Fun! Wonder! Stereotypes! How I found a creep recycling racist tropes

I lost my temper yesterday. On my Facebook feed, I get regular posts about submission calls from science fiction and fantasy magazines, which I hardly bother with anymore, as my work has a different focus these days. But I couldn’t help but notice this. A submission call for a story anthology by some guy named J. Manfred Weichsel who wants stories that “retain the sense of fun and wonder from the jungle adventures of old. But they will be absolutely insane with all the sex! If you read Sword & Scandal, then you know we don’t hold anything back.”

And this is the guy’s accompanying art. Two women of color putting a blonde, white girl in a boiling pot.

I tweeted about this, and I made the unfortunate mistake of actually challenging the guy on his own Substack page in the comments, asking, “How about losing the racist trope art?”

Some clueless idiot wrote back to me, “Do savages bother you?”

Savages. He used that word. It is remarkable that we have people who still think like this, who by implication believe that cultures can still be divided between the “civilized” and the “savage.” It is one of the reasons why I wrote an entire book on the intellectual contributions that Africa has given the world.

So, I could not help myself and replied, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I discovered later a peculiar reply from Weichsel himself. Oh, and a minor update for today, March 27: These replies were strangely missing from the comments section of his Substack last night, but Weichsel has conveniently made them reappear to portray himself as some kind of victim. More on that later.

Really? It’s my fucking language that’s your problem? Not your trafficking in outrageously bigoted stereotypes? Not the fact that it’s 2025, and a white guy who fancies himself some kind of sci-fi and fantasy erotica publisher thinks it’s entirely acceptable to portray women of color boiling a white girl in a pot in a jungle?

Weichsel, however, is right in one aspect. I did lose my temper and use a swear word — which is a wonderfully useful word as far as I’m concerned — and because I couldn’t find the above reply anywhere on the page itself, I sent him a more direct message over Substack’s chat: “Yeah, in regards to your hypocritical, sanctimonious message about personal attacks, please kindly go fuck yourself, you and your fellow racist who did the art.”

Second minor update: Weichsel chose to share my reply with his readers today (March 27), which is his right, and since I already published it here, who gives a damn.

As far as I’m concerned, you don’t get to engage in brazen racism and then play-act at gentility. If you visit his website, you see previous editions of his work that pick on the Congo and Indonesia. Instead of Africans or aboriginal Indonesians as villainous figures, you have “human-chimpanzee hybrids” and “humanoid cryptids” and it’s painfully obvious what he’s doing and who he’s really talking about. Only with his Jungle Scandals art, he didn’t even bother with the pretense — it’s just Black women.

For him, it seems to be a big joke as he quoted my initial remark this way.

And of course, he will have his defenders. One of them suggested the art “was simply meant to evoke the stories of old, with a dash of humor. If anything, the cover is living up to the series’ epithet [sic], though not maliciously, of course.”

Well, let’s see, those stories of old were pretty damn racist if you go through them, from Burroughs to Haggard to Kipling. I love adventure stories. I like the original Tarzan novel, mindful of its racism and The Shadow and all that other vintage stuff, but even the great Will Eisner recognized he had done something wrong in his crude depiction of his sidekick character Ebony White in The Spirit comics, and he changed with the times. He did not go backward, he moved forward.

Not like some idiots who can’t see that there’s little difference between Weischel’s art above and this:

Or this:

Someone even made a collection of how frequent this disgusting trope is. This is the shit that Weischel is essentially defending.

Third minor update: Today (March 27), Weichsel posted this along with my communications on his site and to his chat.

Somehow I have doubts that Weichsel doesn’t attract weirdos. I am fully confident he attracts bigots.

We are now in a new era in which the Trump White House has tried to erase Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen from the historical record, and of course, you don’t have to explain any of this to African-Americans, Africans, Black citizens of the Caribbean or Canada or Black people in the UK. They already get it. In ways that I and other white people can’t begin to fathom. It’s only the stupid white people who don’t get it, who are so obtuse, they think, “Gosh golly, it’s supposed to evoke nostalgia for old stories!”

Sure, like a Confederate flag. Ask BIPOC individuals about the stories of old.

About a year ago, Substack had a problem with Nazis — who knows, maybe it still does. It was bad enough that it earned attention from major news outlets such as The Guardian, The Atlantic and NBC News. I personally happen to think it does little good by banning such cretins, and the way to fight ugly hate speech is with eloquent, persuasive enlightened speech.

Weichsel is not a Nazi but what he’s done is just as hateful and worse, it’s insidious, because no one on the Facebook submissions portal immediately spotted a red flag. Which does not mean there isn’t a problem. Worse, there is nothing explicit in Substack’s Content Guidelines against what he’s published. Which does not mean there isn’t a problem.

It’s a topsy-turvy insane world in which a bigot can turn around and call out a critic’s bad language yet conceivably face no social or site penalties for something so outrageously offensive, something that’s demeaning to an entire race of people.

And more is the pity.

You don’t have to worry about those old racist Warner Brothers cartoons or pulp magazine covers or comics. The likes of Manfred Weichsel will supply us all with new ones.

Shame on you, Substack, for letting this guy use your platform this way.

*** Fresh update (March 28)***

One of Weichsel’s supporters has written a retaliatory hit-piece on me, and no, I won’t bother to link to it to give him traffic, and no, there’s no point in returning the favor of identifying him and talking about the guy’s work because, well, yeech. It doesn’t start off well because this cognitive amputee claims I “smeared” Weichsel as a racist. Little pro tip: it’s not a smear if the information is factually correct. Weichsel is by definition a racist for publishing this art, which engages in a racial stereotype, and so is his artist for creating it.

The author of this article moves on to claiming I’m verbose and even though he’s clearly middle-aged, tries to be in with the cool kids by suggesting he had “major MEGO” in attempting to read the The Gifts of Africa Introduction. I don’t doubt it. I’m sure that despite his pretensions of supposedly being a novelist, he often moves his lips as he sounds out words of texts written at a junior high reading level.

What’s most interesting is this goofball gets the chronology of my complaints wrong and obviously doesn’t know how to tell time — which is clear enough from two of his screen shots and the ones I’ve included above. I promoted my article on X well after I sent Weichsel a chat message. This dumbass quotes my article, which even quotes my sending the chat message early on, but somehow I went back in time after I promoted my article to send the chat…?

Nevertheless, this creep is correct that I misspelled Weichsel’s name throughout my article. “I’m also offended that he can’t spell my name right,” Weichsel tells the writer.

Now, normally I would apologize for that bit of sloppiness and bad manners, even to a creep this revolting, but this is a white dude who doesn’t give a shit about giving BIPOC individuals basic respect, and he’s decided he’s the best arbiter for what’s racially offensive. So yeah, fuck that guy.

Weichsel also said this, which is telling: “The cover is not offensive. It’s a funny piece of cheesecake art and 99.9% of people recognize it as such. What is offensive, however, is some guy barging in where he doesn’t belong and telling hundreds of people that they can’t have fun.”

Hmm… Where was this that I barged in? A Klan meeting? I am willing to bet that the “99 percent” is a bunch of white loser incels, and that still wouldn’t make it okay, because Weichsel’s work doesn’t simply sit within his modest little circle jerk. It manages to ooze and leak into mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Amazon and here.

So, it’s absurd that this clown tries to declare what is offensive.

Here is what one Black woman had to say in a DM when I shared with her his cover art: “What’s next the big lip mammie with skin darker than charcoal singing spirituals in a head scarf and with the biggest behind the world has seen?”

And gee, what a coincidence, other Black friends and associates were similarly pissed off.

But let’s address the point made by Weichsel’s cheerleader that I don’t allow replies on my Substack and didn’t bother to allow them on my X promotional post for my article. What this guy ignores is that when I engaged with Weichsel the first time he very cleverly removed the racist reply to my comment by a third person and even his own scolding reply that I be civil. He put these back when it served his purpose. It’s why I sent that chat message to him in the first place, because I couldn’t respond directly to his reply at the time. Nice hypocrisy there.

Yes, I could explain to these racist troglodytes my social media policies and strategies, but why give them the ammunition? The article is out, the promo post on X did its job, and I removed it to deny them their attempt at a coordinated swarm attack in the replies. If someone comes to your door and knocks and then spits in your face, why would you leave the door open? Idiots.

What’s pathetic is that a small mob of racists pretending to be a fan base of “edgy” and “taboo” material think it’s entitled to control the narrative and debate on racism — after these creeps endorse racism. These guys seem to truly believe their views and this disgusting art, which amounts to hate speech, is somehow entitled to dissemination. If you had kept this shit among yourselves on some weird corner of the Dark Web, fine, but you seek to have it as legitimate in the civilized world, and hell, no, to that.

But thanks for archiving my article. You think I’d take it down? You pitiful bigots.

I don’t go by your likes and views now on this shitty little article or the anthology. Give it time. I fully expect you to delete your contributions within a few years out of the usual cowardice that goes hand in hand with racism. Time is on the side of more enlightened attitudes prevailing once again.