Producers’ Pick | Eric July: Comic Book Industry Goes “Woke”

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This is the Brian Kilmeade Show. This guy, Flash Thompson, he probably deserved what happened, but just because you can beat him up doesn't give you the right to. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. That is from the 2002 movie Spider-Man, a famous line in Spider-Man lore. It's a part, I think the hottest thing in movies right now with the Marvel comics and they come to life from Spider-Man the Batman to Captain America on down, but there's something happened. They're going way woke and it got to the point where a guy like Eric July, one of the most successful comic writers in the country, said I'm done with it.

I'm doing my own thing and that's exactly what has happened. Eric July joins us right now. Eric, welcome back. Hey, how you doing brother? I appreciate you having me.

Hey, no problem. I should say welcome back because I had you on TV yesterday and I'm just really struck by what got you to the point where you said to yourself, I'm going to go do my own thing and form the Ripperverse Comics. What brought you to the point to leave an established career to go try it on your own? Well, for me it was like, you know, I'd obviously been in a commentary space with comics for for a while now and you know, I talked about and complained publicly, you know, YouTube, everything about the direction that these companies were going and for me it was like, you know, what I got to be a part of the the solution. I feel like my calling is to be a creator. Yes, the commentary be a political or in the comic book space was, you know, that's a skill set. However, when it comes to the music and all the other stuff that I've done in the creative sense, that's where my call what I believe God put me on this or to certainly do so I wanted to shift away from just simply complaining about it.

Not to say I won't point it out if something is, you know, bad or whatever, but I need to be a part of the solution. So something that I thought wasn't going to be able to happen until I, you know, was well into my 40s and had all this, you know, money stored up and all that had a lot of success over the last few years and it just accelerated everything. So as they kept screwing up, I was putting I mean the demand obviously kept growing and it just felt like the right time to do it. So it's not something that was necessarily done, you know, to spite these weirdos. It was more this is the great time to do it. And obviously I've been reassured considering that the the campaign is at three million dollars. So yeah, tell me about it.

Isom number one. First off, before we talk about your new thing, what brought you to this point? Because the comic book industry, like so many others, have gone woke and we've noticed that almost they're embarrassed to be American and we've seen it over and over again. Here's an example of Superman.

This is the first one 1978 Christopher Reeve and it changes to you'll see what it is now. Cut 30. Why are you here? There must be a reason for you to be here. Yes, I'm here to fight for truth and justice in the American way.

Politics, does he still stand for truth? Justice. All that stuff.

All that stuff. You started noticing people awake, breaking away from tradition and going woke. Yeah, like within, you know, that's obviously what Gabe El-Tayeb, who of course is the colorist for issue number one. And, you know, that's that's what did it for him. You know, they even, you know, it was nothing wrong, let's say, with Superman being understood as sort of this American hero, not sort of.

That's what he was. Nobody that was from another country had any problem certainly with that. But that was more kind of signifying the changes that were happening kind of culturally within the or subculturally within comics and that there were a lot of spiteful individuals that were starting to become creatives in this space. They didn't like the place that they were at.

They didn't like people, be it various race or whatever, if they had certain ideas. And they were writing those comics to depict their social political views. And this is why it comes off the way that it does right now. And that it's so obnoxious and it's so bad and creative stuff is really gone out the window. It's more about beating the audience over the head with your specific politics.

And that's why I was like, look, man, I don't want to do that. I just want to give people some good, some good story. Yeah, there are those universal truths that I want to certainly acknowledge what is right, what is wrong, what is good, bad, what is just and all those sorts of concepts. But, you know, what we're trying to do here, first and foremost, is give the audience what it is that they want with a good story.

And that point has been completely lost seemingly on the mainstream industry. So tell me about ISOM number one. Well, ISOM is, of course, the first book through Riververse Publishing. We had a, oh man, it was a task to not only just have it be this character's book, but also this is launching the entire universe here for us as we're telling these stories. 96 page comic book, right? 96 pages. I need, I couldn't keep it like 20 pages like what a lot of the books are now with five pages of ads.

I just had to do it my way in the way that it is. And 96 pages was what kind of came out of that. And it's about ISOM. It's this character by the name of Avery Seelman. He used to be a hero of sorts, and then he kind of stopped due to this event. And this story picks up where him, Avery Seelman, gets a call from his sister trying to find the whereabouts of this character, of this other character, who was a family friend. And because of that, he has to go into the city that he no longer lives in.

He lives outside of it to kind of talk to his old friend to figure out what's going on and where the whereabouts of this old family friends they had. So that's kind of where this story pops off. And it, again, it's not just about launching ISOM, the character itself.

This is an entire universe. So there's plenty of different characters that people are going to be introduced to. And I think we had a great balance of giving people that familiarity, definitely if you're into comics, but also giving them some sort of form of uniqueness and freshness about it. Eric, you know, one of the great exports of America is our entertainment. So people got to know what America was, not only the wars we fight, but what we produced. We became this idea, this land of the free, the home of the brave, the chance where there is an opportunity, the Statue of Liberty. And part of it was comic books, the industry you're in, the movies that we put out, the theme parks that we produce. And that was one of the great things about America, just free enterprise, go do it, people will come.

And I just heartened, by the way, that you're fighting to keep that going. Where you don't want to, you don't want to get propagandized, but you kind of like that you're an American. You understand that we hit the lotta when we were born here.

Yeah. Like, you know, I value as obviously as an anarcho-capitalist and libertarian, I value liberty, like first and foremost, it's not a secret. Like, this is something that I proudly wear on my sleeve. And I absolutely understand and acknowledge that being in this geographical area of being born here, I have a lot more advantages than let's say if I was born elsewhere. And I'm not oblivious certainly to that. And you bring up a great point with America being, it used to be like a net export in terms of what was considered the good entertainment. We set the scene, comics are our industry, for example, we set the scene for what the entire world would understand to be a comic book.

Well, now in comics, for those that don't know, it's not like that anymore. The imports are what's dominating the American market right now. Japanese comics, also known as mangas, they're destroying America in there, not just in Japan, they're destroying them in America, in North America. So instead of having the self-awareness, the creatives would say, oh, well, we're getting our tails kicked right now by the Japanese in our own industry, in our own country, they still put out this sort of nonsense. And, you know, I make this joke about all the time about, okay, I'm trying to make American comics like competitive again in this, uh, so that they start yet again, wanting our entertainment as opposed to us having to import it. And really, it's not that the Japanese, for example, are doing anything new. They're doing the same thing they've been doing for decades. It's just that because the American comics have gotten so bad, just by sheer default, something exists that is, uh, that is just simply not beating their audience over the head with this random, uh, social, political nonsense.

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Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcast.com. And also, would you say comics have been race and gender sapping characters where we could just read and not think black, white, Hispanic, um, or any type of pronoun selecting culture? Oh, for sure, man. We've moved in this odd direction where that's the obsession now.

You know what I mean? It's not to say that you can't have a character be black, obviously, uh, with our character, you can't have, you can have care to be a woman or whatever. The problem is, is that nowadays it's the hyper emphasis of it. And because they think the creatives over there think that they are, everybody else is as shallow as them. They feel like, well, I have to have this black character beat everybody over the, uh, the head with the fact that he is black. And then that is going to represent the black population as if we're all kind of just monolithic and have the same exact upbringing, same value system and, uh, and all of that, which is just simply not the case. But again, they think everybody are, is as shallow as them. You know, I say this all the time, like this idea that the only way that I could, let's say relate to a character is if they're black is nonsensical, but it's also insulting. You can have a black character be embraced by white people or a white character be embraced by black people. If you're not shallow, that takes decent writing that takes this idea to be able to resonate with other individuals.

And I don't think these people not only not, they don't have the experience to do that, but they're just so obsessed with identity that that gets in a way of any kind of story that they could tell that's even halfway decent. Eric July is here, founder of the river verse comics and you can go and now they're not out yet, right? How many more days till they're out? So we are going into September, it's a pre-order campaign. So going into September, you guys will start receiving shipments. We have, ironically enough, yeah, I wasn't expecting to make $3 million as fast. It's like still 64 days left in the campaign.

However, because this wasn't a crowdfund, I just took the transparency of it. You guys are going to like most of the product we already got here. We just have a couple of batches of prints of the actual book that we need to get. And then we start shipping those out.

So going into September, even though the campaign still won't be closed, you'll be able to get your, you'll be able to get your items. We're going to mail those. You can get them over at ripperverse.com. Of course, we have different bundles where you could save money and you can go ahead and grab whatever it is that you want. I haven't reached out to a lot of comic book retailers, but the safest bet is to, of course, go to ripperverse.com, place in your order. When you order, you get your login, you can keep up with the, you know, the actual order itself when it ships and all like that.

We keep it right there for you. Lastly, I want you to hear this and we're talking to Eric July, founder of Ripperverse Comics, why he went out and is doing his own thing. I want you to hear Brandon, Brandon Ruth, I think that's how you say the name, try to explain to us why he gets rid of the American Way from Superman.

Cut 31. The American Way is kind of changing and people can take that to mean many different things. So the fact that it's not in the film, I think is powerful because really Superman has transcended America. And although it was founded on those basic values, you know, that we created in this country, that's not as important maybe as, as just the fact that he's so inspirational to, to everyone and that he can be an icon to somebody halfway across the world.

What's he talking about? He can't be an icon to somebody across the world if you say American Way? Yeah, that's bizarre. That's such a weird thing. If anything, you know, they can especially have something to aspire for and aspire to be any event that they know where that character is. So he's kind of being hypocritical in a sense or rather contradicting himself. Yeah, he has existing despite having that true justice in American Way, transcended just America and he's been a way of an inspiration to people that are outside of his country.

So what, why did you need to change it in the first place? Seemed like that it already happened. This is a guy that is more so ashamed to be, you know, in this geographical area.

We know that there's a lot of kind of movements that are unfortunately conflating government with country or with those sets of more so values that you think of Americanism and these folks are trying to run away from it and it's just simply not working. And lastly, here's, I want you to evaluate this X-Men clip. It's a X-Men Dark Phoenix clip when they change the name to X-Woman, cut 32.

It's funny, I can't actually remember the last time you were the one risking something. And by the way, the women are always saving the men around here. You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.

Okay, me too. Such a goofy, I remember seeing that and I was like, oh my God, this is basically when I was, I was about out of Marvel and DC and doing everything with, with Ed, anything that they had to do with as far as buying their products. But I remember seeing Ed and just thinking that's so crazy. But a lot of people don't know Victoria Alonzo, I believe is her name. She's somehow keeps somehow keeps filling up with Marvel. And she's echoed that same sentiment multiple times in different like interviews and whatnot, where she's saying, well, they're called the X-Men.

I don't understand why they're called that because they have a bunch of women that are part of their team. The, again, self-awareness does not exist with these, with these folks. And I used to be one of those guys. I was like, man, this sucks. You know, you see these beloved characters be ran to the ground. But now I'm like, you know what, keep it up, keep it up.

Cause all you do is deny our way. Absolutely. It's good for the Ripperverse, bad for the country, but good for Eric July, especially. Eric, congratulations on taking the risk, showing that entrepreneurial spirit and using your creativity to help restore the American way. Much love. And I appreciate you, of course, having me.

All right. Go out to the ripperverse.com and, and support Eric. He took great risks for you. So at least you could do with support his, his quest here. And he didn't phone it in.

This is 90 plus pages. Thanks so much, Eric. From the Fox news podcasts network, subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one of a kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com.