White people ruin everything. This is an unassailable fact of life. As a white person, I know that I’m a terrible person - or at the very least, a representative for terrible people. It’s my birthright, handed down to me by shitty ancestors and parental figures who think it’s still okay to call the gummy liquorice candies “nigger babies” because “that’s what we always called them”. It’s my cross to bear because of assholes who are too busy blaming things and people outside of their narrow zone of comfort for all of their problems instead of taking a good long look in the mirror.

As a white straight male, I know that I’m pretty well off. By virtue of being born with the right set of genetics in the right location, I was handed a ticket to whatever kind of life I wanted. There were no doors closed to me, and there still aren’t. For most of my life I breezed through situations, thinking that I understood the plight of any given non-white, non-male because I heard about some bad things that had happened, and I disagreed with them happening. I thought that I was a better person because I made a concentrated effort to treat everyone with a basic level of respect until their actions and choices triggered a basic “friend” or “foe” response . Worst of all, I thought things were okay because… well, bad things weren’t really happening anymore. Not to me. Not around me.

Fucking white people.

Things aren’t okay. Things were never okay. They might be less worse, but they’re definitely far from okay. This is something I only started to realize a little over two years ago after meeting my girlfriend, Danica. When you’re a white male, you exist in this weird protective bubble where nothing bad ever seems to happen. Not really. Sure, you might get the bad end of a day or week or year. You might lose your job, get in a car crash, get dumped or have a loved one die - but those things happen to everyone, in some way shape or form. What you don’t get are those moments where it sucks the be just standing around, being non-white, or non-male. Those moments where simply the fact that you’re out at night and it’s dark can be a danger because you happen to be a woman, or those moments where you’re eyed with suspicion because “what colour are you exactly anyway”. You don’t see it. You don’t experience it.

I know that being a white male means certain things. I know that it gets me through certain doors with barely an effort while others have to hammer and hammer for ages just to get the damn thing to budge. It’s not right, and it won’t be right until the god damn doors swing with ease no matter who is on the other side pushing. That time might be coming, but it isn’t now - and it won’t be happening any time soon, especially if everyone thinks things are okay.

…

…what was I going to talk about? Oh. Oh yeah. Image Expo.

Yesterday, Image held their third Image Expo, a celebration of the company and their independent spirit. At each show, they proudly strut and talk about how fucking strange they are in terms of a media entity - after all, what kind of publisher agrees to print comics for a flat fee with no tangible financial stake in a book’s success or failure? Taken as a business entity, pure and simple, the Image model of doing business is stupid and self destructive. They could be making much more money than they currently do by nabbing a small chunk of a concept ownership in exchange for publication - but then they wouldn’t be Image.

The company was founded as a haven for creators who knew that they deserved better. Why should they exchange ideas for a one time pay cheque and let companies like Marvel and DC grow fat off the dollars that flowed from characters like Wolverine or Batman? In creating a company where they could own their own product - while also providing a means for others to do the very same - they created something different. They made the business equivalent of a unicorn, a creature relatively pure in intent and stature, and exceedingly rare.

As always, the Expo displayed this nature proudly while touting incredible success. After strutting around quite proudly, the proceedings turned over to the creators who set about announcing a bevy of new projects, alongside a few old ones which would have new homes with the company. At the end of this, they all stood on the stage. This is when things took a turn for the worst, because… well, white people.

Each and every creator on stage at the Expo was white. Only two were female. The internet, being a place to easily drop half-thought arguments into the cloud, became a shit storm of opinions, and things got… well, not ugly, but heated. If you stumble through enough twitter accounts from people at or watching the event (along a few creators who were either there or caught in some conversational crossfire), you’ll find the discussion, and I will fully admit: raising the question of why the people up on stage weren’t more diverse is a good thing to do. At the end of the day, yes, there should have been more representation on that stage. The problem comes when people start pointing the finger of blame at Image, telling them that they somehow fucked up the world and everything and everyone in it.

In addition to cries about diversity in terms of race and sex, there were cries that Image was no longer a haven for the new creators, as all of their big gets seemed to be people with well established prior careers within the industry. Some mistaking the gathering of what appeared to be a bunch of work-for-hire writers up on a stage as a sign of big business practices began to lump Image in with Marvel and DC, claiming that they were now big enough to… I don’t know, know better, I guess? As though the size of your business and the company that is kept within it changes your general practices. The simple fact of the matter is this: Image did nothing wrong. They put together a show designed to sell their brand and their books, to celebrate the act of creating for the sake of creating, and not for business. Hell, they announced a deal they made with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips that guarantees the pair five year’s worth of work, should they so choose to use it - which is to say, for the next five years, the pair can come up with any concept they want, marketable or not, and Image will publish it without batting so much as an eyelash. This is not a thing that happens anywhere - but it happens at Image. It happens at Image, because it’s what the company was built on. If you want to write something, if you want to pitch something, and you just so happen to be good, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and they will publish it.

Here’s a bit of text directly from the company’s “Submissions” page on their website:

“The books Image publishes are creator owned/creator generated properties and WE DON’T PAY PAGE RATES. It will be up to you to strike a deal with whomever you end up working with, and we’ll do our best to make it as painless as possible. Image takes a small, flat fee off the books we publish and the rest goes to that comic book’s creative team. How that profit is split up is entirely up to the creators involved.”

This bit of text has been up on Image’s website for as long as I can remember. It clearly outlines what Image does, and how they do it. You come to them with a book. If they think it’s good, they will send you a contract. In that contract, you agree to pay them a certain amount of money, and your book will be published by them. After that? It’s all up to you, really. You have to pound the pavement to make things work. You have to get those pages written, drawn, inked, coloured. You have to proof the final document, you have to send it off to the printer. You, the creator, get all the perks of owning your own creation, at the price of running your own business - which is fair. Image can’t be expected to do any more than publish your book for the flat fee they agreed upon. Why should they do any different? They have no real stake in your success or failure. They are not the business, they are the conduit. You - the would be creator, the would be Image Expo star - you and your work is the business. They aren’t paying you. You aren’t in their employ - they are in your employ. You pay them in order to use their structure and make sure your book comes out, and if your work proves to be popular, you get paid what you are owed through your efforts, and not theirs.

The fact that their stage was littered with dudes and white people isn’t something they are doing. These people aren’t in Image’s employ. The stage composition was nothing more than a symptom of problems within the industry as a whole, and something Image can not take the blame for. They can only take the blame for the people in their employ, and on that count, I would like you to take a moment and take a good look through Image’s masthead. It’s far more diverse than the crowd you saw up on the stage, I can assure you.

Despite appearances, Image isn’t a big company - it’s an organism comprised of many small business, all doing their own thing, pushing a product base as diverse as the businesses that run within it. The goal isn’t getting Image to change - they are honestly doing what they can, and they are attracting some of the biggest names in comics to their doorstep. The goal is to get the industry to change, so that those big creators are just as diverse as the product offered.