I truly hope she has realized how she helped cause the destruction of the industry. I love the Hearher Antos clip of “if you don’t like my politics, don’t buy my book” only to talk about years later how comic book shops are closing and the industry is hurting.
Gail Simone annoys me because she was the one to whine about “fridging” and acted as if no stories existed where a woman seeks to avenge the death of a husband, boyfriend, brother, father, etc. I think she also shares some blame for the agenda of crapping on male fans and pushing women into comics despite the data showing they don’t have the same interest level as males. They could’ve very easily made some comic book like Twilight to appeal to a female audience.
Anyway, I hope she has truly learned her lesson.
Hm, let's look that up.
https://readcomiconline.li/Writer/Gail-Simone
Losing the will to live at this point.
So basically she exclusively writes female centric comics, often riding on the coattails of bigger names, almost only ever writes supplementary characters that have spun off in some way from something far more recognisable, and going by the publication dates of her entire works hasn't published anything since The Variants that ran from March 2022 to December 2022.
I know I keep mentioning this but there was no data to support the obsession with girls in comics. Smarter move would’ve been to make comics with themes that appeal to women like Manga does
I count the 'girls in comics' argument as a 'wider audience' pitch, and that whole reasoning is bunk. You are guaranteed to lose your niche audience and your odds of being popular enough after that for normies to band-wagon onto your product are minimal. The result is chasing after nothing.
The irony is that comics is literally doing the opposite. It wasn't 'girls in comics.' it was specifically lesibians. The space got Queered, and comix folx tried trading one niche audience (male grognards) for another (rainbow/alphabet people.) The overlap of those audiences is tiny. Meaning they effectively traded a small audience for the tiny sliver that also fits into another category.
Of course, this kind of inversion is typical leftism: making a lie of what you've said with your actions.
Thanks! I actually downloaded their podcast recently. I remember Eric July (when he was still reading current comics) reading some new Marvel garbage and shouting in frustration “do any Marvel higher ups actually go to comic book stores and see who actually has weekly subscriptions”.
Would you say the same thing happened with gaming?
Gaming's takeover was more like the takeover of Academia on fast-forward. The usual suspects cried racismus and muh soggy knees, infiltrated as consultants, colonized HR, and politicized the space. Games Journalism was the first to fall, and was the vanguard for the color revolutions which followed.
Unlike comics, where there was an active Queering, gaming is more of a skinsuit operation. They're occupying existing institutions and turning them explicitly political by shifting them to the left. Gaming as an industry was also so much bigger than the American comics scene that making the whole thing pivot was impossible due to institutional inertia, so it was more of a 'long march' through the major games devs and publishers.
+1 for Eric July.
I think if there is any answer to the current state of comics, it is to build a parallel publishing/distribution structure like he's done.
The answer to institutional capture has to be parallel institutions.
She wrote two of the best episodes of Justice League Unlimited... which admittedly were fairly female-centric ones. But that's all I know her for, really.