Marvel Comics blabbery

it seems like i guess bc of the film contract marvel is dedicated to never putting out a good x-men comic ever again

I thought they were noting the book sales these days? Isn't that why 's Marvel was such a big success?

why MS Marvel is such a big success?

And yet the "TV season" / story-arc format that they heavily favor for comics series these days, really lends itself to "waiting for the collection to come out." So they're shooting themselves in both feet.

― morrisp, Friday, April 7, 2017 1:49 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This reminds me of another arena in which Marvel is flailing at the moment. Being the anal completest I am, I buy all of the MCU stuff when it's released on Blu-ray/DVD. Except Marvel has suddenly stopped issuing their shows on home video in the US. Thankfully, they're still available in region-free format from the UK, but...really?

tbh i can't shake irritation with the misrepresentation of David Gabriel's original comment, which seems to be a pretty clear "i will acknowledge that our valued retailers have told us that mouthbreathing gamergaters high on their own b.o. are blaming "diversity" but we're not really buying it."

i dunno maybe i've got it twisted

wasn't how i read it but maybe i wasn't paying attention.

Yeah, I also read his original comment as a sad observation about conservative comic book guys, not "Ok, we'll be back to all with the white guys you love soon, promise!!"

I take it back, I think the SHIELD tv show did have a short comics endorsement... in the form of a promotional tie-in with the tv show's sponsor of the time, Lexus (?!?)
http://marvel.com/comics/series/19061/lexus_presents_marvels_agents_of_shield_in_the_chase_2014

so there you have it, the consumer segment that likes comics tv shows and are potential Lexus buyers, that's the market

I guess I could go door-to-door selling GRIT subscriptions in a new Lexus....

I read comics and watch the show and drive a used Lexus and I still think this is a really bad tie-in.

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/04/08/marvel-artist-ardian-syaf-hid-anti-christian-jewish-messages-weeks-x-men-comic/

Very very strange

Syaf's apparently been fired now?

Looks like. Marvel's initial promise of 'disciplinary action' was...unsatisfying. Glad they clarified.

More on this guy
https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/officially-fired-marvel-indonesian-artist-ardian-syaf-officially-says-jews-offended-no-mercy/

When Jews are offended, there is no mercy,

and that's how you double down!

what a dickhead

Have some pity, the man's career is over now. I'm actually crying for his plight as I type.

first they came for the bigots, and I said nothing

It's almost like there's a countdown clock in situations like this for the progression from 'expresses regret for saying/doing something that resulted in termination' to 'expresses sentiment whose offensiveness blows the original offensive act out of the water'.

uh......: http://screenrant.com/captain-america-hydra-evil-explained/

there's someone on twitter who's been tweeting a lot about Marvel's inability to figure out how their editorial actions actually affect comic sales (it's going to be an article, I'll link it when it comes around) but has also been delving into how ineffective the Captain America storyline has been by its "we'll not just have it both ways, we'll have it all ways" philosophy

like Captain America is a villain but he's not racist or anything, and HYDRA is this ancient organization that had Nazis but they weren't really antisemitic, and the Sam Wilson stuff where it reflects contemporary politics but they fiercely deny anything is allegorical

secret empire sounds horrible and tbh I stopped reading anything Nick Spencer was writing, even in Marvel Unlimited

I know they're playing the long game with this and that there will probably be an ultimate reveal on par with the one in Secret Warriors (there are rumblings about big shake-ups with the impending Generations) but in terms of optics this was an unfortunate path to go down for more than a couple of months.

I'm sort of talking out of my ass, though, as I'm only caught up to just before Secret Wars atm.

i've been reading the cap stuff; it's near gibberish

that was the other reason I jumped off -- neither the single issues nor arcs are interesting or even intelligible in intent

Hickman had a tendency to make all his characters too terse and his plot arcs were jigsaw puzzle-like in that once you got to the end and all the pieces made a clear picture. The Capn stuff just actively turned me off after a couple issues

Dan Slott's whole Doc Ock Spider-Man switch at least had some heart

So is the idea that Cap as we knew him was only "pretending to be good" this whole time; or was that an "alternate Cap," created via post-WWII kosmic kube manipulation, and now the "original" (WWII-era) Hydra cap has returned? Even the summary in that article was confusing...

it sounds like:
as far as we knew, Cap was normal until the cosmic cube, in the form of a little girl, rewrote reality to make him always hydra

it sounds like that was partially retconned, and he was in fact Always HYDRA (tm) and the Allies actually used a cosmic cube to rewrite reality and win WW2, but they magically preserved his memories and the recent encounter only brought them to the surface

probably they're going to do some rehashed shit about how his prior cube exposure made the reality rewrite not quite take, so it had to come up with a different take. maybe Bucky shows up and tells him "Steve, forget!" and the whole thing is zapped

I guess DC has its gonzo reboots, and Marvel has its gonzo retcons/clones/Skrull impersonations

steve rogers is really a nazi was one of the dumbest ideas in marvel history

no you see he's hydra, which is uhhh not really anti-Semitic they just allied with the nazis for power or something

That is almost the exact party line delivered very knowingly in a recent episode of Agents of SHIELD (where the team is currently stuck in a virtual reality alternate Hydra world). I'm disinclined to believe that comics Marvel is less aware of how tone deaf a position that is than TV Marvel. But then I did recently read the first issue of Cage!, so...

For all DC books are shit, Marvel is where the real impenetrable and/or outright shit lies at the moment. So many of the X-books are unreadable and IvX might as well not have happened - it was an 'event' that not even all the books that should have done paid attention to, and finished with no consequences as far as anyone could tell (except the X-Men now live in Central Park).

This is why I mainly stick to the "fun stuff" on the margins (although lately I haven't really been feeling any of it that strongly... kind of an "ebb" period for me).

Yeah, Marvel seems to have really crashed lately :(

I'm disinclined to believe that comics Marvel is less aware of how tone deaf a position that is than TV Marvel.

almost typed this exact thing yesterday, other than at this point I think the opposite is very much true re: HYDRA

Oh, I just remembered the scene: brainwashed Matrix schoolteacher Coulson smacking down a student's legit concerns about Hydra's alignment with the Nazis by explaining that the organization had been around for centuries. While the show has gone to great lengths in demonstrating that a Hyrdra-run US is basically the apotheosis of a Nazi state.

tbh the show is also doing a better job of keeping continuous numbering while having short, digestible plot arcs

I've been a lonely champion from day one but they're really hitting it out of the park lately, it's true.

Now I feel the need to jump ahead to see how they're mishandling this in the Captain Hyrdra book.

Re: Agents of SHIELD's digestible plot arcs, it was kind of genius for them to split this season up into three discrete mini-arcs. I don't recall a series that's done that before, but it's a very elegant way of handling the unwieldy 20+ episode order of a standard network TV series.

there's someone on twitter who's been tweeting a lot about Marvel's inability to figure out how their editorial actions actually affect comic sales (it's going to be an article, I'll link it when it comes around) but has also been delving into how ineffective the Captain America storyline has been by its "we'll not just have it both ways, we'll have it all ways" philosophy

I'm pretty sure this is Colin Spacetwinks (www.twitter.com/spacetwinks); their essay on Marvel is available here:

https://spacetwinks.itch.io/shut-the-fuck-up-marvel

Correction:
https://mobile.twitter.com/spacetwinks

yeah! I was about to drop that link in today but have forgotten so far. thanks!

started reading it, pretty decent so far.
some of the ground covered in Susanne Polo's article for Polygon about how insane the pre-order direct market is in there, which still seems insane to me that i didn't know this information until so recently

consumers should know how the messages they’re sending with their money are received

this has to be the most depressing phrase (from that Susana Polo clip) that indicts the whole comics sales/marketing system in a nutshell

Buying single issues of Marvel comics in a store serviced by the direct market: Good signal, series may be continued or collected

Buying digital comics: ??? no one knows, no sales numbers released, might do something?

Buying trades: You should start buying the single issues! Trades are for catching up! We only count single issues!

single issues are such a hassle, I'm strictly a trade guy at this point

Yeaaaaaah, it kinda feels like we're one Trumponomicspocalypse away from the complete collapse of the direct market (which, obviously, is my primary concern in the event of a Trumponomicspocalypse).

it's crazy that it hasn't collapsed by now, its soul has been dead since the big Distributorkreig of 94 (was it 94?)

it's another reason why the NYT killing the graphic novel bestseller list was a bummer

but yeah, i am not gonna start buying floppies again, let alone pre-ordering titles for books months in advance, which I never did even as a kid when I was at the comic shop every week. it's absurd

yeah, I feel guilt because the guy I'd chat with who worked at a local comics shop that moved started his own store and I've never even been in. as far as I can tell, he has comics and nothing else, which is awesome

a couple other local stores do the comics/gaming thing and the comics half of the store is half Funko Pop stuff. I have this theory that a significant portion of the entertainment economy is funko-based at this point, in that they occupy tons of space in comics stores, video game stores, hot topic, etc. and took over shelf space for things that people just don't buy in stores anymore

if anything happens to funko there will be a death spiral