After announcing ComicsGate Comics earlier this week, publisher Vox Day faced quite a bit of negativity and criticism from a number of people associated with ComicsGate.
We reached out to Vox get his reaction on the negativity and his thoughts on the matter.
Bounding Into Comics (BIC): After the ComicsGate Comics announcement, many of those using the hashtag decried you and there were calls for people to disavow you. Do you have a response to the people who claim you aren’t part of ComicsGate?
Vox Day (Vox): Certainly. It depends upon what you mean by ComicsGate. If you mean rejecting the five points laid out by a story on this very site, then we are very clearly ComicsGate. If you mean something that is SJW-inclusive, intrinsically opposed to identity politics, and owned by Ethan van Sciver, then we very clearly are not.
BIC: Are these the five points you are referring to?
1. The adoption of art styles influenced exclusively by Progressive politics, & by the awkward, stilted injection of said political messages into s
2. The hiring of people based pur
3. The change or outright replacement of beloved classic characters in the interest of shallow appeas
4. The elitist attitude & purge of anything that is not progressive under the mantra o
5. The rejection of honest criticism, swept aside as harassment or discriminatio
Vox: Yes, those are the five points. Note that Nr. 1 addresses the question of context with regards to political messages. When the story involves Antifa, one cannot avoid politics.
BIC: You previously expressed interest in working with Ethan Van Sciver, is that still true?
Vox: We aren’t interested in working with anyone who is publicly threatening lawsuits against us and our partners.
BIC: Much of the criticism about your involvement in ComicsGate is centered around your personal politics and the belief that your comics are political. Would you like to address that criticism? Do you believe your comics are hamfisted with political messages?
Vox: That’s a stupid criticism on at least three levels. First, we were only caught up in ComicsGate because we are an independent comics publisher with 22 digital editions and 11 print editions published in 2018. My personal politics have literally nothing to do with anything published by Dark Legion or ComicsGate Comics, and very little to do with most of the comics published by Arkhaven.
Second, comics have always had political and ideological elements to them; the core problem with what the SJWs are doing in comics is less about how they are inserting their lunatic politics into the comics and more about the way in which they are ideologically policing who is permitted to produce and publish comics at Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, and other comics publishers.
Third, anyone who reads the comics I have written knows that I don’t do hamfisted anything. In my opinion, giving the other side a fair and accurate voice actually makes for stronger stories and better characters whether the story is intrinsically political or not. For example, in Alt-Hero #4, which is a highly ideological story, the pro-globalist position being espoused by Captain Europa is a paraphrase of the actual words of French President Emmanuel Macron. It’s more than a fair presentation of a position with which I personally disagree, it is an extremely accurate one. Whereas in Alt-Hero #3, there are no politics or ideology at all. And yet, I wrote both stories.
BIC: Have you had any creators reach out to you to publish under ComicsGate Comics since the new imprint was announced?
Vox: Not under ComicsGate, but under Dark Legion. We reached an agreement to publish an independent, crowd-funded creator who was very pleased to discover that we are able to cut his fulfillment costs to his backers in half due to our economies of scale.
Will you be checking out ComicsGate Comics? What are your thoughts on the new imprint and the reactions that ensued?