“I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re happy now. As you grovel in submission, to feed your own ambition,” – Elpheba, from the movie, Wicked

I woke up from a dream this morning, i was at my friend’s E***k’s house with my whole family. It was more like a dorm though, and I arrived with a lego set meant for my son, we were to build later. I handed it to E***k and asked him to safeguard it. Soon, some strangers arrived, and among them was J**g ** *** – someone I once considered a friend, but was one of the folks who joined in a hate campaign meant to destroy my career, my reputation, and any sense of belonging i had to a ‘comics community’.

In the dream i was incensed by his presence, it took everything in me from reaching out and strangling him. Instead, I stood up and asked E***k to come out and speak with me privately. “What is he doing here, this is supposed to be just for family,” His response was ‘Well that’s why I asked you to leave, I knew they were coming…”

Then i woke up. I walked downstairs and spoke to my wife M****y about the dream, and became overwhelmed with emotion. I sobbed. I never got the lego set back, but E***k assured me he would return it or pay the difference. I wasn’t upset with him, in my heart I knew he was free to make his own associations. In my heart I know we should all be free to make our own associations, even if you are a brother to me, i don’t get to say who is a brother or sister to you. But i felt something palpable upon awakening, I said to M****y: “J**g, A*******o, D**, they were like brothers to me – and they treated me like an opportunity,” I went outside to smoke, and put on some music.

“Defying Gravity” from the Wicked soundtrack came on. Ariana Grande asks “Elphie, listen to me, just say you’re sorry, You can still be with the Wizard. What you’ve worked and waited for, You can have all you ever wanted…”

“I know.”

But i don’t want it. I can’t want it anymore.

This is what I felt sitting at San Diego Comic Con. I arrived at 2 pm, had a short meeting with Zoop, and then continued to somewhere I have not returned to in ten years. Like Odysseus returning to Ithaca, I arrived at the Ody-sea Bar at the Hilton next to the convention center. I can tell you that i was overwhelmed with emotion just being in the same spot I drank and made my bones in comics when i was in my twenties. I’m gonna be 40 this year, I can’t believe how I survived these last ten years, but I did. In fact, i thrived – i am happy now. I have the most supporting wife i could have ever wished for, and a beautiful son, that i play Legos with. Having a family is truly the best thing in my life, and it drew into stark contrast how badly i thought i had a family in comics. I stood or sat at the bar for 8 hours straight – i had plans to go elsewhere, but once i was there, i could not leave. I had to know, i had to SEE what they had made of this community – what was left and who was left? It was a ghost town – bunch of pale faces haunted the place.

I refused to engage. I saw old friends who could no longer recognize me, whether that be because they had no business interest in me or they simply never remembered my face at all – it made no difference at all. Then there were those I saw, who i once called friends. D***y D********c walked in with his girlfriend, with the same hungry gaunt look he always had. He was always desperate for approval, and he still looked it. My heart began racing, I wanted to confront him – but for what? What would it accomplish? He was innocent, not that he didn’t do anything wrong, but innocent like a goldfish with a short memory. I could not believe that any moral culpability could reside in these people. I keep hearing it in my head:

“I know what you did last summer,”

I didn’t know Ed Piskor, I didn’t even like him. I didn’t like that a white guy was treated like he knew something about hip hop just by listening to it. I didn’t believe he knew my life, i didn’t believe he knew where those songs came from, the music for me wasn’t just another collection of artist’s names and tracks and albums to be listed off academically by some white guy cosplaying as LL COOL J. But to be real – i didn’t know him, and i didn’t read his comics, so for myself, i knew it was half bullshit. I was envious of his position. As he made his podcast, i wanted to be on it, because i realized i did admire one thing about him – his love for comics. In that, i felt we might be the same. I never got to find out because he was killed last summer. I’ve spent a year feeling this thorn in my heart, I have such anger, I think “They killed him, but no one is ever going to be held responsible. They got a way with it and they think they did something good or they know they did something wrong but will never face it, they will never face justice,” My wife tells me that she believes that there is a plan for all people, to leave justice for him, like a force of nature. I replied, “I’d like to be that force of nature,”

I remember how they reveled in their victimhood. None of them were personally hurt by Ed Piskor and if you asked a week earlier what they thought about him it would’ve been all smiles and brotherhood. I saw how the hottie who owned a gallery wrote her own ‘problematic’ interaction with him, and then as he died, she wrote her own eulogy for him and included the pin-up drawing he made of her. I couldn’t understand how someone i respected could be so coldly two faced – so calculated. But it wasn’t calculated, they didn’t think about this at all. They weren’t allowed to think – that’s what a mob is. Like swarms of locusts they move to and fro and consume what is consumable because in this day, there’s not much to go around for you to be picky. Even if you’re picking the last flesh from the bones of your ‘allies’. When Ed Piskor posted his suicide note – i called him. I had never reached out before, but i called him to tell him “This happened to me too. But don’t give up man, after you get through it, there’s more to do, more comics to make,” But it was too late – who can imagine who listened to those voicemails, some brother or mother or father maybe, or maybe no one at all. Too little, too late. It wasn’t the first time the mob was activated, hungry for blood, but this was the first time they actually got blood to spare. And after they drank of it, they were horrified and scattered like roaches to their corners of the internet.

And that’s the landscape today. Isolated, broken, thousands of communists but none of them can stand a community. Not if it doesn’t assert their mercurial moods and fickle temperaments at every second. As i sat at a table, an old friend, J*****n spotted me and sat to talk. He said something that really stuck with me: “Look around, you notice anything? It’s a whole new crop of white people,” He was right. It was like we were colonized by thirty something tech bros and their HR gals they cheat with. He went on to say: “Remember when ten years ago, all of us, we were really working to make this scene include everyone. We were doing it too. Then they came, and what did they accomplish?”

In comics, there’s legacies all around you. The people who draw Batman, Superman, they add to this mythos with their own myths, their own lives. Jack Kirby created the Thing out of a life that made him hard as rock. Running in gangs, going to war. Real life – real consequences. But now, comics is ground zero for ‘content’. Its an IP farm and the Masters have reasserted control. How did they do it? Useful idiots. I replied to him, “If anyone ever asked what happened, if anyone went looking, they wouldn’t find any answers.” They didn’t make any comics about what they did, they’ll be no fantagraphics comics about fantagraphics taking part in killing Ed Piskor, but there will be a sleek reprint of his books with 10% proceeds dedicated to a suicide hotline. There won’t be any comics by J**g or D***y, because those dudes don’t make comics, they try to, but they can’t get past 10 pages of a wrestling zine. They can’t get past gazing at their own navels and posting the lint on social media that they find.

Ugly men, with ugly comics, with ugly opinions. D***l A** could never find anyone to like his comics, but he could find people to retweet his hateful opinions. He found success in living parasitically off of other’s success, like a cookie cutter fish ripping a chunk out of your flesh before moving on to the next shark. He couldn’t find love from women, and i know this from talking to him at length about his perpetual incel existence, but he could find Hags and hagfish who kept him around for protection. The femme Mafia of comics saw a boy’s club and attributed all their daddy issues upon it. And when they ran out of daddies they turned on anyone who didn’t call them Mommy.

But all these whisper campaigns, rumor mills, and scape goats didn’t make any fucking art. “Lebensraum” or “Living Space” is what the Nazis called it. Now they call it “making a safe space,”. Your safe space has spread like the bleaching of the coral reefs. Sure, it’s safe now, because everything is dead. The loudest voices, the A*** ** ****i’s and R***n V********s, they return to their faux-pulp comics, pulp comics where the aesthetics and history were created by the same boy’s club they now say belongs to them. Go ahead, take it, and give it a new pronoun, but leave the soul behind. Who cares what your genitals are when you have no fucking heart.

I am a dude who came from a violent household, in a violent part of town, in a violent city. I got out, i had to get out, and I now live in a slightly less violent part of town in a less violent city. And it took me 40 years to get to a point in my life where I don’t react violently, where i tell myself to walk away. Even now, it’s not enough. I got kicked out of the most recent convention i went to because i got in a disagreement with a comics creator. Good kid, great talent, but for some reason, when we had a disagreement, he went straight to pulling his phone out so he could record my name, and call the Masta. The result of these purges is that a convention now is simply a concentrated version of the police state outside our homes that the Left has been powerless to stop. There’s no conflict resolution, there’s no “Hey, let’s take a second here.” It’s “CALL 911” and 911 nowadays is just another “Let me talk to your manager,” I didn’t argue with the con organizer, in fact i volunteered to ban myself – i’ve had the conversation before, you’re not in a court of law just a court of opinion and i know what the court is going to decide: Exile. So I spent the rest of my time in Miami hanging flyers up around the city, having genuine connections about my work with people in the street, with the guys at Bar Kaiju. I went into the ocean and sobbed again, I wondered how much of this ocean is made out of the tears of my ancestors? What if all of it? But what can i do? I can’t stop.

Isn’t this what you wanted? The left says don’t be violent, that masculinity is disgusting, an angry man is never ok. And i agreed with them, in part, that is why i make comics. That is why a dude makes hip hop instead of making war. That is why a dude pretends to be a wrestler instead of being real and smacking the disrespect out of mouths. I make art. I make comics because it’s the only way i can get this out of my heart and somewhere safe. For my son, I do this, for my wife, i do this. For y’all, I do it so i don’t fucking destroy you. When i was three years old, i saw my mother walk out of her bedroom in a daze, covered in cigarette butts. My father had thrown an ash tray into her face like it was a baseball. I can’t get that image out of my head, but the fucked up part is, I can’t get the love for my father out of my heart either. So they sit in my body, constantly at war, two completely contradictory feelings. I am thankful everyday that God gave me the inclination, not to fight, but to write, to draw, to remember. Why do we remember? So that someone else can maybe see a little bit ahead of themselves, and save themselves from being consumed by their contradictions. Comics, art, stories – they are supposed to be medicine. What happens when it’s just content?

They tried to take my only form of therapy away from me, so i can pay some doctor to tell me to feel better. They say there’s no cancel culture, but what is left in exile? When you write down what heals you, but they tell you that you can still be a cartoonist, just don’t show anyone. Put it away, hide it, no one wants to hear from a misogynist, no one wants to hear from a sexist, a racist, a whatever the fuck you are accused of by the thought police. Above all, don’t even try to make a living. They don’t got the balls, pun intended, to kill you to your face, so it’s death by a thousand cuts. Each sticks their pseudo-phallus in your wound and gets wet for a second, before letting the next gang take a bang at you. They hide their faces and none can say they delivered the killing blow, and when you’re left spent – having given them your best work and they liked it, they loved it even, they separate the art from the artist and leave you dead. Hyenas.

I thought I’d go for two days at SDCC, but those 8 hours were enough. “I don’t want it, I can’t want it anymore,” What could I want from this, what could they even offer me? Page rates havent increased since Scott McCloud talked about a comics bill of rights. He don’t talk about it no more, cause he’s fed. It’s been 40 years, he talked about reinventing comics, but now when i think about reinventing comics, i realize you can’t start with the medium. You have to reinvent comic artists themselves. I get kicked out of conventions because i can’t be domesticated, i can’t wear the collar and i can’t smile when i don’t want to. I can’t come around all timid like the D***ys and the D****ls and the J**gs, after talking all that shit online. I walk past them at cons, their heads refuse to meet the patrons walking past. Their heads are kept low because they are scared of actually believing what they write about. They love superheroes, they really do, even as they get more and more embarassed to, but they can’t believe in them. They hate what they can’t measure up to. They convince themselves they are happy as Villeins ((in medieval England) a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land.) while pretending they are the next revolutionairies.

But I have hope. I watched the Ody-Sea bar close out. Slowly, all the ‘pros’ melted away, disappearing to their rooms. In the quiet of the lobby, I charged my phone before exiting into the cool San Diego air. As i passed by the convention hall, I saw the con goers sleeping at the steps to the temple. During the day, they would wait in the hot heat just to take a picture with a Lilo and Stitch display you can find at any movie cinema any day of the week. I mourned, for i know, just as i have to make this art to heal me, they still desire true art to heal them. That’s what makes you do the Hajj to our Capitalist Meccas, what else could inspire such fanaticism except a religious devotion? But the people are getting hungry, and the cosplayers sleep on the same streets as the homeless besides them. This isn’t right, there is something wrong going on, a deep hole where the spirit used to lie, now replaced with an algorithimic machine that feeds on hatred and anger and trades in postcards of modern lynchings for you to feel guilt over and peacock your purer still morality. Nevertheless, many endure, the ‘true believers’.

But now we make our work for a select few, behind the walls of monasteries we call Patreon pages and private discord chats. We hermits endure because we can’t stop believing, we carry this little flickering flame and tend to it, and pass it candle by candle to those coming after, those who go out of their way to find us. Over and over i’ve had conversations with the canceled, and the friends of the canceled who refused to cut ties and were themselves cut off. I’ve told them to never give up, i’ve made compatriots with men who i previously called out myself, when i was the first to call people by names for perceived crimes against me. I’ve apologized to some, knowing i had my hand in it as well. I know i helped draft the blueprint of many future cancelings, and many of the folks i thought were friends, like Maxwell Demon (i never learned his real name), who helped me establish the anonymous Fairpagerates.com website, were all too happy to throw me on the pyre as soon as we finished building it, destroying my anonyminity, revealing my name, to score some points. Was it worth it? Is anyone ever going to trust a Demon like him? But more importantly, is he ever going to make anything worth saving for future generations? No. None of them will. None of them have. None of them can.

Now, the surface has been scoured. Machines crawl upon it, seeking any new bits of IP to swallow up and feed to their protected domed cities. To survive, we’ve had to separate, dig into the ground, and plant ourselves.

But i don’t despair. I’m making the best work of my career right now. They tried to bury us, but i was never an alien to this earth, i belong to the ground. They’re the invasive species. Like a seed, i am growing, and as a true believer, i know the direction of the sun, even if they try to build a factory on my head and black out the sky.

I will never die. I will never take part in your collective ritual suicide. I won’t join their comix cult or offer any more human sacrifices. I can disagree with my fellow creators, i can choose to not buy their works (i already don’t read very many comics), but I won’t take part in your cowardly witch trials and whisper campaigns. I’m a fucking artist, I will write down what you did, i will transform it into something necessary – and i won’t forget it.

I know what you did last summer.

This is the new comics underground.

Dedicated to Ed Piskor.