The Enchanted Dagger

The Green Giant, not to be confused with the Green Giant, was a weird kind of one shot comic that evidently served as an excuse to test print something on an out of use printing press and was never released, which I can identify with.  Death’s Head also made only one Golden Age appearance, in Cat-Man Comics vol.3 #8, which surprises me because I think he is a pretty weird villain.  I can’t think too many other disembodied head characters floating around in pop culture… Jambi the Genie from Pee Wee’s playhouse…did he have hands?

Speaking of Pee Wee, I wanted to offer a update on my recent Journey into Comicsgate.  Apparently I picked a pretty good week to tune in.  Over this past weekend (starting on Friday 26th, I think) the Fuhrer of Comicsgate called together a veritable Teutonic roundtable of a livestream to denounce the actions of Comicsgate’s Sturmabteilung, an organization they call War Machine.  As the councils played out over the weekend (there was a second live stream on Sunday) the chat was attended by a number of the top Comicsgate social media Bundleiter. What followed nearly sent Comicsgate spiraling into a funny book, die Nacht der langen Messer.

Der Fuhrer and a number of the other party members took issue with the aggressive tweeting & meme hurling of the War Machine and called out its leader to explain why everyone was being so mean.  This pompous Gruppenfuhrer, (the Ernst Rohm of Comicsgate, surely) smugly apologized and quickly denied the charges and shifted the blame for the inappropriate conduct (a process they refer to as “doxing”, something I had to look up) to one of his lieutenants who was not present at the meeting (because he was scared, suggest the Fuhrer). There were calls to disband War Machine and have all involved immediately doxed, but the wisdom of the Fuhrer won the day.  He swiftly disavowed any responsibility for War Machine’s actions and encouraged his followers to focus on the true enemy, the rat-vermin Social Justice Warriors.  He insisted that Comicsgaters should treat all of the members of their community with dignity and respect, including all of the artists, who need him to prop up their comic book projects on Indiegogo, and the customers, without whom his comic book career would be in jeapordy, and excluding the SJWs, whom everybody should continue to feel justified in their enmity towards.  By the end of the weekend, some of the Comicsgaters noted that the world of comic books was supposed to be fun and that Comicsgate’s strength came in it’s commitment to making good comic books, free of political leanings.  The Fuhrer reasserted his conviction that SJWs were the enemy and confidently declared that War Machine was still welcome as an environment of reform had taken hold.  All SJW sentimentality within Comicsgate will be purged, in time.

See what I did there?  I’m being a little shitty to Comicsgate.  Having listened to these chicken heads for the last two weeks, I actually think they seem like okay guys, for the most part.  Some of their mocking take downs of the SJW tweeters are pretty funny.  People on twitter are obnoxious!  I think their concerns about the the creative direction of mainstream comics, now under the control of a Hollywood system which is asserting its values on beloved historical characters are not without merit.   I can understand the argument that if you want to create a transgendered reporter character, put your back into it and invent one.  Maybe you don’t need to turn Jimmy Olsen into a transgender character.  On the other hand, why not?  Who cares?  Personally, I’m not making comic books because I’m dying to have my shot at Spider-man or Batman (not that I’m against it, per se) I’m just trying to get good enough to do justice to my own stories and characters.  I haven’t read Marvel or DC comics in 20 years with any regularity and I was always more interested in the stuff just outside the mainstream.  Regarding Comicsgate, the more interesting message to me is their success at gaming the crowd funding to great rewards.  Now that’s something worth being a part of.  The desire to “return comics to the 90’s” which is an expressed goal of the Fuhrer (sorry), is about as reactionary as you can get, but beating up on SJWs for easy click bait to a polarized and battered American social landscape is, ultimately, pretty low.  Not positive and obviously hurtful to people.  Certainly not becoming of someone who comics have been very good to.  If Comicsgate is right about SJW trends being a net negative, the market will bear that out, certainly with this new crop of  somewhat odd Marvel movies,  just as Comicsgate is proving that there is a market interested in a return to the basics.  In the mean time, the Fuhrer should take his own advice.  “To make it in comics you have to be two of three things…either really good, really fast or really nice.”  He’s definitely really good.  He’s certainly not really fast (his first Indiegogo book is 2 years over due), so he better start playing nice.