I made a video the other day about how ComicsGate has harassed creators like Donny Cates and others with a “protection racket” mentality — you either join and “hail ceasar” or you get endless harassment.
I’ve deleted most of the angry comments on the video calling me liar, other names, worse, as the brigade was sent to my youtube channel (I have most of them blocked on twitter) in order to try the same tactics on me — but I’ve already been through it and desensitized.
Another thing they love to do is concern troll gaslighting. It’s done like this:
They try to make you feel inferior/bad about your business, metrics, whatever’s going on in order to get you to try to shut up about certain subjects or to not tell the truth about what’s going on.
The tactic here is to create overwhelming social pressure, which typically can cause a person to get angry, snap, and lash back out. The goal of these folk is to create someone saying something that seems over the line, act like the person did it out of nowhere, and then make videos attacking them for their drama youtube content. It’s a pattern.
The key is these folk always act FIRST, then the person who lashes out is always just responding to being unprepared for a gang of internet trolls descending on them. It’s a tactic used by the old Goon Squad on Something Awful, or people from 4Chan. It’s been weaponized in comics because there’s so few people who care about comics, that when you see 50-100 comments like this it really feels like it’s “everyone.”
All of this is coordinated by EVS through a discord server and through Twitter DM groups where links are posted and creators are attacked in private — EVS has a compulsion that if his name is mentioned, he will near-stalk people because of it. Watch the comments of this post for more.
It’s pretty silly that these are grown men who go around the internet doing this on behalf of a comic book artist and they dedicate their lives to it. Ironically, they all talk about how they’re “alpha males” nonstop — even though most are fat, neckbearded losers.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee the patterns, which is why CG gets such a bad rep. None of it is about comic books with them, or promoting great art, or allowing a culture to thrive. It’s all about tribal political drama on the smallest of scales — where they literally impact nothing.
Which is why they’re all so bitter and miserable all the time.
I just laugh at it, and it makes them all the more frustrated. But it’s cool. I’m one of the only indie creators out there who comes out with monthly comics, who treats comics like a real business, and produces quality, professional stories. It seems like Chuck Dixon and I are really the few who can do something like this. Maybe if some of these other guys spent less time live stream gossiping about other indie creators…
Anyway, there’s great books available. Dynamite Thor is now OUT FOR DIGITAL for all backers! Everyone’s said the book is so fantastic they can’t even believe how we managed to create such an awesome story from this Golden Age character. You can get D-Thor and ALL of my comic books digitally for instant reading on my web store. Print books are going out soon!
This is the real comic book culture change you’ve been asking for. Shop now.
Art by Superman / Thor / Spider-man legend, Ron Frenz!
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