Best selling author Jon Del Arroz delivered an urgent plea for sanity on the part of comic book fans in a recent Periscope.
Here’s a sampling of Jon’s wisdom, somewhat redacted for time and clarity. Be attentive!
Marvel made this announcement about…they’re giving JJ Abrams and his son a miniseries Spider-Man book or something like that, and they hyped it as some big thing. They put a pretty good artist on it, etc. And everybody went ballistic…and they tie it into the Star Wars outrage and all that. And it’s just like, geez, guys, why do you care what they’re doing with their books at this point? Why are you still buying their books? Why are you still reading their books? It makes no sense.
It’s a habit. It’s like a nicotine addiction, and it’s showing your weakness at this point if you care about what they’re doing with a freaking Spider-Man book. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of it matters anymore.
There are alternatives. You can go do something else. The fact that you as a 30 or 40 year-old man care about this is just a sign of being a loser…You need to stop caring about this. It doesn’t matter anymore. We have solved the problem.
That’s what I’ve seen with the general comics culture. It’s a bunch of dudes who are 30, 40, 50, whatever, who are addicted to these properties which are just brand names that were purchased by Disney and Warner Brothers, that you read…when you were a kid. Those don’t exist anymore…You can move on at this point. Or, you can go back and go buy those old collected editions of those old books and reread those if you like them so much. Whatever.
***
It’s fan fiction, right? Stan Lee is dead. Steve Ditko is dead. This is not their character anymore. It’s Disney’s licensed property at this point. Which, because of our weird copyright laws in America, they can keep these in perpetuity as long as they keep publishing this stuff. That’s all they’re doing is maintaining copyright by pushing these out to 10, 20 thousand people. Who cares? Doesn’t matter. Don’t read it.
[Abram’s book] is gonna sell because there’s a celebrity name and because it says Spider-Man on it, right? And all the little gamma losers are gonna buy it…because “I bought every Spider-Man since 1972!” Well, great. You’re part of the problem. It doesn’t make any sense that you’re still doing that.
That is just the biggest waste of money I could ever imagine and the biggest loser behavior I could ever imagine. How could you still be invested in that?
The next level of marketing is because you guys are outraged and you are promoting the book over and over and over and over again…All you’re doing is amplifying their message that this book is coming out. Now this book, which was not a big deal…is now going to be a big thing because everybody’s talking about it. And now it’s a political tribe cause. You made it into a political tribe cause because you are signaling that your #ComicsGate, or whatever you want to call it, tribe, is anti-this book. And because you’re anti-this book, you’re signaling to the other people on the internet that they must therefore be for the book, and therefore these people who wouldn’t have even cared about it whatsoever…now it’s a cause.
Same with the movie Captain Marvel. You already did this. You propelled this movie from a B movie to a billion dollar property.
The outrage stuff, the clicks, need to stop. You need to stop clicking on videos that talk about this or that DC book or this or that Marvel book, or “Oh, my gosh! Maybe they’re gonna have a gay person in this next movie!” Nobody cares. It’s not interesting. It is not helping anything. It’s not helping the culture, and it’s time to move on.
There are lots of good cultural properties out there now. I have a ton of them. If you hate me because I tell the truth or…because I won’t sugarcoat stuff for the YouTube guys who you’re big fans of, that’s fine. Don’t buy my books. Go buy somebody else’s. But stop talking about this stuff, and start talking about the new stuff in culture.
Because the old stuff is just old, guys. It’s over, alright?
It’s a lie that was sold to you by the comics industry to care about these “legacy characters” no matter who the writers were. And they did this, and they kept that numbering system going as they changed these things through the years, so that you would keep buying this, and you wouldn’t actually care about the creators or care about the stories themselves. It’s a corporate shill thing, and of course the corporate shills are going to bring in the big name corporate shills. That’s it.
They’re never going to change that. You’re never going to have an impact on that. It’s not going to stop that, so it’s time to change your behavior, because that’s the only thing you can control.
Stop caring about whatever Spider-Man thing is happening. Stop caring about whatever Batman thing is happening. Start caring about real creativity and real content. It’s on you. Trust me. It’s hard. You gotta rip the Band-Aid off. You gotta go to your comic shop and say, “I’m cutting all Marvel. I’m not doing this anymore.”
Stop reading that stuff. Disconnect from all of it, and just get into stuff that’s actually gonna change the culture and actually gonna do something positive for once. You can do it. I believe in you!
The comic book-reading and moviegoing public has been meticulously conditioned by mass media and now ubiquitous machine learning algorithms to self-sequester within PopCult ghettos.
Whether the original motive was mere profit-seeking, the results have been disastrous as people increasingly invest the sort of passion and energy rightly reserved for religion into various pop culture-based identities.
Jon is right. With indie offerings of higher quality and in higher supply than ever before, there’s no excuse for giving money to people who hate you.
The key to rooting out vices is to perfect the opposing virtues. We’d all do well to start exercising more fortitude.
Same especially goes for Star Wars. Y'all gotta stop with the Rian Johnson videos or livestreams bitching about what Disney is doing to a carbon copy of Flash Gordon.
It's done, it's over, it will never recover. Stop giving them ammunition to attack you with. Peace the F out of the franchise like I have and go watch Space Battleship Yamato or get into Warhammer before it eventually collapses due to GW's incompetence. At least with Warhammer you can do something constructive by building and painting models.
Press F to pay respects.
There are so many creators out there now creating something new that I cannot imagine still bitterly clinging to those terrible modern Marvel comics or hyperventilating at hack Star Wars trailers.
It was fun to make jokes at Disney's expense, but its been years at this point. How many more videos and articles making fun of the clown show of western culture need to be made? We know it's bad and getting worse. Now how about those creating something new?
Alt Music has been blazing along for years, new games by smaller studios are far better than their MegaCorp counterparts and Alt Comic and Alt Books are raking in the cash.
Just gotta wait for the rest of them to wake up and open their wallets
This a million times. I really enjoyed the Marvel Ultimates Universe. Then it got stupid, so I stopped.
I don't understand the complaining about Marvel/fantasy/DC/Disney, etc, by people who continue to buy the crap that these companies shove in our faces.
I completely agree with JD, especially when it comes to books. There are so many classic authors and brilliant indie authors, that I simply don't have time to care about what the latest BS Disney/marvel/etc is doing.
We're proud of you!
I've stopped caring about Star Wars, DC/Marvel, etc.
I've gone beyond love. I've gone beyond hate.
Dread apathy is all that is left. Nothing beside remains.
Or you can get into manga.
True, there is lots of crap, but when you find some good stuff, it's very good.
Of read European comics.
I really miss them in the country where I currently live.
In any case Alterna comics looks to be another good choice for alternative comics.
xavier
I agree with the "stop caring" mentality and want to add a point.
When I was a kid, my dad used to answer some of my complaints with "remember, there's a billion Chinese who don't care."
I think sometimes we find ourselves in the the same pop culture bubble that we criticize. We think that what Marvel and DC and Disney are doing with their properties, or what SJW nonsense is in the latest Captain Whoever movie, has an important role in society and somehow controls the barge of societal thought.
But tens of millions of people in the USA alone don't care about it and never have. It may be hard to believe, but people go to school or work every day and give little or no thought to these franchises.
So the "stop caring" sentiment is spot on, but I personally feel that it puts us in good and numerous company. The influence of people who care have always played a minor role of little consequence. We just find it appalling because we were inhabiting the same small trivial space.
It's certainly easy to lose sight of the fact that certain demographics–mainly minorities and older folks–don't give a fig about geek culture.
The film and record industries have plenty of product tailor-made for them that's just as poisonous.
You get distracted because you're getting ticked off at the skin-suit-wearing creativity-challenged degenerates. But Mr. Del Arroz is right.
Make Ours Arkhaven