Resilience, by David Rhoades – Making Marks | @MDWorld

April 9, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

Meaningful creation of any kind is a long-term ordeal. Writing a novel, creating a comics series, filming a movie, or designing a fresco are not the sort of thing that an artist can do well and quickly. I’m not gonna pop out a book in an afternoon. Unless you’re lucky, talented, or both, doing good work requires time. We all know this. We weren’t born recently. When it comes to working in the industry that surrounds your craft, however, there’s another level to the ordeal.

For comics (and many other media industries), that ordeal includes a cultural battle between where comics have been and where comics are going.

This cultural battle is exhausting. The nature of the Internet (particularly Twitter) means that the tool of cultural change and battle is also the tool for cultural exchange and peace. It’s perfectly normal for an artist to engage in debate (not always civil) with detractors on one day and then chat with friends the next. The problem is that the debate can continue raging long after the creator has exhausted the energy for it.

In particular, I’m thinking about Kate Leth (@kateleth), who has recently been expressing her frustration with the industry whose fans (and even its leaders) have discouraged her or harassed her. She’s an incredibly resilient creator (I’m learning that you have to be), but every person has his or her limits. Her frustration is understandable. Creators often come into this industry with the resilience required to create. That’s normal. In that battle, creators fight their internal doubts, their bad habits, and their creative endurance. What creators have not been prepared for is the resilience required to simply exist.

I don’t believe the comics industry is just in the middle of a passing fad. I believe its in the middle of a revolution, where a socially conscious generation is coming of age in a medium where they’ve been encouraged to create stories about themselves for themselves. Gender equality, racial diversity, or combinations of the two are at an all-time high in the medium, from the minicomic with a print run of 250 to the mainstream superhero books that are coming out.

However, the backfire to this is that the audience that was once originally catered to exclusively is finding that there is much more material that isn’t written with them in mind, and they are reacting to this change with unprecedented hostility. And it’s not like the Old Fanboy has anything less to enjoy — the biggest superhero movies in the world feature essentially the 1960s version of the status quo. There’s just an amazing amount of hate for the fact that other options exist now. And it’s exhausting comics creators who just want to tell stories about their experiences.

I stand with those creators. Any medium has an endless amount of space for storytellers to talk about all experiences, not just the experiences of a select few. I believe, like we are seeing with the GOP in combating homosexual equality, that eventually these voices of backlash will be drowned out in the flood of myriad and diverse stories that will be coming in the next few years. I believe that the medium is changing for the better, and it’s due to the efforts and resilience of people like Kate Leth.