We’ve been banned…
Young Isom: https://rippaverse.com/collections/young-isom-before-the-fall/
Rippaverse has been banned from r/comicbooks, Reddit’s largest comic book community, since the day we launched Isom #1 in 2022. The stated reason was a rule about hate groups. This year I reached out to ask if we could talk. This is what happened, and what a ceiling like that actually costs an independent publisher.
In July 2022, on launch day, the comic books subreddit removed discussion of the Rippaverse and permanently banned the user who posted our trailer. When he asked why, a moderator cited Rule 1 as it pertains to supporting comics from hate groups. That rule lists slurs and bigotry, then names comicsgate as its example. That community had 2.5 million subscribers at the time. It has over 4 million now.
I laughed about it back then. Four years into actually running this business, I understand what it did.
So I sent their moderation team a message. I didn’t ask them to promote us. I offered a conversation on whatever terms they were comfortable with. I offered to mail their team our books at no cost, no strings, so they could judge the work themselves instead of taking someone’s word for it. I asked whether they’d ever consider letting users discuss our titles under the same rules as any other publisher. And I offered to do an AMA where they set the rules, the timing, and the format, and their community could ask me anything, including about my past.
I ended it by saying that if the answer was no, I respected that.
I sent it at 9:34 AM. The answer arrived at 9:47 AM.
I read the full message on camera and show the reply. I want to be clear about something: please do not go bother these people. It’s their community and they can run it however they see fit. Nobody owes me access to their space. I’m sharing this because I said I’d be transparent about reaching across the aisle, and because the mechanics are worth understanding for anyone building something independent.
Here’s what this video is really about. Distribution and discovery are two different problems, and solving one does not solve the other. We’re in retail nationwide through Hachette Book Group. Isom has a figure from McFarlane Toys. We’ve sold hundreds of thousands of books with no outside investment. And there are still rooms where the work cannot be mentioned, which caps how far any of it travels no matter how good it is.
That’s the part people miss when they ask why a company that sells like this one does isn’t talked about more. It isn’t that people dislike the books. Nobody over there has read them. It’s that in certain spaces, saying you enjoyed our work costs you something, and most people understandably would rather not pay it.
Young Isom, with Caanan White, is out now. It tells you where Isom actually comes from.
CHAPTERS
0:00 What happened this morning
0:27 What I said when I started this company
1:23 They decided what I was about
2:20 July 2022: banned from the biggest comic subreddit
2:51 Rule one and the hate group label
3:04 The scale of it
3:27 Why I see it differently now
4:04 It spreads, and it gets indexed
4:26 Reaching out
5:27 The message, read in full
6:47 What I actually asked for
7:33 Thirteen minutes, then muted
8:41 This was never about the books
9:08 Why you don’t see people talking about us
10:06 The ceiling
10:49 Young Isom and their own scorecard
11:54 Ideological, not logical
#Rippaverse #IndieComics #ComicBooks #Publishing