Tag: SJW

Diversity and comic sales

Jon Del Arroz looks deeper into the decline of Marvel as it relates to the comic giant’s descent into diversity:

A comic book retailer in the San Francisco Bay Area voiced his frustration, saying Marvel went from 48 percent to 25 percent of his sales. His shop and livelihood are at risk because of Marvel’s continued dedication to their shallow faux-diversity. If this type of cheap virtue signaling doesn’t work in San Francisco, what audience do they think they’re selling to?

Hearing the poor sales figures from a retailer prompted me to look into Marvel’s writers. Over a period of two weeks, I dug through the Twitter accounts of every current Marvel writer listed on marvel.com‘s new releases page, to see where they stood on politics. What I found would have been shocking, if I hadn’t already seen the extreme left-wing preaching posing as superhero adventures from their products. Even with that, the sheer lockstep and groupthink that these social media profiles display is unthinkable.

Out of 30 writers, every single one made bitter posts attacking President Trump and conservatives. There were no dissenters. Not one had a difference of opinion, not one even saw the sense in refraining from posting about politics… As a business, one would think that a company the size of Marvel would keep their customers’ demographics in mind. But as we’ve seen above, a large portion of their customer base has been told they’re not wanted. Their problem: the new, diverse crowd they desire didn’t come into comic shops to purchase their books to replace those they shunned.

I ran a Twitter search again, this time to investigate Marvel’s religious leanings. Marvel has writers who profess to be atheist, Jewish, and they even have a Muslim writer. Most writers, eager to speak out on their left-wing politics, don’t talk about their religion at all.

I did find one oddity: out of the entire group, I did not find one writer that openly professed Christianity. On the contrary, many of the writers made comments mocking Christians or the Bible. It begs the question: does Marvel hold a latent religious intolerance toward Christians? Based on this research, it would appear so.

No wonder the response to the idea of Castalia House Comics has been so strong. Marvel has completely turned its backs on most of its audience. Increasingly, it appears that disruption is the natural consequence of diversity in the corporate world.

SJW doesn’t like being identified as such

The amusing thing about SJWs taking offense to being called SJWs is that they clearly don’t understand that it was originally their own label adopted by their own kind that was weaponized by the Alt-Right’s sarcasm. Also: Every.Single.Time.

I’ve always said that I appreciate all my readers, both those who agree with me and those who don’t. But lately I’ve been puzzled by the new slurs directed at me by some of the latter. Many I didn’t even understand, so I did some digging.

Apparently, tried-and-true insults such as “fag,” “fairy,” “kike” and “hebe” (yes, I’m Jewish) are old-school, especially among the alt-right. That small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state is developing new coded language, much as the Nazis once did, says noted linguist George Lakoff, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

For instance, in February I wrote about Milo Yiannopoulos, the now-disgraced Breitbart News editor and alt-right poster boy. I heard from many readers about that column, which took Yiannopoulos to task for his incendiary language. But one email caught my eye: “Milo is far less bigoted, misogynist, and hateful than those of you sick sociopathic and psychotic SJW’s who smear him so desperately.” Sick, sociopathic and psychotic, I knew. But SJW? I had no clue. In a personal ad it might mean “straight Jewish woman,” but two of those don’t apply to me. So what was this snarky new gem of an insult?

I emailed back, “What is an SJW?” The reply: “An SJW is a social justice warrior. In the press, this particular public predator tends to be big on PC [political correctness] virtue signaling but happy to smear others viciously with false accusations of sexism, racism, white nationalism, hate speech, etc.”

Well, that was certainly clear — I’m a “public predator” allegedly guilty of smearing Yiannopoulos by referring to his very own, widely reported hateful language.

I started looking into other slurs readers hurled at me. There was “libtard,” and one I really liked at first — “snowflake,” because they’re magical, in moderation.

But here’s the nasty undercurrent: These new words are intrinsic to the alt-right’s rise, according to Lakoff. He connects this to the Nazis and the coded language (prime example: “the master race”) that eventually allowed them to topple governmental institutions. “The strategy is to control discourse,” Lakoff points out. “One way you do that is preemptive name calling . . . based on a moral hierarchy.”

First, the Alt-Right is much bigger than the Alt-White, much less the Alt-Reich. As evidence of this contention, I note that I’ve just been sent translations of the 16 Points in Ukrainian and, of all things, Esperanto. Second, Milo is Alt-Lite, not Alt-Right.

Third, the incessant whining about name-calling by people who don’t hesitate to hurl “Nazi” and “anti-semitic” at a pizza delivery driver who arrives thirty second late with their Veggie Supreme with extra eggplant and tofu is both pathetic as well as indicative of the extreme susceptibility of SJWs to rhetoric.

Fourth, they’re not “codewords”. As one of Steve’s commenters pointed out: ” The alt right is small but has power and this is for one reason only – the alt right is the one group that Calls Things By Their True Name.” And fifth, it’s not hard to understand why Steve Sailer’s appeal remains self-limited, he’s the classic example of the dialectic speaker who simply can’t bring himself to accept the necessity of rhetoric. I mean, if you’re still loftily sperging at this point about using the term “warrior” for SJWs, you simply don’t grasp the way rhetoric works.

Steven Petrow’s column is prima facie evidence of why you should simply utilize SJW instead of whatever your preferred dialectic alternative might be.

Too much Diversity

Marvel Comics decides to pull a little of its much-ballyhooed Diversity from X-Men:

The mentioned artwork in X-Men Gold #1 was inserted without knowledge behind its reported meanings. These implied references do not reflect the views of the writer, editors or anyone else at Marvel and are in direct opposition of the inclusiveness of Marvel Comics and what the X-Men have stood for since their creation. This artwork will be removed from subsequent printings, digital versions, and trade paperbacks and disciplinary action is being taken.

Apparently a Diversity artist has been sneaking anti-Jewish and anti-Christian references from the Koran and Indonesian politics into the comic. Quelle surprise. Whoever heard of an artist surreptitiously slipping their beliefs into art before?

But why would Marvel erase this Diversity? Are we not reliably informed that Diversity makes everything better?

Mailvox: don’t read Earthsea

At the very least, avoid reading anything beyond Book Two:

Imagine that Tolkien embraced communism in the 1950s and was inspired to write a sequel to The Return of the King that embodied his new values of class oppression and false consciousness. The sequel, called simply Elanor, is thus about how Sam’s daughter Elanor discovery that “all along” the Hobbits were the real natives of Middle Earth, and rightful owners of the Rings of Power, and could bear them safely; that the Rings had been taken from them to use to exploit their rightful land of Middle Earth, while the hobbits were entrapped within the prison of the Shire under the watch of their jailers, the Rangers, who convinced them they were weak and needed shelter; and that this lasted for centuries until the truth was revealed when the hobbits had to be enlisted because the owners of the hobbit’s Rings were so corrupt that the only practical option was to destroy them. Armed with this knowledge, Elanor sets things to right by creating the first new Ring of Power in millennia so she can liberate all of Middle Earth with it.

And that’s why you should never read books 3, 4, or 5 of Earthsea.

Drat! I think the emailer just gave McRapey his next big idea….

Really, Twitter?

It is beyond ironic to see Twitter, of all companies, attempting to hide behind “freedom of speech”:

Twitter Inc on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit to block an order by the U.S. government demanding that it reveal who is behind an account opposed to President Donald Trump’s tough immigration policies. Twitter cited freedom of speech as a basis for not turning over records about the account, @ALT_uscis. The account is claimed to be the work of at least one federal immigration employee, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court.

Tell it to Milo. Hell, tell it to me. Even when you think SJWs can’t surprise you with their shameless lies and hypocrisy anymore, they still somehow manage to do it.

How could the legal freedom of someone else’s speech mean that you don’t have to turn over your administrative records when ordered by the relevant authority?

The answer to SJW failure is more SJW

Isn’t it amazing how the Left’s inevitable answer to failure is always more of the same? The EU is failing? Must need more Europe! The Venezuelan economy has collapsed? Must need more communism! Diversity comics don’t sell? MORE DIVERSITY IS THE ONLY WAY!

A few days ago a discussion and subsequent interview with David Gabriel, Marvel Comics’ Senior VP of Sales and Marketing, at their retailer summit began making the rounds, but not for the reasons the publisher was hoping. Marvel has every reason to be concerned, as their share of the market has shrunk dramatically in the last few months. Figuring out the cause of that decrease is vital for Marvel’s survival—yet the answer they’ve come to isn’t just inaccurate, it’s also offensive.

SJWs have reduced themselves to insisting that reality is inaccurate and offensive. After all, an SJW teen librarian writing for Tor must know considerably more about how Marvel’s comics are selling than Marvel’s own Senior VP of Sales and Marketing!

Diversity doesn’t sell for obvious reasons. Blacks don’t read very much. Hispanics don’t read very much. Asians read, but not as much as whites do. And whites like to read about blacks and Hispanics and Asians even less than Asians and blacks and Hispanics like to read about whites.

And the resistance of SJW-converged publishers to these observable facts is why Castalia House will eventually be bigger than Tor Books.

Speaking of comics, the co-creator of Alt-Hero and I are working on putting together a serious comic-related project. Figure two months before we have anything significant to discuss in public, although I’ve got an artist or two kicking some concepts around. But the project is going to be cool, it is going to be ambitious, and it is going to be mind-blowing in several very different ways.

How is that diversity working out for you?

Not so well, according to Marvel:

Part of it, but I think also it seemed like tastes changed, because stuff you had been doing in the past wasn’t working the same way.  Did you perceive that or are we misreading that?

No, I think so.  I don’t know if those customers with the tastes that had been around for three years really supporting nearly anything that we would try, anything that we would attempt, any of the new characters we brought up, either they weren’t shopping in that time period, or maybe like you said their tastes have changed.

There was definitely a sort of nose-turning at the things that we had been doing successfully for the past three years, no longer viable.  We saw that, and that’s what we had to react to.  Yes, it’s all of that.

Now the million-dollar question.  Why did those tastes change?

I don’t know if that’s a question for me.  I think that’s a better question for retailers who are seeing all publishers.  What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity.  They didn’t want female characters out there.  That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.  I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales.

We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against.  That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.

I’m sure we’re all shocked that She-Thor and SuperBurqahGirl didn’t work out for them. Notice that all that equality and diversity didn’t bring in any of the much-vaunted diversity market either. It never does. Diversity always destroys, whether it is a society or a comic book series.

Diversity in comics

Jon Del Arroz surveys the political diversity of Marvel:

Marvel has a diversity problem.

In that they have none in terms of diversity of thought. They are a pure social justice propaganda arm. This is dangerous when it comes to creating art, as if you have everyone thinking in lockstep, unable to get outside the box, you’ll have creative stagnation. More than that, when you turn children’s adventure fiction into adult message browbeating, you lose any semblance of fun that a product formerly had. It’s no wonder that sales have dropped by about half, when they have an entire writing core of every single one of their monthly writers hell-bent on a crusade of alienating half of the country in some social engineering through comics.  I don’t exaggerate my numbers either, and I did some leg work for you all so you might better make educated purchases, or lack thereof, of Marvel Comics.

Just looking on the comics rack, you can see where Marvel has decided to make a foolish stand. No sane person would go and buy these comics anymore, there’s nothing of value there. All they have left is legacy purchasers who have made such a habit of picking them up that they can’t drop it. Even those have been dwindling because Marvel’s taken their political nonsense to more of an extreme than Tor Books or Hollywood itself. Stories themselves don’t exist in a vacuum, however, it stems from their editorial and who they hire to write, which are no longer the brightest creative minds, but SJWs who yell the loudest and who purposefully virtue signal at every turn.

According to marvel.com, there are 18 writers on the current releases. I went through each and every one of their twitter accounts to give you a summary of where they spend their time on social media in terms of politics. I don’t mind people getting political occasionally, or even necessarily holding left wing views, but when it’s constant beating the drum of anger and hate, that’s what makes an SJW, and that’s where one needs to stay away (and is a primary reason for Marvel’s steep sales decline in recent years).  Here’s a brief summary of the writers’ twitter feeds, as I’ve gone through all of them for you:

Mike Costa – Constant Anti-Trump posts.


Jason Aaron – Anti-Trump, has #resist greenpeace retweet from inauguration. However, he doesn’t post politically very often, not pushing some anger crusade all the time.

Brian Michael Bendis – Anti-Trump posts, but posts so much it’s not a large percentage of his tweets.


Cullen Bunn – Rabid anti-Trump.


Becky Cloonan – a couple of snarky anti-Trump posts pre-election, but no political posts since. From the feeds, appears to be the sanest of the Marvel staff.


Gerry Duggan – Constant Anti-Trump posts, retweets Bernie (he can still win!).


Al Ewing – British, and doesn’t seem to post a lot of American politics, but very heavily steeped in globalism in immigration “rights” in his posts. Anti-Western civilization. 


Roxanne Gay –  Constant rants about feminism, anti-Trump posts. 


Zac Gorman – Complains about Republicans as “joke”, but only one recent post as such. Low percentage of political tweets.


Derek Landy – Anti-Trump, not overwhelming in political posts. Mostly sticks to posts about writing.


Kate Leth – Regular anti-Trump posts. Constant complaints about some boogeyman “privilege”, rambles at racist, sexist, etc., “white dudes”.  Rants about queer issues.


Stuart Moore – Regular posts anti-republican, anti-Trump.


Greg Pak – Complains about “representation” of different races. Lots of anti-Trump posts.


Dan Slott – Anti-trump rants all the time. 


Charles Soule – Constant anti-trump rants.


Nick Spencer – Rants about trump/republicans and calls anyone who disagrees with him flat out evil.


G.Willow Wilson – “Muslim” Ms. Marvel writer, rants anti-Trump posts all the time.


Chip Zdarksy – Constant anti-Trump posts.

UPDATE 3/22/17: Found another crop of Marvel writers: http://delarroz.com/?p=687  still batting 1000%. Looks like blackballing is real as the sample size becomes far less coincidental.

18/18 Marvel writers, 100%, are extreme left wing ideologues who hate half of the country, have nothing nice to say about the USA or its president ever.

So, here’s the question. What do we do about it? We are working on a graphic novelization of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, as you can see below. And we do have the rights to a considerable quantity of stories. But we have one – precisely one – self-appointed volunteer who is creating this as a labor of love in his spare time.

Is this something where a Kickstarter would make sense? I don’t like the idea of relying solely upon the Dread Ilk for this, as you are already supporting more vital projects such as Gab, Infogalactic, and Castalia House. Those are strategic projects of general interest, whereas something like this is more specific to a single converged market.

My thought is that it would be interesting to subvert the current superhero genre with a group of nationalist superheroes who are totally opposed to the evil would-be rulers of the world; they’d be seen as villains, of course, by those who romanticized saving the UN every Saturday morning in the 1970s and 80s.

They’d be hunted relentlessly by the conventional superheroes as well as by the UN, Interpol, and all the globalist organizations. Marvel occasionally flirts with this sort of thing, except their themes are incoherent because they want their heroes to be personally rebellious and independent while at the same time being slavish servants of the global government and SJW ideology. We could call it Alt-Hero; typical scenarios would be foiling attempted assassinations of populist politicians, rescuing conservative speakers from antifa and Black Bloc mobs, and preventing mad corporatist schemes to do terrible things to large populations in the name of progress.

The advantage of the Kickstarter approach is that if there was not sufficient interest and the project failed as a result, there would be very little waste of time, effort, and money. What do you think? Is it something you’d find of interest? Is it a ridiculous idea? Is it worth looking into? The thing is, Castalia is going to publish at least one hardcover/softcover graphic novel anyhow, and so the writing, production and distribution elements are already in place. And every de-convergence starts with one small step.

Enjoying their tolerance

It’s always mildly amusing to see progressives forced to face the consequences of their moral posturing, however disastrous those consequences may be for everyone.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and have seen my fair share of transgender/gender fluid people. They in no way offend me. I’d consider myself pretty progressive and tolerant of most things…except maybe people who identify as a person wearing socks with sandals. We all have our line in the sand and that’s totally mine. But how transgender people feel, how they choose to dress or any surgeries they get, don’t infringe on any parts of my life, so I support their decision to live as they see fit. I’ve also seen my fair share of transgender women in the women’s restroom before. Not ALL the time. But over the past few years, I’d say 4-5 that I noticed. Men…who were in some stage of transition and making every attempt to be a woman from mascara to heels. Transgenders who certainly felt comfortable in the women’s room and probably frightened to go into the men’s. At these times, I smiled…I peed…and life went on. But 2 weeks ago something very different happened.

I was at Disneyland with my son, my friend and her son. We were over in California Adventure in the food court area. We’d just finished eating and decided to pee before we headed out to The Little Mermaid. I went to the bathroom while she watched our boys in their strollers, and then I did the same. (For anyone who’s tried to fit a stroller in a bathroom stall, you get it).

I was off to the side waiting with the two boys, when I noticed a man walk into the restroom. My first thought was “Oh shit, he’s walked in the wrong restroom by mistake. lol” He took a few more steps, at which point he would’ve definitely noticed all the women lined up and still kept walking. My next thought was, “Maybe he’s looking for his wife…or child and they’ve been in here a while.” But he didn’t call out any names or look around. He just stood off to the side and leaned up against the wall. At this point I’m like, “WTF? Ok there is definitely a very large, burly man in a Lakers jersey who just walked in here. Am I the only one seeing this?” I surveyed the room and saw roughly 12 women, children in tow, staring at him with the exact same look on their faces. Everyone was visibly uncomfortable. We were all trading looks and motioning our eyes over to him…like “What is he doing in here?” Yet every single one of us was silent. And this is the reason I wrote this blog.

If this had been 5 years ago, you bet your ass every woman in there would’ve been like, “Ummm what are you doing in here?”, but in 2017? The mood has shifted. We had been culturally bullied into silenced. Women were mid-changing their baby’s diapers on the changing tables and I could see them shifting to block his view. But they remained silent. I stayed silent. We all did. Every woman who exited a stall and immediately zeroed right in on him…said nothing. And why? B/c I and I’m sure all the others were scared of that “what if”. What if I say something and he says he “identifies as a woman” and then I come off as the intolerant asshole at the happiest place on earth? So we all stood there, shifting in our uncomfortableness…trading looks. I saw two women leave the line with their children. Still nothing was said. An older lady said to me out loud, “What is he doing in here?” I’m ashamed to admit I silently shrugged and mouthed, “I don’t know.” She immediately walked out, from a bathroom she had every right to use without fear.

It’s always informative to spot the exact point at which the progressive virtue-signaling stops. It’s invariably somewhere between “violence directed at me” and “potential violence directed at my children.” Adjust your rhetoric accordingly.