Being a Bully Is Always the Wrong Answer

So here and there, hither and yon, I've seen the term Comicsgate pop up on social media and a variety of pop culture websites. I assumed that like the similarly named Gamergate, this was not a good thing.

Basically, as I understood it, Gamergate involved a bunch of guys with small minds and smaller dicks unable to wrap their heads around the idea that gamers could be girls as well as boys, resulting in a lot of mindless, hateful trolling against women who just wanted a good time playing video and online games but dang, they have tits so no, they can't. 

So I'm thinking Comicsgate involves some of the same small levels of brutal animalistic misogyny on display in the darker dregs of the gaming community. 


Well, mostly it is. The ire of Comicsgate is provoked by anything smacking of leftist political social justice muckety mockery that dares to make its presence known in their precious comic books.   

But mostly, Comicsgate is the he-man woman's haters club of the comic book community. 

“Damn it! We want a highly sexualized Spider-Woman!" 

"Why can’t you precious snowflakes take a little violence against Batgirl?"

"We don’t want writer Chelsea Crain’s feminist agenda!”  

You know, that sort of shit.

There is I think a proprietary instinct when it comes to comics fandom, steadfastly keeping the faith while all other people found other things to be interested in. I think there is this element of fandom that that says, “Hey, we’ve been keeping comic books alive for years without any help. And now other people want to come in and tell us that everything has to be different now?”  

Hey guys, you need to know this: other people are coming in and everything is different now. 

Here’s the thing: the comic book industry cannot rely on the same white boy demographic if it wants to survive. Comic books need to reach out to women. And comics needs to reach out further and deeper, to people of color, of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds, to different sexual orientations and gender identities.

That means that both the characters on the pages and the creative people who bring those characters to life need to reflect that wide and varied audience.  

You might not like it but that’s no reason to treat people like shit over it.  

Get a load of this especially egregious example. 

July 2017,  Flo Steinberg died.  She was a long time fixture in the Marvel bullpen. She kept the company running. She got the scripts and the art coming in and the paychecks going out. It may have said "Stan Lee Presents..." on the masthead but it was Flo Steinberg that made him look good.

So it seemed appropriate that a group of female Marvel employees should get together a few days after her passing to celebrate Steinberg’s legacy. The gang assembled to drink milkshakes and swap Flo stories. Assistant editor Heather Antos took a group selfie to commemorate the event. Which seemed like a real nice thing to do. 

Which turned out be quite provocative; misogynists ranted online against this image with epithets like  “social-justice warrior,” “virtue-signaler,” “fake geek girl”.  It was a chorus of anger and hate over what?  

Then Comicsgate targeted a widow, Marsha Cooke, the wife of Darwyn Cooke, one of the best writer/artists of modern comics who died in 2016. A Comicsgate-affiliated Twitter user tweeted that Darwyn “would have been #ComicsGate”. 

Marsha was not having any of that shit as she replied: “Hi guys, this is Darwyn’s wife and I can guarantee he thought you comics gate idiots were a bunch of crybaby losers ruining comics, because you are.”  

Well, as is the way of all bullies, Comicsgaters got mad because someone hit them back and so there was engaged a campaign of harassment against Marsha Cooke.   

Thankfully, Marsha Cooke had someone to stand up to the Comicsgate when Jeff Lemire tweeted, “Comicsgate is based on fear, intolerance, bigotry and anger. The comics creators emerging today are too talented, too smart and too loud to be beaten by these weak people. It’s time we all started standing up for one another.”  

I’m not going to pretend I’m wise enough to make sense of this. And it makes no sense to me. After a lifetime of reading comics, I can't imagine taking what I've gleaned from these books and thinking its a good idea to oppress people. Super hero comics, of course, but all other types of comics, stories of fantasy and science fiction, set in the past, set in the future, set on other worlds. Stories with battles against villains and monsters, predators of all kinds. How can anyone immerse themselves in comic book lore and come out with the idea that being a bully is the right answer? 

I know I sound naïve but if you're into comic books, you should know something about honor and integrity. Going around the internet making insults and threats against women doesn't sound like anything I learned from comics. 

What I learned from comics is that being a bully is always the wrong answer.