Hello

Merry Christmas 2020!

Yah im still around kinda. I think its my first mlp art in 10 months or something…anyway enjoy!

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Many of the women promoting the “cancellation” of men in comics, and demanding they post the recent empty promise known as #ComicsPledge, are in fact hypocrites.  In this article, I’m going to present evidence of lies, collusion, rumor spreading, and, in my opinion, defamation and contract interference.

I personally know that they’ve colluded for YEARS to take down men. Specifically those with conservative politics and philosophies. This is an ongoing, coordinated effort. How do I know this?

Because I obtained access to their PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP.

This is Part 1 of the #Hypocralypse leaks

There is simply too much to put in one leak, so I will make the following three points for now.

1. The so-called Comic Book Whisper Network, which has been dismissed as conspiracy since 2016, is real, and I have hundreds of screenshots to prove it.

2. The Whisper Network has been targeting men and trying to destroy their careers, and use their connections in the comic book media to do so.

 3. Whisper Network members have acted unprofessionally and unethically at best. At worst, they have engaged in what I believe could be illegal behavior.

MY STORY

I first heard about the Whisper Network back in mid-2016 from folks I knew at Image, DC, Marvel, and later, Valiant.  Depending on who I chatted with, sometimes the group was called ‘The Women’s Network’, other times ‘The Whisper Network’, occasionally ‘The Whisper Campaign’, and eventually there were more conspiratorial names used mockingly (a friend called them a gender-swapped 4Chan, which became ‘FemChan’ to some insiders).

Regardless of the name, it was all the same group.

The same five or six names kept popping up in conversation over and again. As time ticked on, I noticed a trend on Social Media: half a decade of rumors, false allegations, cancellation attempts , and they almost always traced back to these same five or six people.  The goal of this Whisper Network, according to industry folks, was simple: choose a target, smear them until they lose their reputation, their income, and are ultimately blacklisted – opening up job opportunities for the same people who started these smear campaigns in the first place.

 Behind the scenes these “cancellations” are painted as morally or politically motivated, but in the end it’s all financial. As time passed, the group in question seemed more and more like a reality. I saw their influence. I saw things I knew to be verifiably untrue go viral online, appearing in what I thought were legit news sources. I felt angry and helpless seeing innocent people getting attacked, but did not know what to do. 

A few years passed and by 2018 almost everyone I interacted with in the industry seemed to know about the Network, from top level editors right down to the letterers. It was an open secret, but no one was willing to speak up for fear of being targeted themselves. They knew the consequences.

And after all, this was a secret network. Without proof, there was no point in going public because members would just deny its existence, and use their media connections to smear anyone who challenged them.

 THEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING

December 16, 2018, Whisper Network member Gail Simone, who joined the Network 6 years ago (4 years before the following tweet was posted), mocks “doofuses” who speculate that a “whisper campaign” exists.

At this point in late 2018, I was still skeptical of the Whisper Network’s existence. I’d heard many stories of individuals spreading rumors and lies, and plenty of malicious behavior was going on behind closed doors. Though I wasn’t ready to believe it was a coordinated effort, or collusion was involved.  Then, certain people began openly mentioning the Whisper Network and my attitude changed.

 March 26, 2019, Heather Antos, a member herself, did not outright mention the Whisper Network or her involvement, but she made what some took as a veiled threat to those who got on her bad side.

 Heather “milkshake girl” Antos’ colorful backstory at Marvel, and later at Valiant, is notorious in the comic industry. A conversation about office rumor-spreading and bullying is never complete without someone bringing up a juicy Antos anecdote. Everyone has one.

Up until then, I still hadn’t seen ACTUAL PROOF of a larger scheme. But then, something changed in 2020.

January 8, 2020, Alex de Campi, who I would discover is one of the most active Whisper Network members, openly admits there is a Network. I have no idea if this was a slip or a brazen attempt to show off her power and influence, but this appeared.

Eventually, everything I had heard and read was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt after I gained access to their private Facebook group.

I WAS INSIDE THE WHISPER NETWORK!

This is the place where the Whispher Network has been colluding for years. And although their activity is not confined to just this site, from what I can tell, this was where they first met, and started their coordinated campaigns.

Members of the Secret Group called “Comic Book Women”

At present time, there are 440+ members of the secret Facebook group, called COMIC BOOK WOMEN. From what I can tell, a few are regular users, though many of them have never posted.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/comicbookwomen/ 

*unless you are a member, this will not show up in a search

Secret Facebook groups offer the same level of privacy as closed groups, but operate under a cloak of invisibility. No one can search for secret groups or even request to join them. The only way to get in one is to know someone who can invite you. Everything shared in a secret group is visible only to its members.

This secret group includes a list of members whose actions and connections speak for themselves. Members such as:

Zoe Quinn

Gail Simone

Alex de Campi

Heather Antos (aka Heather Marie)

Mags Visaggio (aka Magdalene Francis)

Mairghread Scott

And several key members of the group are women who work in the comics media and can be used to run damage control, including women like Heidi MacDonald of Comics Beat.  They have contacts outside of the secret network as well, with some male allies in both comics and the media.

Just the fact that all of these folks were secretly linked in a private network came as a shock to me, considering their reputations and the accusations that they’ve made. Immediately I began to connect the dots…

They’ve denied for YEARS that they coordinate their actions in private. And yet they always coincidentally appear on Twitter, retweeting and amplifying each other’s accusations, signal boosting one another, and helping them gain traction. And their allies in media – Bleeding Cool and CBR specifically – will turn those same tweets into stories almost instantly & with no fact-checking or verification, sometimes within the hour.

I’m going to start explaining who the key actors are, and, from my perspective, how they coordinate these attacks.

KEY ACTORS

There are too many people to focus on at once, so I will have to break this into several posts, but I will start with one of the clear group leaders IMO.

Alex de Campi is well connected, despite never being part of the Big Two (since, from what I’ve been told management is well aware of her bullying, harassment, rumor-spreading and unethical behavior that goes back years, and depending on who you talk to she’s almost as notorious as Antos or Tess Fowler).  She just wrapped up a graphic novel campaign on Kickstarter with David Bowie’s son, the Hollywood film director Duncan Jones. It grossed over $366K

All the while she makes baseless accusations while demanding transparency from everyone else.

Now, I’ll take you into their private network.

Two years ago, on May 13, 2018, De Campi launched a private campaign to target an independent creator, claiming she was using her connections to have Simon & Schuster cancel their book.

In addition to contacting the publisher, others in the Whisper Network coordinated their efforts to contact media outlets to have the narrative changed, according to the posts in this thread.  Again, in my opinion, this could end up as a defamation or tortious interference case, and has many implications regarding media bias as well.

It is my pleasure to announce that the A New Calamity Fanzine is now available for purchase! This digital zine features twenty pages of ANC-themed art and writing from incredible contributors within the online Zelda community. All proceeds generated by the sale of this zine will go directly to ANC’s author, Faith, to help with expenses!

Thank you once again to all of our amazing contributors for coming together to make this zine a reality!

Would you like to play a game?

Listen the overwhelming majority of you don’t follow my other social media, and thus haven’t really seen me draw anything other than ponies. Here’s my challenge/signal boosting game. Can you guess which submission is mine from the preview by art style alone? If you guess wrong, you have to reblog to signal boost, if you guess right eternal glory shall be yours! …at least according to the score board, I mean I’m super grateful either way and we’ve got one of our best tallying the results, but I’m curious how many of you can make it onto the coveted lower board. Send me an ask with your guess number and let’s see how good your eye for style is…and thank you for the support!

The people who say “you are not doing enough to make women and PoC welcome!” are psychopaths. Their only goal is to hurt people for the crime of being weak enough to hurt. They relentlessly spread lies, they take over the hobby and do everything in their power to drive out the people who once found comfort there. “Progressive” doesn’t mean good. You should have noticed by now that when your hobby or your company or your label is taken over by “progressive voices”, everyone becomes cruel, the culture focuses more and more on performative politics and then everything collapses when one of them is accused of sexually harassing everyone around them for ten years. This keeps happening. No more women and PoC are getting into the hobby beyond these psychopaths, and the constant lies told by these psychopaths are the biggest factor keeping such people out.

Do you not remember “Gaming has a white male terrorism problem”? Do you not remember how many somber-faced people put it out as proof that nerds are evil and sexually threatening and Must Do Better by bowing to the demands of psychopaths? Do you remember how lurid, demonizing, and obviously nonsensically false the stories it contained were? They don’t want to help anyone. They don’t want to make anything welcoming. They want to tell lies and hurt people who don’t have enough social power to stop them.

Politics devouring everything in the world is a bad thing. Once politics devours something, it cannot be used for anything other than waging Culture War and hurting the weak. It won’t be able to provide any joy or solace to anyone, regardless of race, who maybe wanted to go five fucking minutes without a psychopath using their suffering as a prop. But you don’t even have to go that far.

Do you want Muslim gamers to be constantly reminded of how awful terrorism is? No, you would consider that terribly bigoted. Do you want rape survivors to constantly have to be reminded of rape? No, you would consider that insane. Do you want all campaigns to have to focus on the tragedy of millions of murdered babies in abortion clinics? No, because even though there are people who fervently believe this is a tragedy, and an atrocity, you don’t want to hear about it and this is not the place to do so no matter how serious they think it is.

Do you want to have to be lectured about the tragedy of abortion every time you interact with the hobby?

Do you want to have to engage in purity tests about people’s opinions on abortion before you allow them into the hobby, which would be absurd gatekeeping and an enormous hassle?

Or do you want the hobby to not be politicized, for people to be able to interact with it for what it is, and not have issues performatively shoved in their face so that other assholes can make a huge display of how much they care?

Nice to see more argumentation at least. It’s just a shame it’s a lot of nonsense.

Now, “Gaming has a white, male terrorism problem” is a loaded statement. On one hand, you try to pass it of under the “Gaming makes people into terrorists”-Statement, which I agree, is nonsense. On the other, it tries to rope in the actual problems of often white, male Gamers, who are extremely toxic and defensive against anyone outside of their group. Gamergate happened, and it was a movement by male whiners, who attacked women in gaming spaces. And it was (and still is, at times), very ugly. The call for diversification in media is also a valid one, as not being represented is just another way people are being treated as not welcomed. I’ve seen enough POC, women and others being ecstatic about seeing someone like them in the pop-culture, and how big an impact this makes is easily recognizable by the “Uhura-Effect” (as in: How many Women of Color in that Generation state, seeing Uhura on television blew their mind and set them on their creative paths).

The thing is: It’s politics either way. Not doing diversification, not addressing problematic people, and the like, IS taking a side. You can’t have “no” politics in something, at best you can drive around an issue and avoid it, thereby only having “little” politics in it.

And if the “politics”, that gets included is just, to please respect and tolerate people of all colors, genders and sexualities, so including everyone, except those who don’t behave, there really is little to say against it, without looking like a complete asshole.

The framework you have bought into as the thing you must follow to be moral, is a framework that was invented by psychopaths for the sole purpose of abusing you.

Not screaming about BLM is just as political as screaming about it? You are repeating the words of psychopaths, and I can show you easily.

In this moral framework, not screaming about abortion is just as political as screaming about it, so since it’s such a moral issue, games must also scream about that.

But maybe you’re okay with it because you bought into the glib lie that your position is obviously right and you can just assume everyone has to agree. So how about this?

You know what’s fucked up and oppressive and wracked with bigotry? The Israel/Palestine situation. Not screaming about Israel and Palestine is just as political as screaming about it, right, so you have to scream about it and shove your Correct Opinions in people’s faces. Yet, despite the fact it is a serious moral issue, there is no SJ-Approved Correct Opinion on it! So you have to scream about the issue, and gatekeep people for not agreeing with you, but you aren’t allowed to know what the smugly correct opinion is. But you can’t not bring it up! That’s just as political, and it’s bigoted and cowardly!

Follow the logic to its conclusion and you don’t get to game. You are only allowed to scream politics, to endlessly subject each other to finer- and finer-grained purity tests. Because your life and time are not morally permitted to be for your use. Your life is conscripted into their Culture War, you have no right to it yourself.

I’ve been in a forum where I said, “Hey, I’ve struggled with mental illness and even thoughts of suicide since I was young, and the way you keep making jokes about how male tears are great and nobody cares about some bland white guy’s problems makes me feel really uncomfortable.”

And the response I got wasn’t, “Oh, hey, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, but I get why that would, I’ll try to back off.”

It was, across the board, “This is typical of how narcissistic people try to make everything about themselves! I’m obviously not talking about mentally ill people, and everybody acting in good faith knows I wasn’t, and you need to stop being so sensitive and looking for excuses to be offended at harmless jokes. And hey, if you can’t take a harmless joke maybe you don’t belong here.”

It was like they were literally reading from the “How not to respond when called out on your privilege” posts that they were always posting.

Or the umpteen First Person Shooters set during World War II? 

Or that the BioShock series is inspired by Objectivism? 

And the second game is inspired by Collectivism. And Infinite by both religious/nationalist extremism and far-left anarchism.

Good job. By attempting to show someone ignored nuance, you ignored nuance. And supported Morlock’s point. 

And ignored basically everything Brazen said to strawman it to “politics bad”.

There’s a big difference between creators choosing to put Politics™ in their game, having a game that’s related in some way to politics, and outsiders trying to force it on them as some kind of moral imperative.

Also, North was in the game as a military consultant, not necessarily a political one.