Both extremes of the #Comicsgate debate in a nutshell: “If every fictional story is not tailor-made by people just like me, starring characters just like me and bought only by people like me then they, their creators and readers are all trash but I’m not a self-centered fascist.”
There was a German anthropologist active in the 1930s who made it his life’s work to prove that Africans were genetically inferior to the other skin-tones of the world. I first heard mention of him in a collection of letters from Lovecraft I reviewed for Heavy Metal Magazine. Lovecraft apparently caught some lectures from this man in his brief years in NYC. But the guy proved himself wrong and thus changed his beliefs full circle, by finding instead evidence of a thing largely suppressed in the decades since. Iron-ore working in Africa centuries before any European colonizing. I bet that Stan Lee and/or other early but timely Marvel bullpeners may have also caught lectures as I feel the discovery could have inspired the Wakanda/Vibranium stuff of the Black Panther comics some years later.
But before I derail myself anymore, what I’m getting at is that victories of voices past are not always made by people who look like us or act like us or feel the same as we do.
Comic books may publicly seem to only be limited by the imagination of the creators, markets pending, but there is an air of superiority among any faction of the whole that insists on being oblivious to the past contributions and sacrifices made by people not like them.
The recent vilifying of Robert Crumb’s anti-censorship work the same way that fascists have always tried to demean or suppress his work, enacted now under the pretense of the vilification being an anti-oppression victory, resets the boundaries for dumb.
The whole point of Crumb’s work was to show how stupid all taboos are. He is the first to admit he has no place in society because people cannot live without their taboos, and scapegoats. If the undergrounders of the 1960s had not self-published all the works they did, against endless threats of censoring, to open the medium up to non-commercial viewpoints then SJW-friendly comix today would not exist. There is no leapfrogging in cultural evolution. Any change for the better is incremental, and the notion that it only occurs in the here and now, and only from the efforts of kids today, is wholly ignorant of history. If you personally don’t like something, you are under no obligation to support it. Which is not the same as ripping it apart, because subjectivity does not equal objectivity.
This is like a horde of Christians abruptly calling Jesus a Satanist and his followers satanic, despite the same group making the charges still using the Christian label for themselves because in their own mind all successes of the church only happened on their late-to-the-party watch. Or like Elon Musk, jealous of the attention received by the dive team leader who actually rescued those boys trapped in the cave, decides to repeatedly attack the dive team leader across social media. Becoming the oppressive voice is not combating oppression. Turnabout is not fair-play, it’s stooping. Most adults eventually learn the world was not made for them, and that demanding otherwise is actually a keystone to fascism. Non-comickers see only a bunch of sheltered, self-centered loons. I disagree with 95% of the content at USA Really, but I’m good with that because to their credit, unlike most webzines they actually do run an array of opinions. Imagine if more creative thinkers felt that way about their own mediums.
I have written too many words about the echo chambers of news bubbles and collegiate safe spaces being one and the same as gated communities, all forms of rebranded segregation ideologically and physically. The loudest voices on about identity politics rely on the digital socials more than anything else, whose third party deals amount to actual identity theft and arguably violation of what should be defined as the naturalized copyright of our truest IP, our own personae. They conduct themselves no differently than Christian extremists seeing homosexuality as a bigger threat to the tenets of marriage than divorce attorneys.
Individuality should totally be praised, but mindful of reality in that by sharing in a collective, western society for example as no man is an island and it takes a village, etc, no chain is stronger than its weakest link. Independence at the expense of others is really just codependency.