Severe personal crisis for the last couple of days, but I should be back to semi-regular posting.
First, though, to ease myself back into the habit before I tackle the second half of Liberality for All, I give you…okay, it’s still Liberality for All. As it turns out, the good Mr. Mackey has a page in the back of his comic where he answers questions from fans.
Samples from “The FREEDOM of Information League’s mail bag with views from the RIGHT and LEFT” (LEFT is printed in mirrored letters, which I assume has to with it being “left” and not “right,” but it doesn’t completely work, because RIGHT is on the left and TFEL is on the right. Of course, if you’re looking at TFEL in a mirror so you can read it, then I suppose it’s on the left, but that doesn’t solve the problem of RIGHT. And I’ve wasted far too much of my life thinking about this. Yours too, but that bothers me a lot less).
“James” from “Tupelo,” “MS” asks
“I have seen Liberality for All argued about all over the Internet, but I am NOT seeing it talked about much by comic book new websites…I would have thought a comic book that has gotten so much mainstream press would be big news all over the comic industry.”
My own answer is not the same as Mackey’s, and it goes a bit something like this: Liberality isn’t a comic event, it’s a political one. Which is the only reason anybody is talking about it in the mainstream press. As a comic, it’s shit. It’s a nobody author publishing with a virtually non-existant company. No art industry can afford to give that much attention to the tiny indie crackpots, because there are so many of them (here, the blogger raises his hand and waves). Of course, occasionally the tiny indie crackpots will be something like the Ramones, who ended up getting a lot more press because they changed the industry with their little self-produced LP. Mr. Mackey, I know the Ramones. You are not the Ramones.
Or, if I wanted to take the easy route, I’d just ask you all to click here, here, here (scroll down), here.
Mackey’s response:
“When I set out to publish LFA I knew it was going to be controversial, but I did not realize on how many levels. One questionable issue developing is that of the often-rumored liberal bias in the comic industry and how that may affect what books are promoted by the influential few, upon which, comic collectors rely on for unbiased reporting.
Regarding the lack of coverage in the comic news worlds, I am not sure when there has ever been a greater disparity between news reporting of a comic book in the mainstream press vs. comic book press…it makes any neo-con wonder.”
I hope so. I hope Cheney wakes up at night in a cold sweat, lost in confusion as to why Liberality isn’t in the trade publications.
“I think it is pathetic for a comic collector to be required to read the mainstream press for a story of a comic book that is making so many waves. Yes, I realize a radioactive spider is a bit more thrilling to the average comic geek, but still the mainstream press should never scopp the comic industry on any comic-book story. Consider how rare a comic book article in the mainstream press actually is and how, historically, that affects the secondary market value of a comic.”
“You certainly won’t want to keep this fucker, so thank God all the press and the artificially limited run have jacked up the collector’s value!”
He goes on for quite some time, and the point is basically that the comics industry would rather report stories about Clark Kent aborting Lois Lane’s baby with his heat vision so nothing can stand in the way of him having gay marriage with Jimmy Olson.
The rest of the letters follow a patter: leftist writes in asking if it’s a joke, conservative writes to thank him. The most exciting is surely the letter from Frank in New York, who name drops the Superman Red Son storyline as proof that all comic writers are whackjob lefty commy homo pedophilic universal-healthcare-pushers. And I’m thinking, if Red Son is enough to make you question Superman’s status as a Great American Hero, you are a seriously thin-skinned individual. Oh, he also bitches that the JLA has to, at one point, stop the corrupt Luthor presidency, which doesn’t make any sense at all: is he arguing that a Lex Luthor administration wouldn’t be corrupt? Of course, I don’t remember Luthor misleading anybody into an endless war in the desert.