Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dave sim, entertainment, Erika Moen, neil gaiman

Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, Erika Moen And A Lightbulb

Neil Gaiman is a comics creator and novelist of note, and one of the first comics writers to gin the "female friendly" tag, with Sandman, back in the eighties.

Dave Sim is a comics creator also of note, with the 300 issue strong Cerebus under his belt, which at once point during the days of Astoria had a female friendly tag, which it gradually lost after the book, and the creator, made a series of continual and repeated derogatory comments about women as a gender and especially feminism.

Erika Moen is a comics creator of note, currently working on the sex-positive comic book, Oh Joy, Sex Toy.

Neil is rich. Dave and Erika are not. The latter two are registered to Patreon, which allows supporters of artist to financially support them directly. Neil talked about these two creators whose work he supported on Patreon who couldn't be further apart in world views.

But for some, that was a problem.

https://twitter.com/illogicology/status/636304214055124992

Ah, yes, the pledge. After receiving considerable criticism for his artistic and personally stated views, Dave Sim denied he was a misogynist and, to that end, created a pledge for people to sign to state that he was not a misogynist or he wouldn't deal with them.

You can find it here, in case you would like to sign it – or not.

Which, courtesy of Dave Sim's letter to then-Image publisher Erik Larsen, would be,

— and just between you me and the lamppost I think it had more to do with the all-female jury at the trial. It wouldn't matter what Todd and Neil were disagreeing about, an all-female jury was going to find Todd in the wrong and Neil in the right just because Todd is Todd and Neil is Neil. Had the judge asked them, I'm sure the all-female jury would have been happy to give Neil the rights to Spawn, Todd's house and cars, Madonna's uniform from A League of Their Own and the Mark McGwire baseball and anything else Neil expressed an interest in.

The conversation continued.

The jury is still out on that one, there's plenty more time for you to go insane.

But, yes, I'm going to plead the Neil on this. The best counter to speech you don't like is speech that you do (preferably from you). I also believe that confusing and conflating the art and the artist leads to unfortunate results. And great art should be appreciated even if the views it expressed are repellent. It's falling for those messages that is the problem.

But that's just my opinion. Yours may differ. And that's good too.

Thanks to Moment Of Cerebus.

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