Categories
alt-right antifeminism antifeminist women bullying comics cupcake douchebaggery empathy deficit entitled babies harassment men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny twitter

Comics fanbullies refuse to believe comics fanbullies drove Mockingbird writer offline

mockdet_phixr2
Modified detail of cover art for Mockingbird #8

Yet another woman has been driven off Twitter by misogynistic fanboy bullies angry that she had invaded their putatively male turf. This time, the arena is comics, and the woman in question is writer Chelsea Cain, a bestselling novelist who brought her feminist sensibility to the Marvel comic book series Mockingbird, which recently came to an end after eight issues.

Cain deleted her account on Twitter yesterday, after a series of tweets aimed at the misogyny that’s still rife in the comics world.cain1

cain2

cainagain

Cain’s resignation from Twitter prompted a flood of support, on Twitter and elsewhere, from fans and others troubled by misogyny online.

Her detractors responded by declaring that it was all a big hoax — that she’d made up the misogynistic harassment she claimed she’d gotten. And also that she sucked and feminism sucked and that it was a terrible thing that she and other feminists were ruining comics and that no, the harassment of her, which didn’t exist, had nothing to do with sexism, it was just because she sucked.

https://twitter.com/Taenner4Brump/status/791479331499315200

https://twitter.com/ArchaicHipster/status/791549249976733696

https://twitter.com/MusouTensei82/status/791471542379089921

https://twitter.com/ZekeWars010/status/791440270885650432

https://twitter.com/JamieAgathaRose/status/791585788320296960

https://twitter.com/Outlawdriver_72/status/791515636878807040

Gosh, what a shock to find Donald Trump fans mixed up in all of this.

EDIT: As several people have mentioned, Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain is currently the #1 seller in Marvel Comics & Graphic Novels on Amazon.

H/T — Thanks to everyone who brought my attention to this as well as to CBR.com and Willamette Week for screencapping and posting the screenshots of Cain’s tweets.

94 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
lightcastle
lightcastle
8 years ago

I am sort of dreading this happening to my sister now that her comic is out.

lkeke35
lkeke35
8 years ago

Yeah, I was waiting for that arm and to come off and didn’t care too much for that tease later in the series. Marvel owes me a golden arm!

A Misty/Colleen teamup is the ONLY reason I’m going to watch Iron Fist.

I love Iron Fist in the comics, but I’m angry because once again we’re getting a Might Whitey in Asia trope from Marvel (on top of Dr. Strange, already) and I really stanned for an Asian American to play either of those characters rather than reproducing the same Yellow Peril narratives that ruined Daredevil.

Anyway, for the poster above there is such an African inspired Steampunk novel. It’s brand new, EVERFAIR, written by Nisi Shawl, about how The Congo had defeated being colonized by Belgium because they discovered Steam power first.

Incidentally ima huge Steampunk fan. I try to stay up on my sh*t!?

Fabe
Fabe
8 years ago

@EJ (The Orphic Lizard) & Scildfreja Unnýðnes

Agreed, Guns of Icarus is awesome. I can’t wait for the new adventure game mode/spin off to launch.

Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Scildfreja Unnýðnes
8 years ago

@lkeke35, thank you! Everfair looks excellent, and the whole Belgian/Congo thing is something of a blank spot in my knowledge, so I really should pick it up! I really hope I get the time to do some more recreational reading soon. Sounds very up my alley! I’m not huge into steampunk but I do really enjoy the optimism of the genre.

And the style. Oh god the style. I would be a very happy pony if I could just design funky clothes all day. So good.

eli
eli
8 years ago

@Ikeke35

I’ll thank you, too. PZ Myers recommended this one a while back and I hadn’t put it on my library list. I’m gonna swing by tomorrow and check it out.

chesselwitt
chesselwitt
8 years ago

@lkeke35

A Misty/Colleen teamup is the ONLY reason I’m going to watch Iron Fist.

My understanding is that Misty’s not going to be in Iron Fist, just Colleen. We’re probably going to have to wait for Defenders for their teamup.

leandro
leandro
8 years ago

have you even tried to talk to her instead of making shit up atleast? https://chelseacain.com/blog/140-characters-plus-few-thousand-more-twitter-hubbub

RC
RC
8 years ago

She’s said it was not harassment but an overwhelming amount of detractors

But if they were calling her comic terrible I can see why with these modern jive talking pirate skeletons

Nice Guy David
Nice Guy David
8 years ago

There’s just one problem to your claim, David.

Chelsea Cain herself.

chelseacain . com/blog/140-characters-plus-few-thousand-more-twitter-hubbub

Quote:

I got used to a certain level of take-down tweets after that. Every time an issue came out. I’d get lots of love and support. And a handful of people who seem to thrive off making sure strangers feel hated. I guess it’s a way of being seen. It’s not different than what most comic book writers deal with, especially female ones. The tweets that bothered me were never the ones concerned with content; they were the ones that questioned my right to write comics at all, and were disgusted by the idea of a female hero having her own series.

…

Wednesday, I had a bubble of these types of tweets. Mockingbird had been cancelled, and they were really celebrating. Understand that this is not me looking for mentions. These are tweets in my feed, people who tag me. It is not trolling. I was not being targeted. It was just a lot of people being jerks, per usual, but in greater numbers.

…

I posted a comment about how I was done with Twitter. And I went downstairs.

…

I exchanged a few more tweets with friends later Wednesday night.
The next morning, yesterday, I woke up to find that my Twitter feed had exploded. This was before a Comics Beat story ran later that morning, which REALLY got people interested. Overnight, I had lost thousands of followers. (I’d gone to bed with about 8500.) I had gained a thousand new followers. I had been tagged thousands of times.

Comments were coming in, fast and furious, every second. I’d never seen anything like it. I saw a few of them – a lot of support, a lot of people yelling at one another – a lot of people mad at me for being too quick on the block button or too critical of comic book readers or being too feminist. A lot of them just seemed mad at women in general.

I deactivated my account. I got up. I walked my dogs.

…

But know that I did not leave Twitter because of rape threats or because someone had posted my address, or any of the truly vile tactics you hear about. I left Twitter because of the ordinary daily abuse that I decided I didn’t want to live with anymore. …

Sure, by the time I deactivated my account on Thursday morning, the whole thing had imploded. And I bet that some of the thousands of posts on my feed were really really vicious. But I don’t know. Because you know what? I didn’t read them.

Listen and Believe.

David Futrelle
Author
David Futrelle
8 years ago

@Nice Guy David

Here’s what she said:

I left Twitter because of the ordinary daily abuse that I decided I didn’t want to live with anymore.

Here’s what I said:

Yet another woman has been driven off Twitter by misogynistic fanboy bullies angry that she had invaded their putatively male turf.

There’s no contradiction here. Bullies drove her offline.

Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger
Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger
8 years ago

Wait, so 3 muffugas showed up to prove the point, all thinkin they had the smoking gun? And the “listen and believe” shit? What is it with these people and using SJW terminology they clearly don’t understand? Oh, this is just beauteous!

PeeVee the (Noice) Sarcastic
PeeVee the (Noice) Sarcastic
8 years ago

So the people who drove her off are now here trying to divert attention to the fact that they drove her off?

Is that what I’m reading here?

Are they really that upset that she deactivated her account so they cannot harrass her any more?

Poor babies. My heart. It bleeds for them.

gelar
gelar
8 years ago

Hey, I can do the blockquote trick, too:

I left Twitter because of the ordinary daily abuse that I decided I didn’t want to live with anymore. The base level of casual crassness and sexism.

I mean, I don’t know why somebody wants to come here saying, “No, no, ‘bullying’ / ‘sexist’ is too strong a word! You’re wrong, David! It was ordinary daily abuse.”

Dalillama
Dalillama
8 years ago

@Axe

Wait, so 3 muffugas showed up to prove the point, all thinkin they had the smoking gun?

I’m actually kinda glad they did, otherwise I’d’ve missed lkeke35’s book recommendation.

weirwoodtreehugger: communist bonobo
weirwoodtreehugger: communist bonobo
8 years ago

I guess misogynistic abuse is okay as long as it’s not a rape threat and she’s not doxxed. You learn something new every day!

Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger
Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger
8 years ago

@Dali
And lo, everyone wins ?

Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Scildfreja Unnýðnes
8 years ago

lol

Nice Guy David, I’m not sure how you got from “She was so harassed that she didn’t even read all of her tweets, just shut down her account” to “She wasn’t harassed”, but I suggest you examine the path you took ’cause it’s off the edge of the dock. You want us to throw you a life preserver?

Patrick McGraw
Patrick McGraw
8 years ago

@Scildfreja Unnýðnes:

(I’d really, really like to see some alternate history fiction where the Kingdom of Mali/Songhai was able to fend off the colonial powers, and where Ethiopia managed to fend off the Italians and reclaim old Abyssinia. That would make a great story, I think. That’s just me though!)

Dunno if you’re into miniature wargames, but just such a Kingdom of Abyssinia is going to be one of the playable factions in the upcoming game “The Other Side,” set in the Victorian/Gothic/Steampunk/Wild West setting of Malifaux. We don’t know much yet except that they are going to be more technologically advanced than the other factions, while remaining steampunk.

Joseph Solano
Joseph Solano
7 years ago

Hey, that’s me! I’m in an article. Of course in a negative manner, but hey people understood what I was saying.

1 2 3 4