I always tell Twitter, I never tell Tumblr, even though it’s, you know, a Tumblr thing. So! Please send me questions today that I can answer in between deadlines. Please. I need the attention.
Giffen did so many swipes, I think someone could argue that he turned it into an artform by itself, to be honest – not that I’m about to argue that myself (For some reason, I always think that Ambush Bug is the swipe-iest thing in his career, although 5YL Legion is one massive format swipe). I’d be interested in seeing a retrospective of Giffen’s career that had a dual focus on Legion and the various Justice League projects, I think.
But some of the “conversation” in the comics internet community seems to have been ill-informed and far from constructive. A small but very loud contingent are high-fiving each other while making huge assumptions about our intentions, spreading misinformation about the diversity of the artists involved in this project and across our entire line, and handing out snap judgments like they just learned the term “cultural appropriation” and are dying to put it in an essay. And the personal attacks – some implying or outright stating that I’m a racist. Hey, I’m a first-generation Mexican-American…[Laughs]
Not to mention the casual disrespect that’s been shown to the artists involved in this. One op-ed was so lazily researched that when the writer was confronted with his litany of factual errors on Twitter, he apologized, saying he didn’t know that most of the announced artists are Black. Dude, you call yourself a journalist: Do a Google search! [Laughs] And when he learned that the “3 Feet High and Rising” homage he’d asserted was in bad taste was rendered by an African-American artist [Sanford Greene] and that Posdnuos [of De La Soul] himself, gave props to the cover on Twitter, [the writer’s] response was, “Well, to each his own.” [Laughs] Look, the divide between these critics’ response to this initiative and that of the outside world and, indeed, the hip-hop community they claim to speak for couldn’t be bigger. I actually feel sorry for them.
It’s almost impressive how terrible this response to upset over Marvel’s hip-hop variant cover program by editor-in-chief Adel Alonso actually is. (From here.)
Unusual Concentrations is my first experiment with digital self-publishing. It’s a bleak, funny, sad, strange story about London, crime, coffee and careless talk. You can buy all 40,000 words of it for precisely the price of a disappointing medium latte at S***bucks. I assure you the novella gives better value.
[Kindle users: Unusual Concentrations is indeed available via the Amazon marketplace, but some of you might prefer to use this somewhat less Imperial outlet instead. It’s easier than you might think to transfer .mobi files to your Kindle. A tutorial on that can be found here.]
I’ve been completely snowed under by work for the last week or so, but now that I’m climbing out from the wreckage, I see I missed this. Now I know what I’ll be reading this weekend.
