Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at the Daily Dot blasted out a headline reading, “Indie comic ‘Jawbreakers’ canceled due to Comicsgate link.” Right off the bat, this is a blatant deception by The Daily Dot editorial team. Diversity & Comics, Jon Malin, and Brett R. Smith’s Jawbreakers – Lost Souls graphic novel was not cancelled. It was merely dropped by publisher Antarctic Press mere days after they announced they were going to publish the book.

While the headline glaringly deceives readers, Baker-Whitelaw’s write-up doubles down on the headline in the first sentence, “Crowdfunded indie comic Jawbreakers just lost its publishing deal, canceled due to its creator’s history of online harassment.” Once again the term “canceled” is used. To state it again. Jawbreakers – Lost Souls is not canceled. Shockingly, Baker-Whitelaw even links to the IndieGoGo where the book is still raising funds and currently sits over $270 thousand.

To make it worse, Baker-Whitelaw knows exactly what she is doing because later on in the article she writes, “Jawbreakers is, in fact, pretty successful already. The comic raised over $250,000 on Indiegogo; the kind of money one usually sees for popular webcomics like Penny Arcade or Check, Please! that have pre-existing fans.” This little bit is under the header, “The rise and fall of Jawbreakers.” It hasn’t fallen and continues to bring in more money on IndieGoGo.

Does this make any sense to you? It doesn’t to me. How can you say a book is canceled and then turn around and say, “Jawbreakers is, in fact, pretty successful already.”

But wait here’s the real kicker. Baker-Whitelaw writes, “Jawbreakers isn’t really “canceled.” The book will still go out to its 6,800-odd Indiegogo backers, and its creators already announced they’re launching a new publisher called Splatto Comics.”

That’s right. After repeatedly saying the book was canceled earlier in the article, Baker-Whitelaw calls herself out on her own deception by saying the book “isn’t really ‘canceled.'” I don’t think it gets more dishonest than this.

But she wasn’t done, she actually then says, “Getting dropped by Antarctic Press may wind up being a net gain for Jawbreakers.”

The amount of deception in this article is astounding. She claims the book is canceled and then ends up actually saying getting dropped by Antarctic Press will end up being a “net gain.”

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw doesn’t just deceive her audience by claiming the book is canceled; she also assumes who the book is targeted at. She writes, “It’s aimed at people who think “traditional” male heroes are a dying breed, and that superhero comics are losing sales due to women and diversity.” Her source for this assumption? Her own article she wrote last year which quotes Marvel’s VP of Sales David Gabriel who said:

“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.”

If people didn’t want diverse female characters, they probably wouldn’t be funding Diversity & Comics’ Jawbreakers – Lost Souls. A cursory glance at the IndieGoGo page shows the Jawbreakers team features diverse characters.

Here’s some of the artwork by Jon Malin and Brett R. Smith:

Looks like a pretty diverse team to me!

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