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What you cannot say
When I was a kid immersed in comic-book culture, there were a few names that stood tall over the others. Kirby, of course; a deity. Romita. Steranko.
Marvel produced two horror / supernatural titles in the early seventies: Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness. Original stories and artwork. Didn’t sell well, and eventually they ended up reprinting old monster-of-the-month comics. Fin-Fang-Foom, Grotto, Spoorg, Blorggo, and so on. But the first issue of Tower had a story called “At the Stroke of Midnight,” which was one of the most innovative comics I’d ever seen. All Steranko. (Romita did the cover, though.) From then on his name was associated with the apogee of the sequential arts.
To my amazement and delight I found him on Twitter, where he occasionally issues messages to his Henchmen in classic Stan Lee Bullpen style. When he popped up in my feed with an all-caps Exclamation Point! exhortation, it was delightful.
I regret to inform you that he has crossed over to the realm of the undesirables.
The first response by an important blue-check Eisner winner said he would probably have fewer people in line the next time, alas.
Because Steranko said the C-word. Four hundred-plus replies, like this one:
Normal, well-adjusted people who harbor no animus towards anyone who see a tweet, get the twirly-eyes, rise with arms outstretched, and go looking for Chinese people to assault.
Attributing COVID to China is a right-wing talking point. It is also misinformation.
No one in the long, long thread of responses seem to dispute the origins of COVID. But if you name the origin, this leads directly to Boogaloo Bois and other white-supremacists attacking Chinese-American citizens. (If not Boogaloo Bois, then a handful of people with false consciousness acting out supremacist ideology; we need delve no deeper into the matter than that.)
Side note: some people are so invested in the response to COVID, and so personally intent in castigating any questioning of the response, that they seem protective of the source. Something something happened somewhere, Trump reaction the primary outrage, lockdowns good because safety, hashtag stay the F home, personal fulfillment through vicarious karenism. The whole “China” thing is irrelevant at best, and probably bad-faith scapegoating. Only wrong people bring it up.
Steranko is now a wrong person.
Published in General
Thanks, Lileks. I just followed Steranko on Twitter and added my very own comment about the Wuhan Plague. Death to Marxism. Oh, and Excelsior.
No one in power speaks against cancel culture. We are ruled by adolescence
Only one of an ever growing list of “What you cannot say”. Say it anyway, often. Otherwise the right to speak freely will wither away. Speak in love with boldness, but refuse to be silenced.
Racist Dr Seuss approves his tweet.
Note secret Fascist salute….
There are in fact alot of attacks against Asian Americans, especially older ones, going on. But it has nothing to do with calling it Wuhan flu. It has to do with the leftist policies of defunding police, letting criminals out of jail and no bail policies. But the insipid leftist morons do what they do best: deflect and project.
As Jordan Peterson has noted, the left doesn’t know whenever it has gone too far.
The lesson here is “Do not go on Twitter.”
I don’t tweet because 1) I don’t have the time to waste, and 2) no one cares about my opinion anyway. Well, they don’t care unless I say the wrong thing . . .
Nick Fury and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D!
Man, I loved those books.
I’m sure, however, that those language fascist wokists are genuinely worried about the UK and South African variants of the we-won’t-say-where-it-came-from virus.
That lack of limits is baked into leftist philosophy.
It goes like this: white leftist subconsciously perceives tribalistic distrust or even loathing within himself when thinking about Asians; such dislike is amplified by frustration and fear of the virus; this subconscious reaction conflicts with the leftist’s conscious beliefs about himself, and the painful conflict threatens to send the leftist into a fugue state; resolution is achieved by the realization that the leftist is an exceptionally good and moral person, and that if he is capable of having these sinful subconscious thoughts, then certainly all Republicans, who are far worse people than he is, must have these feelings to a far, far greater degree. Therefore loudly accuse all Trump supporters of having worse feelings than he does, including racistly calling the virus Chinese, thereby at once absolving himself of sin and drowning out the racist feelings within.
Curiously, all the attacks on Asian-Americans by young black men somehow get blamed on White Supremacy.
For example:
Yeah, I don’t understand either.
Huh, I didn’t know Fin Fang Foom got his start in obscure horror comics. Good for him. Just goes to show that with hard work and tenacity a dragon can work his way up to Earth-616.
;-)
Yep.
And I fear it is only going to get worse. Much worse.
I understand that Google is developing a new system that will allow the government to track all your comments on the net. Oh Yea! Finally some good control of these miscreant Trumpian NutJobs! Then we will have real censorship!
He and Ditko should get together and start their own company. I’d love some new Mr. A comics.
How do you expect to annoy them if you don’t go on Twitter?
I assume that as the ideological purification programs pare off more and more artists, the “cancelled” group will soon be larger than the “non-cancelled.”
At which point, there should be a sudden and welcome recalibration of the Overton Window in comics.
I thought of that too reading the post but you beat me to it.
Kung Flu, WuFlu, and the ChiCom-19 Virus are off limits. I do feel guilty about taking fresh bats off my grocery list. It’s been canned bats only for the last year.
In oil, or water?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Ditko passed away in 2018.
Meanwhile, on Politico today:
“In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322
Never in oil! Too much risk of botulism.
Canned in their own natural juices….much safer….
Always keep in mind that the Left/Progressives, are closely aligned with the ideology of the CCP, eg, socialist/Marxist/Communist ideology. Those objecting to anything that impugns China may also have economic interests in China that they need to protect, (like Disney or the NBA). Or for whatever reason they feel they need to burnish their social credit score under the watchful eye of Big Brother CCP
Details.
Nothing a little necromancy can’t fix.
I think I got it. I will post an essay later today.
It could work. But we should get a different guy than whoever did Joe Biden’s necromancy.
Even the NY Times (in a Sunday article by Jay Caspian Kang) acknowledges the gap between the charges and reality, as related yesterday by Jim Geraghty: