JDA interviewed Razorfist about his new crowdfund for Ghost of the Badlands 2: Ghost Dance, at Fandom Pulse.
You’ve been a vocal critic of mainstream entertainment. Is the problem the creators, the corporate gatekeepers, or the audience that keeps buying products based on corporate IPs indiscriminately?
It’s a failure trifecta.
1) Creators emanate from what are, in effect, covens of coastal insularity. Even those who are not avowed propagandists advancing an agenda all attend the same colleges. Are ‘educated’ by the same professors. Attend the same parties and rut with the same sexual partners. They may never see a single MAGA hat outside of a television their entire lives. They truly do not know how anyone in a ‘flyover state’ thinks, nor have they incentive to do so.
2) The fans, whether from ignorance or habit, keep going back to the same failing franchises for a second and third turn at ‘revival’.
3) The corporate structure is almost the least pernicious of the three: These corpos were, in most cases, in fiscal freefall long before they assumed a ‘woke’ sociopolitical posture. They see vanishing profit margins, ascendant alternatives, and in the case of comics, waited entirely too long to transition to digital. So they’re taking the “free” ESG money, and the Faustian checklist items attendant to it.
The internet has taken up the cry of “Get woke, go broke”, but it’s an incomplete formulation: My, slightly fuller, exposition is “Go broke, get woke, ultimately croak.” And, from BioWare to DoubleFine, we see daily reenactments of this truism.
Do you see the independent, creator-owned scene as a true alternative to Marvel and DC, or as a separate market that will always be smaller? Is there any way to get people to wake up and move over?
Marvel and DC have slowly sunk to the status of an IP piggy bank, which their parent entities plunder for movie and video game material periodically (less frequently these days, as the superhero film trend has plummeted earthward). Independent creators should not aspire to be the decayed husk DC and Marvel have been relegated to. We should be building something else entirely; something more akin to a culture, with comics almost as an adjunct. New franchises or comic series are less key to the prosperity of the same than is the creation of an independent media environment where they can be reviewed, discussed, discarded, or championed. The underground has been festooned with new projects since time immemorial. That’s nothing new.
It’s the mouthpieces to let passionate people become fans of such – that separate the stellar stuff from the trash – that we need. A modern, digital variant of that killer ‘Zine culture – somewhat elitist, but oriented around the honest interests of its adherents – led to the ‘80s black-and-white comics explosion, and seems to precede every such creative revolution.
Read the rest of what is a very good interview there.