As your faithful Condiment King correspondent, I'm obligated to supply you with an update on his delicious trail of crime. The Prince of Pickles was spotted at the Baltimore Comic-Con on Sept. 29--cavorting with comics creators, perusing some substantially but not excessively over-priced vintage comics, and generally having a blast despite some very sore ankles.In fact, I had such a generally pleasant and enjoyable time that I almost forgot that the comics industry is supposedly at the center of a firestorm right now--the fearsome #comicsgate. I follow enough people in the comics field on Twitter to know that they've all been affected by this "gate," either being forced to deal with it head-on or take steps to actively avoid the onslaught. I'm sure it came up at some of the panels I missed. But on the convention floor--where the real comic-conning happens--you'd never imagine it existed. No angry protests or counter-protests, just goofy cosplaying.
It's the weird nature of the Internet today that controversies can somehow be gale-force and non-existent at the same time.
What is #comicsgate? I actually have no idea. It involves a lot of vitriol and apparent sexism and transphobia, provoking comics creator to condemn it as a kind of manifesto. It's yet another culture war with vaguely familiar fault lines--Social Justice Warriors on one side, Men's Rights Activists on the other--but the particulars are as confusing as they are uninteresting. It started with a milkshake selfie (I kid you not), interpreted in some corners as a Girl Power declaration within Marvel Comics. It's been percolating for a year since then, ping-ponging off of various sociocultural pressure points, and it has something else to do with authors feeling excluded from the industry. But it's not really about any of that, the same way #GamerGate was never really about whether some software designer boinked a game critic for favorable reviews. In broad terms it's about some impulse to contract as the industry tries to broaden and diversify its readership. The particulars are basically impossible to follow and barely seems worth trying. Why would I care about all of this stupid bullshit when I could just read great Batman comics?But as hard as it is to understand, it's also getting increasingly hard to ignore. (And don't misunderstand me--despite its transparent ridiculousness, #comicsgate has appeared to cause people real harm.)
#Comicsgate is yet another bitter, histrionic battle in an endless culture war, that to outsiders feels like it's being fought in some alternate dimension which occasionally rips a portal into ours.
