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Today, the Toronto Comic Art Festival (TCAF) has withdrawn its invite to digital cartoonist artist Saba Moeel, author of the Pink Cat Daily comics on Instagram, as a guest of the upcoming show, after significant negative reaction online, reported yesterday by Bleeding Cool. TCAF did not respond to Bleeding Cool when approached to comment but has issued the following statement;
TCAF is rescinding its invitation to Pink Cat, also known as Saba Moeel, due to code of conduct violations and the concerns expressed by the comics community. TCAF initially extended a programming invitation to Moeel on the basis of their daily digital comics work on Instagram, and the personal importance that work had to one of our team members. At the time of this invitation, the organization was unaware of Moeel’s online conduct, plagiarism, or allegations of tracing. We apologize for programming and promoting this artist.
We made a mistake. As a promise to our community, we will use this as a learning moment as we move forward as an organization, and will re-examine the checks and balances we currently use to process our programming decisions. In reading your feedback there are a few things that the organization would like to address.
TCAF does not accept money to program featured guests, ever. Those artists are selected along a wide set of criteria. Most featured guests at TCAF are funded to attend our festival through cost sharing between the festival, publishers, or international cultural agencies. No one in the TCAF organization has financial ties to Moeel. TCAF is an organization of largely part time staff who work in a collaborative framework. When an issue of this importance is raised, it takes time for us to come together and discuss the appropriate next steps. If you want to know who we are, you can see our names on the about page of our website, and we can be reached through our public-facing email accounts, which are also on that page.TCAF does not tolerate bullying or threats against any creators, volunteers, or attendees participating in the festival. Any member of our community who is verbally abusive, violent, or otherwise overtly unwelcoming to any other TCAF participant will be removed from the event.
If you would like to discuss this matter with us further, we can be reached at [email protected].We are very proud of the line-up of artists and exhibitors we have gathered for this year’s festival, and it is our sincere hope that this error on our part does not overshadow the hard work of our team, our other guests, and our exhibitors.
The objections to Pink Cat attending the show were initially in regard to her commitment to generative NFTs derived from her cartoons, a mix of issues of environmental concern over energy cost, the attraction of NFT to money launderers, the ephemeral Ponzi-scheme style nature of NFTs, and what is seen as an over-commercialisation of art, but then continued further as people dug up swipes she had made of other people’s work, as well statements seen as rather problematic. We ran a few of the swipes yesterday, but a collection has been collated here.
Yesterday, Saba Moelle posted her response to much of the commentary including an explanation for the swiping/reference, saying “I come from a region completely decimated by white supremacy and imperialism, and someone being like “that’s a Disney character you drew” like yes…it’s a common well known meme we women use on web 2. Bc toxic, corporate, colonialist Disney was stuffed down our throats. Because our families fleed EXPLODING BUILDINGS, sanctions bc we do not use the central banking system, we did not have access to our own culture. American culture was shoved on to us, even the English language…we should be speaking our own language” as well as adding “What do you guys think about an older white man telling probably the only female Muslim comic book artist who was invited go the event to “stay home” bc i adopted my business to blockchain, and fundraised through my own following instead of going through VCs?”.
Saba Moelle who has created her Pink Cat Daily comics on Instagram for around five years with a following of around a quarter of a million people, did not respond to requests for comment about TCAF’s decision earlier today. Though I understand she plans to make media appearances later today.
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