8 Times Marvel And DC Screwed Over Comic Book Creators

2. Marvel Fired Chuck Wendig For His Tweets

Darth Vader Chuck Wendig
Marvel Comics

Creating comics is a precarious thing. Work is mostly freelance, you're beholden to a weird and admittedly outdated ordering system that can kill your book before you've even finished the first issue, and to cap it all off, you might just get fired for expressing a reasonable opinion on the internet.

This was sadly the story of what happened to Star Wars writer Chuck Wendig, who ran afoul of Marvel editorial for his vocal and persistent criticism of the Trump Administration. Factor in that Marvel Entertainment is ran by Ike Perlmutter - a personal friend of Trump's - and you can see why the whole thing is more than a little bit shady.

Wendig had worked with Disney on his Star Wars novels hitch-free for years, and continues to write tales set in a galaxy far, far away to this day. Marvel took issue with his personal account however, and kicked Wendig off his Shadow of Vader series and an as-of-then unannounced Star Wars comic. Wendig took to Twitter to explain what happened, and the whole thing just sounds super dodgy.

The social media policies at Marvel and DC are so inconsistent. Previous writers have gone out of their way to target industry voices on social media solely for the crime of criticising a comic, and they're still at Marvel, while openly trollish behaviour from another figure went unchallenged at DC for a good long while.

There's no consistency, and while Wendig had other revenue streams to draw from as a writer, for those who work in comics and have nowhere else to go, the threat of being removed because an editor took issue with a Tweet only exemplifies just how precarious a profession it is.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.