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.
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Ultimately, it’s 2015, gang. If a massive publisher like Marvel with 70 or so books and well over 150 different creators can’t hire at least 10 female creators, they’re just not trying hard enough. There are so many talented women doing amazing work in this industry right now. It’s not hard to find great female cretors. Marvel’s usual response to a lack of diversity is to point out that there’s more coming, and that’s all well and good, but tomorrow is not today. And today, these numbers are rough. It’s even worse because it’s their big relaunch month. At a time when all eyes will be on Marvel, female creators will be few and far between. Not cool, Marvel. Sort of shameful, Marvel. Get it together, Marvel.
