How One Panel of a Captain America Comic Led to Backlash, Death Threats, and Valid Debates About Fandom
http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/captain-america-comic-has-led-to-online-chaos.html
Superhero comics have long relied on final-page cliffhangers: Our hero is … dead? The bomb timer only has … one second left? Could it be that … we’ve traveled back in time? The goal, of course, is to shock readers into buying the next issue, and presumably that’s what comics scribe Nick Spencer and his colleagues at Marvel Comics hoped to do when they executed a final-page revelation in last Wednesday’s Captain America: Steve Rogers No. 1: We learned that Cap is actually … evil? The Star-Spangled Avenger uttered the words, “Hail Hydra,” the fascistic slogan of longtime villain collective Hydra. Say it ain’t so!
What Marvel couldn’t have predicted is that those three syllables of dialogue would cause a bizarre, head-spinning chain reaction. The online fallout to the twist has included vicious accusations of anti-Semitism, backlash to those accusations from comics historians, a torrent of death threats, a much-read essay comparing the aforementioned death threats to demands for queer inclusion in comics, essays backlashing that essay, a harsh fight between a prominent comics blogger and a successful comics writer, and Thor knows what else in the future. The superhero-fiction blogo- and Twitterspheres haven’t seen an uproar this loud and complicated in recent memory — and, as crazy as it all is, the incident has led to some legitimate and intelligent debate about how fandom works in 2016.
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Wow. Crazy reactions, threats, and "agenda" movements in this article.
http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/captain-america-comic-has-led-to-online-chaos.html
Superhero comics have long relied on final-page cliffhangers: Our hero is … dead? The bomb timer only has … one second left? Could it be that … we’ve traveled back in time? The goal, of course, is to shock readers into buying the next issue, and presumably that’s what comics scribe Nick Spencer and his colleagues at Marvel Comics hoped to do when they executed a final-page revelation in last Wednesday’s Captain America: Steve Rogers No. 1: We learned that Cap is actually … evil? The Star-Spangled Avenger uttered the words, “Hail Hydra,” the fascistic slogan of longtime villain collective Hydra. Say it ain’t so!
What Marvel couldn’t have predicted is that those three syllables of dialogue would cause a bizarre, head-spinning chain reaction. The online fallout to the twist has included vicious accusations of anti-Semitism, backlash to those accusations from comics historians, a torrent of death threats, a much-read essay comparing the aforementioned death threats to demands for queer inclusion in comics, essays backlashing that essay, a harsh fight between a prominent comics blogger and a successful comics writer, and Thor knows what else in the future. The superhero-fiction blogo- and Twitterspheres haven’t seen an uproar this loud and complicated in recent memory — and, as crazy as it all is, the incident has led to some legitimate and intelligent debate about how fandom works in 2016.
---------------
Wow. Crazy reactions, threats, and "agenda" movements in this article.