Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 238

I'm asking you once again, please stop being insane

HELLO AGAIN WORLD

It’s been a discouraging week in comics, but a beautiful week for me otherwise. Weather is great. Saw some friends (rare when you relocate 11k miles from your home). Learned (sorta) some new skills. I hope your week was productive and fulfilling.

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THERE’S GONNA BE SOME BUMMER TALK, BUT FIRST

Here’s some really not-bummer content to chew on.

The ANTIOCH trade will be in stores soon. 12/27, to be exact. Walk into your shop and purchase one. If they don’t have a copy they will order you one.

I’ve gone on and on in this newsletter about the challenges that popped up during production of this series. And that’s all true. But it’s not what matters. All that matters is the quality of the book. And that is, in my view, unassailable. This is what I love in comics. Characters you’ll care about interacting in ways that feel real in situations that test them and payoff in meaningful ways. That’s it. Action-adventure, superhero, prison story inspired by 90s anime. The final 22 pages are Marco’s finest to date. Really next-level comic book bombast.

It’s a ride. Pick up a copy the moment it drops.

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CONGRATS, YOU BUMMED ME OUT

I am a grown man with a family, so I avoid ‘fragile’ entirely and dodge ‘effected’ whenever possible. But you got me, comics. This week you really put me in a mood.

It started with a 50sec clip of a comic shop owner ranting. He was bemoaning the lack of reverence new creators have for what came before and how that’s most reflected in how they write established characters. Paraphrasing: “Big Two comics are shit at the moment and no small part of it is readers come for one thing and you give them another.” In his view, many of the current creators write themselves into the stories and insist that characters adopt their views.

Alright. A widely held belief. Maybe you share it, maybe you don’t. But difficult to imagine a world where it’s controversial.

Somehow, it became controversial. Despite making no political statement of any kind, people on Twitter assumed the man’s politics. Despite revealing nothing about the health of his store, people on Twitter assumed he was a bitter failure. Despite the original tweet making it clear the man was a 30-year-comic retailer, people on Twitter assumed he doesn’t know the business.

It was weird, man.

Then legitimate slobs on Twitter thought the clearest path to victory was denigrating the man’s looks. It became open season on Comic Book Guy. That was truly bizarre. We’re an industry of 4s and then when we disagree with a guy we make ‘male model’ part of his job description.

A number of old guard pros were sympathetic to the man. They are from the era where a relationship with retailers is not just essential for success, but unavoidable on just a practical level. They sent kind messages. Mark Millar jumped in to defend the man and invite him for a chat.

The response from the new class was not as warm. Which, I suppose, makes sense. The man was insulting their work, after all. Defensiveness comes naturally to some and nobody likes the sting of informed criticism.

I’d like to talk about a specific aspect of this whole thing. One that some pros are discussing behind the scenes, but don’t want the hassle that comes with saying it aloud. And that is:

None of the people shitting on the guy are where they wanna be in their careers.

The non-nuts in the comic business watched this go down and couldn’t believe who the fuck was talking.

Dudes who washed out. Dudes who haven’t produced meaningful work in a decade. Dudes who never made work worth reading.

It was a who’s who of losers. And what made it unbearably pathetic was how tactical it all was. People who I know know better were jumping in because they thought it would buy them points with the right people.

The right people being the editors who don’t call them back. And the equally bitter peers who would step over them to receive that hypothetical phone call.

I watched two completely cashed-out washed-out never-gonna-reclaim-what-they-had buffoons go on about this bullshit. Two people who had potential at one point and now subsist off commissions while waiting for that phone to ring.

I’m not perfect. I’m way lazier than I’d like to be. But if I had a moment or a window and then fell off, I wouldn’t signal my surrender by blaming a retailer.

I’ve never met a creator who wasn’t irritated by retailer decisions. And I’ve never met a retailer who wasn’t irritated by creator decisions. It’s called being in business. But I’d love to know what the crime was in saying “my customers don’t like this shit, and I think I know why.”

Let’s briefly talk about the man’s claims.

They’re true. Full stop. Which doesn’t mean you’ve assign it the same value judgement he does. You can say “I think comics have a different sensibility than in the past and I’m grateful for it.” You can say “it suits my tastes.” You can say “it’s an interesting evolution of the medium.” You can say “it reflects broader cultural shifts and in that respect is inevitable.”

But what you can’t say is “current creators write characters the same as creators did 30 years ago.” Any serious person who has been reading comics knows that is not true.

And you can deflect the man’s allegations of “and this hurts sales” by listing all the other problems comics has. But what you can’t do is call him a liar for describing a cause-and-effect relationship he’s watched play out in his bottom line. He’s the one who sells the fucking things.

I don’t think I’ve seen comics in an uglier place than right now. Whatever cultural winds are blowing, it’s causing people to act in a way they will regret. They are lashing out in ridiculous and maladaptive ways.

None of these creators are happy with their careers. If you’re gonna advertise that fact, at least make it constructive. Sucking dong to get a 4-issue Jubilee series isn’t the ladder they think it is.

Get yourself some creator-owned work that reflects your actual tastes and ween yourself off the corporate tit that goes cold on you for years at a time.

If you love the way comics are written in 2023, then own that. Say you love it and list the reasons you love it. But stop being flat-earthers about the market. People who read comics are reading them less. Maybe the characters being unrecognizable is part of that. Deal in reality.

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I GOT MYSELF IN A MOOD WRITING ALL THAT

So I’ll see myself out. But before I do, I’d like to give us both some perspective here.

The Pogues were one of the first bands that roped me into music. A comics tie-in here, I was exposed to the band by the staff at FantaCo comics who would play it in the store. Age twelve, I checked all the albums out of the Bethlehem public library and the impact was profound. The band’s singer, Shane MacGowan, has been an inspiration on what I do since I first involved myself in music.

Most people would know the band, and MacGowan, best from ‘Fairytale of New York’, maybe the only Christmas radio standard of the past 40 years that isn’t horrendous.

Nobody was particularly shocked at his death. He was a high-order self-abuser, with alcohol and heroin being unfortunately the center of his life for much of his life.

But it being anticipated doesn’t render it any less sad an occasion. I did not expect to be so moved, but here I am. I do not care for funerals or the way we talk about successful dead people. My personal tastes would push every sad thing to the private sphere. But if you’re gonna have a funeral, MacGowan’s was a decent model. His music was performed. People cried a little. Danced a little. I think more than anything, they just reflected on how deep a crater music and lyrics can leave in you.

To people in comics, you have the potential be remembered in this way.

But it won’t come from variant covers and meat-riding editors.

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THAT’S IT FOR ME

I’ll remind you a few more times about ANTIOCH. We’re selling through every copy and then dropping new work on you.

And I’ll have some work to show you from Paul soon. I looked over the first two issues of a new thing we’re doing. Goddamn, man. The pure storytelling chops on that man.

Oh, here’s some videos to check out from this week.

Hope you have a good week. Hope we can all shake this weird era of fighting over the shadow of the memory of scraps, and actually go out there and achieve things. The man is the arena. Do for self.