Eating Crow: Rippaverse

On a basic level, I get being anti-woke. I hate performative empathy, toxic positivity, and offensively shallow Marxism as much as the next person with a brain. Yes, woke still exists. Yes, it's still bad. No, it’s not anymore “caring about people” than sticking someone in a Soviet camp.

At anytime someone of less reading comprehension than my seven year old gets lost, refer to the above paragraph.

In 2020/21 I would say I was a fan of Eric July’s content. He seemed to have some strong common sense, without being driven by the insane rage that had taken over so many. He was pleasant and snarky, without being a jerk  

So when he announced he was going to start his own comic book company, Rippaverse, I was excited! Sure! I would need to see proof of concept and whatnot, but as a general idea? Absolutely! I wanted to see what he had to offer. 

I have written reviews on three Rippaverse comics: Isom 1, Isom 1 and 2, and Alphacore. I was generally positive about the three books and handled Isom 1 and 2 the way I would want someone to handle my first written works: as trailers for what they may accomplish. Alphacore isn’t the best thing Chuck Dixon ever wrote, and its art is atrocious, but overall, I liked it. Overall, strong enough to keep me buying. Not the best stuff I had ever read, but I thought it had potential.

Then Yaira 1 came out. 

And then Goodying. 

Holy crap, did I hate those books. The art issues that plagued the first three (particularly Alphacore) were even worse than before. The art was just flat out bad. The plots clearly needed another pass or five before being sent to the penciller. 

Yaira suffered from having too much stuffed into it. There's all these ideas that, on paper, are really good, but they don't interact very well with each other, not in 90 pages. 300? Sure. 90? Absolutely not. The plot doesn't breathe, so it all felt incoherent. And, once again, the art is just... it's a hodge podge of crap. I hate saying it, because it's very clear everyone is rushed. If you can't deliver a good product on time, delay. The story and art are what matter! Saying "Oh, we're on time" is not enough. 

Goodying was bland. Flat out bland. Again, there's good ideas in the text. Goodying being a stoic is a cool idea! Goodying as a character was easily my favorite in Isom 1, and I loved the things revealed about him. But the plot is just flat out bad. It's not serviceable. It's not even mediocre. It's bad. The characters stay static, and the plot just doesn't... do anything. Nothing. It's just there. There's characters I do actually want to see have an adventure, and it's boring to read about them. And that's unforgiveable in a story.

These are just outright bad books. Defending them sounds like a wife with a black eye saying they tripped down the stairs. I wish it wasn't so! But they're so cookie cutter. So corporate. Rippaverse's stuff reads like the kind of corporate shlock I hate Marvel for, but it's supposed to be some scrappy indie company. I take offense at that. 

A splash of cold water across the face. Two, really. That's what Yaira 1 and Goodying were. The problem was that my hatred became retroactive. No longer was I as generous with Isom or Alphacore. They stopped looking like birthing pains and became a “If someone tells you who they are, listen” situation. It’s one thing if you’re figuring out your craft, but this started to look like someone loving the smell of their own farts. 

Unfortunately, July has clarified that for me via his Iliad-length Twitter (it will NEVER be X) posts. Here's part of one.

C’mon, folks, that’s just cringe incarnate.

So. 

Here’s the deal. 

July’s stable of crap is soulless. I can hear the squeaky squeak of the pen in the checkboxes. Once is your first time, sure. I get it. Writing is legitimately hard. You gotta figure out how to structure your ideas to put some soul in, that makes sense. Five times, three of them from other creators, is on purpose. The line just feels so bland and mediocre. Much as I hate 99% of Marvel these days, at least they have the grace to be bad. Bad is clear. Bad is easy. So is good. But mediocre? Get out. 

The problem is that most of the “anti-mainstream” is like this. They have checklists of what they think are in good stories, like it's a form. Like somehow, some way, they can just connect the dots. 

You know who else talks like that? Corporations.

I'm disappointed. I wanted Rippaverse to be good. I really did. But this just isn't it. I spent my hard-earned cash on books that were, at best, mediocre. And considering that I can't seem to find an honest review of any Rippaverse stuff, or even anyone actually talking about it in general, I can't even ascertain if any future books are worth my time or not. 

And that tells me a lot.

Alphacore #1

Many have accused the Rippaverse of being a stunt. They have gotten at July’s writing with a level of bad faith that isn’t surprising, but still annoying. And frankly there’s some basis for this: July’s dialogue is awful and he chose to start the Rippaverse with a slow burn world-building arc. July has said repeatedly that he did this on purpose. After all these repetitions you can either believe him or be an idiot. But with the hiring of Chuck Dixon to write Alphacore, the Soska Sisters hired full-time, and Mike Barron to write Goodying, the picture changed. July backed up his declaration that he was in for the long haul.

Welp, here’s the first non-July project, Alphacore #1! It’s next to me as I write. It’s quite pretty, as per the Rippaverse standards. This is a premium product. It’s pretty obvious where a lot of the money went. I could go on, but it’s repetitive at this point. Point is: this is a really well put together book, especially for 28 bucks.

The pencilling by Joe Bennett is amazing, front to back. There's a reason why he was a front-line penciller before being blacklisted for not being on the side of the cancel pigs. His storytelling particulary is on point, something that has been pretty standard for the Rippaverse so far. But there are not one, not two, not three, but FIVE fucking inkers on this book. FIVE. What the hell is this? Why are there five inkers on the project? There is no way they can maintain visual continuity with five of them, no matter how much they may talk, email, or cuddle after their orgy. And it shows in the product, trust me. There's moments where characters radically change appearance and you can tell it's coz that inker didn't stick to the other four freaking inker's styles hard enough. One of the characters, a cop called Wilkins, suffers more than any of the others, in some spots looking like something out of a redneck satire. I would have been okay with waiting a bit longer for the book, even swapping its debut out with Yaira #1 if that was a thing that needed to happen. But it wasn't, and that leads me to believe that we may see more crap like this. It is because Joe Bennett is so good that the book doesn't look like a total travesty, as opposed to just janky. The instant you hand a lesser penciller to five inkers there are gonna be problems.

Oh, and there's two colorists, and they really didn't freak talking to each other. They clearly didn't even try. One of the strongest moments in the whole book almost falls part coz I can't tell if the guy is supposed to be a red-head or a fucking blonde.

The fact that all of this adds up to "okay" art is a miracle. It's just janky at times. This could have gone a hell of a lot worse. Hand this to any lesser artists and it would have been a complete laughingstock.

Fortunately the story is awesome. Oh my God I love the story in this issue. Chuck takes the 96 page format and makes it sing. The beleagured and harrassed Alphacore, comprising the idealistic-but-dumb Bryan Solari, smart-but-temperamental Ingrid Valdez, and the silent cypher Braxten, stumble acrost the machinations of the shadowy Michael Copper and Lilian Ronashi. The book opens with Solari stopping a bombing attempt at a bank... only for the bomber to be legitimately surprised when his bomb goes off. It's one hell of an opening. And it just rolls from here. The story builds and builds and builds and then doesn't explode (literally), in the best way possible. The Alphacore are beautifully rendered in their frustrated-and-flawed glory. See, they want to be "regular" cops, but they're not regular, they're Excepts, and they're only wanted for whenever other Excepts are screwing around! This isn't a totally unreasonable request. Alphacore are justifiably frustrated, coz they want to be cops. And they can't just be cops. So they get more and more frustrated and start making mistakes. These are people just being people, with the epic consequences of their mistakes and frustrations being front and center. It's to the credit of Chuck that every beat of the way makes sense, but isn't defended or glorified. I love that every single second of these flawed characters is fun. Heck, my pulse started going up! It was fun! I had a great time! And the ending felt so damn good to read. I mean it. This is why I buy superhero comics. This. Right here.

I'm going to address Chuck Dixon's ending note now. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the mainstream U.S. comic book industry is falling apart at the seams. Sales are horrible, the books are worse, and frankly if I was an artist having to draw one of these new books I'd cry, coz they're so boring. Dixon's ending note, and the fact that 1 million bucks (so far) has been spent to glory in this end note, not to mention the incredible comic book before it... that should be very disconcerting. Change is here. If change keeps looking like stories like this the mainstream needs to get with the program, and quickly. But they won't. The note will go unheeded.

Alphacore has a lot of problems, and I spent most of the review bitching about them. All the things I said are true, but they are potentionally misleading. 

This book is so much more than the sum of its parts.

A lot more.

And it is a failure of me, as a writer, that I cannot adequately explain that. This comic builds on itself in a way that very few outside of Chuck Dixon can adequately do these days, nevermind hit it out the part like he does. The ending of this comic feels good. This comic feels amazing to read. There are so many problems with it, but everything clicks together so fucking well that it's honestly a bit breathtaking to witness. This is a great comic. Buy it. Yeah, there's problems, but man that last double page spread is so fucking cool. 

I love it.

It really is that simple.

ComicsGate Has a Point

No, don't go away.

Sit down.

The message of comicsgate has always, always, been that ideology has become the center of modern comics. Not that politics are in comics. Not that comics can't have political messages. It's that popular comics have become a propaganda machine for the progressives and their ideology at the cost of story. You listen to even five minutes of a single comicsgate video and that becomes obvious quite quickly. Anyone who says differently is lying. Period.

Like Mark Waid. Definitely him.

No, don't go and read an article about what people say it's about. Or any non comicsgate person.

These folks are on Youtube. They aren't hard to find. And they're not that hard to listen to either, particularly Perch.

I didn't say these people were saints. Or even that I like them. They're people, and thus are a decidedly mixed bag. Some folks "classified" as comicsgate don't even go by the moniker, because they just want to talk about comics, like Perch. But you have folks like Just Some Guy (a very much so black dude, as he frequently brings up), who seem to have mainlined the comicsgate Kool-Aid, despite having some points... sometimes.

But then again it's remarkably easy to dunk on Mark Waid. Dude's a genuine creep.

So maybe I'm giving Just Some Guy a bit too much credit.

Point is, I'm not necessarily a fan of comicsgate either.

So, why am I bringing this up?

 Because Eric July's Isom #1 is currently at 3.2 million bucks and I've heard very little about it from the establishment.

Well, except this hit piece from Bleeding Cool.

He hit 1.5 without any form of advertisement. At all. And anyone who says differently is lying, best of my knowledge. It's absolutely bonkers!

Sure, at some point Fox propped him, but that was after he made that actually shocking sum in a day.  Without any help from anyone in the comics industry. And the response on Twitter has been... I'm not going to copy some of those responses to him on Twitter. Go look. You'll find them. Some of them are just flat out racist. It's not subtle. Nor is it right. A black dude makes a comic book about a black superhero... and folks are calling him an Uncle Tom. And a whole hell of a lot worse. Not to mention calling him a liar and a fraud.

One of the rumblings from the Comics Gate folks is that, really, right when you get down to it, the "mainstream" only cares about power. They don't care about race, or minorities or whatever it is they're propping up, they specifically want power, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

Which, by the way, factors into what socialism really is to begin with: the weaponization of disaffected lower classes by one element of the upper class against another.

But this isn't kind of blatant.

Why am I posting this? Why am I bothering to write at all?

Well, it ain't because I bought a comic from Eric July. I've not spent a red cent on his work. I took a look at the website, shrugged, thought "Not for me", and went about my business. The book could be great! I hope it is. But I have absolutely no stake in how Eric July does. I'm not sitting around and hoping he'll fulfill (he has it done and printed already, unless he's faking that warehouse I've seen), nor am I a comicsgate person myself. If a work is good and I'm interested I'll buy it. I've a full run of Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man by Tom Taylor sitting in my closet right now and I love the ever-loving shit out of it. The incredibly woke Tom Taylor probably wouldn't want to be in the same room with me, nevermind be my friend. I don't care. His writing on that title was gold, and I bought every last issue of it. I wish he'd write like that more often. 

I'm pointing this out because the fact that someone is knocking it out of the park like this and there is concerted effort to shut him down is enormously obvious. Again, go check Twitter if you don't believe me, cause I'm not blaspheming my hard drive or blog for you.

I'm pointing this out because a black dude making a black superhero, the very definition of what the left has called inclusivity, is getting called a traitor and an Uncle Tom (AND WORSE). There's not a lot of ways to go forward with that, folks. He doesn't share their politics. Therefore he is hated. It is truly that simple.

It's also exactly what comicsgate was saying would happen, the whole time.

No, really, I went and looked. They've been calling it for years.

I am not suggesting that comicsgate are great people. I certainly am not on their side, for the same reason I'm not on the establishment's side: I don't pick sides, best as I can. There is many a thing I disagree with comicsgate on, their idiotic and garbled non-Euclidean screaming about the sequel  trilogy being one of them. I think libertarianism, Eric July's political leanings as pointless as Waiting on Godot. You can't call anything "apolitical", because that's impossible. And, with the exception of Perch and Razörfist, the rest of the group have some clear axes to grind. Perch is just too damn even keeled to have a grudge and Razörfist had been complaining about the issues that led to comicsgate and gamegate for years before either movement came to pass.

Oh, and Chuck Dixon (remember him??) seems to be a pretty even-keeled and standup guy from what I can tell.

But, c'mon. This is obvious. On this one spot the comicsgate people are 100% right: the mainstream comics industry is rotten from the inside out, having exchanged story for straight up propaganda, and it's playing out, in real time, if you know where to look. 

The fact that you have to know to look should be enough of a reason to be deeply concerned.