In the most absurd instance of this kind of discrimination by conventions yet, East Coast Comic Expo has banned creator Larry Higgins from exhibiting his books at their convention. in this banning, he wasn’t accused of doing anything wrong himself — but the accusation involves him TALKING about a controversy which has nothing to do with the convention.
Higgins streams on youtube talking about comics and pop culture quite a bit, it’s a part of his strategy toward crowdfunding his comics. The Expo however, has no cause for any public concern over Larry, who is a small time creator almost everyone at the convention probably wouldn’t have heard of. His channel only has a few hundred subscribers. They have no reason to go after him.
But they did anyway. Higgins alleges he was at a convention and heard a conversation about voice actor Vic Mignogna, talked to a man about the actor, and the man disliked Higgins’ opinion about Vic so he took to Facebook to try to rile up a mob against Higgins. The man allegedly became angry, flinging a term at Higgins calling him an “MRA” – or Men’s right activist. The term is a dogwhistle by the extreme left to point outrright wing men and shame them.
Vic Mignogna is a popular anime voice actor who’s come under a lot of fire lately by feminists and left wing activists to try to destroy him. He’s recently come under fire, getting removed from jobs, conventions over similar online mob allegations, but with him over harassment. It appears the attacks on Mignogna were also partly politically motivated, as Mignogna has voiced he’s a Christian, and upset the radical LGBT activist community by refusing to sign pornographic homoerotic images of characters he’s done voice acting for (a “genre” of fan-based art known as Yaoi), resulting in accusations of homophobia for the actor. Accusations of sexual harassment then started appearing on the internet about Mignogna.
Higgins has no connection to the actor, nor has he spoken with the actor. Someone pushed a political agenda and tried to rile up an online mob against this poor comic creator, someone who’s just getting his career started and finding his audience. The East Coast Comic Expo allegedly then called Higgins and told him he’s no longer welcome to exhibit.
This kills a budding comic career, as creators need to get to these conventions to sell their wares. Having “wrong opinions” should not be the purview of a convention to go after a writer. It shouldn’t even have to be said. Casting a shadow on Higgins is destructive to his career, and he has little recourse in this matter as the convention has not made any public statement about him.
The tribalism of these conventions is killing fandom, making it so right wing or centrist creators who disagree on ANY topic have to be fearful about any opinions. It’s fascism in culture, and exactly what we’ve been fighting here for a couple of years. However, this has reached an absurd level, where a small time creator can’t even have an opinion about a voice actor.
We’ll be keeping an eye out for how to support HIggins in the next couple of days, as I do not believe he has a campaign up as of current, but we will definitely be looking out for him and trying to help him with his career as these conventions try to kneecap him over politics.
If you are fighting the culture war and are sick of people getting banned from these conventions for no reason, read my books! For Steam and Country is the first in a multiple award-nominated and award winning series. You’ll love it if you love heroic characters who display loyalty in a time of crisis. Read it here:
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