ComicsGate is a Political, Aggressive, Poorly-Written Movement Attacking “Political, Aggressive, Poorly-Written” Comics
By: Anthony Gramuglia
Tags: Superheroes, Comic Books, Comics, Hate Groups, Literary Criticism

Let’s get right to the point: despite what they claim, ComicsGate is a political, aggressive, poorly-written movement attacking “political, aggressive, poorly-written” comics. They are a picture of hypocrisy, but, due to a combination of ignorance and pride, can’t see they’re doing exactly the same thing they attack their “enemies” for.

I touched upon the connections between GamerGate, The Sad Puppies, and ComicsGate in a prior essay, so, if you want my extended thoughts on the core concerns of these three movements, click there. However, to cite the claim I made in the prior essay, I am of the opinion that these three movements, at their core, are against the politicalization of media, which is a catch-all term for any media that pushes a liberal social agenda.

But what makes ComicsGate particularly troublesome is that, unlike the gaming and SFF communities, comics are a close-knit web. It is not surprising if a SFF novel or video game pushes over a million copies. Even ten million. Only five comics ever have sold more than a million copies of a single issue — and all of them were published in the early era of the 90s.

So yeah, comics have a limited audience. It’s small. When there’s a schism, it affects the whole fandom. In the gaming and SFF communities, you could ignore GamerGate or The Sad Puppies — or, better still, not realize they’re even a thing.

But ComicsGate is unavoidable if you read comics. Writers and artists have taken sides. Fans are divided by misleading information. Who can you trust?

But don’t worry. I’m here to bring order to the chaos. The simple truth of the matter is that ComicsGate collectively throws around a lot of critiques at the comic industry, but none of them really seem to understand the implications of their critiques…because if they did, they’d realize they were guilty of all the things they’re “calling out” the comic industry for.

Diversity Points

ComicsGate can be traced back to two people in particular: Richard C. Meyer and Ethan van Sciver. Sciver is an industry veteran with a long history of brilliant pieces of art, while Meyer has for years tried breaking into the comic industry, though he seems to lack a real understanding of how comics function as an art form.

Of the two, Meyer is the more interesting to critique. Sciver has been accused of being an alt-right supporter for years, but his freaky paranoia about comics and personal vendetta against comic industry veterans can be chalked up to sour grapes. The man was fired for his racist comments and overt bullying (including one incident where he told a kid to kill himself on Facebook). So Sciver is a bully who plays victim constantly.

But Meyer? He’s sort of the founder of the ComicsGate movement. In my opinion, he’s way better of a target for criticism.

While there’s always been a subset of comic book fans who are prejudice against minorities (afraid of women and PoC and the gays ruining their comics), Richard C. Meyer managed to be the right guy at the right time — or, rather, the worst guy at the worst time.

In 2015 and 2016, Marvel made a huge push for diversity in their comics. Characters like Miles Morales — a person of color who replaced Peter Parker as Spider-Man in the Ultimate Comics line — had been met with resounding acclaim from fans and critics alike. People loved Miles. Even people who claimed that Miles would just be a “push for diversity” and that it was somehow “wrong” to make a black kid Spider-Man seemed to be won over by a series of fantastic stories in an alternate universe. They didn’t affect Marvel’s main continuity (the 616 Universe), even if the 616 Peter Parker crossed into Miles’s world for a few special stories.

That’s not to say no one hated Miles. Miles had haters from his first appearance. Many were upset that the successful Ultimate Spider-Man story they followed for 160 issues was coming to an end, but there was a vocal minority who were just racist and hated the idea of Miles Morales. It is important to acknowledge that both camps of critics existed.

Still, new readers were drawn into Miles’s story, since Miles acted as a jumping on point for new readers to become interested in an original, new character.

So Marvel, seeing the potential to draw in new readers, initiated the a new phase in the Marvel NOW relaunch in 2014.

For those unaware, the Marvel NOW relaunch was supposed to draw in new readers to Marvel Comics, starting a ton of issues as new “Issue 1s” to attract new readers to the fold. The first Marvel NOW relaunch occurred in 2012 following the X-Men vs Avengers arc, but, when that didn’t revitalize comics the way Marvel expected, they shook things up again.

This time, they added in a ton of diverse characters. Which also meant…replacing established favorites.

Sam Wilson, AKA The Falcon (longtime partner of Captain America), replaced Steve Rodgers as Captain America, Jane Foster (a long-time love interest for Thor) became the new Thor after the real Thor became “unworthy of Mjolonir,” and newcomer Riri Williams, a dark skinned teenage genius, replaced Tony Stark as Iron Man.

Comic fans are not good with change.

Most people seemed fine with Sam replacing Steve. Sam was a well-established character who had fought alongside Cap for decades. Like when Bucky took up the mantle of Captain following Steve Rodger’s Civil War death, fans were quick to accept Sam as Cap.

But Thor and Iron Man…?

Thor had the benefit of not replacing Thor as a character, but rather becoming worthy of Mjolonir. To add to that, the mystery of who replaced Thor offered some suspense for readers in the first several issues (though the reveal that Jane Foster, dying of cancer, took up the mantle was welcomed by most fans). Sure, early issues played up the idea that “Look guys, Thor’s a woman!” but fans were quick to point out that Thor had been “replaced” multiple times during his Marvel history.

…but Iron Man…?

I’m gonna be honest, and this is just me as a fan: I don’t really care for Riri Williams as a character, especially in the early issues of Iron Man. Riri comes into the arc, takes over the mantle of Iron Man, and…remains an awkwardly developed character. It’s only in recent years that Riri has found her own voice as a character after moving beyond her role as “the new Iron Man.” I have hope the upcoming Iron Heart run, being written by Eve Ewing, will prove to vindicate Riri’s character.

It’s clear that Marvel hoped that these new replacements would draw in new readers. Instead, it primarily drew intense criticism from long-time fans for valid reasons. Riri just didn’t fit into the line-up the same way that Sam Wilson or Jane Foster did.

But not all the changes were met with criticism. One of the best additions to the the 2014 Marvel NOW relaunch was Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel, to occupy the role of Ms. Marvel after Carol Danvers became Captain Marvel. Khan was a superhero fangirl given the super powers. She idolized Carol Danvers in particular. She’s also Islamic, making her the first major superhero to be Islamic.

It is of my personal opinion that Kamala Khan is the best original character Marvel has come up with since Miles Morales.

However, many fans without reading Kamala Khan grouped her into the growing list of characters certain fans regarded as Marvel’s “diversity points.” A growing subset of characters who served to only add to the “quota” of ethnically diverse characters.

It is also no coincidence that many of the new characters were women, but, unlike female characters from like, say, the 90s, they were drawn with women readers in mind, so not overly-sexualized or exploited. Many were teenagers. And fans, for some reason, regarded realistic women as a bad thing. Hell, even Spider-Woman being pregnant for a few issues was seen as a “bad development,” because God forbid there’s a story about a superhero dealing with the miracle of childbirth.

Around the same time, Marvel made changes to other established characters, most notably Iceman of the X-Men, who, it turned out, was a closeted gay man. A younger version of the character traveled to the present of the time line with the rest of the original five X-Men (long story), and, in one story, young Jean Grey accidentally outed Iceman to the whole world, leading to a very uncomfortable story line where both young and old Iceman were forced to confront their repressed sexuality.

The story is profoundly uncomfortable, but many fans were glad to see a major superhero turn out to be gay. Other fans, like myself, found the execution a little exploitative, since Iceman had no initiative on coming out, and played up “being outed” as Iceman “coming out,” which is hugely problematic.

But, of course, there were fans who were disgusted by the fact Iceman was gay. You’d think an audience reading a thinly veiled metaphor for oppressed minorities would be more open minded to different sexualities, but no.

In short, Marvel had, in a matter of years, pissed off a subset of sexist, homophobic, racist fans.

But what sucks is that fans with legitimate criticisms got grouped up with the racists, and were dismissed largely by the opposing side of the discussion, especially initially. It’s understandable why, since both camps critical of the change often seemed to not like the fact that comics were changing in a way they didn’t like. Given that internet comments are often incoherent and poorly written — it’s no shock other fans couldn’t tell the racists apart from those with more understandable issues.

So where does Richard C. Meyer fit into all this?

Comics & Diversity

Meyer was an army veteran and apparently a long time comic fan. He had for years been trying to break into the indie comic scene, but found himself butting heads with everyone. There are records of a DeviantART account believed to be Meyer’s that feature him demanding cheap art from artists, and complaining about the “lack of professionalism” cheap labor could buy him.

Here are a few screen caps of a DA account linked to Meyer’s old social media presences. (He even named it after himself, unlike his later moniker “Diversity & Comics”)

Clearly, he is a sound individual without a racist, classist bone in his body.

Already, it’s clear Meyer, despite liking the comics themselves, didn’t have much respect for the process through which they were created.

But in 2016 and 2017, Meyer started up a Youtube channel called Comics&Diversity. In it, he criticized modern Marvel comics and the diverse population of characters he believed Marvel was pushing as of late.

Up until now, fans critical of Marvel attacked the company, but Meyer told them that, no, the problem wasn’t JUST Marvel as a company: the artists and writers were to personally blame.

Meyer spent many videos ranting about Marvel’s poor writing, but spent just as much time attacking various artists and writers who created content he didn’t like.

And this makes sense by Meyer’s logic.

Because he doesn’t think of comics as creative expressions or even entertainment. He thinks of it as a product.

Made for him.

Now, this is awful for a number of reasons. By accusing one well known Marvel artist of “sleeping her way” into her job or calling someone a “c**-dumpster,” he directly harasses and bullies the talent behind comics, as well as offers a sign post for who his legions of fans can blame (and bully) over their perceived “critiques” of Marvel Comics.

If all Meyer did was criticize comics, I’d say he’s a bigot because of his bigoted criticisms, but when he attacks real people — and justifies the bullying and harassment of real people with a shrug — then he’s trash and I don’t really care about him.

I don’t feel the need to convince you bullying a person is bad. So I’m going to do something that Meyer would never do.

I’m going to attack his ideas, and not his person.

But I’m not worried. There’s plenty of material to work with there because his ideas are stupid.

Basic Storytelling

He makes broadly political statements to argue that comics are too political. He sets racial quotas to quantify how other people are setting racial quotas. He claims other people are racist so he doesn’t have to contemplate his own racist statements.

But I don’t want to break down Meyer unfairly. So I decided to watch his videos. Just to give him the time of day, and even before reading excerpts from his horrendous indie comic, I came to a very huge conclusion: Meyer doesn’t understand how story telling works.

I’m going to focus for now specifically about his critiques on comic books. His statement that Marvel is to blame for tons of comic book stores closing down is too ignorant of real-world economics to even acknowledge. I mean, in an era where Toys R Us went bankrupt as we move to digital market places, what chance does a niche store like a comic shop have?

Also, I’m going to ignore all sales figures Meyer presents for similar reason: he only uses physical sales of individual issues in America. International sales are ignored, as are the sales of trade paperbacks and digital sales (primarily because Meyer can’t find that data). You simply can’t make any meaningful conclusion based on so little information. (In fact, recently, it was revealed that Kamala Khan’s comics alone sold nearly 500,000 in trade paperbacks alone.)

So let’s focus on Meyer’s actual critiques of comics.

And why it proves he doesn’t know how a story works.

Meyer often tells his viewers what counts as “good story telling.” One of his core critiques of Marvel’s push for diverse heroes is that all the stories lack conflict, that they serve to inflate the egos of its main characters, and that the characters are justified for their rude, boorish behavior.

And in all counts, Meyer fails to actually explain why any of that is a bad idea. Oh, he tries. But his reasoning is circular and fails to ever make a point. An average Meyer argument goes like this:

“Riri Williams is a bad character. She’s so awful. Stupid. Terrible. She’s just there to check off a box in the — ”

He rambles on like this for like ten minutes before giving any specific examples, but you know by the time he gives an example that it must be something juicy because he hasn’t shut up about it for the whole time. (Hey Meyer, maybe instead of filming you looking at a comic book you could freaking write a script! It’ll help you get to the point faster.)

“Riri in this comic doesn’t have any conflict. She just walks around, everyone praises her, and nothing bad happens. And that’s why Riri is a bad character. And all comics are like this nowadays thanks to diversity.”

I focus on Meyer’s generic critiques about Riri because I’ve already admitted I didn’t think the early Riri comics were all that great. So you’d think I’d be inclined to agree with Meyer’s opinion since we’re both criticizing the same thing, right?

Well, no. Because Meyer doesn’t have a point yet.

Having read Riri’s comics, there is some unsubtle praising of the main character. They do talk about how cool the main character is, and so often everyone talks about how incredible this character is. And, so often, despite a few superficial problems, Riri always solves every problem presented to her, no questions asked.

Now, I want you to try something: replace Riri’s name in that previous paragraph with any other superhero ever, and tell me if you couldn’t apply that to any other superhero ever.

Mainly because Meyer’s critique is so generic it lacks the specificity to mean anything.

A fan going in disliking Riri can buy into Meyer’s critique because they just don’t like the comic. They can go “Yeah, there is no conflict!” And that’s fine for them because they’re basically sheep who don’t think for themselves.

But if you actually read the conflict, you can see that the early Riri comics employ a more internal conflict. The comic is more focused on Riri’s social relationships and interactions. It’s less concerned with external action that one would expect from an Iron Man story. Struggles do lack tension in the story.

But Meyer doesn’t tell you how. He just offers generic, bland critiques, and managed to convince enough people he knew about writing that they funded his awful indie comic.

One thing Meyer seems to hate is when characters draw attention to the fact that they’re women or a different ethnicity, as if he expects everyone to be the same generic white-bread characters.

That would almost be a fair critique if he didn’t seem to point to individual panels featuring this occurring, and then say “The whole comic is like this panel. Just take my word for it. Everything else. It’s just dialog like this copied and pasted over and over again.”

Except it isn’t. At all.

Consider the new Thor series, which did reference that Thor was a girl quite frequently in its first issue. It’s sort of a self-referential “Yeah, we know. Not what you’re expecting.” This sort of stuff can be distracting at first, but once the novelty wears off, the writers stop doing this so they can focus on the real important stuff: Thor kicking ass.

Ms. Marvel spends even less time on this. More time is spent showing that Kamala Khan is a superhero fangirl than it is focusing on her ethnicity. OF course, her ethnicity is a huge part of her character, and is presented in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Characters are Islamic. It affects their behavior. The cultural heritage informs her private and personal life, but it isn’t something that comes up in every conversation until relevant.

The early conflict of Ms. Marvel is that Kamala Khan is trying to find her place in a universe she’s idolized from birth. It’s very internal and honestly a little post modern. It reminds me of that popular comic Kick-Ass, where it shows what life would be like if an ordinary kid became a superhero. Except where Kick-Ass tried to be edgy, Ms. Marvel tried to be a fun little adventure. More an emotional journey than anything else.

But if you asked Meyer, he’d say the whole comic doesn’t have any conflict because Kamala doesn’t punch Taskmaster in the face or shoot people. Like in the 90s.

What I’ve presented are the closest thing to a “real point” Meyer ever makes. Many comics do have more subdued conflicts. Some comics are just fluff — because that’s what the target audience wants. If you’re main issue with a comic is that it isn’t offering something you want, then maybe that comic isn’t aimed for you. I mean, consider this: around this same time frame (2014–2016) that Meyer cried about, Spider-Man had several terrific arcs back-to-back to read about. You had The Superior Spider-Man arc, the Spider-Verse arc, and even outside the main books you had the terrific Scarlet Spider and Venom comic lines, all of which were a ton of fun. That’s not even including the Miles Morales material.

If Meyer really cared about compelling comics with intense superhero action, maybe picking on lighter fare was a bad idea.

But I still haven’t addressed Meyer’s biggest issue (nor have I explained why it’s absolutely ridiculous).

Political Comics

Meyer argues that most comics coming out today are part of Marvel’s political agenda, pushing leftist ideas on its audience who just want to read comics. Now, this is completely fair statement to make. Comic artists and writers do put their political ideas into their comics.

Because all works of art draw from the world view of their creators.

But to call any comic book “bad” for pushing a political idea is borderline idiotic. I say “borderline” here because the idea borders on something worse than idiotic: delusional.

In order to make that claim that modern comics are bad, Meyer has to ignore every comic published ever. Because every superhero, in some way, is a product of politics.

Take Superman. He was created by two Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who based Superman on the immigrant experience. He is, essentially, Moses. He’s sent on a raft through the great unknown, ends up being adopted, and becomes a savior for those who are weak and disenfranchised. The fact that Kal-El has become a Jesus metaphor in pop culture since is telling that later writers and creators pushed THEIR political and sociological perspectives onto the character.

But Meyer doesn’t seem to care about that, almost like saying using comics as a means to express deeper feelings bout the world is a normal thing to do.

Captain America punches Hitler in the face in his first issue. For that time, that was a strong political stance. The X-Men represent disenfranchised individuals facing bigotry (and over time featured an increasingly diverse cast to better exemplify how prejudice manifests, from sexism to racism to homophobia and transphobia). Even Iron Man was created as a sort of antithesis to the ideal held by liberal comic fans of the 60s.

The 70s, which Meyer never seems to reference, saw a rise of tons of political comics. There’s the controversial issue where Lois Lane becomes black to see what it’s like to be a person of color, there’s the one where Speedy gets addicted to heroine, and there’s everything with Luke Cage and John Stewart. All pretty political comics for the time.

But Meyer never talks about the 70s. Almost like he never read any of those comics.

Even in the 90s, that era that Meyer pretends was a glory day of comic writing (because comics sold well during the 90s speculator boom), comics were incredibly political. Take the first few issues of Spawn, one of the most 90s of all 90s comics around. Every issue presents a satirical view of American media, playing up events such as child murder as a means to boost ratings. This of course draws from Frank Miller’s work on The Dark Knight Returns, where he similarly satirizes American politics and American media to make a point about society’s divisive policies and sometimes authoritarian policies.

But sure, Meyer, tell us how comics are only just becoming political in the last few years.

Meyer’s argument is that comics should be a product that can be enjoyed by anyone without them getting political. That’s a sentiment I don’t entirely disagree with. I believe all art can be political, but sometimes you need some goofy fun to pass through the day.

You know. Like a comic with Kamala Khan. Where she hangs out with an alien dog meeting her heroes while discovering herself in high school.

But apparently, the very act of including an Islamic character is a “political act.”

This leads me to the biggest criticism I have against Meyer: he only calls it “political,” when he doesn’t agree with it. Comics that reinforce his political world view he doesn’t think are political. Which tells me that Meyer sees comics as a safe space echo-chamber to avoid interacting with conflicting ideologies.

No, really, he adores the 90s extreme comics where violence solved all problems, which is fine. That’s also a political statement from the author, telling people that men need to be strong, that women need to be sexy, and that Rob Liefeld is the best artist in the world. These are all politically charged statements I don’t personally agree with.

Meyer only calls work political when he doesn’t agree with them. When he agrees with the political viewpoints in the comic, it’s fine. It’s a “normal comic.” Which tells me that his whole point about comics being political at all is a moot point. He doesn’t care about comics pushing politics; he cares about comics pushing his politics.

Because comics are a product, not an expression of artistic merit.

At least, in his eyes.

Meyer’s Work

So Meyer talks and talks, rallies up his fan base, and, finally, has the chance to make the comics he’s talked about endlessly for years. He raises funds to publish an indie comic…

And guess what? It’s a poorly written mess full of politically charged statements.

It’s over priced, overly violent, but incredibly political.

A few of Meyer’s comics have surfaced in recent memory. One is a pitch for how Meyer would work on Riri Williams if given the chance (and, guess what? It’s trash). He presents Iron Man as a fat loser and Riri as this megalomaniac. He actually pitched this idea originally on his YouTube channel, in fact…and it was a stupid idea then because he forced Riri, a character he didn’t like, into being a villain.

And the sample pages showed how bad he is at writing human beings talking.

The other work that proves Meyer has no idea what he’s doing creatively is his independent comic Jawbreakers, which is pitched to its audience as so (from his Kickstarter page)

What happens when you cross THE AVENGERS with THE EXPENDABLES? You get JAWBREAKERS, former superheroes who take on real evil like ISIS

Real evil…like ISIS? Okay then.

So the comic raised a ton of money to make what is essentially a generic comic with a fairly conservative political viewpoint. Because, naturally, Meyer proves time and time again how he’s against politics in comics by…making a political comic. And he talks about how to avoid bad characters by simply making his characters as bland as possible.

Seriously, if an artist sketched one of Meyer’s Jawbreaker characters and put them next to one of Rob Liefeld’s Young Bloods characters, a casual observer would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

And that’s not even getting into the racism and sexism of the comic. Because oh God…it has that.

A sample page from Jawbreakers

What you see next to you is the first page of the various sample pages Meyer posted of the comic on his IndieGoGo featuring a woman. It is an African woman wearing the sort of tribal outfit you’d see in a racist cartoon from the 50s. Look, even in a professional setting, she’s wearing just rags.

An that’s to say nothing of the spine-breaking pose she’s holding in the big panel. It’s just another example of the over-sexualization PoCs face in the media. And this isn’t even me as a liberal getting offended over nothing. This is the most ridiculous thing in the world for someone who claims to be “against” politicization to produce: an incredibly political image full of “pro-America” sentiments, racist imagery, and straight-up cheesecake.

You can’t claim to be against politics in comics when the image you present for your anti-political comic is so damn political!

And then there’s that sketch that floated around that featured a Spanish woman “cooking for dinner” the first Spanish dish Meyer could google: rice pudding. It’s almost like Meyer didn’t care enough to actually know what it was he was putting on the page. He just looked up the first freaking dish that he could find in Spanish, and just thought it was a popular dish people eat for dinner.

This was so obvious of a blunder that comedians like Patton Oswald and industry pros like Gail Simone laughed their asses off over it. Most professionals would acknowledge the mistake, play it off or joke about it, but Meyer? He hid deeper into his echo chamber and blocked everyone who criticized his mistake.

Meyer doesn’t care about making a quality comic.

He just. Doesn’t. Care.

Oh, and the asking price for an issue of this comic? One issue?

$35.

You can get three trade paperbacks for that money.

So What?

So what do we do now? Do we do anything? Should we really care what Meyer does?

Meyer, CvS, and all the ComicsGate cronies have harassed tons of industry insiders. They’ve attacked fans who disagree with them — going as far as to Dox them to the public. They’ve made themselves pariahs in the comic fandom.

And now Meyer is planning on milking them for every cent they’re worth by making them pay real money for a terribly drawn, terribly written comic book.

They’ve made their bed. Now they have to sleep in it.

They will never live this down. None of the comic creators will find friends in the industry after making everyone an enemy. And, quite honestly, after such a deliberate crusade of anger, I don’t think they deserve forgiveness. You can’t harass marginalized folks using coded, bigoted language, attack industry titans, and behave worse than children at peak-temper tantrum-ness, and expect forgiveness.

They want to prove they’re “better” than everyone else? Fine. Let them go.

Let them just fester. Let them just disappear.

Let them argue and scream until they fizzle out of juice. Let their increasingly shrinking numbers and increasing sense of self-importance boil away. Let them spend way too much money on a terrible product. Let them tumble without support into their own hatred.

Let them continue buying a terrible product, and let them go bankrupt all on their own.

Let them become irrelevant.