I work at McDonald's. Oh, work? How do you like that? My sister took me. She goes there with you? Yeah, yeah, Leigh likes McDonald's.
I like McDonald's. Hi everyone, it's your boy Zach. So I was going to talk about something else today, but you just can't get away from Eric July.
I stopped keeping track of whatever stupid shit he's doing. I finally got Gmail to stop showing me his promotional ads in my email account. And then I'm watching TikTok and one of my favorite comic talk accounts started talking to him.
I was like, Jesus Christ. So the guy went in pretty hard on Eric. Was obviously not a fan.
But it was not just a fair assessment, but it was a professional assessment, in that he looked at the Hachette book group deal, the Ripverse says, and he's just like, okay, these books are returnable. Like, this doesn't work. And he went on kind of like a Dennis Miller tear against him, but at one point he just laser focused in and he said, you know, this is something that was built in crowdfunding.
He says something like, Eric built a highly defensive and loyal political tribe. And that's, yeah. I mean, he forgot to say of guys who look like Zippy the Pinhead, but you need to do more research than that.
But it sounds like he had given a good amount of research, and he just said the most basic thing. That Hachette, which is the mainstream book distributor for most bookstores you go to, operates on a returnability model. So Eric doesn't really get much money until like six months later until they see if the stores return them.
Now, he doesn't have any guarantee of being on shelves. Mostly the change, it's just bragging rights. It's just something that makes him look.
He's just trying to get like movie deals, streaming deals. So he's like, I need to look important. I need to look successful.
It's like, what if I could say I had an international book distribution? Wait, your own warehouse doesn't ship internationally? But it's one of those things, it looks like success. And that's what Eric July's whole thing is. He wants to look successful.
He doesn't want to be successful. He's now selling well under a thousand copies of pretty much everything he puts out. Although he's doing the thing, he's like, I'm limiting this to 600.
But if it sells 600, maybe I'll limit it to 700. These are like actual quotes. And so it's like, dude, wrap it up.
Okay, just wrap it up. This is, I mean, I've talked before about how it's impressive when a comic book company gets to five years because that's when the wheels start to fall off. And I was saying that before and after I hit five years, where things were fine, the wheels started to fall off around year six for me.
So don't get cocky if you just squeak past the five year mark. With Eric, he started flaming out, I think, even before he hit year three. He had a good year.
Awesome, sold 3.4. But once he started trying to expand, that's when all of it collapsed. It wasn't like, oh, once a year we give money to this mushmouth guy I saw on Fox News. It's like, oh wait, you think you're an actual publisher? You think you're an actual writer? No, this is a mug club in comic book form.
Like, what? How? The thing is, Eric July's books don't translate in any sense of the word. Not literally. I was just laughing this morning imagining his GTA 4 Ebonics being translated into like a hundred languages.
He would probably sound more intelligent. But how are you going to sell to someone in Lithuania? In Zimbabwe? In Singapore? Buying a book to piss off Heather Antos? Heather Antos isn't internationally known. I guess you could translate it into The White Witch or something like that.
It's like, we're fighting The White Witch. But nobody gives a fuck. Even, you know, Heather got some mileage in the last week or so attacking John Byrne, but collectively Earth told her to shut the fuck up.
It's like, you're not 25 and cute, you're pushing 40 and fat. You have no power. So she's just been kind of poopy pants ever since then.
How do you sell How do you sell Ripaverse to anyone who's not international, who doesn't know about not just American politics, but American libertarian and conservative politics, but not just American libertarian and what do you call it, conservative comics, or whatever. You don't understand what I'm saying. But like 2019 to 2022 because I've done videos before where Eric is like you know, we got Rewoman and Ripaverse and then I show like the latest X-Men crossover and it's like Rogue and White Queen right in the front and they're doing that position where you pose so you can see their ass and their tits at the same time.
It's like, what? So you're making comics in 2026 to protest Marvel Comics in 2017? That was a while ago. But there's no way you can sell this. They're like, we have shitty comics here.
Why would I buy shitty comics from America that are meant to piss off some doughy middle-aged woman? There's nothing to translate. There's no ideas. I saw he was announcing a crossover.
Like a crossover event. And he's like, why am I doing this? It's like, you need money. You idiotically bought a warehouse and gave full-time employment to like 15 people because you thought your best selling book was actually going to trend upwards forever.
Like that Simpsons bit about disco. Yeah, from 1977 to 1979 there was an amazing upward trend for disco, but let's graph out 80, 81, 82. But yeah, you got nothing to sell.
Trust me. People in Zimbabwe have their own bad comics. Moreover, they have their own problems.
Real problems. Like rain. Like drought.
They're not trying to piss off Heather Onto's. Anyway, I thought I had more stuff. This probably could have been a community post.
Oh, sidetrack. So the guy who attacked him, which is of course what they're reframing it as. They're saying he's wearing a toupee.
I don't know. I've been watching his channel for a couple months. I've seen him have wet hair, get haircuts.
It's a dumb but it was, he said highly defensive, which is kind of a weird, I would say reactionary. You don't just get to criticize Eric July. They're going to just attack you personally and purposely misconstrue what they say.
So they're doing it to this guy who has a moderately actually not even that huge TikTok comic book review account. But yeah, there's nothing to translate. People in other countries, well actually the only countries Canada but really the UK.
And I even asked one time, why is the UK so involved in American conservative politics? It's like, well they know they're cooked. The conservatives are never going to win over there. But they can see it having a long term victory over here.
I mean the UK is crazy. You get arrested for memes. And that's not like a thing that's exaggerated.
That's a literal thing. They will knock on your door and arrest you and take you to the police station. Now I think they just write up some paperwork and let you go right away.
But you literally get arrested for memes. So I kind of understand. So, you know, Canada UK, America to a smaller extent Australia, but like international international? One of the funniest things is this is just a, there's bugs around so I'm going to wrap this up quick.
It's like you have to understand how different the life experiences are of other people. I'm watching a lot of the World Cup right now and I swear when I watch any match of the World Cup I feel like there's never been a war ever in the world. I just feel like everybody loves each other.
But no, people have very, very different experiences in all of their countries. I was asking a friend if there's a mercy rule in soccer, football. And he's like, no.
I go, they literally need to do it because some of these teams, they go back to their country and they get beaten up if they didn't do very well. And then someone was explaining the ultras in, what is it, Spain? He's like, that happens in Europe. The mercy rule is if one team is just trouncing the other one, you just stop the game.
I think it might be an American baseball thing. But yeah, people in other countries have actual real problems. And so you can't you can't sell bland, meaningless characters.
Oh, getting back to the thing he said about crossovers. So, he's like, why am I doing a crossover now? You need money. But then he started to explain it.
And it was not he had a good idea. It was that he's been publishing for four years and four years is like a good amount of time. He's like, ten years would have been too long.
Two years would have been too soon. So I thought four years was... You're literally going to sell your crossover event on the idea that four is a good number? You've been publishing for four years? It's unbelievable. It's really... It is a company and a man that is beyond parody.
Just with my OCD, if you're going to talk about between one year and ten years and what's the right year like five years in, he needs the money. He needs the fucking money. He's selling fewer than a thousand copies of his books these days and he's spamming out, what, one every week? He needs the money.
And it's not going to come from the international market who has, number one, real problems. Number two, doesn't know anything about 2022 culture war American shit. And number three, they have not only their own good comics from that region, they have their own bad comics.
So why would they order Rip Averse? Anyway, that's the book. Thanks for watching. Bye.
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