Superpowers

The Warm-Up

This whole thing isn't really about comics, but for the first half, it will seem like it is.

The piece of media that’s been dominating my mind the most in the last couple of months has been a seven-part series Abhay Khosla wrote in The Comics Journal, going in-depth on several sexual misconduct scandals that rocked the comic book industry this summer. The first entry is here, and I'll link to a couple of the others, but you don't need to read them in full to understand what I'm writing about. 

Abhay is one of my favorite writers on the internet; he writes like he's setting off a bomb. However, his style is very stream of consciousness and not really “correct” most of the time, grammatically speaking, which puts a lot of people off. I understand that to a degree -- taste is subjective! -- but two things captivated me as the series came out.

The first thing was the series itself. Abhay presents a mountain of evidence against all of these guys, and it’s really impactful to see all of it collected into one space rather than scattered hither and yon around Twitter and other corners of the internet. When gathered together, each man’s misdeeds can be seen for how monstrous they are, and the complacency of the industry that tolerated them snaps into focus.

In addition to being a compelling collection of facts (and some very good interviews on these topics with some prominent women in the comics industry), these articles are very much written in Abhay’s style: prone to digression, often jokey, and absolutely savage -- pretty typical for Abhay’s writing on mainstream comics. Via jibes, insults, and unflattering comparisons, Abhay torches each one of these shitty men, castigating them for their behavior, mocking them for their cowardice, and blasting the quality of their work.

This brings me to the second thing that captivated me about the series: the Twittersphere reaction to it, which often seemed as hostile toward Abhay as it did toward the things he was very clearly, stridently, and justifiably condemning.

There were a few criticisms of style that are, again, subjective, as well as at least one victim who said Abhay’s reporting on her situation was materially incorrect: both valid points to make! However, most of the criticism basically boiled down to two major complaints. The first was that Abhay’s tone was wrong, that his rambling, snarky mannerisms should never be applied to a topic of this magnitude. The other was that his criticism of some of the aesthetic elements of the creators and the industry was out of bounds -- that it made Abhay seem like he was taking a victory lap at tragedy’s expense, like when folks said “I never thought he was funny anyway” after the Louis C.K. revelations.

Both of these takes miss the point. For one, Abhay writes about these incidents with a gonzo, burbling, bilious rage because they are infuriating and insane, and his vicious mockery (which is never directed at the victims) is nothing less than what the perpetrators deserve. For another, his aesthetic choices aren’t just potshots; they’re illustrating how the mainstream comics/nerd world allowed this abuse to happen, by virtue of being propped up and populated by people trapped in arrested development and prone to unthinking hero worship. 

More than being misguided, however, these takes dovetailed with a trend I’ve been seeing a lot among the progressive-leaning as of late: the overwhelming need to align oneself with the right optics, regardless of right behavior.

The Wind-Up

This issue is hardly contained to comics. On a recent episode of the popular medical history podcast “Sawbones,” co-host Justin McElroy castigated any person who might want schools to reopen in any form during the covid crisis, suggesting that there was no legitimate reason anyone could feel otherwise. For a guy who’s quick to talk about recognizing privilege -- a worthwhile endeavor, to be sure -- Justin failed remember that not every parent works as a stay-at-home podcaster with multiple streams of spousal income, and not every child lives in an attentive household with family who can help them through a year of lost education. 

Does that mean I think every school in America should throw its doors back open? No! The safety risks are real. But he was in such a rush to reach the orthodoxy that he missed the reality: In a system beholden to cruel capitalism, run by a government with no interest in providing any relief, not everyone can afford to stop things indefinitely.

Covid is a great place to find a lot of takes like this: Bestowing virtual sainthood on Anthony Fauci while conveniently forgetting that he misled the country about the efficacy of mask at the start of the pandemic, likely contributing to many people’s distrust of them today (sure, it was for a good reason, but still not true!). Getting mad that any business owner would want to reopen, despite the fact that rent hasn’t been canceled (though it should be) and people still need to pay the bills. 

Politics, especially right now, is another area ripe for these takes. Seventeen years ago, George W. Bush and his cohorts lied the US into a war we still haven’t been able to fully extricate ourselves from. Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result. But today, if Bush says something mildly critical of Trump -- a man who he absolutely agrees with on policy positions most of the time -- he’s an honorable guy. “Welcome to the Resistance.” Liberals can donate millions to a bunch of ghoulish hucksters at the Lincoln Project, and Democrats can welcome a war criminal to endorse Joe Biden at their convention, and it’s all great, water under the bridge. Anything to beat the Cheeto.

The Pitch

Why do people act this way? Ultimately, I think it’s just because it’s easier to do and say the “right” thing than it is to confront what a fucked up place we inhabit and how each of us is complicit in that reality in our own little ways. It’s easier to follow patterns than it is to meaningfully change our behavior. 

Praise Kamala Harris for being the first black woman VP nom in major party history! Don’t think about how she worked to uphold the horrific police state currently showing its fangs around the country, and certainly don’t think about how she apparently has no qualms about working with a man she told us all was a segregationist a year ago! When we had a president who wasn’t Trump, it was so much easier to tune out of other people’s problems, and if our leaders have cool shoes, all the better!

Are you mad that J.K. Rowling outed herself as an enormous transphobe? Good! So am I! However, while I don’t believe in dictating how other people should respond to the news that one of their favorite artists is a shithead, it’s the coward’s way out to solemnly declare that Harry Potter “belongs to the fans now” and thus doesn’t require you to change anything or even think about your involvement in other people’s lives. You’ve absolved yourself from participating in the conversation.

The comedian Tim Batt has a little saying that I’ve been trying to live by, as much as I can: Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in. For me personally, I’ve tried to stop using Amazon. I’m trying to donate more. I’m trying to learn more about industry practices in the fields I care about so I can reward good actors and withhold my money from bad ones. I don’t say these things to brag; they’re infinitesimally small drops in the bucket, and I should have started doing them a long time ago! Nor am I saying that you have to do the same things. I’m just saying that these are the decisions that ultimately are more important. You will have more effect on the world by doing right than you’ll have by “being” right.

For one final moment, back to the Abhay series. I have long been a fan of DC Comics (a fact that Abhay and a lot of the TCJ cohort would likely criticize, justifiably so!). In Abhay’s final piece, he laid out, as damningly as he did to all the individual creators, a timeline stretching back almost 10 years of DC Comics getting called out for its totally negligent handling of sexual misconduct, and he pointed out that many of the people who were making those decisions, or at least enabling them with their silence, are still working there. I had heard some of these stories before, and I’d done nothing. I’d maybe avoid an individual book here or there, but I didn’t want to deal with the fact that something I liked, something I got a lot of joy out of over the years, was corrupted. I didn’t want to acknowledge that in some small way, when I bought one of their comics, I was saying that I didn’t care enough about how this company was treating women to change my behavior.

So, though I didn’t want to, though I’ll miss it, I decided to stop buying comics from DC, at least until there is a lot of meaningful structural change there. Once again, I’m not asking for a cookie; this is not some brave act, though I would like to publicly say thank you to Abhay for writing these pieces, and especially to the women who bravely shared their experiences with these men.

Regardless of whether his style was “appropriate,” Abhay inspired me to do something. I still see the people who criticized him, some of whom I respect, pop up on Twitter every now and then. They’re often recommending DC Comics. A year ago, they were talking about how well the “Watchmen” TV show handled racial issues, never mentioning the fact that it was based on a comic that was stolen from its creators, one of the industry’s myriad sins against those who built it.

But, sure: Abhay’s tone was the problem.

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What else is good on the internet?

I’ve given Abhay a lot of links already today, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share his 2015 comics year in review series, one of my favorite pieces of writing on the internet in the last 10 years.

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What else have you been up to?

I reviewed “The Glorias” this week. Really wanted to like it, but I didn’t! It did make me want to learn more about Gloria Steinem, though.

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From the vault

You’ve read enough of me already this week! I’m taking this one off!

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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.