Hello Friend!
Hope everyone has had a great May! This last month has been full of ups and downs. My routine has been all over the place, and I’ve really been struggling with confidence every once in a while. Yesterday we said goodbye to kittens we’ve been fostering for the last three months and I shed quite a few tears. But! I am really excited to finally start sharing chapter 3 with you all. I am really starting to experiment with page layouts to try to do some unique things, and it’s been a lot of fun. Also, stick around till the end. A fellow comic artist had a really bad take about the comics industry, and I’m gonna dive into it.
Last week Alex Graham, author of The Devil’s Grin, posted a comic on her Instagram about what she thinks about the state of comics culture.
It was quickly met with a lot of pushback. For context, a normal post from her gets about 20 to 50 comments. This one, and a subsequent clarification post have close to 1300 comments total. So what was the comic about?
Without describing the entire comic, the message is that the reason that comics made by people of color and by people and other marginalized communities are praised is because of white guilt, and not because of any merit of their own. She calls out comics with “cal-art adjacent character design” which is often used to put down stories and animated projects that have LGBTQIA+ themes.
She goes as far as to show a character wearing a shirt that says white guilts, pretending to like comics because he feels like he is supposed to.
The point Graham is trying to make is that culture has gotten to the point that white people are forced to say they like something out of fear, even when they are not good. However, what she is actually saying, and probably wouldn’t deny, is that white people are the ones being oppressed right now, and the work of people of color and of marginalized communities is not as good as those made by her white counterparts…and herself.
After the pushback she received, she doubled down on her thoughts. Again mentioning “cal-arts” and alluding to “over-hyped” comics.
Though this post took off on Instagram, I would argue. This is not a view only held by Graham. The counterpoint to her view that I would argue is that in today’s culture people are looking at things made by marginalized groups and are saying that the only reason they’re successful is because they are made by people in marginalized groups. The people making these critiques paint one big broad critique instead of viewing these projects based on their merit.
What Graham, and people like Graham fail to understand is that there is an importance to representation and on top of that not everything needs to be made for a white, cis audience. Graham may not connect with a piece of media not because it is not good, but because it was simply not made for her. And when these projects succeed, she is filled with jealousy because she did not think it was good and feels her work deserves this recognition.
We have gone through hundreds of years of art, good and bad being dominated by mostly white men. Most of the media we consume, even today is catered to that audience. The more we diversify, the more cultures and religions and gender identities we represent in our stories, the more these things get ingrained into our culture. We become a society that understands differences and values them. We become a society that can read a story and understand it has value even though it does not have a protagonist that looks like me. We learn to be more compassionate and more empathetic. Kids can grow up being proud of who they are instead of questioning why no one that looks like them is in the movies and comics they consume.
It is disheartening that a fellow comics creator would use their platform to tear down people in comics. Especially when she ends her second post by saying “You are free to dislike, disagree, or even hate me. But save this kind of vitriol for violent serial rapists. Not artists making $20K a year.” Comics can be so many different things, and there is room for all of us. It is not a competition, and we don’t have to work from a scarcity mindset. Instead, we should come from the mentality of a rising tide lifts all boats. So if you’re a comic creator reading this, I encourage you to have the mindset of uplifting and encouraging other creators, instead of viewing them as competition.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Take a look at the post and come to your own conclusions. Then let’s have a conversation!
On a different note, many of you may have heard that our sweet cat, Billee, has been sick. She had been throwing up nightly, lethargic, and we could tell she was physically too small and her coat was looking rough. At this point we are still waiting on some test results and she is on antibiotics (which have been helpful!), but as you can imagine our vet bill has been high. My wife Brandi and I decided we needed to ask our community for help.
If you have the means and are willing, any and all support would mean the world to us. You can find info for my Venmo in the image below, or you can hit the link below. Thank you so much!
Thanks again for all your support! Really excited to keep making my stories. If you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber for less than a buck a week! Just a little from you means the world to me!
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I appreciate you being here!
Until next time,
Raj
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