Offering no additional explanation, Baron steps away from this alt-right project both as its Indiegogo fundraising page has disappeared and as provocateur Vox Day’s Alt★Hero series (discussed previously by guest columnist Sean Kleefeld) has apparently raised over ten times its campaign goal on the new “free speech” crowdfunding platform FreeStartr. Whether the BSM project could resurface on FreeStartr is unknown at this time.
As of last month, comics writer Chuck Dixon remains attached to the Alt★Hero volumes. Vox Day (aka Theodore Robert Beale) continues to tweet publicly about the project:
[The following piece was originally published at KleedfeldOnComics.com and it is reposted here with the author’s permission.]
On Business: Dixon on Alt-Hero
A couple of weeks back, Vox Day launched a crowd-funding campaign for his brand new comic called Alt-Hero which Day describes as “A new alternative comic series intended to challenge and eventually replace the SJW-converged comics of DC and Marvel.” It garnered a bit of news because Day is a right-wing petty asshole who’s an active racist. He led the 2015 and 2016 “rabid puppies” campaigns to deny any people of color from the Hugo Awards, mostly out of spite for not actually winning an award himself in 2014. He later described his actions as, “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”
Now first off, it’s absolutely laughable that he thinks he can replace Marvel and DC. Politics aside, Marvel and DC have each been making superhero comics for the better part of a century; they do superhero comics very, very well. No one in the past fifty years has come close to even touching their sales on superhero comics. They’re not invulnerable, certainly, but any and every problem they have had and will have is of their own making, not because of a competitor. If someone else is able to usurp their place as premier superhero comic publisher, it will be because they got out of publishing comics.
Second, “SJW-converged comics of DC and Marvel”? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously, no definition of “converged” makes sense in this context. If that’s the level of writing he’s bringing to Alt-Hero, Marvel and DC have nothing to be worried about. Hell, anyone making mini-comics out of their parents’ basement has nothing to be worried about. If I had to guess, I suppose he’s trying to say that Marvel and DC have been taken over by social justice warriors and that they have been pushing a decidedly leftist agenda. Which clearly is not the case if you actually look at any of their books. But Day is doing what he does — whipping up conspiracies to make it look like white men are being oppressed. Because his mediocre work isn’t celebrated enough.
OK, all of that is old news. I only mention it to make sure you’re up to speed on who this asswipe is. (And why I’m not linking to any of it!)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Any links have been provided by Sacred and Sequential.]
For the largest collection of Indian comics in the U.S., including those about Hindu myth, lore, and religion, one would want to travel to the University of Illinois where Mara Thacker, librarian and professor in South Asian studies, has curated a collection along with reference services librarian David Ward.
“The uniqueness is one of the things we first thought about,” Ward said. “It’s an area that’s not being collected heavily elsewhere in the United States, which provides the opportunity to have this unique collection.”
Photo by L. Brian Stauffer
In addition to compiling the collection, cataloguing it has been its own “beast,” reports Nicole Ream-Sotomayor, foreign language cataloging specialist. “The comics proved to be the hardest material she has ever had to catalog,” reports Stephanie Kim of The Daily Illini.
Along with the comics themselves, the library offers useful online LibGuide for research and popular resources on the topic, along with a go-to bibliography.
Tacker can be followed on Twitter as @marathacker.
A. David Lewis speaks with Mike Baron in August 2017 about the upcoming Based Stick Man series, the politics of the series, and Baron’s own views on free speech and violence.
“Sometimes our heroes aren’t the people we’d most like them to be. You’ve got to take who you can get.”
If you missed this year’s Free Comic Book Day, then you likely didn’t hear about Fantagraphics’ Worlds Greatest Cartoonists collection featuring such creators as Ed Piskor, Richard Sala, or Liz Suburbia. Additionally, the FCBD offering — intended, says the publisher, to “Features a Breadth of Styles and Visions and World-Building” — also included a notable piece from Ron Regé entitled “From the Star and the Clot,” a visual retelling of the Quranic visit of the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.
Given the frequently cited tensions between comics and Islam, Sacred and Sequential had the opportunity to interview Regé about the origin of and his goals for this work. (Note: “From the Star and the Clot” was first presented as a minicomic and is still available for purchase as a stand-alone work.)
S&S: Where did “From the Star and the Clot” come from? What was your source of inspiration for it?
RR: I was inspired to draw this sequence after reading about it in a book called The Alphabet vs The Goddess. I think I happened upon it in a bookstore, strangely enough. In it, Leonard Shlain lays out his theory about how the development of written language helped bring about a patriarchal hierarchy of power and control that was absent from previous image based, matriarchal societies. It’s not a perfect work, but it brings up questions and ideas that I’d been curious about for my entire life.
S&S: How long ago was this, approximately? That is, was this a recent discovery or something that’s shaped your thought for some time?
RR: I guess between 2008-2012 I was putting myself through a sort of self-directed course, reading dozens of books related to spirituality, history, philosophy, etc. I found myself attracted to figures & people with some pretty out there philosophies & ideas. Tesla, Mesmer, Wilhelm Reich, Swedenborg, Gurdjieff, etc & so on. This was all in the period that I was working on The Cartoon Utopia.
The idea that laws and rules written in books could be used as instruments of control by men in power, that a literate class could control the rest of society with such tools is a pretty powerful & obvious argument when looking at the misogynist horror that is Western Civilization. Is it wishful thinking of the modern age to think that oral traditions and societies of the past were more holistic, matriarchal, and malleable when dealing with matters of their moment? Perhaps, but it brings up fascinating conflicts between left & right brain, male & female, science & spirituality that continue to cause much confusion in the world today.
In a recent e-mail to Sacred and Sequential founder A. David Lewis, Eisner Award-winning comics creator Mike Baron wrote the following:
If you missed this year’s Free Comic Book Day, then you likely didn’t hear about 