Note: mentions of sexual violence, statutory rape, rape apologia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, transphobia, transmisogyny and “cancel culture” follow. I anticipate it may be upsetting reading for people who have experiences such as these. You really, truly, do not have to read this.

Let’s talk about an elephant in the room.

2D Cloud was arguably the most important alternative comics publisher of the 2010s. Their comics were transgressive, confessional, formally innovative, and loose, a vision of a comics avant-garde that exposed readers to the bare psyches of cartoonists and the raw elements of comics style. A short list of their publications will undoubtedly impress: Rudy by Mark Connery; Virus Tropical by Powerpaola; Someone Please Have Sex With Me by Gina Wynbrandt; Gulag Casual by Austin English; Yours by Margot Ferrick; Extended Play by Jake Terrell; Perfect Hair by Tommi Parrish. If you read any one of these books, you feel something strong at their mention, something that bites into you as a reader or an artist.

Today, 2D Cloud is irrelevant. They have been for a while. Their books come out with a thud at a drip pace, if at all, sometimes interesting but generally antiquated, a relic of a scene that’s moved on. But recently, the publisher has found a slight spotlight again. They have done so by becoming reactionary.

In 2017, 2DC’s prolific star artist and frequent editor Blaise Larmee was credibly accused of alleged sexual assault of a minor. The source of this accusation came from the pages of Larmee’s 2015 graphic novel 3 Books, which included screenshots of a sexually explicit exchange between Larmee and a teenage girl. By my recollection, outcry against Larmee on social media was in some circles intense, but generally scattered – after all, this was a niche artist from a publisher that prided itself in getting obtuse and noncommercial books into shops. Of all people, then-editors of The Comics Journal Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel were particularly vocal. To be blunt, to care about this “scandal” at all, you had to have read Larmee’s comics, which I don’t think all that many people were actually doing even if they said otherwise. 

Nonetheless, 2DC’s actions at the time were dramatic. A now-deleted Medium post by the publisher announced that they were pulping all unsold copies of 3 Books, and that they would henceforth not associate with Larmee. This outsized stunt appeased critics at the time, but in retrospect smacks of just that, a stunt, disproportionate to the outcry and saving the publisher inventory space for an underperforming title that could arguably now be considered child pornography.  A summary by Nola Pfau of some of the events that followed can still be found at Women Write About Comics  (the criticism of Nadel in WWAC’s summary for supposedly claiming “firing creators for their behavior isn’t taking responsibility” is… interesting in retrospect). Not long after, another Medium post by co-founder Maggie Umber suggested that 2D Cloud was restructuring and that she was also divorcing co-founder Raighne Hogan. In the months to come, the narrative quietly shifted – 2DC brought on a new editor/curator and announced a slew of potentially interesting books, many of which never actually reached print. But by 2020, 2D Cloud seemingly fizzled out, their website putting their books on sale at liquidation prices seemingly every few months. The damage had been done.

Last year, this changed. In 2023, after some enigmatic social media posts, 2DCloud reemerged, with Raighne Hogan seemingly steering the publisher independently of its other co-founder. 2D Cloud’s website went through a major overhaul, albeit an awkward one, resembling the graphic design of Landfill Editions’ books but as a storefront, every title filling half the screen in gigantic serifed text. A new season of books for 2023 accompanied this graphical revamp, including the new flagship anthology Compact Magazine, which featured a story by sci-fi legend Samuel Delany and new work from notable artists including Yvan Agalbe, the late Morgan Vogel, and someone we hadn’t seen much of in the last six years: Blaise Larmee. At this time, many of us found that the Medium posts denouncing Larmee had been deleted. Today, 3 Books can be purchased on 2DC’s website in a bundle along with another of his comics, 2001, and 270°, a minicomic by Maggie Umber.

As in 2017, there was some widespread outcry about Larmee’s quiet return. Some, including myself, were disappointed to see a publisher that had once so loudly denounced a sexual predator welcome him back to the publisher and scrub the net of their statements. However, it didn’t really come to much, because in 2023, and still in 2024, 2D Cloud is not very much. It’s a publisher most often recalled in the past tense, albeit fondly. There isn’t much reason to protest the actions of a forgotten small press long past its place in the subcultural zeitgeist.

On January 24, 2024, 2D Cloud’s Substack, fittingly called House on Fire, shared an essay by Blaise Larmee entitled “On Being Canceled,” an oddly versified personal musing on the woke mob that has apparently forced Larmee out of public life these past 6 years. Larmee asserts his artistic boasts of sexual predation were a misunderstood form of performance art, and compares his experience of published confessions being widely denounced to being a closeted homosexual, and later to being raped multiple times. It is a disgusting, insulting, cruel, stupid piece of writing that I do not recommend reading. 

As a survivor of sexual abuse and the dreaded closet myself, I find Larmee’s screed, endorsed by his publisher, upsetting and infuriating. Larmee equates his experience of facing consequences with the closet and with rape, suggesting that really his experiences are so misunderstood that they must be worse, and perhaps the hysterical rape survivors and queers who do not like him must be hypocrites. The real rapists are apparently the ones upset about rape. As fellow critic RJ Casey observed on his Instagram story, 2D Cloud and Larmee’s stance is indistinguishable from the average right-wing screed shared by Fox News on any given day. It’s just reactionary hate, no more, no less.

And let’s be clear, callouts have dangerous consequences. Many marginalized queer people, especially racialized queer people and people affected by transmisogyny, have experienced callouts as rhetorical violence as a consequence of existing in public. If you know a trans woman who is any sort of visible, she has been smeared, whether for speaking up about abuse and prejudice; creating challenging, mature art; or for simply being in any space as a whole person. “Cancel culture” is a false flag buzzword of the right-wing appropriated from Black slang which misrepresents the real phenomena of callouts being used to enact harm by distorting who faces the greatest violence. 

In 2020, a trans woman writing under the pen name Isabel Fall was hounded to a suicide attempt after receiving disproportionate hateful attention for writing a short story with the provocative title “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.” From her last public comment, it appears that she detransitioned after the highly visible incident, but this is hard to confirm, as she has left writing and all public life completely. Many of the ringleaders of the online hate mob co-ordinated against Fall, such as popular SF author Neon Yang and blogger-cum-Raytheon employee Ana Valens, received praise for their public apologies after nearly killing her and have continued writing for large commercial audiences to this day.

In 2017, fine artist and cartoonist Blaise Larmee authored a rape confessional that upset many readers, who noted he was confessing to rapes in his rape confessional. The publisher of the rape confessional said they destroyed all copies of it, an action which nobody asked for, and cut ties with Larmee, but the co-founder of that publisher remained friends with him. Larmee continued to make work in the fine arts, and after six years returned to comics with the same publisher that once pretended to care. 

Whose closet? Whose silence? Whose pain?

And yet, dear reader, I don’t think we should get very angry about Blaise Larmee and 2D Cloud. Like everything else about 2DC today, this incident is old news and utterly unremarkable. This kind of shit, this gross, open misogyny, happens everywhere, in every art form, and isn’t terribly exciting. On his Patreon podcast “Who Do You Think You Are? I Am,” Sean McTiernan wryly observes that Larmee’s return plays out like a several-years-late retread of Tao Lin’s journey from literary darling to reactionary weirdo following an unsubtle allusion in one of his novels to a real statutory rape. In comics, I’m sure many of my readers remember Dark Horse’s long and troubling association with Scott “Careful, He Bites” Allie, and how it took Mike Mignola himself speaking out for the publisher to finally cut ties. “Me Too” was a movement. 

2D Cloud’s rationale for publishing Larmee’s screed could not have been to clear his name – simply keeping quiet and hoping that the few loyal readers old and new didn’t remember or wouldn’t care would have been a lot more effective – some people picked up Compact! I suspect on some level, their motivation was to regain relevance. “On Being Canceled” is undeniably the most widely read and discussed publication by 2D Cloud since 2017. So I guess it was successful! Congratulations guys, you triggered me! Enjoy the clicks! However, has this really changed anything, other than making the world of alternative comics briefly feel a little bit more unpleasant? It’s difficult to imagine 2D Cloud will find much readership from 2024 onwards beyond fellow reactionary rape apologists who think that the left has gone too far and a handful of old heads who didn’t hear about any of this or just really need that that second printing of The Necrophillic Landscape. I struggle to imagine the creaky narcissism of Larmee’s hopelessly dated avant-garde drawing in new readers unfamiliar with his controversy, for the simple reason that they are boring, turgid works operating in a mode that the entire scene has moved on from. 2D Cloud published many masterworks of the comics medium, but that was a long time ago. There is no need for a callout. My words may condemn, but my intention is simply to describe this living corpse, risen from its grave with nothing but spite to offer. 2D Cloud is still irrelevant.

Until next month.