In a thread called “How long do you expect Dan Slott to be the lead/ sole writer of Amazing Spider-Man?”, lejayjay posted a comment seemingly deriding Slott as a fair-weather comics writer who would likely depart for a more lucrative field. Though the comment eventually spun off into facetiously hyperbolic territory, it began by directly attacking Slott’s motives for writing ASM at all:

It is jus a paycheck for Slott anyway. He’s not a real fan.

Those two sentences prompted the following response from Slott, who expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms:

As a guy who turned down a side job this year for a paycheck that would’ve been over a third of his yearly income– BECAUSE it would’ve meant cutting back on his not-so-lucrative comic book writing career– and get in the way of working on his Spider-Man dream job…

…and the guy who slept less than 12 hours over the course of 4 days this week working on a script while he was sick… a guy who finally had to be ORDERED off it by his editor to go see a doctor… and is still in a good deal of pain today…

…this is the first time I think I’ve ever said this to somebody over a comic book message board:

Go fuck yourself.

Seriously.

Go. Fuck. Yourself.

lejayjay apologized almost immediately, wishing Slott well and characterizing the initial post as “schtick.” But the exchange still strikes me as a revealing one, for several reasons.

First, it shows — as if there were any question at all — that even some of the biggest names in comics, well paid by massive entertainment corporations for writing the superhero genre’s most popular characters, read and take very seriously the anonymous and semi-anonymous criticism and insults of people on the Internet. Whether that’s good, bad or indifferent for the creators, the companies, the comics or the consumers is up for debate, but it’s a very real phenomenon.

Second, it shows the folly of ascribing specific, and in fact unknowable, motives to creators whose work you dislike when a direct critique of that work itself would more than suffice. If you feel that (say) Dan Slott’s Spider-Man work lacks heart or is poorly told or runs counter to what you value in Spider-Man comics, there are countless ways to address this by discussing the actual work — pointing out specific shortcomings in plotting or dialogue or characterization; comparing it to other, better work by different creators; even comparing it to past, stronger work from the creator in question — rather than concocting theories about their personal feelings toward the characters or how they’re only in it for a paycheck or whatever. You don’t know that; unless they come out and say it, you can’t know it. Acting as if you do wastes everyone’s time.

Third, it shows that large segments of fandom expect creators to follow rules of decorum they in no way apply to themselves. Both in the original thread and on other sites where the exchange has been brought up, like this post and comment thread at Spider-Man Crawlspace or this question on Tom Brevoort’s formspring account, many fans responded to the exchange not by getting upset at the original, insulting post (joke though it turned out to have been) and empathizing with Slott as a person whose integrity and creativity had been questioned, but by getting miffed at Slott for forcefully responding. Wanna insult a person who works in the arts by saying the most derogatory and baseless things you can? Go ahead! Work in the arts and want to respond by cussing the insult-thrower out? Why, that’s no way for a grown-up and professional to behave! Break out the fainting couch, I’ve got the vapors! HOW DARE YOU, SIR!

Again, we can question the wisdom of popular professional creators engaging with message-board and comment-thread name-calling, but to act as though one side of the exchange can do basically whatever they want while the recipient of the abuse should never respond in kind is an absurd double standard. Moreover it evinces a profound sense of entitlement: a demand to be able to treat others however poorly you want while reserving total immunity for yourself, and a reduction of the artist to a glorified conveyor belt that must silently transport your preferred art-product to you and to whom you have no behavioral or ethical or moral obligations. It’s the same mindset that leads readers to insult creators who express contrary opinions about how their work is made available digitally, or attack people with legal and moral claims to the proceeds from a certain work if those claims are deemed to provide even the slightest impediment to the way those readers are accustomed to consuming that work. For better or worse, we the readers really do have some power thanks to the Internet. And you know what they say about power.

The teaser image that broke Mark Millar's internet in half

So you’ve seen the X-Men teaser images Marvel’s been putting out featuring (among other strange character choices like Elektra and She-Hulk II) Blade and what sure looks like Vampire Jubilee, right? So has Ultimate Comics Avengers writer — and current toast of Hollywood thanks to Kick-Ass — Mark Millar.

Apparently the “X-Men vs. vampire mutants” storyline people have deduced from the teaser images is awfully similar to an upcoming Ultimate Avengers storyline Millar’s been talking about for years…and he’s very, very upset about this. Like, to the point where if I were Marvel, I’d worry that he might show up at the office in a green-and-yellow jumpsuit with a crowbar or two.

Here’s the rundown of Millar’s furious posts on his message board, in a thread titled “I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS X-MEN/ BLADE THING” (all-caps in original):

I’m just starting Ultimate Avengers 3, issue 5, and it’s the arc I’m maybe most proud of. As trailered forever, this is vampires in the Ultimate Universe attacking mutants and Blade brought in to help the Avengers as heroes go down one by one.

Now someone’s sent me a link to an X-Men event out two months previous that’s exactly the same idea.

Seriously.

What do I do? This is what JRJR and I were going to do 5 years ago before Enemy of the State and I’ve been talking about it in interviews (and on here) since Ultimate Avengers launched. Blade’s even on the cover to issue 1 as I’ve been excited about this since I had Blade painted on an ice cream truck in 1978.

I don’t want to pull the issues as they’re part of a complex plot that runs through my entire four arc run, but I’m almost finished now. I’m writing issue five of six and they’re really, really good.

How the Hell did this happen? It wouldn’t have been as big a deal if I hadn’t started the series yet, but it’s almost done and just going to look foolish following an X-Men event. Am honestly just so disgusted with this as I’ve talked about it many times. Thoughts on what I should do next?

I’m hoping this is some horrible misunderstanding. I’ve only seen what you’ve seen online with Blade and the X-Men and a vampire Jubilee (again, very close to stuff I’m doing). Fingers crossed this bullshit gets fixed, but am getting closer and closer to just doing my own stuff every day.

The difference [between this situation and examples like Blackest Night/Necrosha and Deep Impact/Armageddon] is that was competing companies with different characters. This is something I created for a company that’s being used within the same company and using the same characters, now two months earlier.

I’m going to speak to the guys and then take a night to think about this. But really, really pissed off about this as have put a lot of work into this and it’s really, really good.

We’ll see what happens. This storyline was planned 5 years ago, like I said, and was known at the company. But it’s been public knowledge since I started hyping Vampire X prior to Ultimate Avengers issue 1 coming out. The mods here read the original proposal I sent to all the Marvel bigwigs in 2005. I’m hoping this is all bullshit and the teasers are misleading.

I’m not changing anything. I did this first and it’s too tightly plotted with the other arcs to pull and replace with something new. I guess they could kill the series with the second arc and bring someone else to take in a new direction. I dunno. Hopefully it won’t come to that. We’ll see what they say when I speak to them tonight, but I couldn’t believe it when I saw this online. How the Hell did this happen when they have weekly meetings about what’s coming up across the line? I discussed this arc at the Marvel retreat in Summer 2008, weighing up with the guys whether to have Leinil do this arc or the Punisher/ Ghost Rider one.

Now, we’ve all seen Millar tout his own awesomeness in bombastic (and occasionally unrealistic) fashion for years at this point. There’s a little of that mixed in here, in fact. But I dunno about you, but seeing him get equally worked up about something else’s suckitude is almost frightening. Can he successfully fight a two-front war with Marvel and Roger Ebert?

Update: The Millarworld thread has been deleted following a post from Millar that read:

Hi guys

am now in boozer but just off the phone with dan b [Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, presumably] and were all talking tomorow to sort this out. Have never had problem in ten years at company so expect this can be fixed fast. Dan assures me this was a misundrstanding and he’s a good bloke so have no reason to doubt. I don’t think this is as bad as it looked a litle earlier. Will keep you posted. Ps to mods. Please remove other threads in meantime.

The storyline connected to the “We are the X-Men” teasers is expected to be announced Sunday at C2E2.

Take the back-and-forth we noted last week between PvP creator Scott Kurtz and Comics Alliance honcho Laura Hudso . It started when Kurtz publicly blasted a Wizard/Shamus functionary with both barrels after the staffer obliviously sent him an email addressed to “Kurt” — hey, these things happen — soliciting his attendance at Anaheim Comic Con. Hudson took Kurtz to task for tarring all Wizard employees with a brush perhaps better reserved for the company’s decision-makers. This led to a lengthy and ugly comment-thread roundelay between Hudson — who, as the former senior editor of Tim Leong’s defunct Comic Foundry magazine, need bow to no one in the “taking cheap shots at Wizard and its employees as though the two were fungible entities” department — and Kurtz, some of his fans, and former Wizard staff writer Chris Ward. Over the course of the argument’s five pages, posts were deleted; accusations of trollery, spamming, egomania and hypocrisy were thrown about like so much confetti; Hudson’s problems during her tenure with Jenna Jameson-publishing Virgin Comics were hashed out; former Wizard President Fred Pierce was accused of buying off former Wizard critic Frank Miller; and a horrid time was had by all.

But as unpleasant as that argument got, it looks like one of those Sam-and-Diane fights from Cheers where they end up making out compared to the blistering comments made by former Wizard Senior Vice President of Operations Joe Yanarella regarding former WizardUniverse.com Editor Rick Marshall. After Robot 6 reported the shuttering of Wizard’s message board following its users’ vociferous criticism of the company’s recent convention maneuvers, Marshall, currently the editor of MTV’s Splash Page comics/movie news blog, commented that he wasn’t surprised by the move given what he characterized as Wizard’s longtime neglect of the board. Marshall said that after he was let go by the company, for a time he remained in financial and administrative control of the board because Wizard hadn’t paid the hosting company. Several days later, Yanarella, currently a writer for the sports news site Bleacher Report, stepped in to dispute Marshall’s story in strenuous terms. According to Yanarella, Marshall held the board and its passwords “hostage” to extract monetary concessions from Wizard. After disparaging Marshall as an employee and as a person, Yanarella went on to say, “I’d also recommend you move to the other side of the street should we ever see each other again.” It’s worth noting that from lawsuits to rumor mills, the engendering of serious hostility by forced departures from Wizard is not uncommon.

So yes, tensions run high, and the Con War is spilling a lot of bad blood. But what of the competing cons themselves?

All we can do at the moment is compare guest lists. Today, Reed’s C2E2 announced its newest guest of honor, Blackest Night writer Geoff Johns, and a trio of featured guests: Beasts of Burden‘s Jill Thompson, Green Arrow/Black Canary‘s Mike Norton and The Stand‘s Mike Perkins. Wizard’s competing Anaheim Comic Con — being held the same weekend as C2E2 (April 16-18, 2010) in a move widely seen as a tit-for-tat response to Reed’s encroachment upon Shamus’s Chicago Comic Con turf — recently announced Power Rangers and Naruto voice actor Neil Kaplan, Hellboy 2 performer Doug Jones, ’60s Batman villains Lee Merriwether and Malachi Throne, Babylon 5 actress Tracy Scoggins and CHiPS star Erik Estrada. I for one am left wondering who among them realizes they’ve just enlisted.

Full-scale warfare between convention promoters isn’t universal, believe it or not — some are giving peace a chance. In addition to the recent arrangement worked out by Heroes Con and Supercon to avoid a date conflict, Emerald City ComiCon‘s Jim Demonakos tells Robot 6 that following an unavoidable conflict with Orlando’s MegaCon the weekend of March 13, 2010, he and MegaCon’s Beth Widera collaborated on choosing dates for 2011 so that future overlap could be avoided. “We ended up on the same dates for 2010 and neither of us could move, but we’ve talked and coordinated and our mutual 2011 dates will not be on each other’s dates at all,” says Demonakos. “Con planning, always an adventure.”

Indeed. While it’s not quite “all quiet on the Con War front” in terms of open hostilities between the nebulous Gareb Shamus/Wizard Entertainment empire and Reed Exhibitions, things have at least died down to a dull roar at the moment. Shamus remains silent, Reed insists it’s business as usual regardless of Shamus’s confrontational scheduling moves, and about the closest you can get to one-on-one antagonism between the two rival convention promoters is a do-it-yourself comparison of their pre- and post-Halloween guest announcements: Hellboy creator Mike Mignola will be a guest of honor at Reed’s C2E2, while Batman TV star Burt Ward will be appearing at Shamus’s Anaheim Comic Con that same weekend.

But the lack of direct conflict doesn’t mean a few verbal grenades haven’t been lobbed Wizard/Shamus’s way over the past week by other parties, ranging from former employees to a pair of recent Wiz sparring partners, cartoonist Scott Kurtz and Marvel’s C.B. Cebulski.

One such explosion took place at the message board of Panels on Pages, a site founded by now-ex-Wizard Universe Message Board users-cum-Wizard website/magazine writers. With the shutdown of the WUMB last week, PoP has become increasingly required reading for dedicated Wizard watchers. Case in point: PoP message board user Foxy recounted a story of how earlier this year, Wizard employees Brett White and Adam Tracey used the WUMB to search for fan-owned Michael Turner sketches the company could publish in an expanded version of its Turner tribute hardcover. The staffers announced that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to the Sam Loeb Foundation, set up by comics superstar (and Turner’s friend) Jeph Loeb in honor of his late son, who like Turner died (too young) of cancer. But after White was fired, Tracey unceremoniously quit, and the book finally came out, Foxy and other WUMBers discovered that the promised donation was never made. The WUMB thread announcing the search for sketches and chronicling the subsequent demand for answers as to what happened to the charitable donation never received an official response and disappeared (as did two similar threads) with the WUMB itself — but not before PoP member Solstrom preserved and reposted it on PoP’s board.

The outcry attracted the attention of Rich Johnston, who since his Wizard-funded trip to the Big Apple Comic Con has emerged as the only writer able to get Wizard staffers to comment on the record (outside of press releases and the now-defunct WUMB). Writing both on the PoP board and his own Bleeding Cool site, Johnston said he got in touch with Wizard VP of Business Development Stephen Shamus (brother of owner and CEO Gareb Shamus), who blamed the disappearing donation on a communication breakdown caused by staff turnover, and said that now that they’d been made aware of the problem, the company would contact the Sam Loeb Foundation to make the donation — and to see if they’d be interested in setting up a donation drive at future Shamus conventions.

However, Shamus’s explanation, and Johnston’s subsequent statement that “it’s possible the right people did not read the right thread,” didn’t fly with the PoPsters, who point out that threads about the Turner book, customer service issues, and other problems went on for months with the clear knowledge of Wizard staffers. Indeed, the frequent intervention of Wizard higher-ups in ordering the deletion and banning of threads and users critical of the company appear to indicate that if anything, this sort of thread received extra attention from decision-makers within the Shamus organization.

Elsewhere on PoP, former Wizard staff writer, frequent WUMB pot-stirrer, and Political Power: Barack Obama author Chris Ward was a guest on the site’s weekly podcast. (Discussion of Wizard and the death of the WUMB begins at 1:04:20; Ward’s appearance begins at 1:09:38.) Ward minces no words for his former company, which he calls “totally mismanaged.”

“These guys literally have no fucking idea what they’re doing… They have neither the skills nor the insight to keep up, and the people that had that, they fired,” Ward says of Wizard’s upper echelon. [Full disclosure: I don't know from skills or insight, but I was one of the people the company fired.] Though he does praise managing editor Andy Serwin, Ward also reveals that he’s been blacklisted from the magazine for making a joke about a freelance check bouncing, tells tales out of school about the work environment, and takes some pretty vicious shots at Stephen Shamus (and, in passing, Rich Johnston). For their part, hosts Lee Rodriguez, Jason Kerouac, Tripper McGee, and Jason Knize describe the experience of being plucked from the WUMB to write for Wizard proper, only to watch their gigs disappear as the editors who hired them got laid off one after another.

But it’s not just ex-Wizard writers who have a bone to pick with the company. Fresh off his Twitter tirade against the company, PvP writer-artist Scott Kurtz really let loose after receiving a letter from Sales Manager Larry Ernst, addressed to “Kurt,” encouraging him to attend the Anaheim Comic Con, apparently sent without knowing that Kurtz had already made his feelings about Gareb Shamus’s conventions abundantly clear. In an open letter to Ernst and Wizard, Kurtz writes “Your conventions are total horseshit” and gets angrier from there, reserving his most undiluted fury for what he describes as the magazine’s ignoring of late artist Mike Wieringo, then its public about-face upon Wieringo’s passing. Kurtz’s sentiments echo those of Wieringo himself, as expressed in this impassioned defense of Heroes Con and attack on Gareb Shamus, written by ‘Ringo during Heroes Con’s initial scheduling conflict with Shamus’s never-realized Wizard World Atlanta. (Ironically, a gallery of Wieringo’s Wizard covers, which might offer proof that the magazine did indeed pay attention to the artist, has disappeared along with the bulk of Wizard’s website.)

Reactions to Kurtz’s post have varied. Marvel talent liaison C.B. Cebulski, himself no stranger to public disputes with Wizard, tweeted a link to the open letter in seemingly supportive fashion, indicating that a recent high-level meeting between Cebulski and Wizard editorial either didn’t produce a rapprochement or was subsequently undermined by the Big Apple/NYCC battle. Comics Alliance’s Laura Hudson’s defense of current and former Wizard employees against Kurtz’s blanket statements (coupled with a few shots at Kurtz’s self-described status as “a pioneer in my field” and “‘tastemaker’”) met with vehement comment-thread opposition from Kurtz’s fans (UPDATE: and from Kurtz himself), and with considerably more polite dissent from Tom Spurgeon, who argues that getting yelled at from time to time is the price of working for a company with divisive policies. And on his own blog, Chris Ward returned with the inside story of the incident Kurtz says turned him against Wizard — a “convention horror story” involving Kurtz, Ward, Ethan Van Sciver, a deaf fan, and “the world’s shittiest band.”

As Shamus/Wizard higher-ups continue to strategically distance themselves from the comics industry (even as seemingly contradictory moves are rumored behind-the-scenes); as decision time approaches for guests of the conflicting Reed and Shamus shows; and as sharper contrasts are drawn between the tactics used by Shamus and those employed by Reed and by regional con organizations like Emerald City and MegaCon, we may see more and more professionals and Wizard alums become comfortable publicly taking aim at the house that Gareb built.

(“Con War” graphic courtesy of Jason Erwin)

Not the Wizard Universe Message Board

“Board offline” — that’s what visitors are seeing when they attempt to use the Wizard Universe Message Board. As first noted on the comics discussion site Panels on Pages, the WUMB, as its users affectionately dubbed it, ceased to exist just before 7:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.

The board was launched in 2006, at the start of Wizard’s often-shaky attempt to maintain a web presence in a comics-news scene increasingly dominated by online outlets. The WUMB was a priority for then-Editor-in-Chief Pat McCallum, who mandated daily posts from all editorial staffers as a way to increase the sense of community with readers of Wizard’s publications (at the time, there were four monthly magazines).

McCallum and many other high-ranking editorial figures — among them, Wizard Editor Brian Cunningham, ToyFare Editors Zach Oat and Justin Aclin, VP Joe Yanarella, Anime Insider Editor Summer Mullins, WizardUniverse.com Editors Rick Marshall and Jim Gibbons, and Wizard and WizardUniverse.com Managing Editor, uh, me — posted on the board frequently, even though its hosting on an outside company’s server prevented its hits from being counted toward Wizard’s main site.

Though the creative staff policed the board’s users only for spam, obscenity, and netiquette violations, higher-ups from Wizard’s business end frequently intervened to order the deletion of posts or threads critical of the company, though this would often, and predictably, simply spur further complaints. Over recent months, a perfect storm of problems — including the firing of yet another batch of popular staffers (of the editors listed above, only Aclin remains with the company), a slew of customer-service complaints about Wizard’s web store during the holidays, and dissatisfaction with Wizard magazine’s creative direction and page count (perpetual and not always reality-based sentiments, to be fair) — spurred a dramatic increase in the number of members joining, and threads being created, for no purpose other than to criticize the company and its policies. The recent announcement of Wizard owner Gareb Shamus’s intention to challenge Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con by scheduling his own Big Apple Comic Con directly against NYCC next year, coupled with what many WUMBers described as a lackluster and frustrating Big Apple show this year, set off a real firestorm of complaints, many of which were then deleted — along with the potentially off-message responses of staffer Mark Allen Haverty, one of the few remaining Wizard employees to maintain a presence on the board.

It’s unclear if today’s rash of complaints regarding the elimination of Wizard magazine’s comics price guide — news of which, like that of several Wizard-related stories since the Con War’s outbreak, actually broke on the WUMB — was the final straw for the board. Indeed, this may have been a planned maneuver following the dismantling of the WizardUniverse.com site last week. But with the WUMB’s ostensible purpose of fostering good will toward Wizard seemingly a lost cause, and given both the company’s track record regarding criticism on its own site and its increasingly noticeable pivot away from the comics community as its target audience, this final move (provided it is a final move and not some sort of revamp) was not entirely unexpected.

Jason Kerouac of Panels on Pages — a site founded in part by WUMB members and populated by WUMB refugees — has posted a brief tribute to board. As someone who spent his fair share of time there over the years, I’ll miss it, too.

The most necrotic section of the board is the “Comics Journal” section itself, where people only post to bitch that their subscription copies are late. Many TCJ subscribers seem to be under the impression that Gary Groth runs not just Fantagraphics but the U.S. Postal Service from his basement. They get really pissed. No one ever posts about the content of the magazine itself, proving that not even the most hardcore fans of The Comics Journal read The Comics Journal.

Ouch. She also demolishes Comicon, Newsarama and, of course, Byrne Robotics, though, oddly enough, CBR seems to stay out her sights. Perhaps a sequel is in order.