Jennifer de Guzman has a pretty good piece up at ComicsAlliance titled
The House That Silence Built: Harassment in the Comics Industry. It mostly deals with a post by Janelle Asselin at Graphic Policy back in October, titled
Enough is Enough: Dark Horse’s Scott Allie’s Assaulting Behavior, which was precipitated by X-Files writer Joe Harris's report that Allie had drunkenly groped him and bitten his ear at a bar after a convention. This was not an isolated incident; multiple anonymous sources told Asselin that Allie is well-known for this type of behavior.
de Guzman's article also links to a 2013 post called
Comics Guys, Harassment, and Missing Stairs by Jay Rachel Edidin, which itself links back to a post called
The Missing Stair by somebody using the name Cliff Pervocracy (and, as you might expect from a post by a guy named Cliff Pervocracy, that last link may be NSFW, more due to its URL and tagline than any content in the post itself).
Cliff Pervocracy wrote:Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? "Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there's a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it's okay because we all just remember to jump over it."
Some people are like that missing stair.
I think de Guzman's post is good; it points out an institutional problem and strongly advocates that harassers not only be exposed but fired.
My biggest problem is that, in the entire post, the only harasser she names is Scott Allie.
Here's the passage where she links to Edidin's post:
Jennifer de Guzman wrote:In a scathing essay written in 2013 in response to cartoonist
Tess Fowler outing a harasser, former Dark Horse editor Jay Rachel Edidin spoke of “
missing stairs.” Those who know where the missing stairs are can step over them. Those who don’t, fall in.
It’s time to let everyone know where the missing stairs are — and to
build new stairs.
Okay, but if that's your stance, why do I have to click on the link (which, incidentally, is broken in de Guzman's article; I fixed it in the quote above) to see that the harasser Tess Fowler outed is Brian Wood?
Here's another passage:
Jennifer de Guzman wrote:Another prominent publisher is attempting to woo young readers, especially young girls, even as it employs an editor who has a history of being accused of sexual harassment.
She doesn't provide any other information on what publisher or editor she's talking about. A trip to the duckmobile turns up a post by
Alex de Campi indicating that the publisher is DC but not naming the editor, and a post at
The Outhousers suggesting that it's Eddie Berganza but, again, not actually saying his name:
Jude Terror wrote:Which senior editor is de Campi talking about, and does his name rhyme with Tony Danza? Well, we can't answer that, because she didn't say, but you can take a look at the credits in a Superman or Wonder Woman book and take your own guess.
I can, unfortunately, understand why industry pros like de Campi, Edidin, d'Orazio, et al are reluctant to name harassers, and why people speaking up like Harris and Fowler is the exception rather than the rule. Criticizing powerful people in your industry has consequences, up to and including needing to find a new industry to work in -- and it paints a target on you that pretty much guarantees you're going to be subjected to
more harassment, from fanboys who don't want to hear criticisms of creators, publishers, or comics they like.
But it's strange to me that, in an article
explicitly about the need to expose harassers, de Guzman would choose to hide Brian Wood's name behind a link and not even name DC, let alone Berganza himself.
The cynical guess would be that CA's editors or corporate parent are worried about losing access or exposing themselves to legal liabilities, but on Wood, at least, that sure doesn't look like the case; CA had no trouble putting
"Brian Wood" and "sexual harassment" in the same headline back in 2013, and in fact the site's coverage of Wood seems to have completely died off after that piece (at least, judging by the
Brian Wood tag). Granted, the site's changed editors several times since then, and had
just recently changed owners when that post was written, so perhaps there are stricter guidelines there now? Hard to say.
Harder still to say in the case of
Bleeding Cool, which referred to the same breast-groping incident in 2012 as de Campi did but, like her, did not name Berganza as the harasser. BC has made it pretty clear over the years that it really doesn't give a fuck about ruffling publishers' feathers, and indeed referred to
Berganza's "indiscretions" in an article just two weeks later.
There's probably a feeling of tawdry gossip around this type of story, too -- "Did you hear what so-and-so did?" And I'm sure there are people who are just interested in that element of the story, who just want to hear about celebrities (for some values of "celebrities") behaving badly.
But that's not what this is about. de Guzman and Comics Alliance are right: serial harassers should not be sheltered, should not be allowed to continue to harass. But if that's their stance, they shouldn't be
part of that sheltering; they should publish those names. If de Guzman believes that these harassers should be fired -- and she says she does, and I'm inclined to think that she's right -- then she should be willing and able to say
who should be fired and why.