>Be the Bigger Man

brevoortformspring:
Tom – I’ve come to really enjoy your FormSpring – a lot. It’s rare that someone in your position with as much knowledge of the product they work for interacts with their fans in the entertainment field. You guys literally sell out conventions that have 150K+ attendees. So when someone like me who loves your product and can interact with the most senior editor (I’m sorry I forget your official title), it’s a great feeling. When you answer a question from me, I feel like I’m no longer an ant amongst giants. I love that you enjoy doing this and taking the opportunity out of your personal life to interact with your fans. And I can’t be the only one who feels this way.
Lately though, I feel like you’ve been ignoring some potentially great questions to interact with bullish dummies who are crying because they can’t get their way. They cry that Marvel is racist for not including enough white people, or that Islam is the devil’s book or whatever. Do they deserve the same right to get their questions answered by you? Possibly, but for every petty political argument these idiots start up, as someone who has had questions answered from you, I feel like they’re taking precious time away from your queue and robbing your more rational fans of achieving that feeling of standing on the shoulders of giants like I do whenever you respond to something me, a nobody, sends to Tom Brevoort, the man at Marvel.
I had a question lingering around that I thought was very thought-provoking and would have loved your response, and I’m sure many others do as well. But my general feeling about most things in life is that if I feel a certain way, I’m not one-out-of-everyone. I’m sure there are other fans here who are disappointed because they feel that their chance to have relevant questions or comments answered are being short-changed by these petty arguments over there not being enough white heroes, and why are there so many women heroes now, or whatever nonsense that floods your inbox.
I ask for your fandom at large, not just Marvel fans, but fans of the Tom Brevoort who is generous enough to spend his free time interacting with his fans, to toss the trash away and don’t engage all these anonymous posters claiming they have some kind of right that they’re entitled to. Of course, by asking this I may be doing the same thing to you, since this is your Tumblr and all, but I think the majority of us who frequent this page daily to see what kind of questions are being asked and what kind of answers are being posted would much rather you focus the energy you put into this forum to relevant inquiries, instead of people trying to provoke some kind of nasty response from you.
So that’s why I’m asking you to be the bigger man, ignore these intruding nobodies trying to rile your feathers, and give people with legitimate inquiries feel like they have a voice again.
Thank you,
-IReallyNeedToSignUp (real name: Eric from NYC) >
Eric,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. There are a couple of points that I’d like to respond to here.
The first is that, as I’ve mentioned before, I get far more questions, far more good questions even, than I could ever answer. At the moment, the counter tells me that there are 20,476 questions queued up here, which is way up from the last time I mentioned this. Point being that there are any number of reasons why I might not answer a specific question. It might deal with a subject that would spoil upcoming stories. It might deal with an issue that is legally or contractually sensitive and that i cannot disclose information about. It might simply come in on a day when a lot of other questions come in–I don’t get to answer stuff every day, and so it’s possible for questions to end up swamped over by other more recent questions, since I typically start with the most recent stuff.
The other reason, though, and this is a failing of this format, is that answering complex or thoughtful questions takes work. Typically, when I’m answering questions, I’m either in the middle of my morning start-up routine, or I have a few minutes somewhere where I’m stuck waiting or some such, and I open up the page and knock a few out. What this means is that, by design, the questions that are easier to answer inevitably get preferential treatment, because they’re just quicker and simpler to deal with than a question that merits a more complete answer, such as this one.
There’s also just the question of what amuses me.
I’d like to be able to give you more thoughtful answers to more in-depth questions, but I’m afraid this isn’t the best format for that typically. I’ll try to do better, but realistically I’m only going to be able to do so much. The kind of focus that answering a real question entails is better spent working on the stories themselves, which is where the greatest good can be done.
FWIW, I think that repeatedly, brusquely, and adamantly answering the overtly racist and sexist questions you get is doing everyone a service. It creates a constant stream of a singular message: that you are against these ideas, that you are pro-diversity and pro-representation, and that even if you might not always get everything right, your efforts are definitively and soundly on one side of this debate. It tells these people that at least one of the people making the comics we love strongly believes that comics are supposed to be for everyone and wants to try to do better, and it tells people like me that when we think you’ve taken a misstep, you’ll at very least consider our opinion– particularly when you’ve made a point of publicly apologizing, recanting, clarifying, asking follow-up questions, and reblogging criticisms of your own words when people suggest you may have done something wrong or misspoken on a subject. As a reader who doesn’t always agree with your responses but sees you genuinely interested in working with readers like me and against readers who oppose these kinds of changes in popular media, I appreciate that a lot.
And you’re right. The stories are where the most good can be done, which is why they provoke these reactions in the first place.

(via teaberryblue)

3 February 2016
39