Everything and Nothing has changed.

Exploring the personal complications of a worthless middleman blowing up my business.

Hello Everyone!

Gonna start off with some housecleaning before we get into the meat of what I have to say. First of all, we’re a few days into our campaign for Descent into Dread and approaching the halfway mark in our funding goal. For reasons that will be explored later, we really appreciate any support you can give for this campaign, and all our books in general!

This weekend I’m going to be at 3 Rivers Comic Con in Pittsburgh, PA, so if you’re in the area, please come and say hi! I love talking to fans and, while cons can be exhausting, they’re often the highlights of my year as far as comics goes.

Now, about Stripe…

Two weeks ago, I got an email that I didn’t think much of—Stripe, the payment processor behind Kickstarter and BackerKit, needed some information about my business. This didn’t concern me at time because I’ve done this dance before. When I was doing my campaigns for Smut, they reliably sent these emails and nothing came of it because, despite the name, it was obvious to any one that was actually paying attention that there was nothing wrong with the book from a ToS perspective.

That is not how this audit went down. Instead of following the very simple lines of logic that led them to believe nothing was wrong a year ago, they have opted to fully nuke my business account with no ability to appeal. As a result, much of my back end and ability to work with BackerKit has been shut down.

I’m not going to get into the myriad of ways this is bullshit—everyone knows Stripe’s policies are unevenly enforced, thinly veiled tools of censorship that empower a glorified credit card magnetic strip to shut down businesses based on vibes and unaccountable, faceless ghouls. Instead, I’d like to focus, just for now, on how this affects people on a human level.

I have been working for nearly six years to build up an online audience that depends entirely on a level of trust between me and my readership. If they don’t trust that I can deliver on my promises, I have nothing. For six years now, I have been working my ass off to prove that every time I say something will happen, I’m going to make it happen. Sometimes there are delays, sometimes things don’t go exactly according to plan—The Catskin and the Rose went a year and half over schedule due to problems with the artist, but that book eventually got done.

For the first time, I’m in a position where I may not get to follow up on my promises entirely because of an entity I never even wanted to work with. It’s a small thing, but there are people who will attempt to buy things or turn in their BackerKit surveys late that I will have no ability to follow up on. They are violating trust on my behalf.

And that sucks, but where trust has really been severed is between me and Kickstarter. This incident has not affected my ability to make campaigns and they didn’t do anything to block money from the campaign that they took issue with (no idea why, but I guess that’s a win), but my confidence that I can make good on my promises has been shattered. Everything is now filtered through the veil of “assuming Stripe doesn’t decide to fuck me over again on this.”

I cannot remember a time I didn’t want to write and tell stories, it’s been a part of me for as long as I’ve wanted anything. But right now, with these obstacles and violations put in front of me, I am for the first time having trouble even wanting to try. “What’s the point?” Has never once crossed my mind. Until now. Because if the only real source of funding that I have to make my comics gets cut out from under me by a pointless middle man who’s only job it is to charge credit cards and hand the money over to me FOR NO REASON and I have NO RECOURSE in the situation, that means I can’t promise my artists payment for their work or my readers a book at the end of the process.

I feel incredibly burnt out. Things were already pretty bad, gas is over $5/gallon where I live, the news is an endless parade of stress and idiotic decisions made by a government that seems desperate to speed the collapse and pick apart the carcass of the place we’re all forced to live. I can’t blame my readers for prioritizing getting groceries over buying my comics, but now I can’t even promise to the people that stick around that their investment in me is secure.

For weeks, I received emails from Stripe with the exact same format, same greeting, same clumsy citation of vague rules that didn’t do anything to explain what I had done to violate their terms of service, same insistance that I should find a payment processor that does support my kind of business (ignoring again that I didn’t choose to work with them, Kickstarter and BackerKit did). All these emails were signed, first name only, by different people. John, Raj, Zach, Devon. People that almost certainly didn’t exist.

For weeks, I argued with a faceless, nameless AI that I wasn’t actually violating their terms of service, until I was told (maybe by a real person?) that my case was final and there was nothing I could do to appeal. This whole process was designed to make me feel powerless. And it worked.

I don’t yet know what this fully means for my ability to make comics, in a financial business sense, but on a personal level, I have never felt more pessimistic about my ability to do this. Not because I did anything wrong or because people don’t want my books, but because there is no guarantee that my career won’t once again be upended by a soulless AI created by equally soulless corporate ghouls for completely inscrutable reasons.

I hope that soon I am inspired to write again, but there’s a weight on me right now that makes me worry that anything I create will be imbued with a bitterness and cynicism for the future that can only produce a kind of story I don’t want to tell. I wish I had a more hopeful message to end on, but here we are. Things suck, the future is broken, and I don’t know when or if it’ll get better.

Ironically, this comes at a time when my live events, conventions and signings and the like, have never been better. When it’s me and a real person talking about comics and stories, it’s obvious that what we’ve made over these last six years is special and connects with people. But online, where no one has a face and an AI can shut you down if it doesn’t like your keywords, things feel pretty bleak.

Talk soon, hopefully with a more optimistic attitude.

Wells Thompson