One thing that struck as extra-odd was the idea that there’s hell to pay in terms of people holding grudges. I haven’t found this to be true over the life of what I shudder to call a career in comics. People get grumpy and pissy about stuff, but actually holding a lingering resentment? It doesn’t seem to happen because of critical discourse. The publishers of this site once conspired to label Adrian Tomine a moron and a piker; here’s him holding a grudge. I think I’ve interviewed all of the comics pros that went after me hard during that same era. Two of the comics professionals I like most currently are people with whom I’ve had massive differences of opinion in the critical realm. Many of the other people of whom I’m most fond in comics are very critical of my own work. I worked for King Features seven months after writing really negative articles about King Features.
Reading this, I had two immediate responses. The first was a cynical, “Clearly, Tom hasn’t criticized enough Big Two comic books/comic book creators*” and the second, a more wistful “Why can’t I be like Tom?”
I agree that there’s not “hell to pay” about people holding grudges, although I’ve certainly had experiences where people holding grudges against me have had problematic impacts on my life and my job in ways I wouldn’t have anticipated. But for the most part, what can you do about people holding grudges, especially if you’ve apologized and tried to rebuild bridges you didn’t even know existed before apparently burning them down? Some people are just resentful and petty and angry, and you have to just let them be like that, I guess.
(* That sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not; I genuinely think creators and staff working for those companies trend towards paranoia and grudges more easily than independent cartoonists for reasons that essentially come down to the corporate culture in which they have to operate and the Internet culture which has built itself up around those companies, but that might be my own personal experience forming an entirely unrealistic bias.)