TAKES: On being a dead ender

The culture war is a productivity murderer, so I'm tapping out

Earlier last year, I spent an entire working day watching two creators publicly accuse each other of being affiliated with COMICSGATE (if you don’t know what that is, 1. God bless you, 2. stay in the dark, 3. click away from this post and wait for more drawings).

Both are fairly well-known personalities on the independent comics scene. For about 72 contentious hours, I checked in regularly to see each of them, bent into pretzels, slandering one another, posting dubious links showing how so-and-so once liked a tweet from what’s-her-name who follows what’s-his-nuts and performing the most pathetic imaginable version of the famous Spider-Man pointing meme in real-time.

And for what? The 4-12 people tapping the “heart” on each tweet?

The stakes of this kind of fight, as well as the insignificance of the prize, can be summed up easily:

This is high school shit.

Let’s attempt to calculate the opportunity cost of this battle of wills. For me, it was at least 3 working days (5 if you count the time I spent typing this up). For the artists involved, how much more? How much time did these two people, ostensibly participating in this community to become known for their art, waste acting like two coyotes fighting over a wet ribcage in a dank alleyway?

I’ve always felt out of place in this scrum. Sure, I’ve tried to play the voice of moderation from time to time. Because I always assumed there was some kind of common cause running beneath the petty squabbles.

I assumed that everyone here has a crappy job, like me. That they have families or responsibilities they struggle to take care of, like me. That they do art in the margins, like me.

I assumed we were banded together under some kind of shared struggle of the starving artist. That we have a community.

It’s a nice thought. But I just don’t buy it anymore.

It’s hard to claim you’re a positive, uplifting community pursuing art and creativity with so many coyotes fighting over wet ribcages all the time. Some of that is inevitable. But, I think we’re a little inverted. The politics and the personality conflicts have had an outsized influence on the community for a little while.

I suddenly feel very far away. Like I’m watching all of this unfold on the Discovery Channel. Or like I’ve been sucked into a reality television show about housewives that I couldn’t give two fucks about.

And not even a good two fucks. Two fucks that I was about to throw out anyway. I would still throw them away rather than sacrifice them on this altar to Dark Triad personality traits.

If you’re getting a sense that I feel like I’m better than all of this, your intuitions are correct. I do think I’m better than this.

Or rather, I value my time more than this.

I think all of us who feel a twinge of disappointment about the toxic elements of the comics community should. And I know you are many, because I talk to all of you, all the time, about it.

Just, privately.

Many such conversations are happening all the time.

There are other complaints I could litigate. I could write at length about bad incentives in the online comics community, rewarding antisocial behavior, bald-faced dishonesty, and purity spiraling, but I don’t want to waste your garbage-bound fucks on this reality TV show any more than I want to waste mine.

So I’m taking out the trash. I didn’t sign up to be a witness to petty, vindictive personality conflicts, or to have my attention held hostage by narcissists and scolds. I didn’t sign up for a culture war. I conscientiously object to being implicitly drafted into one every time I log on.

The knot

I know I’m not alone. We all seem to hate this.

But we also feel… kinda stuck. Tied up in a knot.

We use these free online tools as venues for building an audience. These platforms appear to be, to completely understate their potential utility, a miracle.

In theory:

• They allow us access to an infinite number of readers and patrons.

• They give us real-time feedback and analytics.

• They allow us to raise thousands of dollars (plus) to make our dreams come true.

We can do all of this without ever setting foot outside our homes. Without maxing out our credit cards to set up at a trade show. Without ever introducing ourselves to a publisher.

I think a good most of us get this.

But not all of us.

Instead of unleashing their creativity and striving to do their very best work, some have chosen to invest a significant amount of their bandwidth, even their identities, into something else.

That is, drawing lots and lots of attention to themselves to consolidate influence in an attempt to dictate what they think the community ought to be.

And where the powers of persuasion fail, these individuals resort to pure Tonya Harding shit:

• Telling people what platforms they can and cannot use.

• Telling people whom they can and cannot associate with.

• Getting books that people want to read canceled.

All the while making sure that you never forget that they are the victims.

If you think I’m talking about you, hear this: I hope you wise up and make better use of the immensely valuable and inherently limited time you have on this little blue pearl. I’m rooting for you to do that. I want you to make your best work. You owe that to this community.

For everyone else, let me be candid — if you are being told what platforms you can and cannot use, who you can and cannot associate with, and what books you can and cannot read, you are the victim.

You’re in an abusive relationship. And you need a divorce.

The problem is, divorce is hard! It’s hard to know when a bad relationship is worse than the unknown alternative.

This is the knot — We know we need these platforms to build our audiences. And navigating the community is the price of admission. Even if you’re only here for the art, the “bad relationship” is the cost of doing business.

But is the value that was once there still there? Do you see Twitter or Mastodon or Threads as places to discover readers?

The bad relationship might be worth tolerating if the social platforms were auditoriums packed with potential readers. But I think they’ve devolved into awkward company Christmas parties. Office watercoolers. And when I do find a “fan” in the IRL wild and ask them about the watercooler gossip, most of them don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Those two creators accusing each other of being COMICSGATE? “Never heard of them. And uh, what’s Comicsgate?”

There’s a disconnect here. Two theaters.

I think the hard-to-swallow truth is this:

The same way a nude beach is a great place to view flabby middle-aged men, and a poor place to pick up the chicks of your pornographic fantasies, online spaces are not obvious places to pick up readers anymore. It’s mostly peers. And peers do not an audience make.

So the knot isn’t what it seems to be. It’s not a freewheeling competition for the eyeballs of curious readers. It’s about figuring out how to navigate this informal gatekeeper network to tap into the audiences the other creators already have.

That’s a touchy game, because your peers and colleagues are your competitors.

Some of them could be friends. Some of them are!

But some of them never will be. And there are simply some people you won’t be willing to grovel to in exchange for getting ahead. I don’t see what there is to gain by pretending otherwise.

I’m not pointing all this out to make vague personal criticisms. I’m not singling anyone or any “side” out. This is just how the game works. I don’t blame a rabbit for destroying my marigolds. A rabbit does what a rabbit does; we do what we do.

But my faith in this game has slipped. I don’t know that I was always on board. I always worried that it would be a productivity drain, or that navigating the office politics would overtake my focus on creating art.

And creating art is the only thing I want to do.

I don’t want to insert myself into these dead-end community dramas anymore.

“Nobody asked you to!” You’re right. It took me too long to realize that.

But, I have realized that, and if nothing else, if you’re in a similar predicament as I am, I hope this helps you. It’s a permission structure to dip out of the awkward Christmas party. Make your Irish goodbye.

For those of you who have made invaluable connections and lifelong friends here, I am happy for you.

I’ve struggled to do the same. I don’t share the reactionary politics of Comicsgate. I would not, did not, and will not vote for Donald Trump. I don’t think watching grown men set Rose Tico action figures on fire over on YouTube is a productive use of my time. I’m not interested in a “consumer movement.”

Or any movement.

I leaned left after 2016. October 7 was my reward. It brought many long-simmering skepticisms about leftwing social politics to a head for me. It is now a movement full of hypocrisies too large to ignore, and lies that I will not tolerate.

I need a divorce. It can be an amicable one, or it can be a shitshow. But it’s going to happen one way or the other.

What I’m doing now

I’m going my own way.

TAKES as a category of rent*space is dead. I write this post only to facilitate a fresh start. I’m someone who used to think it was valuable to weigh in. I’m no longer that person. I need this to be an artifact I can point to that explains why.

I’m quiet-quitting the online comics community. I’m not checking in on the reality TV show happening wherever the people who left Twitter ended up (spoiler alert, they’re still on Twitter).

I’m not keeping tabs on which platform is okay to use and which creator is problematic anymore. I don’t care. I will make those decisions for myself.

And as I’ve said before, if you give up all your tools to your enemies, your enemies will have tools; you won’t. I’m done shooting myself in the foot over moral panics and personality struggles I don’t have a stake in, nor give two good fucks about.

From now on, I’ll let my work speak for itself.

Maybe I’ll fail. Maybe it’ll take me a hell of a lot longer to build an audience.

But I will know that it’s mine. And that I didn’t have to make any compromises to get it.

Some immediate next steps:

I’ve iced out my Twitter. Its value was waning for me long before its current incarnation (and if you were wounded by my mild criticism of leftwing politics above, be assured that I voted with my feet on the question of Elon Musk while many of you remain on “X”).

If you noticed you were no longer following me or I was no longer following you, don’t worry. I don’t follow anyone. Except for the glorious Essen Haus.

My Twitter is a digital tombstone now. It exists merely so no one else can claim the handle. I won’t be using the platform anymore, at least in its current incarnation and under its current leadership.

For this next phase of what I’m doing, Substack is my home base.

I’m going to redesign my approach to focus more on building subscribers here. Anything else I have out there will point people in one direction: Ronin Digital Express.

It will take time to find the right next move here as I break out to discover a community of readers very far away from the knot. I’m sure they’re out there. Comics is a great medium. Nothing else can do what it can do. We’d have the goods; the page rates, the millions in sales, the royalties, if only we could get out of our own way first.

I’m going to prove it to you.

And for those of you who sympathize with what I’m saying here, I’m happy to have you around. You got me this far, I hope you will stick with me on this next chapter.

In the meantime, I am still working on Fistful of Yen. I want to relaunch Ronin Digital Express with a substantive update first. Apologies for the false start. But I haven’t given up on it.

Take care of yourselves. And for God’s sake, if what you’re seeing in some of your online spaces is driving you up a wall, at least take a break.

Maybe a permanent one.

Post-publication note (1/3):

Wow, thanks so much for the positive support over the last few days. I knew a lot of people felt the way I did, but I was genuinely heartened to hear from so many people, publicly and privately, and from a very diverse crowd of perspectives and experiences.

Aside from sharing my gratitude, I’m writing this update to point you toward

The Empire of the Tiny Onion

. A recent post caught my eye and I am linking to it below as a companion read to my essay above.

There are a lot of good gems in here about comics marketing, but also some post-mortem insights on social and online culture that add to the conversation.

Enjoy:

SKTCHDxTINYONION: Some Thoughts On Social Media and Comics Marketing