The Facade of Iron Circus Comics and Spike Trotman
I feel like this needs to get some more traction on social media…
#comicsbrokeme trended recently, with comics creators and artists telling horror stories of extreme low wages, cruel bosses, and the constant struggle to make ends meet.
One company, and one person came up in an alarming amount of posts… Iron Circus Comics and its founder, Spike Trotman.
What Trotman has been accused of is not just run of the mill mismanagement or low wages, though they are infamous about underpaying and missing payment dates. They will actively and precisely bully, berate, and mentally destroy creators working under them. Trotman uses their clout as an internet famous comics publisher to keep people in line, and a recurring threat that if creators ever spoke out, Spike would sic their fans on them.
If you ever wondered why so many creators from Slipshine and Iron Circus up and vanished, THIS IS WHY. Several artists and creators have said that Spike Trotman sapped them of their desire to make comics.
This is downright sociopathic behavior to be sure. But then one starts digging into Spike Trotman’s past, and there’s a lot of skeletons in the closet. Squee Rat and Darth Versace were their previous handles on the internet. Squee Rat may sound familiar to people who have heard of the ‘Burned Furs’ movement.
Burned Furs was a puritanical, homophobic, transphobic offshoot of the furry fandom, founded by Spike Trotman, who also wrote the ‘Furry Manifesto’, which outlined their goals of getting rid of pornography, degeneracy, and expression of sexuality in the furry community. They distributed pamphlets at cons encouraging ‘degenerates’ to kill themselves.
A very inconvenient past to have when your brand is leftist and sex positive. Spike very much knows this, and they have tried to scrub all evidence of their past as Squee Rat from wikis and articles about Burned Furs.
Right now, Spike is hoping that this all dies down. In fact, they just had a big party for the success of the Lackadaisy cartoon pilot.
Especially ironic given that Spike once encouraged people to eat one meal a day to make ends meet in the comics industry.
What you can do is make sure this reaches the eyes and ears it needs. Find the dissenting voices against Spike and Iron Circus, and boost them as much as you can.
They shouldn’t be able to hide behind this facade and continue to hurt people.
