If you for a moment thought corporations stand by their art, will ever make a move that is for you, know they’ll be intimidated as soon as there’s a social media campaign.
The cover shows Batman dressed in black, as usual, and flinging a Molotov cocktail in front of the slogan “The Future Is Young” in bright pink lettering. When the image was released on Instagram and Twitter, Weibo users pounced.
They complained there is a connection between the Molotov cocktail – a weapon protesters are accused of using – Batman’s age-old outfit color (worn by demonstrators), and the title Golden Child which symbolizes yellow, another color associated with the protests.
No real, tenable connection exists, of course, between Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child and the Hong Kong demonstrations. But that isn’t stopping observers from drawing tenuous, oblique parallels.
Furthermore, it was enough for DC and they gave in, pulling the artwork off social media. Variety reached out to a Beijing rep for parent company Warner Bros.; they declined to comment.
At what point do these companies need to be brought up for sedition? There is no way our culture can even survive let alone thrive in a world where a foreign power can dictate the cover of a comic book. This is absolutely insane.
And another reason for you to support independent art. I’ll make what I want and do not fear any power except for the one eternal power:
It’s funny how they look at all those Chinese and salivate thinking that they can sell their product there. They don’t realize tht they will never make it into that market – the culture is just too different. They need to choose, either move there and try to sell there, or sell here.
You can’t do both. You can’t serve two masters.
But they’re greedy assholes and they’ll punish the market here in the US (which they’ve spent the last decade destroying anyway), by caving into China, where local comic companies have already cornered the market. Of course new companies will arise here and take over the market, so in the end they’ll be like the dog that came to the lake with a piece of meat in it’s mouth, barked at its reflection, thinking it could have both, yet ended up with neither.
Gotta love those Harvard business grads.
A pox on both their houses. Although if China is responsible for ensuring my movies and comics are not polluted by genderfluid characters and other SJW crap then I will give them positive credit for that.