US – For those who haven’t been following the latest front of the ongoing culture wars, Comicsgate is, well, exactly what it sounds like: Gamergate but comics. In 2014, the Washington Post described Gamergate as “a proxy war for a greater cultural battle over who belongs to the mainstream”, and that description, four years later, remains perfectly adequate to describe its comics iteration.

Many will tell you that the movement began with the 2017 rise of Richard C Meyer, a Twitter user who amassed a platform largely based on denouncement, derision and disrespect of marginalised industry professionals, as well as their advocates typically by co-opting marginalised rhetoric to reposition himself and others like him as victims.

“The issue with trans,” Meyer said in April to the Daily Beast, “is that I believe there’s people who have basically weaponised their status and they’ve been put to this gatekeeper position because they’re unassailable because of their trans status.” Of course, months earlier, Meyer and his thousands of followers had made it their mission to virulently misgender and personally insult trans creators and critics on the grounds of their being trans. It’s a boring but familiar tactic, one that draws a through-line from the relatively small western comics industry to the national and international stage.(The Guardian)…[+]