NS: Chuck Wendig Gets Axed From Marvel

[cygnia]

I initially became aware of this from the Absolute Write forums.

In Which I Am Fired From Marvel

"And then we announced SHADOW OF VADER juuuuust last weekend, and people were excited, and I thought everything was good. I was not made aware of any issues, and my online self has always been my online self, so.
Except, yeah, no. Today I got the call. I’m fired. Because of the negativity and vulgarity that my tweets bring. Seriously, that’s what Mark, the editor said. It was too much politics, too much vulgarity, too much negativity on my part.
Basically, because I was not civil.
Which, of course, is their decision to make. I’m not their boss. (And, turns out, they’re not the boss of me, either. Har har.) (I joke because otherwise, I cry.)
My understanding over this call was that this was a Marvel decision, not an LFL decision, but I can’t really confirm that. The editor said he had made the call. He seemed genuinely upset at my tweets and profanity, so maybe that’s accurate. And again, that’s his right to do so. If they honestly feel that my presence will damage the book, I don’t want that. I want the book to shine, and artists like Juanan Ramirez and Greg Smallwood to do their amazing thing. Artists like that are gods in my mind, so I’m happy to not distract from their literal magic.
But it does set a troubling precedent. One we’ve seen already – James Gunn, Jessica White, and so on – of folks fired because they riled up the wasp’s nest of asterisk-gate. And it seems odd to be mad that I’m mad about politics when – well, look around. Climate change, kids in cages, sexual harassers at the topmost tiers of power, and so on. A call for civility as the PA GOP candidate threatens Tom Wolf with a golf cleat stomping. I dunno, man."

Comments

[deh_tommy]

I often hear about how terrible Dan Slott is on social media. What did he do wrong?

[cyberghostface]

Well he’s strongly anti-Trump and has gotten into a few twitter arguments over politics. In particular we have Douglas Ernst who’s obsessed with everything Slott does so the two have gone after each other’s throats. One of the biggest was when Ernst posted graphic Holocaust images for a Superior Spider-Man review (because of Otto’s global warming scheme to wipe out the planet) which pissed off Slott who is Jewish.

In this latter case we had someone make a comment about ASM on Twitter and Slott responded to her tweet. It was pretty obvious that he was just searching for comments on his issues on social media but Ernst and co. made it a big thing about him stalking her because of it. I think they even tried taking it to BleedingCool and Rich had to tell them there was nothing to report on.

To be clear I do think Slott is a bit thin-skinned and leaving Twitter was probably for the best but a lot of the controversies were overblown.

[obsidianwolf]

It all depends on who you ask some think Slott has been unfairly maligned by folks who just don't like him and that he's justified in being harsh back and others think he's an unprofessional jack ass who uses his position as a pro in the field to harass others with no consequences.

I've personally seen examples that support both points of view

[cyberghostface]

Who has he harassed?

[angelophile]

I mean, we're going back years here, to when S_D was on Livejournal is when I originally heard of him following people who made critical remarks about his work and tracking them down to their personal accounts to attack them and that behaviour hasn't mellowed over the years. There were instances of the same thing right up until he deleted his Twitter account.

It's easy to find names. It's only been five days since it was mentioned:
https://twitter.com/CPHwriter/status/1050836931846791173

[laughing_tree]

I don't know. Going only off that person's description, finding someone on Facebook to complain about something they wrote non-anonymously is perhaps petty, but assuming all they did was complain instead of actually get abusive in their language, it's a FAR cry from harassment. I mean, if I went to Slott's Facebook to write a complaint about the latest Iron Man issue, is that harassment? Then again, I don't actually know the full situation here.