Comics Pros and Leftwing Store Owners Collude to Pressure a Small Publisher Into Cancelling Its Relationship with "Ya Boi Zack" of Diversity & Comics

I interviewed "Ya Boi Zack," government name Richard C. Meyer, with Ben Domenech on the Federalist Radio Hour a couple weeks back about his crowd-funded comic book Jawbreakers: Lost Souls.

He later announced that he had secured a publisher, Antarctic Press, which was eager to put the book out and into comic book stores, after the Indiegogo funders had gotten their own editions. "They want this audience," Zack crowed, speaking of his own community of disaffected, largely former comics readers looking for a reason to get back into the pastime.

But the comic book gatekeepers weren't having any of that -- various short fat manbabies, childless weirdoes with 47 roommates, and men in party city wigs began a campaign to pressure the small independent publisher to cancel the run of the book, to keep Zack out of their dwindling club.

Even with its tremendous success, Jawbreakers' distributor Antarctic Press said they won't distribute the series in an ominous post on their Facebook page Friday: "It is the decision of Antarctic Press not to release the comic series Jawbreakers."

Their backtracking had big implications for Meyer and his team, as the book would no longer be distributed to comic book stores. But there was little they could do about it. Antarctic Press was hit by a storm of industry professionals colluding to try to force conservative-authored competition out of the business, which was followed by several retailers threatening to drop all Antarctic Press books from their shelves if the publisher produced Meyer’s book.

The precedent set is disturbing, but this kind of anti-conservative discrimination has been festering in the comics world for a long time.

The author details some of the previous threats and schemes against Meyer, then writes:

The attacks from the industry brought Meyer to national prominence, pushing his YouTube subscriber count to nearly seventy thousand people -- a much higher number than most top selling comic books. Meyer and the #ComicsGate movement became a threat to the left-wing controlled industry overnight. Most of the industry, however, mocked the movement, typically with commentary asking why conservatives don't just make their own books if they hate the current market so much.

The industry should have been careful what they wished for.

...

With a high-profile team of conservatives who had been targeted and blacklisted by the industry, "Jawbreakers: Lost Souls" became a political statement, more than just a book.

To clarify: the book is, reportedly, apolitical by design, but the statement of supporting an apolitical book which wasn't stuffed to the breaking point with stupid #TwitterPolitics was itself a political statement -- give us this kind of escapist entertainment you used to provide.

It has high quality art, a very fun theme, and looks to be one of the top tier books on its own merit, but comic fans had good reason to make sure this book was a mega-success. Consumers wanted to unequivocally tell the industry that the success of Alt-Hero was not just a one-time event. There is a big market ready and waiting for quality content without the social justice narrative.

Jawbreakers made history with one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever. The industry professionals who worked so hard to create a left-wing echo chamber, however, would not let this stand.

Once the project funded, Mark Waid opened fire on Meyer again, posting several rambling Facebook messages. "I have a call in to Antarctic Press," Waid said. "Curious as to how they feel about publishing creators whose marketing strategy is to allegedly (*koff*) encourage their fans to threaten the employees of stores, and/or harass and one-star-review-bomb stores, that don’t offer their product." There is nothing written on Meyer's public social media profiles that come anywhere near the accusations Waid made. Waid did, however, encourage the industry to attack Meyer.

...

These creators inspired retailers to make tweets about refusing to carry Jawbreakers. Left-wing activists then became involved, sending a flurry of hatred against Meyer and his team. "Hate speech is not free speech & fascists like [Meyer] have no place in this diverse, inclusive industry," posted one woman, who claims in her Facebook profile that she works for Planned Parenthood.

...

Meyer [] urged his fans not to blame Antarctic Press, citing they are good people, facing extreme harassment over their association with Jawbreakers. "Mark Waid acted maliciously knowing that he and his cohorts in the industry could bear incredible pressure on this tiny mom-and-pop operation down in San Antonio," Meyer said. Colorist Brett R. Smith went further, saying, "Defamation of character, slander, libel. Marvel must be so proud to have this man on their roster." Mark Waid has since deleted his public social media profiles.

Brett R. Smith did the color work for the Jawbreakers book. He previously did the color work for the comic adaptation of Peter Scheweitzer's Clinton Cash, so you know Marvel isn't itching to hire him. (Though his color work looks damned great.)

Mark Waid, meanwhile, is an extreme leftist who has frequent melt-downs on social media, and, some report, has fat manbaby tantrum syndrome, a sad syndrome whereby a fat, short weak decrepit juvenile gets violently frustrated at fairly minor bothers because he's so fat and weak and can't really do much in life except wail and scream.

Like a short, fat baby.

He also sometimes thinks he has Internet Muscles and suggests he might get Manfully Confrontational with a bigger, younger former Marine if he sees him at a convention, though most people understand, Waid being fat, weak, and hormonally girlish, he would run from even the hint of a confrontation with a man who wasn't his direct underling at the company he works for.

So that's the sort of person Marvel Comics has writing its "action" comics (which contain suspiciously little action any more): A lot of women who don't like action and think it's silly (and so undermine what little "action" they put in the book with meta-jokes and references -- so many pop-culture references! -- in the middle of fights which are supposed to be, you know, consequential and maybe dangerous, but are made into silly Disney XD Sitcom material in order to avoid any support of Toxic Masculinity), and fat aging manbabies who think the ultimate defense in a street-fight is to block someone on twitter.

Anyway: Zack will be fine, given that he didn't turn off his fundraiser and it's now rolled into an online store where you can continue ordering the book, and he's raised over $291,000 and will almost certainly hit $350,000 by the time the book actually publishes.

So: He's not exactly crying (though getting his book into the shops was a big part of his dream here, to make the point that this sort of book can sell in shops -- if the gatekeepers permit such a thing, of course).

But the take-away is that we are now separate countries unfortunately still comingled, and institutions which used to be non-partisan are for hardcore leftwingers only, with blacklists and purges and whisper campaigns and political campaigns aimed at smearing individuals, and they'll even go so far as to possibly flirt with a tortious interference with a business relationship lawsuit to keep the deplorables out.

We will have to create our own parallel structures entirely.

Ethan Van Sciver, for example, left DC Comics recently. He says it was by his own choice, that he needed a break and wanted to try the same thing Zack was trying, revisiting his first creator-owned character Cyberfrog and self-publishing through Kickstarter or Indiegogo. To be honest, I don't know if he's being completely straight when he says this was entirely of his own choosing: DC had gotten pissy with him posting political stuff online, something they seem to not mind when the political content is hard leftwing, and also maybe for being a friend of Zack's/Meyer's.

And who knows, maybe they decided to take a break from each other, for a while, once the controversies settle.

John Malin, the artist for Jawbreakers: Lost Souls, seemed to have lost his career after Marvel after noting, quite fairly, that, in current year, the X-Men are not stand-ins for minorities, but rather that the X-Men are stand-ins for normies -- non-ultra-leftwing militant Maoists -- and the Social Justice Warriors are the Nazi-types harassing them.

Apparently at Marvel you can claim fifty thousand times that the X-Men are victims of the mutant-hating Trump voters, and put the #WokeRacist Ta-Naheshi Coates on the Captain America book (with a debut issue suggesting that the heroes facing down the Trump voter stand-ins, Hydra, are black-clad members of Antifa), but if you flip the script and say no, the X-Men are the normies harassed by the Social Justice Warrior hate mobs, you won't be asked to draw for Marvel any longer.

So that's where we are. The conversation is over and the heretics will be purged and made to walk into the desert.

And that's why I push the idea of boycotting and bankrupting these corrupt propaganda outfits.

On that note, if you're a commenter here and you've done your own excursions into creative endeavors outside of the leftist controlled institutions -- I mean mainly the authors, but I'm sure there are others who've done creative things outside of writing -- by all means, give your books/efforts a plug and a link!

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:15 PM

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