I Stand with Chelsea Cain

It’s been a tough week online for the comics industry. The brilliant comics writer Chelsea Cain was tweeting about her disappointment at the end of her Mockingbird series, canceled by Marvel. She shared an alternate cover for the final issue:
mockingbirdfeministagenda_home_top_story
Then the abuse came. This is Chelsea’s take on it:
Overnight, I had lost thousands of followers. (I’d gone to bed with about 8500.) I had gained a thousand new followers. I had been tagged thousands of times. Comments were coming in, fast and furious, every second. I’d never seen anything like it. I saw a few of them – a lot of support, a lot of people yelling at one another – a lot of people mad at me for being too quick on the block button or too critical of comic book readers or being too feminist. A lot of them just seemed mad at women in general.
I deactivated my account. I got up. I walked my dogs.
You might not believe that in 2016 this sort of thing happens. It does. Here’re a completely real screenshot of just one person’s tweets on the issue.
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It makes for disturbing reading. This is the general theme of what Chelsea was talking about. It’s bad enough from one person, let alone a whole load of people.
Obviously, it’s nonsense. Feminism is not really a political agenda. It’s much bigger than that and hasn’t really got anything to do with politics. To me it doesn’t seem a big step to imagine a world where everyone is equal, regardless of gender. Sadly for many that does seem to be the case.
Comics are for everyone. I’m a big fan of Spider-Man, largely because I relate to Peter Parker so much. We’re a similar of a similar age, both white males and into science and want to help people. He’s quite like me.
I seems perfectly logical to me that people want superheroes that they can relate to. 50% of people happen to be female so 50% of superheroes should be female. Marvel is working hard to increase the diversity of it’s superheroes but there’s still a long way to go. These conservative men don’t have to read comics aimed more at women in the same way they don’t have to read novels aimed more at women. There’s room in the medium for all sorts of different stories for all sorts of different people.
The idea that superheroes are conservative is also odd. Most superheroes are on the left of politics, fighting to make things better and help people. Often supervillains are super-rich businessmen and there’s an element of fighting for the little guy in comic books. Surely the whole idea of being a superhero is a million miles from the idea of conservatism?
Feminism doesn’t ruin comic books. Abusive, selfish, misogynistic ‘fans’ ruin comic books and there is no place for them in any part of the modern world, let alone in the comics industry.
These people are in the minority but sadly they do still exist. I think it’s the job of everyone else to drown these people out by welcoming all to comics and showing them that comics are truly for everyone.

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