It’s a high point in my career as a comic writer, teaming up with an A-List artist like Mike S. Miller, who worked on DC Comics’ famous Injustice storyline. We wanted to make a fun comic in Top Grift #1- The World’s Greatest Parody Comic mocking the controversial Andrew Tate with a fun comic book with a profound message as a warning against online grifters who sell self-help courses. To Kickstarter, that good message meant hate speech, and they are accusing us of “intolerance toward marginalized groups.”
If it sounds like an insane level of censorship, it is. But we’ve teamed up now with a Christian entrepreneur, Luke Stone, who’s made a website called Fund My Comic dedicated to free speech, and launched our new book Top Grift #1 on there instead.
Here’s how it all came to pass.
Top Grift is LIVE on FundMyComic. Get the comic book here and support our culture war fight! https://t.co/Rv1pNd8Ex7 pic.twitter.com/AVr9OjMUbn
— Jon Del Arroz (@jondelarroz) November 16, 2023
It’s hard enough as a conservative in the arts to have to deal with censorship. Major publishers will not even look at your work, so you must do everything possible to get seen in an independent publishing space. Platforms like Kickstarter are critical to building a sustainable business because there is an audience there who has accounts and trust backing on the platform. Those audiences don’t cross to other platforms and often don’t even look at other websites for purchases.
The natural traffic of a Kickstarter accounts for 40% or more of most comic book campaigns, a number that can make or break profitability for a book. Unless you already have your own audience at a critical mass of hundreds of thousands of people, driving traffic to your site or a website people aren’t already comfortable with is impossible. I’ve done tests launching books on my website or on Fund My Comic, where we’ve placed this one, and the backing numbers I usually get drop by 2/3 or more just because of the website difference.
When we created Top Grift, Kickstarter was an integral part of the business plan to make this story successful. The original idea came when we saw Andrew Tate releasing a comic, Top G #1, priced at $117. The absurd price is meant to milk his superfans’ wallets rather than produce a professional-quality comic book. I picked the book up for review and found it was one of the lowest-quality comics I’ve ever seen with art that looks like he made it as cheaply as possible.
Mike S. Miller and I brainstormed how to mock this offering with a story matching our conservative values of self-sufficiency, working hard, and overcoming evil. We decided to craft our work in Top Grift about a young man who desperately wants to impress a girl, is susceptible to an online grifter like Tate, but eventually overcomes the nonsense to become his own man. It’s humorous and poignant, as some of the best satire and parodies traditionally have been.
When we put the book on Kickstarter, we made a cover similar to the Top G, but with Mike S. Miller’s superior art skills, we fixed the anatomy problems that the original had. I immediately received a message saying the campaign was declined, something that’s never happened in my six years of building Kickstarter campaigns, with more than ten graphic novels released on the platform. The message told me, “Cover A goes against our policies. Kickstarter disallows projects or creators that promote discrimination, subjugation, or intolerance towards marginalized groups.”
Miller and I racked our brains as to how our book cover could be promoting hate speech as they tried to say in their corporate gibberish. All we could come up with was the image of our Top Grfiter looked too much like Andrew Tate, who’s been arrested for human trafficking as well as engaged in several shady online practices. We decided to redo the cover to make him look much more sinister in order to make it clear he’s the villain, and I explained to Kickstarter, “This is an Anti-Andrew Tate Parody Book. He put out a self-insert comic called Top G and charged readers $100 for a single comic, so we are doing “Top Grift” to make fun of him and his toxic movement. The entire intention is to mock him, and the book is a story of a young man who falls prey to online scams.”
Kickstarter permanently banned the project in response without further explanation. I also received a message that they declined my appeal, and I wouldn’t be allowed to appeal it again.
I had no idea what was going on and panicked. Why would Kickstarter ban a satirical book mocking someone awful like Tate? In a roundabout way, this almost comes across as their approval of Andrew Tate and his message. Do they not want him criticized?
This banning shows the danger and incompetency of the current corporatocracy of content publishing through Google, Amazon, and Big Tech controlling messaging on everything. They even prevent PJ Media here from receiving certain ad revenues, so becoming a VIP member and supporting the site is vital. Those companies squash search results via their algorithms, making it an uphill battle at best for conservatives to make our art or get our news read.
All we can do is do the best we can to show our art to the world, and I’m thankful for a platform like PJ Media to be able to get the word out. I’m also grateful for Fund My Comic, which allows artists to make our work censorship-free. But we still lose the natural foot traffic of Kickstarter even with the platform, and we need your help to get the word out about our comic, which has a great, positive story, is humorous and witty, and has a message many young men on the internet need to understand.
Please check out our Top Grift #1 comic campaign and share it on your social media, because it’s the only way we’ll get the word out after being censored by Kickstarter. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Also, sign up as a VIP member for PJ Media. This is one of the few news sites that promotes independent conservative culture and fights the good fight. They even gave me a special promo code CENSORSHIP for a 50% discount so you can check out the great exclusive content by some of the best journalists in the business.
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