[...] those of you with long memories will remember that Bendis and I had a rather notorious online run-in back in 2000 where he encouraged his contributors to insult me. And as early as the beginning of [...]

You’ve got one hell of a point, Joanna, and I wish more people would pay attention to it.

It’s like ” is wrong”

“What, are you saying war is wrong? We should never go to war? Oh you’re saying we should surrender! What if we surrendered to Hitler? WHAT A HORRIBLE PERSON YOU ARE!”

>.

POWERS is plugging Warren Ellis as a guest star. Not a guest writer, or even “plotmaster”; instead, he’s appearing as a character. The ad asks “What … is Warren Ellis doing in a book he has nothing to do with?” Why, plugging himself, of course! In the brave new millennium, to stay noticed, you have to promote yourself; the work is secondary to the creator’s reputation. (Shame it’s come to that; I’m all for giving creators their due, but there has to be a happier medium than what we’ve got.)

I never understood why that upset Bendis so much, but it was more than half a decade ago now, so I guess I’ll never know.

I heard about the Dixon Newsarama post, but I didn’t see much to interest me in it. It seems to be an example of the kind of logical loops people go through to build a career working on other people’s superheroes.

[...] Lost in Translation: Batman 660 and Lost in Translation: Redux from Paperghost and Quoted In Powers from Comics Worth Reading – In the Paperghost entries, Chris Boyd from Paperghost starts off with a missive about the use of pidgin English in Batman #660 and ends up with a dismissive comment by writer John Ostrander. In the Comics Worth Reading entry, Johanna gets a dismissive comment from Brian Michael Bendis. The reason I picked these entries as MUST READS and put them together like this is because, as bloggers post entries looking at diversity on their blogs, I’m finding more and more creators have become dismissive of these commentaries. Now, I realize that creators are probably barraged by reactions from fans out there in the blogosphere with not always nice things to say and just get exasperated. But, it seems like a dangerous trend to me because it shuts down the conversation about diversity, walls are built and there is no productive solutions raised. I do find this sad. But, at the same time, I think it’s important for we as fans to also look for the good that creators do around diversity. I hope that this blog tries to look at both sides and, while it certainly will talk about the bad, it will always look for the good. [...]

(I hope you leave some room for a response to Newsarama’s Chuck Dixon interview. Reading the comments threads, it’s depressing that a few rational people have such an uphill battle, but that’s the comics world/society in general for ya.)