Links to the other posts 1, 2, 3, 4

Well sad news one and all who hoped that the combined forces of assholery on the internet would consume each other in an internecine apocalypse of name calling, Vox Day has “released” the “ComicsGate Comics” imprint. Yes, I sat and watched another turgid video. Let me once again despair at how awful the medium of talking head YouTube video is. I appreciate that there are many examples of people being entertaining in off-the-cuff videos but in general, this is an awful medium. Aside from anything else, it’s like twenty minutes of video conveys the same amount of information as about a minute of text.

Enough ranting by me. In a recent “Darkstream” video Vox Day (well-known supporter of far-right terrorists) entitled “ComicsGate and Cyberfrog are now free” announced that he had “released” the ComicsGate Comics imprint from the “system”. Of course, this was presented by him as a kind of vengeful masterstroke of the ‘Ha, ha, now look what you made me do!’* kind.

I have to say I’m a bit unclear as to what exactly he did here. He appears to be talking about the distribution system for graphic novels. Now, I’m aware that your standard monthly comic distribution is pretty much controlled by a monopolisitic distributor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Comic_Distributors ) but that collections, graphic novels etc (which get distributed to bookshops as well comic shops) has a bigger variety of distributors (including groups like RandomHousePenguin) [People who understand this better, please wade in]. I don’t know how Vox Day’s comic imprints (Akrhaven and Dark Legion) are distributed in print form but he seems to be claiming that in some “system” he had claimed the term “ComicsGate Comics” and has now ‘released it’.

The dastardly twist is that supposedly now the dread SJWs can grab the term themselves! Oh no! Although it is not obvious why anybody would want to or why that would be disruptive to supporters of ComicsGate. Having a line of comics called “ComicsGate” doesn’t seem to be an objective of the ComicsGate crowd and controlling the name of an imprint nobody (aside from Vox) seems to want wouldn’t help the left or critics of ComicsGate any.

In short, it’s just Vox claiming victory in the face of defeat again. I’m suprised he caved so soon. Hopefully they’ll all start fighting about something else soon and leave everybody else alone again.

For those interested in the underlying resentment fuelling this dispute, Vox reveals the fragile spot of his ego in a follow up post:

“But I became suspicious of his [Ethan Van Sciver’s] two-faced nature when, after praising how well written the bestselling Alt-Hero #1 was, and asking me if I might be interested in writing with him in the future, he went out and publicly slagged the story in the YouTube review he did with his father the very next day, even pretending that he couldn’t figure out what was going on from page to page. He didn’t say one single positive word about my writing despite having praised it effusively the day before.”

Vox really wants people to think his fiction writing is good. Unfortunately it isn’t – it’s pretty bad, much worse than his non-fiction writing.

*[Not his literal words]

Links to the other posts 1, 2, 3, 4

Unfortunately a lot of the toddler tantrums are playing out on duelling YouTube videos. I have carefully honed skills of quickly acquiring key details from written texts but video requires you to trawl through the whole boring boring thing and what’s worse, is that I’ve then got to rely on my shaky memory to remember specifically what was said. Anyway, I sat through a video by Vox Day (I shan’t link to it but it was entitled “Two-Face Van Soyer”) and a response by Ethan Van Sciver (again not bothering with links but if you have spare brain cells you want to kill it’s called “CYBERFROG $600K, LAST DAY LIVE STREAM!!” -no, seriously). For ease of typing Vox Day will be VD for the rest of this post and Ethan Van Sciver will be EVS. I used the modifier “odious” for various people who crop up but it became too repetitive.

Some observations:

• Nomenclature: As it’s a kerfuffle about who owns the words “ComicsGate Comics” the appropriate name is “ComicsGateComics-Gate”. However, as the modifier “Gate” now also means “a campaign by a group of shouty right wing trolls”, that makes it “ComicsGateComicsGateGate”. However, however there are TWO groups of shouty right wing trolls, so I’ll use ComicsGateComicsGateGate for VD’s partisans and for EVS’s partisans ComicsGateComicsGateComicsGate because they call themselves ComicsGate. On second thoughts…maybe not.
• VD has the advantage that he’s set himself up so that all publicity is good publicity for his business model. His main comic book line (the semi-tautological ‘Arkhaven’) is on Kindle Unlimited, making any degree of fuss more likely for KU users to check out the comics (even if it is just to rubbish them). That’s all revenue for him.
• EVS appears to have broader support but that doesn’t get him anywhere. Like a lot of these right wing shouty campaigns there’s no clear achievable goal. There’s no obvious way of winning here. Unlike VD, EVS doesn’t gain sales of anything from the surrounding publicity and may lose out in future crowd-funding due to ill-feeling.
• However, its not all good news for VD. The political attacks on him are quite pointed and various social-media right wingers are now pointing out things about his views that they conveniently ignored for years.
• Both EVS and VD are claiming that the other one is in some ways double-crossing, back-stabbing con-artists trying to fleece money from hapless right wing dupes. Luckily this is bad for both of them and should contribute to general demoralisation and disaffection on the right.
• Timothy’s only public relations management client, Jon Del Arroz is in a sticky situation. He’s characterised himself as being ‘there’ from the start and for once he has a point – he genuinely was doing weird harassment of Marvel ages ago before it became a hobby for others. JDA has a gig with VD’s comic line but he’s also been a big booster for EVS and he is also in the midst of his own crowd funding campaign. He was speaking on the EVS video I watched and characterised as a ‘friend’ of VDs – he was placed in the position of trying to defend VD without alienating EVS.
• Somebody asked me about VD’s previous feud with social media platform Gab. Sorry, I don’t know what happened with the threatened legal action in the end but Gab still advertises on Voxopedia. I suspect they found a way of mutually backing down without losing face. I suspect the same will happen here.
• The main winners are everybody who is getting a break from being harassed by right wing trolls because said trolls are too busy shouting at each other.
• Can you safely ignore all this? Probably.

Links to the other posts 1, 2, 3, 4

Some loose ends from yesterday’s post on the gazumping of ComicsGate:

• I said that Vox Day had trademarked the term — I was incorrect. Actually, he is saying the term isn’t trademarkable (which isn’t exactly true either as he is using it as a brand for a set of products).
• Ethan Van Sciver is threatening legal action against Vox Day as Van Sciver claims the term is his because he uses it as a name for some of his YouTube stuff.  That doesn’t sound like he’d get very far with any legal action.
• Various rightwing social media “personalities” who have for years conveniently forgotten to mention that Vox Day supports violent extremism magically discovered this yesterday.
• Yup, it’s remarkable how another movement that’s happy to have Vox Day and his supporters involved only suddenly spot his support for mass murderer once Day screws them over commercially.
• And while we are indulging in the schadenfreude lets note that GamerGate, Sad Puppies, and now ComicsGate have each in turn had to distance themselves from Vox Day because of his action — yet the right of SF still thinks it was a terrible injustice that the SFWA expelled him. Every year that specific move by the SFWA looks smarter and smarter 🙂