I've seen a fair amount of general press coverage over the past month or so for a crowd-funding campaign for a new Rat Queens game, based on the comic created by Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch. Mostly the fairly usual "just republishing the press release" stuff, but the occasional interview and side commentary and such as well. Clearly based on some relatively aggressive PR work.
And all of it completely uncritical of the creators.
A quick recap if you're unfamiliar... Wiebe and Upchurch first launched Rat Queens in 2013. It's a sword-and-sorcery fantasy about four loud, raucous, sometimes drunk adventurers. That's part of the appeal -- that it feels like a group of friends sitting around the table playing Dungeons & Dragons. The other part of the appeal is that they're all women, so the whole book plays against the stereotype and showcases a form of female empowerment. It sold reasonably well (for an indie type book) when it launched and it quickly developed a devoted following. However, after about a year, Upchurch was arrested for domestic violence.
This was not a matter up for dispute. His wife had visible injuries, and he admitted his wrong-doing. He was ordered to go through six months of a counseling program by the courts. Wiebe "fired" him from Rat Queens, and got Tess Fowler to take up art duties. This is all a matter of public record.
In 2015, Upchurch solicited an interview with CBR in which he admitted -- using mostly passive, third-party language -- that he committed domestic violence and he was trying to do better. It came across to me like a poor man's "mea culpa tour" in which he would say "I'm sorry" and everything would be forgiven so he could return to his career. Except it was only the one interview, and given that Upchurch himself reached out to initiate it -- specifically with a female interviewer -- and that he never actually apologized for his behavior, it fell very short for me. Even moreso when his wife responded on her own blog citing several instances in the interview in which he said things that were provably untrue or misleading with deliberately no context. Contrary to his claim, she noted he'd had almost no interactions with their kids and certainly hadn't offered any financial support, and he hadn't talked at all about how he'd also cheated on her. Upchurch talked a lot about "moving on" and "doing better" but she saw no evidence of that.
One thing Upchurch was upfront about was that he was hoping to use that interview to get back into comics' good graces and start working again. And what came out indepenently later was that Wiebe had been working to get him back on Rat Queens. Which makes sense conceptually, as they were friends and co-creators of the series, but Wiebe was doing that initially without telling Fowler and -- once she learned about it third-hand and confronted him -- he flatly lied to her about it and only tried to back-peddle his words later when he couldn't otherwise weasel out of the lie. She left the book in digust and sold all of the original artwork for it super-cheaply so she could get rid of it and not have to look at/be reminded of that experience ever again. Probably at the insistence of the publisher, Weibe took a year off to give the book what's listed in Wikipedia as a "soft reboot."
(None of the details about Upchurch are mentioned in the Rat Queens Wikipedia page, by the way. It just says "Upchurch left the book after issue #8." There's more information about Fowler's departure and the 'controversy' there than about Upchurch!)
Now, that was all a decade ago at this point. I can't find any other comics work Upchurch has done in comics since then besides a single Rat Queens special in 2023 and a few covers. Upchurch's two oldest kids are in their 20s now and the youngest from that marriage, I think, must have just graduated high school. I don't know if he re-established regular contact with them, or what their relationships are like today. I presume the divorce papers he seemed unbothered to sign initially eventually made it through the courts, but I have zero clue whether or not the woman he left his wife for is stil in the picture at all.
Could Upchurch have genuinely and sincerely changed since all that went down? Sure, it's possible. I can't find any evidence one way or the other more recent than 2016. Did Weibe learn a lesson about open communications from his debacle with Fowler? I hope so. The original Kickstarter campaign for a Rat Queens game ended in 2021 and, while it hasn't been delivered and the originally contracted manufacturer seems to have gone AWOL, Weibe himself does seem to have at least been relatively consistent in ongoing monthly updates. But in the two years since he said, "I have rescinded the Rat Queens rights from Ox Eye Media and their partners" he hasn't delivered anything for that game either.
People are inherently fallible. We all make mistakes and do/say things we shouldn't. Over the course of ten years or more, one would hope that people would learn lessons from their bad choices though. But simply saying "mistakes were made" without any effort to own up them, much less offer any evidence that you've tried to correct for them does not cut it. It's just lip service offered in lieu of anything substative. Businesses do that kind of bullshit to avoid legal liability; individuals do that kind of bullshit to prop up their pride. Are you willing to wait a decade or more for someone to learn from their mistakes?
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