In a blog post titled "I down, 534 to go," Travis Corcoran, the owner of online comic book store Heavy Ink suggested that the Giffords shooting was a good start:

It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot “indiscriminately”.

Target only politicians and their staff, and leave regular citizens alone.

Please!

Many comic creators have been aggressive in their efforts to refute Corcoran and Heavy Ink. Writer Gail Simone told him to "grow a soul" on Twitter, and Paul Cornell and Nick Spencer have asked their fans to stop buying their books through the store. Warren Ellis, as always, puts it best:


Obviously, I’d rather Heavy Ink didn’t sell my work, but I don’t have a choice about which stores order my books. However, if you do buy my work from Heavy Ink, would you please consider buying it from someone else instead?

And before the nutters start: yes, I’m sure this can be justified as your lovely American free speech and not hate speech or malicious communication, and yes, I’m sure he has a perfect right to say it and all that shit. Guess what? I have a perfect right not to like it, and a right to wish not to be associated with the nutter who spews it.

Meanwhile, the comics press is behaving weirdly about this. Comics Alliance, as always, has been providing very strong coverage. Comics news site Newsarama ran a post by Russ Burlingame on their blog yesterday about the comics industry response to Heavy Ink. Or at some point they must have run it, because the post is in my RSS reader, but it seems to have been deleted from the site. I sent an e-mail to Newsarama asking why they pulled the piece, but I haven't heard back yet; if I do hear from them, I'll let you know.