I fear we’re never going to be able to get rid of the trolls entirely. But we can stop feeding them.

When somebody posts something deliberately provocative — like, say, calling for someone to be fired for writing a comic book she doesn’t like — we don’t have to act as a megaphone.

Of course, pros (creators, editors, etc.) already have a megaphone, so when they say something provocative it’s going to make the rounds no matter what.

I think you’ve touched on a problem that is not confined to comics but to the Internet and social media overall. It’s okay to be pissed off and offended and voice your opinion. However, when you call for someone to lose their job because you don’t like something they did/said, you take things to another level and one that is going to elicit anger.

I can understand Rick telling people to “drown themselves in hobo piss.” He was pissed off as anyone of us would be if someone was calling for you to lose your livelihood. What makes these situations even worse is often the people that call for firings don’t understand or get what’s going on wrong. (Like Jackie did) They talk loud and hope they can get the attention of the professional outrage groups (we know who they are) who will then call for the company to fire them, so they can feel like they accomplished something. Thank goodness Rick’s fellow creators and that one blogger came to his aid and turned this thing into a joke because it could’ve gotten a lot worse.

Jackie’s actions are part of a culture of outrage that has spawned on Twitter. A culture that believes the world revolves around them and if something challenges that belief it shouldn’t exist and the people making that challenge should suffer. It is the pinnacle of selfishness. And what makes it worse is when people in charge listen to these people and legitimize them.

To the Jackie’s of the world I say this. You’re offended by something in a comic book. BIG WHOOP! How does it affect your life? Have you thought about not buying the book? Ignoring the creator? Why can’t you do that? Why does the creator have to be fired? And don’t give the, “it fosters a hostile environment” excuse. I’ve heard that one before. It was that comics were responsible for juvenile delinquency because delinquents happened to read comics. It was BS then its BS now.

Or at least, give yourself five days to think things over before calling for a firing. I guarantee you’ll find there are much more important things then something a creator did a comic or wrote on Twitter.

No, no conversation. Because everyone thinks the other side is trolling.

For instance, regarding the new Batgirl, the attitude was ‘if you are a man and don’t like this, you’re wrong, and likely some terrible misogynist.’ Same with new Thor. However stupid you may find the idea, the opposition was immediately assailed with impunity, from pros and fans alike, as being simply wrong, and approaching the concept from a misguided point of view.

The degree to which pros and fans tolerate people insulting each other like crazy (so long as they’re on the ‘right’ side of the argument) is appalling. Everyone seems to think it’s just this minority anti-women people, but it’s pretty much everybody.

An amendment: Just because you don’t like something in a book doesn’t make you an “-ist” or “-phobe”

^ This

I found the “apology” you linked to fairly interesting, in that it was really a non-apology. “I’m sorry for making the hashtag and taking it personal. But I’m really not sorry for anything else afterward!”

Well, at least some people are beginning to come around to the fact that you can dislike something and not be an “ist” or “phob” and that knee – jerking on social media is not the way the loudmouthed minority should set the rule of moral law for the rest of us. I for one cannot stand the idea of a female Thor because I read Thor for Thor. Not Hercules, not Thunderstrike not even Odin, but Thor. Doesn’t mean I hate women leads. Some of my other fave books are Lazarus and Velvet and they both have strong female leads so the “ist” does not apply. Take a look at the context before screaming for someone’s head on social media.

No. We cant. When I first got on comic book sites I was very excited.I don’t know very many ppl that are into comics and most of the ones I know work at my LCS so I thought “Man heres a chance for me to talk to other ppl about comics!! This is going to be great!” WRONG! WRONG! I have to say I was shocked about how it was. All i wanted to do was talk about comics and the ppl that worked on them. Everybody was hating everything,everything was stupid,everybody was dumb,Comics were ruined for all time every week.
So i gave up.I now stick to reading the “news sites”,occasionally add a comment and read the comments and just SMH.

@President of Common Sense
Except that Remender didn’t say that horrible “hobo piss” line(which I would find it objectionable no matter what coming from a professional in any field) in response to the recent #firerickremender thing. He said it quite a while ago in response to people simply not liking the speech that Alex Summers made in an issue of Uncanny Avengers.

To be honest, when I read Jackie follow-up (http://www.themarysue.com/rick-remender-marvel-hashtag/) I found it to be a well articulated piece with solid reasoning. I did not agree with everything that Jackie wrote, to say the least, but I could certainly understand her position better.

I’m frustrated by this whole fiasco because it really just entrenched people’s positions further. Those who are unwilling to listen to the “Tumblr set” normally now dismiss them entirely. Those who are doing good work in the “Tumblr set” are not associated with this unfortunate and misguided campaign.

I’m frustrated that many comic book fans, especially ones that frequent this website, always dismiss other people’s legitimate affective reactions. Often people rely on this “offense can only be taken, not given” platitude which is utter bullshit (especially in light of very interesting work done recently in affect theory). People are allowed to feel the way they feel. Comic book fans, or at least the vocal ones on this website, react the same way to any issue as “this is a non-controversy and it’s people just looking for attention.” It’s poor rhetoric and it’s poor empathy,

Cultural objects are never produced in a vacuum. They reflect and in turn shape their political reality. Increased and better representation of marginalized people often leads to inspiration and social change. This concept is not really some sort of secret history; one only has to look at the depictions of queer folks in the media over the past twenty years and society’s acceptance of them as a correlative.

Obviously, this campaign was a misguided and misinformed. I won’t dispute that. But let’s not generalize all people as being “selfish” because they want better representation and they don’t want to read sexist/racist/homophobic shit in their cultural objects.

I want more and better representation in comic books. Every child, no matter their background, deserves a superhero they can look up to, one that reflects them, and allows them to hope and dream they can accomplish great things.

@Mike T
My sentiments exactely. I remeber the good old days of the Internet, when forums started and and it was fun to get in contact with others, post art and just have a good time talking about our love of comics. Sadly these times are long gone, eventually all topics have endless discusions and nobody moves an inch from her/his point of view.
Related to the topic, while it is nice to have the opportunity to have your voice heard, in 99% it is useless babble and even the smallest remark by person X is blown out of proportion. People cry wolf too often, I’ve decided to stop listening.

I’m not done yet, LET’S YELL SOME MORE!

C’mon folks. This is the generation of The Perpetual Outrage Machine. If we wait another two or three months for something else that gets people’s ankles rankled, this hullabaloo will be forgotten and we’ll be jumping and tripping and falling through this cycle all over again for something else. It will happen.

In these comic books, in dramatic fiction that “deals in extremes” as Blake accurately notes, the central narrative thrives on conflict. That we echo it’s intensity speaks less of the intricacy of the book’s writing and more of the sleepy-eyed disposition of the reader.

Personally, I get my comics in batches and haven’t read Cap #22 yet. So I’m still a slight outsider looking in. I’m interested in seeing it for myself, but the factual context stated thus far tells me there’s have little to fret over. But I’m cynical, and hell, now I kind of want there to be something in issue #22 that isn’t.

After all, if you can’t be a real hero (or villain) if you never face any significant moral conflicts, right? (Remember that issue where Crossbones beats the living crap out of Sin? Essentially torturing her? People jumped all over Brubaker for that one.) We perhaps learn the most about ourselves when we drop into a world that is so evidently corrupted by someone else that we flinch (“Well, I would never…”). On characters who do things we don’t agree with:

“The point is that these characters aren’t real [...]. What is naive and blinkered is the insistence that fictional characters be held to the same moral and behavioral standards we expect of our friends. It seems to me that part of the point of literature is to enlighten and expand, and there are few pleasures in fiction that expand our consciousness further than getting to observe the world from the perspective of characters so different from us, so thoroughly flawed, that if we were to encounter them in real life we wouldn’t like them very much.” (Emily St. John Mandel)

People just need to contemplate more before they post. How much of this would have happened if, instead of a knee-jerk reaction and subsequent posting and hashtagging, everybody sat for a moment and considered what they were wanting to say and why they were wanting to say it?

At least in the “letters to the editor” days people had to sit, write a letter, re-read it, put it in an envelope, buy postage, and put it in the mailbox. There’s plenty of room for contemplation there. And if you were still an asshole after that contemplation, then at least you were a consistent asshole!

Thanks in no small part to how human brains work, if you fly off the handle and post something you wouldn’t necessarily back up if given time to think about it and people attack you for it, you’re more likely to dig in and defend your statement and let the conflict escalate. The same happens to a different extent if people praise you for that ill-conceived idea. It becomes harder and harder to let go of that idea and eventually you just look like an ass when the evidence mounts against you. At best you relent and give a non-apology. At worst you now have a shitty opinion and have helped make a new division in your sphere of influence. Welcome to politics!

In most cases I think people are legitimately concerned about the issues they bring up, regardless of the side they take. We all just need to start sitting back and thinking about the issues that resonate with us before we speak to them. Why do we feel the way we do when we see this comic or hear about gun control or foreign policy or who’s qualified to buy what comics based on their gender or whatever? Where is our reaction coming from? Is there a deeper issue behind our feelings? Is there a deeper meaning we’ve sensed behind the thing to which we’re reacting that we need to understand better?

I know these aren’t approaches people are going to just adopt because a guy wrote a wall of text on the internet about it but I think it’s an easy solution to the rhetoric problem our culture faces these days!

In this current age of the 24-hour news cycle, the sound-bite, and the “I’m special because I posted first” false sense of accomplishment, many people are not doing proper research before they respond to something they read or hear.

Take a breath, get your news from several (never just one) sources, and then make your mark with an INFORMED response.

I would rather be the 534th poster in a thread with all of my FACTS in a row, than be the loud-mouthed insecure ignoramus who crows incendiary nonsense, just to be “first”.

It’s gotten to the point where Twitter and Tumblr responses have become parody. #firerickremender when people started parodying them. I hope creators start parodying more to show the world how ridiculous this is.

What’s offensive to you is not offensive to me and your offense is not worth more then mine. Don’t like something, DON’T BUY IT, DON’T READ IT, DON’T FOLLOW THE CREATOR. But if I like it don’t try to take it from me and others. Trying to do that is selfish. It’s “I don’t like this, YOU can’t have it.”

As for the changes on Thor and Cap. Does anybody really see these lasting past the release of each character’s solo films? Lets be serious. (Hello Superior Spider-Man)

Remender lost all moral footing when he told that fan to drown in hobo piss when all the guy did was very respectfully say “Hey, I have a problem with this and this is why.”

His half-assed apology means nothing.

I’m always amused when people invoke “common sense” as if it had some sort of a priori objectivity.

The root of the problem wasn’t even that scene. It was the latest in a long string of offensive things that Remender’s written in Captain America and Uncanny Avengers, as well as the utter refusal of Remender, and Marvel as a whole, to listen to any criticisms.

When people who are members of real life minorities were offended by the M Word speech, they were brushed off and Remender told them to drown themselves in hobo piss. When people were offended by Sharon Carter being killed off because “Steve had to lose something” (Remender’s own words in an interview on this site), they were brushed off as hysterical women who were overreacting to something which could be the definition of fridging. When people were offended by Jet Black’s costume being strips of fabric, they were brushed off and told it was because of her powers. And take a guess at what happened when people were offended by the “you do this job because you get off on it” conversation between Jet and Fury, and the Yellow Peril villain?

The fans can’t have a conversation about criticisms when the creators refuse to admit that there’s any possibility of them having written anything that could be offensive to people, and placing blame on people for being offended.

The entire Remender problem could have easily been solved by people working for Marvel admitting that the scene came across badly, and that Jet’s age should have been established earlier, given the ambiguous nature of the art.

There is not conversation to be had.

One person lied and threw a temper tantrum, and comic industry reacted exactly as it should.

The #firerickremender people are no different than the guys who accused Dan Slott of ruining their childhood when he “killed” Peter Parker.

This is hilarious.