dealers, and at one point comparing black folks to being worse than stray dogs! As Cincinatti Black Blog covered at the time of Spencer's campaign, he wrote on his blog stuff after a highway shooting like this, emphasis mine:
Lots of blame to throw around here. Let's try this one: Ross Love. To hell with that guy. He owns the WIZ [a local radio station], then tries to walk around town like he's such an upstanding citizen... maybe you should look into that shit you've got on heavy rotation over at your station. You know, like "Ridin' Dirty" a song about drug dealers trying not to get caught by the cops while they've got crack in the car...What Spencer didn't mention was that Ross Love had sold the radio station 5 years earlier, that "Ridin' Dirty" was about police brutality, that "Ridin' Dirty" also aired on a Clear Channel radio station affiliate run by a white owner that Spencer never called out, and The Ritz was a club that directly competed with a bar that Spencer owned at the time. Oh, and the song was never connected to the shooting in any way by authorities. He was also growing increasingly paranoid, convinced that "thugs and prostitutes" were waiting to shoot at him and hiding guns in trash cans.
And let's give it up one more time for The Ritz ownership [a local club with mostly black clientele]...
I love going to IHOP after we close up the bar, and the place has a big post-Ritz crowd there around the same time... I see stray dogs act with more survival instinct than some of the Ritz clientele.
Bad news... Jump Cafe' space on Main may be leased out to the owners of The Ritz in Roselawn. I'm not kidding-- just when you thought thing couldn't get any worse. The neighborhood is going to have to mobilize in a big way to prevent this from happening... I don't have any hesitation in saying this: if they move in, we go.Writer Kieran Shiach, who also did a great recap of Hydra Cap and related issues earlier this year, sums up my feelings on this:
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| Image Description: Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII drawn as a black male with blond locs. Part of a fan art series by artist Nikolas Draper-Ivey |
...[S]ome people on my page had a problem with me drawing black people because I, a black man, was drawing far too many of them (and not as stereotypes or tropes) when I’m known for having diverse character designs in the first place.
I literally got asked, “Do you ever draw white people?” And “You only draw black guys. Why?” In the same morning and I’m like, “Oh so this is a PROBLEM now?” Anyone that has seen my work knows that I draw people from all over.
...if me drawing people of color as characters and not stereotypes and over used tropes offends you, then get ready to hate my black ass then, because I’m not about to sit by and let us not be represented in a respectful, uplifting and positive light anymore...Rather than letting the haters get him down, though, he used all that salt to work on some truly awesome fan art and give his take on the main cast of the Squaresoft RPG Final Fantasy VII. Why'd he chose that game? As Draper-Ivey put it, "I specifically chose FFVII because it’s already a diverse cast and to Square Enix’s credit, you could literally tell the same story with these designs."
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| Cover to Secret Empire #0. Art by Mark Brooks. |
Nick Spencer took to twitter with all the class you'd expect:We've also been asked to change our store logos to Hydra symbols. My staff are LGBTQ, Jewish, or both. We are no longer hand-selling Marvel. https://t.co/gQnBfBZC8L— Glamour Toad 🌈🐸🌈 (@NickiColey) April 20, 2017
Then again, for a dude making his living writing super heroes, Nick Spencer doesn't seem to have the greatest grasp of them. Like when he rushed to twitter to give his hot take on Nazis getting punched in public:Haters upon seeing the advance reviews for SECRET EMPIRE 0 pic.twitter.com/lFU0RStBd6— Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) March 23, 2017
Last week, I talked about how Marvel's VP of Sales tried to blame "diversity" for poor comic book sales, and how that assertion is utter bullshit. itch.io user spacetwinks was pretty pissed off about that assertion too, and put together a thorough and damning analysis and response, as described thus:@nickspencer Nick....you just described what a superhero is.— ANTHONY OLIVEIRA (@meakoopa) April 17, 2017
This did not sit well with others, the idea that retailers and Marvel would blame these books for low sales - and it didn't sit well with me, either. So I've hunkered down and put in the hours researching sales data reaching back over a decade in Marvel, and looked for what could possibly be the true culprit in their sales problems.It's offered as a pay what you want download, and is a very insightful read. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
"Shut The Fuck Up, Marvel" is a nearly 30k long essay, a spiritual sequel to The Problems With Comics, a deep dive into the true issues with Marvel's economics and business - and how an obsession with short term profit, the constant renumbering and relaunches and events, all compounded by a complete inability to understand basic marketing techniques or outside audiences, has absolutely destroyed the sales stability of many of their former best selling books, all as they condescend to those who criticize them on their stories, or on how they try to sell comics.
Update: Wow, this post is starting to blow up! My hosting is getting slammed! So if you liked this article and want to see more, you can help support it by pledging a buck or more to my Patreon or by tossing some spare change in the virtual tip jar to the right. Thanks!
Just to be clear, “diversity” has very little to do with the drop in sales in Marvel’s top 10 books. Only three (“The Mighty Thor,” “Invincible Iron Man” and “Black Panther”) can be considered “diverse,” in that they star a lead character who is a woman or a person of color. The rest are series starring white male heroes or teams made up predominantly of white male heroes. These are Marvel’s traditional A-list heroes, being written and drawn by A-list writers and artists (almost all of whom are themselves white men), and yet they are floundering...
While Marvel has admittedly had some misses among its “diverse” titles, it has also had some genuine hits. “The Mighty Thor” remains Marvel’s No. 2=selling ongoing superhero series. “Black Panther” has been a solid hit as well, selling enough single issues to be in Marvel’s top 10, and enough trades to make the bestseller lists. “Invincible Iron Man” (starring Riri Williams) is also in the top 10, showing very little attrition from writer Brian Micahel Bendis’ pre-“Civil War II” series. “Spider-Man” is close behind, selling about 5,000 more copies than Miles Morales’ pre-“Secret Wars” series.”Spider-Gwen” and “All-New Wolverine” are also both doing well, with more than 29,000 copies sold in February for both titles. And then there’s “Ms. Marvel” and “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl,” two series whose trades have also made the bestsellers lists.
Having dug into the data, it’s become clear that diversity is not hurting Marvel. The truth is, Marvel’s “diverse” titles actually sell decently.So if Marvel's more diverse offerings are actually selling decently, bringing in newer clintele and winning awards... then what's up with declining sales? Professionals and fans on twitter have a few ideas:
An idiotic conclusion, @Marvel. I stopped buying your books because of the high price & event fatigue not diversity. https://t.co/uysUOwOBkh— Anthony John Agnello (@ajohnagnello) March 31, 2017
Other industry analyses have pointed out stumbling blocks that Marvel has seemed to put in its own way, like trying to make its Inhumans line-up replace the X-Men series while X-Men hemorrhages sales and the Inhumans branding repeats many of the same mistakes of the X-Men before them. The Nerdist has an excellent take-down of how diverse casts written by the same ol' roster of white men leads to a lot of tone-deaf bullcrap that can end up alienating readers old AND new:Marvel thinks diversity is ruining their sales? Idk, MAYBE turning Captain America, a worldwide symbol, into a nazi has something to do— ㅤmanu (@gecrgeblagden) April 2, 2017
When Brian Michael Bendis writes Miles Morales as being upset with a fan who mentions his black heritage, or when Nick Spencer has Sam Wilson apologize to Steve Rogers for any activism-fueled anger he may have displayed in the past, it comes off as tone-deaf and leaves readers understandably less than thrilled. The same comic features multi-ethnic villains who are parodies of the “Social Justice Warrior” stereotype, who shout phrases like “You should be an ally, not helping to defend oppression culture!” and “Consider this your trigger warning!” as they throw grenades at Sam...G. Williow Wilson, the lead behind the currently Hugo-nominated Ms. Marvel points out a few things about authenticity, new audiences, changing markets and industry expectations:
Let’s also remember SHIELD #8 (2015), written by Mark Waid, where a black woman viewing her young son’s corpse remarks, “He was no angel“—the same phrase used to vindicate Michael Brown’s murder.
What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this... Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is the world...
Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away.
The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.That last point is something important to remember as far as sales. The relaunched Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (which I covered here back in 2015) only sells a few thousand issues a month... but its trade paperbacks and graphic novel collections sells like hotcakes to little kids via Scholastic Book Fairs. The market is changing, how comics are sold are changing, and the audience is changing. As Alex Brown puts it on Tor.com:
Blaming readers for not buying diverse comics despite the clamor for more is a false narrative. Many of the fans attracted to “diverse” titles are newbies and engage in comics very differently from longtime fans. For a variety of reasons, they tend to wait for the trades or buy digital issues rather than print. The latter is especially true for young adults who generally share digital (and yes, often pirated) issues. Yet the comics industry derives all of its value from how many print issues Diamond Distributors shipped to stores, not from how many issues, trades, or digital copies were actually purchased by readers. Every comics publisher is struggling to walk that customer-centric tightrope, but only Marvel is dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot, then blame the rope for their fall.Looking at a diversity initiative as the beginning and end of what's needed to help improve the state of comics is short-sighted and wrong-headed. Instead of just having the same white men tell stories with some characters of color here and there, there should be structure in place for minority writers and artists and creators to tell the stories they want to a mainstream audience. Diversity as the final and only goal is a hollow act that does nothing but reinforce whiteness and the status quo as the default. That's not the world we live in, so why so worlds we get to make up have to be that way? Free your mind, and the audience will follow.
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| Description: A young black boy faces the camera, giggling. He closes his eyes, then disappears with a puff of black smoke. He reappears on the other side of the room, suddenly reappearing in front of his mother, who drops the bag of groceries she was holding in surprise. |
“Traditionally in comics and really most stories, the protagonist is the one with the powers,” said Piperberg. “You see the world through the eyes of the character with all the abilities usually because they are immediately the most exciting and/or interesting person in the story.”
... “I think a lot of people still don’t get that The Talk is a real thing that black families have to have,” said Piperberg. He admitted that initially the parallels weren’t all that clear to him either. “I think it’s really important to step out of my bubble of privilege to see what’s really going on. To discover and look at injustices that have been swept under the rug, or worse, accepted as the norm by society.”The first issue of Raising Dion is available online to read for free.
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| Description: A caucasian girl with blond hair poses in her home made Ms. Marvel costume- a blue tunic emblazoned with a lightning bolt over a red shirt & cape. |
My daughter was recently invited to a Superhero themed birthday party for Thor Odinson. Naturally she leaped at the opportunity. As I’m currently reading Marvel comics with my daughter at bedtime, I thought it to be perfectly fitting that she goes as the one and only Ms. Marvel. I searched my local Forbidden Planet and to no surprise I found nothing there. ‘No biggie’, it was a long shot, but I’m sure Amazon.co.uk would have something. I was even more disappointed to find the results for girl super hero fans under the search ‘ms.marvel girls outfit’. It started off ok, the first search result being a Spider Girl outfit, closely followed by Captain America girl’s outfit, but that’s where the options stop for 6 year olds. Second page of results give a Spider Girl outfit again but this time in pink (really?) and page three, Sexy Batgirl and Sexy Red Riding Hood, which I don’t need to go into detail over.
OK, time to rack up the dad points here. There’s only one way Ms. Marvel is going to celebrate Thor’s 6th birthday and that means I’ve got to make one. A flustered trip round Croydon resulted with a blue dress (reduced from £60 to £10), the yellow fabric from a pillow (£3), a glittery blue mask (£2) and some cheap red polyester (£2, per foot). A further expense being getting the dress taken in (£18) and the tights and top we already had. I exercised my sewing machine skills and the result, you see above. £32 worth of work pad off in my view. Providing one goes down this route in the future I wish you all success in buying a blue dress in the first place, let alone one in the right size.
When it finally came together, my little one fell in love with it. With hindsight, I’m glad I made it over buying one already put together, but I write this not as a rant but as a plea to make merch more girl inclusive. Ms. Marvel is an incredible concept who empowers a multi-cultural demographic and to be honest, this needs to be pushed harder!!!
I love the avengers as much as the next guy and it’s great that we get to buy cool toys that allow us to shoot silly string webbing from our wrists, or smash things with over sized green fists, but maybe Ms. Marvel Embiggend Fists is what we need to see on the shelves AS WELL AS her angry green counterparts. But should the merch for all of Marvel toys be so male-centric? It may be a shame that this is the truth, but I believe this post could be the start of something good, if even it gets the wheels turning a few degrees.
Yours in hope
Captain Milkshake
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| Description: A copy of "All Star Comics #3" encased in a protective sealed cover. |
Writing about Strange Fruit #1 has been a long time coming... since it was announced on February 20th — Dwayne McDuffie’s birthday. For readers who are unaware, Dwayne McDuffie was one of the most prominent black comics writers and, arguably, one of the most prominent black activists working within the industry. He is one of the few faces that looks like mine whose work specifically aimed to promote other faces like mine in the comics — on the page and off it — and for that alone, he represents a lot. And his birthday was the day BOOM! Studios elected to announce that two white men would be writing and drawing a title about the racist South called Strange Fruit.The entire article is a great read and review of the comic itself.
...No, seriously, stop a second and look at this constellation of events. This comic, announced on Dwayne McDuffie’s birthday, about racism in the South by two white men is being marketed as a “deeply personal passion project.” Do I need to go into why I have some questions about why a story about racism is deeply personal to white people? Do I need to explain why I think that marketing choice was tone-deaf and perhaps even toeing the line into disrespect? Do I need to air my concerns about what that indicates about who this book is being marketed to and why I suspect it is not people who look like me?
I would think that you, who spend so much time pointing out the flaws and problematic areas in other people’s work, would be able to take one silly comic directed at your work and others like it. Normally I wouldn’t respond to this kind of thing publicly, but I’ll make an exception since you called me a shit.Diaz has done many examples of comic and media criticism, notable among them being his redesigns of iconic DC Comics super heroes and concept art he made of Zelda as the lead character in a video game inspired, he said, by Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games. And while Cagle parody comic wasn't specifically aimed at Diaz, it most certainly was inspired by a tumblr post (since deleted, see cached copy here) by him where he said "Inspired by some amputee photo shoots, I decided to try my hand at some cyborg-themed pinup sketches with Kim, a sort of celebration of the female form and taking agency over one’s body." Which is pretty ridiculous in the face of it, more so when you see the pin ups and his justification for drawing them (and that's leaving aide his kind of creepy "being disabled is totally an opportunity for the transhumanism movement). That fact that he deleted it shows that he recognizes that he messed up somewhere along the line, but instead of addressing it, he just vague-tweeted about it for a while.
There’s a place for everything, and an artist has the right to create whatever they want to create, for whatever ends they choose. What I have a problem with is that your comic is not presented as a science fiction comic with a dash of sexy thrills, but rather as a feminist narrative in support of powerful independent women. You've made it clear on many occasions that you don’t consider your work to be objectifying or sexist. I have a problem with cheesecake-style art being presented as something feminist, empowering, enlightened- something made “for women”, when it’s clearly made for men.You’re allowed to make art with male gaze. But please call a spade a spade...Honestly, I don't have any sympathy for Aaron Diaz, nor do I have any sympathy for his position nor his reactions. He got called out for his messed up behavior and has fired back with sadly-all-too-typical defensiveness.
I don’t think I've seen a single page of Dresden Codak that doesn't feature a woman posed in a male-gazey way, with loving focus on her ass or cleavage, or wearing a sexual costume, or in some situation that puts her in a compromising position (like the most recent page in which Kimiko's clothing is burned off of her body, which has happened at least twice in the series’ run.) I have a very hard time believing that these details are accidental.
...Aaron, you can do whatever you want with your own comic. However, if you really do care about female characters in media, or care to know why so many people seem to be angry with you about it, I would do one of two things. If you don’t want your comic to present its female characters in a borderline-erotic light, then stop doing that. If you don’t mind that, then by all means continue, but please just admit that you like drawing t&a and that it’s not particularly empowering, or feminist, or a celebration of personal agency. As a woman, I resent being told that men’s eye candy is actually meant to uplift me and that I should celebrate it.
So men who adamantly refuse to believe that their own gender privilege may have resulted in a variably-applied resistance to accepting a woman's objection or approach as valid -- to believe a woman when she speaks, to allow that what she is saying is true, even if they have not experienced precisely what she has experienced -- are displaying, at best, a touch of willful ignorance. They are privileging their own feelings and desires over women's truths, lives, stories, and experiences. And the end result doesn't tend to be very flattering.
yesterday!
As Spark, the world’s youngest superhero, she’s a junior member of a superhero team while also trying to live a normal life. Can Lucia juggle her friends and family while also saving the world from super villains? We’re posting a 15-page standalone comic here to give readers an idea of what the book would be like.
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| Miles Morales, the current Marvel Ultimates' Spider-Man. Image courtesy of Marvel Comics Group. |
There’s a really interesting conversation happening about comic books and diversity. And it’s largely happening online. Producer Daisy Rosario takes us to Special Edition NYC, a comic book convention, to talk to fans and creators and bring you an overview of just how the conversation is shaping up. People who already follow comics are likely very aware, but for the people who maybe see the movies and don’t know much else, this is a chance to hear it right out of the mouths of the people who are living this. As is true in other art forms, such as film and music, there are a lot of diverse creators making their work independently and with smaller companies. But we are focusing on well-known superhero comics, the type that have a greater reach, for the purposes of this story. First we meet some fans. Then we talk to David Marquez, the artist who draws Miles Morales aka Ultimate Spider-Man. Later we meet Rachel Edidin, former comic book editor for Dark Horse Comics. She is also a writer, podcaster and pop culture journalist who has covered comics, as well as other topics for Wired magazine and more.
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| Inage courtesy of Bleeding Cool |
I am turning 60 years old next March. I mention that major turning point in my life only because the last time that I did not attend a San Diego Comic-Con, I was 17 years old, and still in high school. Since I graduated, for all 42 years of my adult life, I have committed the heart of each of my summers to my personal obsession with experiencing the joys of the San Diego Comic-Con. I even passed this personal passion on my part on to my four daughters, all of whom spent their entire childhoods delightedly roaming the halls of the various incarnations of this great comics convention.
Sadly, that entire blessed reality may need to end after this year’s show closes tomorrow evening. I have not yet found the courage to reach my final decision, but my best estimate is that, at our current rate of sales, we will suffer a loss of $10,000 at this year’s show. As much as I like being a part of this wonderful gathering, I simply do not have the money to be able to pay $10,000 out of my own pocket for the privilege of providing the fans here with comic books. After 42 consecutive years in a row, it may finally (at long last…) be time for me to bid San Diego good-bye, forever.Before I go further, I would encourage those of you who have not yet read my newsletter from yesterday to first read my analysis of some of the seismic changes that have contributed to our loss. The one factor that I would ask that you especially note when you read my first essay is the fact that our entire 7-booth display that we are operating at this year’s San Diego convention was first premiered six weeks ago, at the Denver Comic-Con. Despite our having about 20,000 fewer comics available in Denver, and that convention being only three days long (with half the number of attendees as San Diego…), our sales per hour in Denver were double (!) what they are here. That made all the difference, as we turned a reasonable profit in Denver, as opposed to a massive loss in San Diego.
So how could an extremely successful back issue comics booth in Denver become so stunningly unsuccessful in San Diego? Because in Denver we were not being utterly crushed by the very publishers whose goods we sell on a daily basis. In a nutshell, the comics publishers with booths at the San Diego convention have so cleverly exploited the greed and avarice of comics fans through limited edition publications that are only available through their own booths, that there is no longer enough disposable income left in the room to sustain us. A sad state of affairs, but also completely true.
To illustrate my point, I had the leader of one of the major comics publishing houses stop by our booth on the way out the door last evening. This man has been our friend and ally for decades. He was absolutely ebullient yesterday evening in describing the amazing success that they were experiencing in their booth as a result of selling vast quantities of exclusive variants. I felt more than a little embarrassment and shame when I had to rain on his parade, by pointing out to him that the collective effect of his actions (combined with the other publishers and manufacturers at the show…) was devastating our sales. My response was not at all what he expected to hear. But as the validity of what I was expressing became clear, I could see awareness dawning in his eyes.All of the above having been said, my publisher friend is an extremely astute man, so he quickly understood the unintended consequences of his actions. Given that he was only seeking to cover his own costs of exhibiting in this dreadfully expensive venue, however, he could muster no material reply to my pain. In many regards, that was the most depressing aspect of this entire fiasco. Being obviated by lifelong friends is particularly galling, especially when we it is clear that we are nothing more than collateral damage, in a battle being waged by giants.So where does this leave us? As much as I hate to admit this, it now seems obvious to me now that we finally have to end a lifetime of exhibiting at San Diego, and instead seek out relatively popular comics conventions in other cities. Especially conventions where our publisher friends choose to not exhibit. Doesn’t that thought just drip with irony? Comics publishers have evolved to become toxic to their own retailers. Who would ever have thought that would happen? Even with all my many years of experience, I simply cannot believe that our world has now been so perverted by the mania for exclusive variants, that comics retailers can now only survive in the absence of the very publishers we support. No matter how you look at it, this is a profoundly sad day.
It was a mess. There was Chuck, complaining to a solitary customer about losing money hand over fist and blaming it on the con exclusives, while the exclusives Mile High were selling were pretty difficult to see or to find. This year they didn't bring any trades either. There also weren't any big ticket items like we saw the year that Spurlock made his film. I browsed the back issues for books to fill out my collection, but I was appalled by most of the prices: $6 for a comic book issue I could probably find at my LCS for fifty cents... The Mile High Comics booth was nearly empty all weekend while other booths with half-priced trades and comics marked-down below cover-price were incessantly swarmed with ravenous comics readers. These people weren't mobbing these booths for exclusives, as Chuck posited. They were just looking for something good and affordable to read. Many of these bustling booths didn't even have exclusives. It wasn't until Sunday, the final day of the con, that Chuck put out a sale sign, and guess what--business started booming for him as well. But it was too little, too late.And while Rozanski has talked about leaving SDCC for good before, this time it may stick. What did Horn think?
Part of me thinks, "Good riddance. That's a huge booth that's going to open up and maybe Dynamite Entertainment or Valiant will finally have a place to make their own in the exhibit hall. Or maybe a comics megastore like Mile High but with fair prices will move in. This could be a really great thing."
