Skip to main content

The "Problem" of How to Think About Problematic Creators

I've talked to many of my friends about my complicated relationship with the work of Warren Ellis. His work is primarily what got me into comics as an adult, and I think a lot of it is still brilliant, and people should read it.

Also, a little more than a year ago, a number of women came forward to recount their stories of sexual coercion and... misrepresentation? I don't want to make light of it, and my point is not to go in depth on what he did. Let's just say that he used his influence in the comics industry to solicit MANY women into sexual relationships, so much so that they created a website somanyofus.com which now has over a hundred people that have logged their histories with him, often times backing up their stories with emails and chat histories.

Warren Ellis is a skeezy womanizer, and probably a pretty bad person. So how to view his works, and more specifically their influence on me? Some of my favorite go-tos for people that wanted something short and amazing to read in the comics space, that weren't superheroes, were Global Frequency and Supergod. Those aren't my initial picks anymore. Now I recommend something else, and if they come back for me, I might bring that up, but we have to have the "caveat discussion" about the creator.

Ellis' problematic views/behavior don't seem to come through in his works, at least not in ways that I pick up. But maybe there's some subtle allegories that I'm not keen enough to pick up on? Do those still affect me even if I don't consciously recognize them? I'm not saying that I'm afraid of being brainwashed by comics, but I am conscious that some of my thinking has been shaped by his writing, and it makes me uncomfortable to think about how problematic that influence might be.



Flash forward to a year and change later: For a good few years now, there has been maybe the most amazing Hulk story ever told, in the pages of "Immortal Hulk", this has been written by Al Ewing, with art by Joe Bennet. Now if you know these names, and are somehow hearing about this just now, leave me a comment because I want to know how you even found this blog, but also, breathe easy about Al Ewing. As far I know, the man's a saint. Joe Bennet, on the other hand, is at least an anti-Semite. 

My first exposure his nature was earlier this year, when someone called out a panel from Immortal Hulk, that takes place inside a jewelry store, and the shot is framed to look out through the store window to the street. The window features a prominent Star of David, and the shop name is revealed to be "Cronemberg Jewery", admittedly the "y" at the end was blocked by a character's head. When confronted about it, Bennet said he was "unaware" of the problematic stereotypical association between jewelers and Jewish people, and that the name of the business was just an accident, because he was doing it backwards he even misspelled "Cronenberg" because it was supposed to be an easter egg nod to the horror director.

Except, this isn't the first time Bennet's done this, he apparently did something similar in X-Men: Gold. it makes you wonder how much other racist hate speech he's snuck in as easter eggs in these books, and nobody caught it. The times he does get caught, he just says "Aww shucks, I'm sorry, I didn't realize/it wasn't intentional" and then apparently just goes right back to hiding things in there so that only people how "know" will find it?

He's particular bullshit came to a head this week, when a political cartoon he'd made in 2017 of Bolsonaro in armor, exterminating rats that were obvious racist caricatures, resurfaced. Al Ewing quickly made a statement this was the final straw for him, and that Immortal Hulk is done, but he won't be working with Bennett ever again. Marvel, always a day later and a dollar short, also came forward and said that they would not give him any work in the future, and that they were cancelling his involvement in books that were already in production.

I'm glad Bennett's gotten at least some of the repercussions he deserves for his shittiness, but it's interesting to me to contrast it against the situation with Ellis. In the case of Ellis' work, I wonder if there's some hidden message in the writing/theme/plot of his work that might be sinking in, but don't REALLY think there is. In the case of Bennett, he was CLEARLY trying to sneak in hidden messages into his books, like some sort of fascist cryptopropaganda. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket
1 comment
Read more

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig
Post a Comment
Read more

Final Fantasy XIII: I may not finish this

The latest installation in Square Enix's flagship series, Final Fantasy XIII does a number of really cool things. I don't want to take a lot of time going into the mechanics under the hood, but you need to get the basics in order to get a feel for the game. The battle system is real time, the battle constantly goes on even while you're deciding what to do, you're only in direct control over the party leader though, keeps you from being overwhelmed, the other two party members are only controllable only insofar as you can dictate what class they use. Class management is an important part of the battle system, only commandoes can physically attack enemies, and ravagers deal elemental damage, along with a myriad of other classes, each character starts off with access to a small selection, and by the end of the game will have extensive access to three classes, as well as marginal access to the remaining classes. Which classes you use are determined by paradigms, sort of pre
Post a Comment
Read more