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Why they mad tho?

 

Who? Gi joe fans or the wwe fans?

 

How can anyone be mad about communist laser ninjas wrestling dinosaurs???

 

You are vastly overrating that a-hole's influence. You only have to watch a couple minutes of one of his videos to realize how odious beyond belief he is in his pathological hatred of anything not straight, white, and male. And he goes after a ton of books from multiple publishers. Anywhere a different culture or gender dares raise its head. Some of which continue to be huge sellers, in spite of his idiocy and any pea-brains he may influence. Because if the books' writing are solid, they're completely immune to his nonsense.

And this is also all pretending that no one who identifies with the left has ever worked on GI Joe and been embraced by the fans, which is ridiculous.

 

"He was definitely the big driver of the outrage towards me. It started with G.I. Joe fans, and that guy saw a battle he thought he could win, and they campaigned really hard towards IDW (and Hasbro both) to get me removed from the book."

"In September, IDW initially was sending out e-mails in support of me and explaining, 'Listen, Aubrey was there, who are we to tell him how to feel about this, he watched it happen'. Which was really nice, and accurate. But that was before Diversity & Comics got involved, and started this concentrated campaign against IDW and Hasbro. And then IDW put out a statement throwing me under the bus. They put out this kind of very generic apology statement. They made it sound like I said the 'n-word'. It's the apology you send out when somebody working for you says something so abhorrent and unforgivable that you can't even allude to it. And that kicked off a firestorm from people who hadn't heard about it, because it had only existed in that lunatic fringe circle."

 

And the new character designs would be good... for other characters with their own names. Sure I'm used to name reuses on unrelated characters throughout the 30+ years of Transformers, but when it comes to Visionaries which hasn't been seen in 30 years, I'd expect something closer to the original. Not just Leoric, all of them. Modernise the original designs, not completely throw them out and then make up your own crap, because that's just not Visionaries.

And yeah, the original Visionaries were based upon the knights of old which were boxy and clunky. Plus it worked from a story point of view too - technology that would be required to make the IDW costumes was stripped away from them and they were forced to live and adapt to what was essentially our medieval ages. That setting was what made the original Visionaries interesting to me. These new Visionaries are just going to be generic modern day super heroes by comparison.

 

Wait, you're going to take quotes from the guy playing the victim? How gullible are you? Yeah, he made the story that it was Nazis who lost him his job and that it had nothing to do with the quality of the stories or the fact he attacked fans. So yes, all of his quotes are going to back up that narrative.

Wake the hell up. If that D & C dork actually had the kind of power claimed, the entire comics industry would be an empty wasteland, because that guy goes after everyone. You hear something from one source, the aggrieved party, and just take it as fact. You'd be a delight on a jury.

I don't have anything against Sitterson as a person. I'm not a huge fan of comics creators who get defensive and then attack fans, but he's in good company on that. Half of Marvel's current writing staff does the same, and it doesn't turn me off of Marvel (other than maybe Slott). And his comments on 9/11 are neither here nor there for me. People F up sometimes. Maybe it wasn't the greatest thing in the world that he said the things he did, and maybe he could have handled it better when people called him out on it, but we've all seen people in all areas of entertainment say and do much, much worse. Life goes on.

But his writing sucks. Not because he introduced new characters, because that's been a hallmark of GI Joe since the 1980s. Because what he wrote was boring. His ideas are not interesting. And it didn't help that he was backed up by the most uninspired, low-rent Masamune Shirow impersonator of all-time on art.

I listened to the podcast, and all the way through, I kept thinking, "This is a guy who loses a game, and blames the refs." He never looks inward at what part he may have played in his failure. It's allllllll other people's fault. People like that never end up getting anywhere in life.

 

And the ultimate happy end with this book finally dying is that Skywarp might go back to Transformer books. Yay!


It never was more than an extended epilogue to Revolutions.


Also, Visionaries my afterburners.

With all changes IDW already made for the sake of... Hell knows what?


Their franchise is just a name slap.

Making Prysmos a part of Cybertron was probably a final facepalm.


Crap is crap. There's no way an incoming trainwreck of this proportion could turn anything good.

 

Seriously.

 

I was going to say that after this kind of drama probably no publisher is going to hire Sitterson again...


...but then I was reminded of Marvel, yeah.

 

The facts are, a bunch of people were gunning for the book, it didn't sell well, and it got cancelled. I don't know if that first bit impacted the latter, because I can't read the mind of whoever made the decision to cancel. Aubrey is trying to spin it as, yeah, they totally caved to the pressure and put themselves on the wrong side of history and now evil has triumphed. And I'm like, hm, idk, I don't really expect that "Rom & the Micronauts" is going to sell any better than its predecessors either, is that vast the right-wing conspiracy's fault too?

 

You don't use social media.

100% of everyone's social media problems came from themselves because of a lack of self control and the inability to recognize that.

 

Exactly. Want more diversity in your work? Fine. But Create something new, don't co-opt something old. Wrong tool for the job. Hammer for a screw. That's the issue.

 

A guy who makes crappy reviews on a camera phone got him fired?

 

Apparently???

 

I really don't get why people try to make him out to be this big boogey-man. He's some small time youtuber who makes dumb little reviews on his smartphone. If they ignored the guy, I doubt he'd have much of an audience. The only reason I think he's as well known as he is now is because Marvel editors/writers can't shut up about him.

 

Look, the book (Sitterson's GI Joe) was selling in the sub five thousands, and falling. It is an extremely niche book. This was before the 9/11 comments; the book wasn't selling well before that. The first series had already been solicited thru to it's completion by the time Sitterson said the 9/11 stuff... the readership had already rejected it. Scarlett's Strikeforce was not solicited as a GI Joe book for whatever reason (Sitterson claims this was IDW's call; I can't imagine Hasbro being thrilled about putting out a GI Joe comic without GI Joe on it, but who knows), and yet was a continuation of the already unpopular direction. It didn't make the numbers, on the retailer level, not the consumer level, to succeed. They gambled that outsiders (TF fans, people who thought "laser dinosaur ninja robot mashup yay") would make up the numbers, the way they did for the Tom Sciolli book (which, as you will recall was mostly derided by people who only read GI Joe or Transformers, but caught on amongst the arthouse / indy comic crowd and the more casual fan who liked TFs or Joe as a kid, but didn't follow the comics), but it didn't happen. That D&C creep had nothing to do with it. The Yo Joe (et al) boycott may have had a tiny effect on the numbers for SELL THROUGH for the remainder of the Joe comic (remember, Strike Force isn't out yet to buy), but would have had little to no effect on preorders at the retailer level. Now, is IDW completely blameless? Probably not; they didn't handle the 9/11 controversy very well with messages of support and then non-support for Sitterson. I suspect that, if Sitterson had kept his mouth shut, they would have released the fourth issue, if only to complete the story arc and have material for a trade, but again, who knows. If the numbers were that bad, they may have saw no way to recoup any money on the whole thing.

I love this place and most of you guys, but a lot of you are simply unaware of how comics work, are solicited and, ultimately, are sold. GI Joe has sold very well (for IDW, anyway) and sold very badly. This isn't the first time it's been cancelled and binned by this publisher. Even ARAH doesn't exactly bring in massive numbers, but it's the only consistent Joe book they current publish. For good or bad, if you deviate too far from what the very, very small remaining core audience of Joe wants to see, the book isn't going to sell. Southtown Kid got it exactly right; Sitterson is blaming the refs for his team losing. More than that, I'd imagine he's shot himself in the foot for ever doing anything with IDW again by painting them as being snowed under by the heavy fist of the right wing.

In today's super polarized social media-enabled world, it's easy to paint whole swathes of people as bad guys or whatever. You have tons of creeps and trolls on Twitter, waiting for your every misstep. Sitterson's mistake, besides writing a book that didn't resonate with the few thousand folks that are still willing to buy a Joe comic, was to try to paint all Joe fans in a certain light. Are there psycho, intolerant Joe fans who can't accept change, shout "America, love it or leave it!" unironically and the rest? Sure. Just as there are Joe fans who are normal, decent, tolerant people. There are people like Sitterson describes in every walk of life, every fandom. He (knowingly or not) is grossly overinflating their power, their voice, to make up for his own shortcomings, and, if he's not careful, I suspect it may cost him work in the future.

 

There's going to be a trade, and it's going to include the two G.I. Joe/M.A.S.K. First Strike one-shots and Scarlett's Strike Force #1-3. That may have always been the plan; I think that's what was listed on Amazon well before the cancellation was announced.

 

On one hand, I'm glad I'm not forced to buy G.I. Joe books to keep up with Skywarp anymore. However, I don't like that the series is ending on a cliffhanger, with any remaining plot points unresolved. I wouldn't mind if they picked up a new writer to try to relaunch under a new name (but let Skywarp come back to the Transformers books first  ).

 

I can agree with you on D&C videos, they start to feel and sound the same if you watch one too many of his videos. Plus, his criticisms on some comics aren't the most well thought out. Sometimes they range to understandable to "What the h*ll are you talking about"? If you want a small time Youtuber that can formulate sound constructive criticism and explain themselves and what's going on better, may I recommend "Just Some Guy". His channel is also small, but he knows what he's talking about. It's a good pass time for me, personally.