Hello and welcome to another Previously on Comics! Kate here, catching up with the rest of you on everything that’s been going on this week. I had movers come on Sunday and had to skip Rose City Comic Con and it feels like this past week was just a blur.
Happy SPX to everyone who celebrates!! Both Kat and Kayleigh were onsite doing some awesome social media coverage, so take a gander over on Insta for some FOMO and nostalgia. A post with all the Ignatz winners and links to our coverage of winners and nominees for the past year is forthcoming.
On a more serious note, earlier this week there was more drama involving Webtoon, this time concerning wages and specifically the difference in pay for the Latin America creators vs. US creators. The whistleblower Twitter account WebtoonExposed was deleted, but these screenshots of the pay disparity have been shared widely.
So, the "WebtoonExposed" account got deleted. Might have been because of a breach of a NDA (not so sure about that). In the meantime, the most relevant screenshots: pic.twitter.com/ea5zBpO6eD
— Mario A. González @SPX Table W46 (@ErgoComix) September 14, 2022
The story is drawing more attention to the fact that many US-based comic companies (including Marvel) have been doing the same scam. They hire artists from Spain, Latin America, or Indonesia and pay them considerably less than their North American or UK colleagues. I hope that this issue of exploitation keeps getting talked about. Justifying paying people less because “what’s a living wage” is different in another country is so early aughts outsourcing capitalist bullshit. And in the age of the remote worker it’s even worse. It gets me genuinely angry in the same way that the tipped employee minimum wage still makes me angry ever since I learned about it. Corporations do not love you, no matter how much you love their IP, and it sickens me that they exploit their fans in this way.
And speaking of IP that is beloved, yesterday was Batman Day. While I’m always going to be more of a Supes gal, I have an incredible fondness for the Adam West Batman TV show from the 60s, which I watched in reruns with my dad when I was very little. No other Batman can compare—and no Joker, Catwoman, Riddler, or Penguin, for that matter. In that spirit, I share this tweet that made me question everything I thought I knew about that era of television:
Never forget that Adam West & Frank Gorshin were once thrown out of an orgy because they wouldn’t break character #BatmanDay pic.twitter.com/sHs5KFXwGQ
— Taffeta V. (@TaffetaV) September 18, 2022
