Intolerant X-Men?

While free speech protections certainly protect Marvel from incurring any actual legal liability from Syaf’s actions, it is clear that major publishers are not interested in dealing with artists who sneak in political messages into their comics like this, especially when done in such a way that the editors of the issue would be hard-pressed to even get what he was referring to. The inclusion of “212” as a reference to the December 2 protests against the Jakarta Governor, is a good example. As the number is also the area code for New York City, and the X-Men live in New York, it would be very difficult for anyone to see it and say, “Oh, that must be a reference to a protest in Indonesia — that I didn’t know happened.” So Syaf might be accurate when he says that his career is over.

If so, it would not be a matter of Marvel Comics actually “firing” him, since Syaf was a freelancer who Marvel just contracted for a certain amount of issues of “X-Men: Gold.” They terminated his contract, but he was always an independent contractor and not a Marvel employee (unlike other artists who have signed Exclusive deals with Marvel or DC Comics. Syaf had previously worked for DC under an Exclusive deal. These artists are more like employees, as they receive employment benefits like health care from Marvel and DC like any other staffer).

Since most artists are freelancers, you very rarely have an instance of someone being actually fired over the use of hidden messages, especially since very rarely are hidden messages quite this controversial. Ethan Van Sciver trying to sneak the word “sex” into every page of an issue of “New X-Men,” for example, is a lot different than political protests. If the company is mad at them, they just won’t give them more work rather than “firing” them.

It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad few weeks for Marvel Comics. March sales figures have shown the company in a dangerous sales slump, losing out to eternal rival DC in terms of units sold and only coming out on top in terms of money earned, due to the fact that its comics are more expensive. There has also been growing anger online over the upcoming culmination of a story in which Captain America is depicted as the leader of a Nazi-affiliated group.

Matters got worse two weekends ago with a total PR disaster in which the publisher’s vice-president for sales and marketing, David Gabriel, told an interviewer at industry-analysis site ICv2 that he’d heard retailers saying the slump was due to recent attempts to make their characters more “diverse” — e.g., putting in more women and people of color. The comments were misleadingly interpreted in the geek press as meaning Marvel was giving up on such diversity initiatives, right when editor-in-chief Axel Alonso was touting those initiatives in a big Fortune profile. Gabriel clarified his statement, and it seemed the storm might have been passing.

Then came the Koran reference.