I would like to point out that while Tapastic is comprised of multiple people from all walks of life and political leanings, Tapastic as a platform should remain apolitical.
My goal as editor in chief, is to maintain a safe and healthy environment for all of our creators. We are an open platform, home to creators and readers from all around the world. I think it would be incredibly unfair of the site to have any type of political bias one way or another.
And regardless of who is president, I want to maintain the fact that Tapastic will always remain an open platform that encourages everyone to express themselves through art, and that will never change. We will always be here to support creators.
I know that a lot of you feel unsure or uncomfortable about the recent turn of events. I've been trying my best to answer every e-mail and private message that I get from creators regarding the future.
I know that so many of you have felt cynical or afraid due to the rhetoric and ideas expressed by a majority of the political candidates during the campaigning season. And a lot of those sentiments were being constantly reinforced by the media.
But I want all of you to know that I remain hopeful about the future.
A little bit about myself. My parents are immigrants, my father is a first generation immigrant from Korea, and my mother is a first generation immigrant from Japan. They both worked very hard in order to financially support our family. And because of that, I was raised predominantly by popular culture, through television, movies, comic books, and novels that they had accumulated when they first arrived here. I devoured fiction while both my parents worked. In a strange way, the fictional characters that I love were surrogate parents for me.
I grew up on pulp science fiction novels with gilded cities of the future that promised jet-packs, flying cars, robot butlers (that often times turned evil). I grew up on Star Wars, and Spider-Man, stories about embodying the idea of hope and doing good because doing anything else just didn't make any sense. And through this pop culture regiment, I felt like I was being promised a bright and bold future - where all of these things were possible.
And while, so many of you might be down trodden and cynical, I want to tell you that I am still very, very hopeful about this future, because I still see it everyday, here on Tapastic. I still see creators making fantastical worlds full of the hope and goodness that I grew up on. I still see a family of creators that are making art that we should all strive towards.
There's never been a better time to be a comic creator than right here and right now. We started with less than a handful of creators when we first started, and now we have over 17,000 creators. And if you were to read through all of those comics like the editorial team and myself have, then you'd know that the overall tone of the site leans towards goodness, leans towards hope, leans towards understanding.
I've been very fortunate to see this progression, and I want all of you to know that Tapastic will always be a home for us. A home for us to express a great diversity of opinions, to build worlds where anything and everything is possible, a home for us to dream the dream of dreams.
As always, if you need someone to talk to, you can always private message me here on the forums, leave me a note or private message on my creator wall (www.tapastic.com/michaelson) or e-mail me at michaelson@tapasmedia.co (.co and not .com).
