About that Jimmy Carr ‘joke’

Before I get stuck in properly with this let me make it clear that Carr isn’t especially funny to me, and his recent Netflix special is bloody awful. He’s trying hard to be Bob Monkhouse but doesn’t have the material to match his, so copes on ‘edgy’ comedy to give him his material and again, much of it sucks.

His Netflix special came out just before Christmas, but his line about Gypsies being murdered in the Holocaust was only picked up a week or so ago. Carr has rightfully been condemned, and his line isn’t funny unless you think the murder of thousands of Gypsies is funny. That’s where one can peel the humour off it. That’s it. Do I think that Carr should be canceled or as one SNP councilor says, the crowd laughing at the crowd should be prosecuted?

Well, no. Condemning Carr for being a prick is enough, though that just feeds his ego and prolongs his career but going down the road to prosecute the audience leads us down the road to the sort of authoritarian regime that gave birth to the likes of the Nazis or Stalin. There’s also a lot of talk about how comedy should be only about ‘punching up’, which leaves comedy in a place where it essentially it picking on the usual easy targets for leftish performers and audiences and closes off so many subjects of comedy because anything can be the subject of comedy or satire.

Except Carr’s line was neither. It was just racist pandering to a core of his audience. In a free world Carr should take the criticism for this but at the same time we shouldn’t be calling for audience members to be prosecuted.

But Superman shouldn’t be gay!!!

The headlines are full of gay at the minute as Superman is gay!!

Except it isn’t Superman, it’s his son. DC here are having their cake and eating it, and yes, it is a massive publicity stunt because superhero comics love a publicity stunt, and yes, DC can stuff him back in the closet just as quickly as they pulled him out of it. But it’s a sort of positive in that more gay, BI and lesbian representation is in superhero comics but not just to get a sales boost or tens of thousands of headlines across the world. Making gay from the off rather than in Jon’s case, aged up rapidly (last time I read a comic with him in it a couple of years ago he was barely out of nappies) to late teens/early 20’s to fit this storyline in.

So overall, a good thing but could still do better.

Cancelling Janey Godley

Janey Godley’s cancellation for some pretty vile racist Tweets does not come as a massive shock. She made her name through edgy humour, and although over the last few years she’s tried pandering to her new more middle-class audience, not to mention figures high in the Scottish government but you can’t be a mate of government and an edgy comic at the same time. It was clear that Godley was trying to reshape herself by quoting things she clearly didn’t believe but would see her in good stead with government, but you can’t hide from your past online and that came back to hurt her.

Yet this isn’t really her fault. Whoever authorised her to be the face of a government campaign and paid her £12k (which somewhat takes the piss out of anyone’s progressive credentials to cash in on the public purse during a pandemic)should have been soundly bollocked but I doubt they will.

And I also dismay of the feral packs who hounded her to cancellation, even though she’d indulge in the same herself sometimes with people who were not abusive Rangers fans, but political opponents to the SNP for I assume, a few brownie points. Here’s the thing about cancellation; these packs will turn on anyone and find anyone. I remember seeing one Tweet when Lindsay Ellis was cancelled that said ‘they didn’t care’ about the facts but that they’d now got the chance to go after someone and effectively try to destroy their life. Which is the problem with cancellation; it never stops. One day you’re the head of the pack and the next the pack is savaging you.

Godley’s mistake was to ignore this fact and because of that she’s suffered a public shaming which ultimately, is the entire point of this thing. It’s medieval, cruel and needless, and unless we find ways to curtail it we’re all fucked.

Cancelling Frank Miller

If you ask people one of those who changed how comics are seen as a medium since the 1980s then Frank Miller is going to be high on the list of names given as his Daredevil work for Marvel, then Dark Knight and Batman Year One for DC being given as examples. Dark Knight is one of the best selling mainstream comics of all time. Also people may mention Sin City or 300, but Miller from 1980 through to the late 90s produced a body of work few creators since have matched let alone got near.

Since the late 90s his work has been, well, sketchy. After watching his hometown being attacked on 911 he appears to have went off the rails a tad, but if you’ve had to live by breathing air containing soot, smoke and atomised human then perhaps the horror of that day might have got to you. All of that does not excuse Holy Terror, a thinly vieled Batman booked where he tortures and kills a lot of stereotypical Muslim terrorists in a work that is toxic, angry, awful and unforgiveable all at once.

It’s a work which really shouldn’t exist. Miller in more recent years seems not exactly proud of it, even apologetic for it, which to be honest he should be because it is every bit as terrible as it sounds.

Anyhow, Miller has turned his hand to helping make average comics for DC these days but his part in making comics what they are today is untouched, so as a guest at a comic convention you’d expect Miller to be not just a huge draw but to go down well? Not in the case of Thought Bubble, who’d invited Miller over as guest, who announced today that he was no longer coming due to complaints from other creators who felt ‘unsafe’ had he been present. The full story is here at Bleeding Cool.

The idea that Miller being in the same area is essentially making the area ‘unsafe’ would hold water if after Holy Terror he’d carried on producing the same sort of work, which he didn’t. If anything it provides an opportunity to discuss the book with Miller in a way that hasn’t been done publicly. Instead a boycott is threatened, the organisers back off some people feel worthy, and nobody learns anything. There’s no sign that people change or contain a complex set of thoughts and feelings, good and bad. Instead it’s do right or do one, and if you don’t like it the hive will come after you.

Life is about living with different types of people of a variety of different opinions and thoughts. Sure, fuck full on actual racists but I don’t beleive Miller is one, and it would have been fascinating to see someone who has fought hard for free speech and against censorship in comics to discuss this with people in a con setting.

So instead we get this. Thought Bubble were in a no win situation, neither was Miller, but the organisers of the boycott feel like they’ve won a victory but it’s a sad time for the UK comics scene when a creator as important as Miller to the mediums history is ‘cancelled’ like this. The only shining light is that if one sets themselves up as morally pure then they’d better be careful not to drop these standards or do something others might find offensive or they’ll be the purity guard after them. This sort of rightous authoritarianism always leads to a bad place.

And next year Thought Bubble should book Howard Chaykin just to fuck all the right people off.

The gory, filthy joy of Squeak the Mouse

One of the times in my life where I thought I’d be locked up for distributing ‘obscenity’ happened in the year of 1990 when I was still working for Neptune Comic Distributors and we could a shipment of comics, including the glorious Squeak the Mouse.

Comics shipped from the US would normally land at Heathrow, so over the years we built up a relationship with customs there, but this time we had to pick the shipment up from Gatwick where the customs lads were akin to the fucking Stasi! So imagine a young version of me, and another member of staff standing there watching customs decide to go through every single box and imagine my face when I spot Squeak the Mouse and think ‘oh fuck, that’s me fucking fucked’.

Just to explain, at this time the UK was suffering a wave of overt morality led by Thatcher who was trying to hide the disaster of her final days and the Poll Tax, a fiercly unpopular policy which helped her exit from power. Comics were just one thing being targeted by this new ‘moral majority’ with Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss, and Lord Horror being the two main targets for these two-faced moralists. This meant that we dreaded Gatwick with its scary customs officials who didn’t look the other way, or just couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork for nicking three copies of some obscure underground.

Just to explain why this may well be an issue here’s Cartoonist Kayfabe showing you Squeak in all its glory…

The gore wouldn’t be an issue that much, but the slightest sign of an erect penis, even a cartoon cat’s penis, would send customs insane, and seeing one go into a woman’s vagina, even a cartoon cat’s vagina would send them reaching for the handcuffs. By some small miracle we appeared to have the work experience officer or the blind one, or both as he picked up the obviously gory cover, flipped through obviously seeing enough erect cartoon cat cocks than one would expect to see in a lifetime shrug and put it back in the box. I made sure that box was firmly stuffed into the van and as we drove back to Leicester (where we were based) it felt like we’d stolen the crown jewels, or in this case a cartoon cat’s testicles.

Stupidily I sold my copies some time ago thanks mainly to a girlfriend reading them one day when I was at work and decided I was a bit more of a sicker freak than she’d expected, but that close call with customs nearly denied me a read of what is a fantastic bit of comics. Yes, it was the template for Itchy and Scratchy but don’t say it too loud, especially now The Mouse owns those characters but as a piece of comics it is one of those works fans of the medium should own, preferably wrapped in a brown paper bag and hidden underneath the matress.

As a wee bonus treat here’s an animated version of part of the first volume. Enjoy.

Sutcliffe! The musical.

Peter Sutcliffe is dead which is a good thing, but during all the talk of his and the women he murdered abanned sketch from Brass Eye came to mind. Brass Eye was a TV series produced by Chris Morris and a team of exceptionally talented team of writers and actors for Channel 4 in 1997. It is by far one of the great bits of TV satire/comedy ever produced in the UK, but during the first broadcast it suffered heavily from censorship, especially in Episode 6 which saw whole sketches lost including one about Peter Sutcliffe starring in his own West End musical.

At the time a Jack the Ripper musical was proposed, plus ‘Ripper tours’ of the murder sites were pulling in the money in the East End of London, which back then hadn’t gentrified to the state it has now so it wasn’t ironic hispters being mocked, but working class women. There was also a glamourisation of old gangsters, some of which commited crimes as bad as Sutcliffe. The idea this sketch was supporting Sutcliffe was a joke, but it was one pushed by the usual suspects.

However judge for yourself…

Scotland’s proposed hate crime laws are an illiberal mess.

There’s a lot bout Scotland to praise from how the NHS is still free to its arts to attempts to make us more akin to a liberal Scandinavian democracy than whatever the UK is turning into. On the whole, the governing party of Scotland, the SNP, have guided Scotland in right directions over the last decade but they have a problem with well meaning, but legally troubling laws. The ‘Named Person’ idea was, and is, a great one but was badly put together legally as was The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act was an actual attempt to deal with sectarian abuse in Scottish football but again, it fell apart because it was well meaning but legally a mess.

The latest bill to come down the line in such a way is the proposed new hate crimes law which finally gets rid of blasphemy in Scottish law but replaces it with new types of blasphemies which a progressive 21st century democracy should not have. To quote from this piece…

Offences are currently aggravated by prejudice against a victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or their transgender identity.

Hate crime can take many forms including verbal abuse or insults, assault and damage to property, but also online abuse on sites like Facebook or Twitter.

When a criminal is convicted of a hate crime, an ‘aggravation’ can be added to their sentence, meaning that if, for example, someone attacks an individual based on their race, then a racial aggravation can be added to the crime of assault.

The Scottish Government’s proposed legislation would incorporate the existing aggravating factors but also add the characteristic of age, with the potential to include sex at a later date so misogynistic harassment can become a standalone offence.

If passed by parliament, the Hate Crime Bill, will also make “stirring up of hatred” extend to all the characteristics, rather than just against race, which has been an offence in Scots law for decades.

The characteristics aimed to be protected under the bill are listed below.

• Age
• Disability
• Race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origins
• Religion
• Sexual orientation
• Transgender identity
• Variations in sex characteristics

So far, so relatively uncontroversial though one has to ask why sex is not included in the list (it may be added at a later date) when we live in a time when misogyny is rife and other, more vague criteria is included.The issue rises when we hit what makes an offence which is the offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ which under these proposals would make it an offence for a person to behave in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner, or to communicate threatening, abusive or insulting material to another person where in doing so, the person intends to stir up hatred against a group of people by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origin. The problem comes when the offence is that someone is ‘likely’ to result in hatred.

This opens up the bills from one supposedly designed to update hate crime laws to one which suddenly closes down free speech and freedom of expression while opening up a Pandora’s Box where any group could easily abuse the act to suppress an opposing opinion. Imagine a group of highly organised people organising a campaign to get someone prosecuted because they don’t like what they’ve said? Removing religious blasphemy for secular blasphemy is not progress.

What marks criticism of this out from other bills is the level in which Scotland’s legal organisations themselves are providing warning and lead the opposition to parts of the bill which will limit freedom of expression and will criminalise people who may well be unpopular among a section of people, but offering a different opinion may offend but if as a society we limit offence then we’re heading towards a very controlling, bland society. So to take just comedy, this bill could criminalise Frankie Boyle, Billy Connolly, The Life of Brian and much of the rest of Monty Python’s output, the works of Chris Morris and pretty much any important work of comedy of the last century.

Juries will have to decide if a statement, or a work of art, or just a Tweet, is designed ‘to stir up hatred and as the bill excludes protecting “expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse” it seems as said, designed for small, powerful groups to target individuals especially, If we’ve hit a point where society is so weak, and arguments are so thin that they need to game the system then we are basically fucked.

So I hope the SNP listen, take the bill back and change it otherwise it’ll become law and a few high profile cases will show it to be a mockery, and the Scottish Government will have to rethink something which will not do what it may set out to do. We need a society where dissent is tolerated.

Tom King and the apology to Jae Lee

When I wrote about the whole Tom King shaming Jae Lee situation I made the observation that someone in DC’s H.R department needs to get involved, and indeed it smacks as if someone has had a word.

King has made a very public apology, as well as removing all associated Tweets.

As I have done privately, I’d like to publicly apologize to Jae Lee for my actions a few days ago. I should’ve talked with Jae before I sent a tweet about him that put his career at risk. I made a critical mistake, and I am profoundly sorry. I will do what I can to repair this with Jae, and I will do better in the future. I’m not going to offer explanations because they sound like excuses, and I’m not asking for forgiveness or understanding. I’m just saying I see what I did, and I’m going to try to make up for it. Thank you.
I have kept up the tweets up to this point in order to show that I was not hiding my actions. I will now take them down.

Bleeding Cool makes the situation clear here. Fact is King has done all of this too late, the damage has been done and all the wrong people won’t learn a lesson as if you check online there’s still people saying Lee must have known ‘something’ because they can’t believe some people don’t live their lives online.

But for now, we have a resolution of sorts. The future will tell us how badly it affects Jae Lee.

Why did Tom King shame Jae Lee?

Tom King is writing DC’s new Rorschach maxi-series which is yet another example of them milking Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen for everything it can. Of course Moore famously wants nothing to do with DC or what they’re doing to work he doesn’t fully own himself, or with co-creators, plus the idea of making Rorschach even the anti-hero of his own series would probably leave a bit of sick in his mouth.

There is a massive issue here of the creator’s rights. Moore has been stripped bare by DC over the years, not to mention this sends out the message that if DC Comics can fuck over Alan Moore, they can fuck anyone over. Of course, they can’t do it without the aid of creators which brings us to Tom King doing this off the back of the dreadful Doomsday Clock semi-sequel. King’s participation in this has already caused controversy outwith the creator’s rights issue, and frankly, the blurb does not fill one with confidence.

“This is a very political work.” he said in a statement. “It’s an angry work. We’re so angry all the time now. We have to do something with that anger. It’s called ‘Rorschach’ not because of the character Rorschach, but because what you see in these characters tells you more about yourself than about them.”

But this is how DC and Marvel operate these days. Things won’t change, especially in a Covid world. So last weekend during the virtual San Diego Comic Con, King Tweeted this.

The hate group King refers to is Comicsgate, who are indeed full of hateful racists and misogynists, but they run crowd-funding campaigns for their comics which end up raising their goals. They’re awful, but this is still a tiny part of comics even if they are painfully vocal, especially with their daft wee boycotts. The variant cover King is talking about is this one.

Lee was then promptly canceled. Boycotts were organised, and fans pushed for Lee never to get work at DC, all the usual stuff you’d expect when there’s an online swirl of shaming and canceling going on. Problem is Lee wasn’t asked by King his version of the story until the damage was well and truly done, but of course this wouldn’t have attracted any attention.  Lee was busy dealing with the death of his dog and isn’t on Twitter, nor does he know what Comicsgate is. It appears he did the cover because he drew a Cyberfrog cover back in the 90s, plus as a freelance artist it was a job.

Which has seen people further point out the fact why didn’t King do this in the first place? Was it really so urgent that it’d not have waited a couple of days til Lee had made clear his side of things. But no, people want blood, and if he’s innocent of anything then they still want blood. For example.

Lee was not fine. Lee will probably lose work over this. He’ll forever have the labels of racist and bigot hanging over him. People will want Lee to ‘learn’ now he’s been so publicly shamed, but Lee did nothing more than do one cover for someone. He’s not a Comicsgater, nor does he seem to want to do anything but make art, but King has used his position of power to taint Lee which means people aren’t talking about King’s next project in the light of creator’s rights, or any other criticism prior to this weekend.

In most companies, King would be facing possible dismissal. At least he’d be disciplined for what he did to a colleague. I would hope DC’s H.R department move on this and bollock the living hell out of King because we live in a time where cancel culture is real, and people know they can weaponise it against someone, or use it to get likes or detract from anything rattling in their cupboard and an ex CIA operative will have many a skeleton rattling away, and one can only imagine how Alan Moore feels about a former CIA man working on his creations when Moore’s written a comic about the CIA’s bloody history.

So we have here an example of the horror of living in the 21st century. Public shaming is fine as long as you discuss facts after the shaming is done, and if the damage lives with someone for a lifetime well they’ve learned a lesson haven’t they? This is the weird bizarro world we now live in and how amazingly toxic it has become. If I were Lee I’d be crowdfunding for legal action, and I’m guessing the reason King has backed off is he’s now fully aware he’s open to be sued, and I hope Lee does because if this is the way to stop people leaping to cancel then so be it. There’s no point asking for kindness because many of the people holding up pitchforks are those who consider themselves ‘kind’ or progressive, but are happy to destroy lives for shits and giggles because it isn’t just the right doing this, but the supposed left.

And what’s going to make this worse is that the horde will move onto their next victim probably as I type this…

 

 

 

About that ‘cancel culture’ letter

A letter condemning cancel culture signed by over 150 academics, writers, journalists and others. In 2020 this shouldn’t have to happen, but it has and although the statement is as anodyne in defence of free speech as possible, it’s been causing controversy as people say there’s no such thing as cancel culture while at the same time rallying behind calls to cancel people listed on the letter.  The letter itself can be found at this link.

Thing is instead of an open debate we saw what the letter is talking about play out in real-time with people posting just why free speech is under threat, and why a certain aspect of the left has decided to be just as authoritarian and censorious as certain aspects of the right. As an example, the actress Jodie Comer was revealed to be dating a supposed conservative which has seen the most appalling screeching nonsense about how she’s Satan incarnate, and of course guilty without trial, evidence or indeed, sanity from her accusers.

There’s the element of witch-hunting here, and certainly, there’s an obvious joy from some that they can wield such power (I’d recommend Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed to see just how dark cancel culture can get) that a young woman like Comer can wake up to a stream of frankly, insane bullshit about her private life. Then there’s the reaction of people who think Person A is guilty by association so they hold or advocate the views of Person B who they don’t like. Remember when Johnny Depp was attempted to be canceled due to domestic abuse allegations which eventually ended up showing that in reality, Depp was the victim rather than perpetrator? Now that’s readily forgotten as people support Depp in his legal action against The Sun but for a while there it seemed like the internet had crucified Depp.

Problem is when we now spend so much time living online and everyone is a cop trying to police people for wrongspeak we have a situation where there is no debate. When that spills into the real world, especially in an academic context so that debating opposing views is shunned, or worse then we’re diving headfirst into a dystopia where everyone has to conform for fear of cancellation and all that brings.

So personally I’m done with being associated with an illiberal section of the left who want to control rather than convince, and that lives are simplistic things where people should only associate themselves with other like-minded people. Ideas are not exchanged, therefore they’re never challenged and we leap on this course of anti-intellectualism as this culture war between the hard right and left knock chunks off each other. I fear for where things are going and I’m not convinced there’s a way to pull back however, the only chink of light is the majority of people still find this alien which is why so many of these types on right and left, have major problems when entering the real world. Hopefully sanity will prevail.