Marvel Comics blabbery

Ack! I know. I'm putting off the last issue as I don't want it to be over.

i'm starting to wonder what it might say about me that comic books and videogames, two of my favourite things, attract fans who are regularly so fucking vile

brb gonna get into classic literature, crochet and gardening

vision ends well btw

Any medium/genre that appeals to a multitude of age groups is going to unfortunately attract some people with arrested development. But a whimpering fanboy who wishes that dumb girls understood they're not welcome in his cloistered superhero clubhouse are ultimately no different than the dude with Truck Nutz on his pickup who longs for the halcyon days of the '50s when those gays didn't use their mental powers to make unsuspecting hetero folks think of ding dongs rubbing together all the time. The world moves on, some people have difficulty with that, and the worst among them lash out in confusion and fear. It maybe just seems more pronounced in a smaller community. But, yeah, there's a reason why 99% of my comics discussion and celebration has been relegated to very particular online haunts.

Feel like the whole bro/neckbeard culture never made it to the UK, but I could be deluding myself. It's not like we don't have a very conservative culture (obviously), they just aren't very interested in comics or computer games, except from the "ban this sick filth" angle.

Actually, I know next-to-nothing about computer games, so have no idea on that front. And Milo is British, isn't he? So never mind.

xxp true, and clearly the ability to organise like-minded people via social media has made it easier for hateful bags of shit to find each other and conduct harassment campaigns.

i guess maybe (although i fucking hope not) the same witch-hunts against 'sjws' are happening in the online classic literature / crochet / gardening communities too but i'm much more likely to be aware of campaigns by comic book and videogame fans because i pay them more attention.

and yeah, thank god for the relative sanity of ilx when it comes to talking about this stuff because there are so many shitty, horrible forums out there that are unfathomably popular

xxpost To be fair, I had pretty much zero offline exposure to those types in the US but, to be even fairer, my offline exposure to other comics fans is just a few ticks north of zero.

chuck, bro culture might be less of a thing here in the uk but, assuming by 'neckbeard' you mean the redpill/mra mindset, that's definitely and unfortunately an international phenomenon. thanks internet :(

Ah - oh well. I keep thinking everyone else is like ILX and Camden Mega City.

Gonna buy my protest Mockingbird anyway - was actually waiting for the collection. First ish was surprisingly good but felt like it'd read better together.

This is a treacherous thought to entertain but -- I feel like the DC milieu is just a wee bit more nourishing a Petri dish to your mra gamergate swarmer than the marvel milieu. There's something baked right into the characters of superman and (modern) batman that feeds it...

My gf was aware of the furor because she reads, like, actual books or whatever, and Chelsea Cain is apparently another one of those legitimate book writin' people who've taken a stab at comics of late. Sadly, she's probably learned her lesson on that front.

Jon, I don't think that's an unfair assertion at all. Although they admittedly still have work to do, Marvel has made serious strides at diversifying both their creative staff and their character pool in recent years. DC wouldn't let Batgirl get married, and generally still seems to be putting out a lot of regressive stuff (to say nothing of the behind the scenes culture, like the shit that was allowed to go down in the Superman office).

yeah, it feels correct to me, jon - marvel are at least making an effort, miles morales has definitely become a beloved character in spite of the questionable objections people raised at the time of his debut, but they're also publishing the fairly indefensible tartakovsky luke cage book...

It's a big tent!

I would've loved to be a fly on the wall during the discussions about whether or not to release that new Cage book. I don't think Tartakovsky's involvement on its own was enough to justify it even from a business standpoint, so I have no idea what they were thinking but it stands out pretty starkly in relation to the direction in which they've been heading.

i guess it's probably instructive that marvel seem to be working to build a more inclusive cast of high-profile characters while dc have worked to roll back new versions of established heroes in favour of reinstalling hal jordan, barry allen et al

I am curious as to whether there's more going on there than just the enormous batsignal you send up by making Geoff Jones the Chief Creative Officer.

I'm curious to see if DC gets any kind of shakeup if AT&T does ultimately wind up buying WB.

what's up with people who have the worst creative direction ideas having names that are atypical variations on "Jeff"

going to apply for a job in comics, my name is... Joephh

i don't think it's entirely a regime thing, though DiDio and his shitty ethos have been in place far far longer than I expected. The bedrock of modern DC is this this self-pitying neo-nietszschean humorless trip which is always gonna be ambrosia to a certain kind of asshole

assbrosia if u will

my name is jerf please let me direct tv show

BREAKING: DC NAMES NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/4/4c/JoffreyBaratheon-Profile.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20160626094917

My name is J'eehpf, English is sixth language and have traumatic head trauma impairing plot- and character-formation centers of brain, I would like to run your universe.

A few years back Chris Sims (and IIRC others with an even more strident tone?) made the case that part of the problem is DC's hangups about its "legacy heroes" - who, being created during and before WWII are almost all white. So the urge to reach back to classic versions, and the primary pantheon itself, end up kind of accidentally being all-white: http://comicsalliance.com/the-racial-politics-of-regressive-storytelling/

I would push that a lot further though - the urge to go back to a putative golden age of heroic clarity is reactionary on its face, and in America, the "good old days" narrative only makes sense for a certain reactionary slice of the white audience. I'm thinking of "Make America Great Again," but also that viral comic strip where people get excited about traveling back in time to different periods, and the one member of a racial minority ultimately has to point out to these bozos that none of the periods they want to go back to look particularly fun for him. So there's this sense with DC that there's a great enduring canonical past where Heroes Were Heroes, and all changes after a certain date are just disposable products of temporary Crises awaiting the next reboot to the 'classic' status quo, the "real" versions. It's a narrative that basically invokes an all-white, pre-liberal-meddling golden age even before you look up the character sheets and find out that indeed that is exactly what it is.

Marvel is definitely NOT without versions of this problem, and the new Cage comic stands as Exhibit A that there is something really fucked up in their editorial culture/practices, that that could seem normal and just slip on through. But I do think there's something important to Sims's point about the chronology of character creation - there are all these really popular characters with decades of established material whose "real" versions are minorities - there is no white Storm to reboot the character to. And that's even before you get into more recent variants of legacy characters (e.g. Miles Morales) that have managed to 'stick' so far, at least in some capacity.

I think even that gives DC too much of a free pass - the reason that there was a situation to revert to Barry/Wally/Ray Palmer is that DC has a history of passing on mantles (generally to other straight white dudes, granted). Marvel still had all of the original Avengers / FF / Spiderman, so it was more of a break to go "Fuck it, Thor is a girl now, suck it up", and still they did it.

doc casino otm, although it's kinda ironic / sad / disappointing that chris sims was himself responsible for fucking horrible online shit towards val d'orazio

the shit that was allowed to go down in the Superman office

ooh, what shit?

Google 'Eddie Berganza'.

Ahh fuckkkkk, I remember hearing about the D’Orazio thing but somehow didn't connect the dots or internalize that Sims was the perpetrator. Shit.

DC is so basically bad right now it would be funny if it weren't kinda depressing that they are still the biggest/second biggest fish in the pond.

DC comics could feature nothing more than Batman and the Flash discussing hummus recipes or passing a turd back and forth every month and it would still be one of the top two.

Didn't Neal Adams write that comic?

big fan of Batman: Odyssey over here

ditto; wish marvel would hire him to do a similar ongoing series with literally any character
imagine black bolt talking about his problems about talking

the entire comic would be Black Bolt's word balloons getting crowded out by increasingly-pulverized rubble

also an ice axe for some reason

His First X-Men thing or whatever it was called was shit.

re: Chris Sims, I hadn't heard about him, Val D'Orazio or the shit he did to her until now, so I can say that I hated X-Men '92 because it was terrible and not because his bad behavior tainted the comic for me.

I'm reading the old Doctor Stranges starting with the Strange Tales back-of-the-book appearances and I'm at a loss as to why Marvel doesn't even try to do this kind of anthology series anymore - test new characters, let things get weird, keep people interested in a title unto itself rather than just following Spider-Man.

I guess throwing 842 titles a month at the wall and seeing what sticks is effectively like publishing a really expensive anthology. Stuff like Squirrel Girl and Hellcat seem to be doing pretty well under that model, whereas they probably would've been quickly cancelled when Marvel was more conservative wrt the number of monthly books they put out.

Marvel kind of did that with the Spider-Man consolidation/biweekly publishing thing they tried after the One More Day garbage. A lot of the issues had shorter main stories followed by backup stories.

I believe the main reason they had these dual-story issues back in the day had more to do with artificial constraints on how many titles they were allowed to have on the newsstand at a time

sorry for the reddit link, it was the only one I quickly found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/30vuva/how_did_dc_limit_marvels_distribution_from/

the gist of it is that Marvel lost distribution in 1957 and until 1968 they were distributed by the company that owned DC, so they were limited to eight titles per month

xxp - pretty well is relative, the internal numbers I've see have Squirrel Girl/Hellcat-type of titles selling ~10% of Spider-Man, it's actually pretty shocking that they haven't been cancelled.

By anthology, though, I also mean trying different types of stories and target groups. I feel like the way Strange Tales started (Marvel's version of EC SuspenStories/horror) with the marketing push of Marvel AND the opportunity to do oddball stuff with the usual characters on occasion would sell.

Marvel Comics Presents was probably the series that fit the bill when I first started reading comics

i bought the shit outta MCP
Marvel does those infinite digital comix that are sort of fast and easy anthology type stories?

There were quite a few anthology titles put out during Secret Wars and CivWar 2, mostly tryouts for new artists and writers. Taking Sides and Street Dance Battle or something. I can't recall reading any really good ones, though :/

Isn't it the case that anthology formats have traditionally been unpopular with US comic buyers? That's one of the reasons that's usually given for why 2000AD never really caught on out there.