Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

I'm not a fan of Rob Liefeld's works, but he really didn't deserve this:

http://blog.newsarama.com/2009/08/10/wh ... onvention/

Hopefully, this will never happen to Sakai-Sensei.

In the late 1990's Harlan Ellison wrote an essay titled Xenogenesis that related just a few of the abuses some SF and fantasy writers have suffered because of fans. I could not find the essay but here is a brief description, and these are nowhere near the worse of it:

http://everything2.com/title/Xenogenesis

I'm very lucky in that Usagi readers are extremely nice.

That's just incredibly rude. I wasn't a fan of Heroes Reborn either, but come on, thats just inappropriate. If you don't like a direction of a story, don't read it. There are a lot of artists and writers out there that I am not a fan of, but they still need to be treated with the proper respect that any human being deserves. Plus Rob gave us the female Bucky who is now in the proper Marvel Universe! (I really like her)


MikeM

I just read the remainder of that guy's story about meeting Liefield. Clearly, CLEARLY he believes that creators exist for his own personal amusement.

I realize there are some out there who would argue that, as a public figure, you're putting your work out there and the public has a right to respond as they wish. If no one is harassing you in your personal life, it's all fair game.

Still, I believe in a common decency that fits a bigger scope. Don't ever go out of your way to hurt someone. I think it would be okay to honestly tell Rob that you were sincerely disappointed by Heroes Reborn. That's giving feedback about a comic book at a comic convention (even if it is nonconstructive feedback that comes 13 years too late), but to make the guy into a joke...

My least favorite comic book creator of all time is Todd McFarlane. I find his business ethics questionable, his ego unbearable, and I honestly hold him single-handedly responsible for the decline of the comic industry in the mid-1990s that we still haven't fully recovered from. I could write pages and chapters explaining all of this and, every time my friend and I go to a convention, we joke about what I would do if Todd McFarlane was there. Some of those ideas were far worse than what this guy did to Rob. Now I'm reconsidering those imagined actions. Todd might actually deserve it, but it still wouldn't be right, and it would still lower me to a level that I no longer care to go to.

Stan, I guess what this shows is that Usagi fans aren't necessarily a nicer breed. Your work and personality just give us every possible reason to revere you.

Incidentally, I do find it ironic that Harlan Ellison would write an essay about how harsh fans can be. Wasn't he the guy who devastated Michael Fleisher and essentially ended his career with a single comment?

When I was watching coverage of SDCC, I was a little bit dismayed that people like Stan Sakai and Sergio Aragones only seemed to be getting a small fraction of the attention that much less deserving stuff was getting. Then I thought about it a little more and realized maybe that's for the best. I think that Sergio really got it right in his intro to Book 7 when he compared UY to a small, high-quality independent film in a sea of overblown Hollywood blockbusters.

I'd like to think that the reason that UY fans tend to be nicer is simply that UY is a comic that attracts a higher class of fans. Part of it may also be that it's simply a very different fandom than the type of fandom that Harlan Ellison wrote about in that essay and also because UY doesn't have the level of hype surrounding it that other stuff has.

I don't get out to very many cons, so getting to meet any comics creator, whether it's one I'm a particular fan of or not, is a bit of a novelty for me. Whether their work is very good or not, I think that hassling them because you don't like their work doesn't show a lot of class.

A transcript of Liefeld's response (via Twitter) to this whole incident was posted within this thread on John Byrne's forum...

http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/foru ... PN=1&TPN=2

Whole thing appears to be just a big shrug to him...

Comic Creator's Hell is Comic Fans....

You will never find a more wicked hive of scum and villainy than at a Con.

Ugghh...fans...sometimes you wish they would just go away.

Yeah, Liefeld is an over-rated talent in comics. If I even go so far as to call him a "talent"? Liefeld has been drawing the same stuff for years. He is no Stan Sakai, we all know he is a master of the arts in this joint!

Gosh, If you could only realize how many times I had referred to Image as a bunch of drunken egotistical assholes. It would have been one too many. Ha ha!

I am still debating in my head whether California or Comic-Con are real places or not? I just think the world sort of tapers off around Colorado.