May 27, 2015
All Best Wishes To Sam Hiti, Whatever’s Going On With Sam Hiti
If you missed yesterday's comics-culture Internet thing involving the very talented Sam Hiti,
this sympathetic essay provides enough information for you to backtrack, I think. (I can't tell if it's by the artist Paul Pope or the person assisting with the site.) Basically: a shut-down of social media accounts belonging to Hiti
suggested a death, and for a time no one knew if that death was real or if it was a "career death" until Hiti was reached by phone. Some folks had already memorialized him on Twitter and other social media platforms as if he had physically died. It'll be up to Hiti to speak out on the matter. This site and I assume several others are open to him if he wants a platform not of his own creation.
I think this is one of those things where people are fully justified in flashing anger at Hiti. I felt anger, too. People shouldn't do that to other people. The Internet stuff with Hiti flared up just as several folks were processing the very real death of the warm and generous wordless comics scholar David Beronä. I imagine many of Hiti's peers were also friendly with the late Seth Kushner, recently deceased and surely in the thoughts of several folks out there. At the same time, as the essay points out, comics can be
devastatingly difficult. At some point anyone with the experience of trying to find recognition and reward for their own talent within comics will likely sympathize, at least a little bit, with wanting to kill off that whole aspect of their life.
It's okay to have both reactions. It's okay to have one more than other. I think the big story of comics right this moment is how to claw our way to an infrastructure and rewards system that honors the talent out there more than it exploits or ignores it. No culture and no industry can make everyone's dreams come true, but perhaps they can minimize casualties.
posted 12:55 am PST |
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