Beyond The Panels #7- Marvel, We Should Have A Talk or A One Sided Intervention
So, in my second post, I talked about how I felt about the state Marvel a little bit. When I was first thinking about what I was going to write, I figured it was going to be a lot more mean spirited, but it wasn't. See, no matter what, I do love Marvel. I want good things from Marvel. I want Marvel to be good.
Now, I don't read every Marvel book- most fans don't have the money to read all seven thousand books Marvel puts out a month (we're going to to talk about that in a bit, so hold on). However, I get this feeling from Marvel. Something is rotten there. Something is wrong. I speculated a bit about the whys of this in my second post, but let's go a little further.
For starters, I get the feeling Marvel doesn't care very much about its comic fans. See, right now, Marvel Entertainment is one of the biggest media companies of them all. Their movies make billions of dollars. Some of their TV shows are rather acclaimed. Kids buy Marvel toys. Adults wear Avengers shirts. The vast, vast majority of these people have never read a comic and they never will, yet they'll still give their money to Marvel and there are more of them there are comic fans. So, it would make sense for Marvel to cater to these people, right? Economically, you go where the money is.
There's a big problem with that, though.
Right now, Marvel as a whole is riding high off movie money. That money enticed Disney to come in and buy them up. Superhero movies are the biggest thing in Hollywood right now and Marvel, regardless of the quality of their movies (which, let's be real, is fair to middling for the most part), are the leaders there. Do you really think this state of affairs is going to stay forever? Do you really think an Avengers movie without RDJ, Chris Evans, Scarlet Johansson, or any of the others is going to make a billion dollars? Did Doctor Strange kill it? Shit, even Spider-Man: Homecoming wasn't the box office titan everyone hoped it would be. The popularity of types is cyclical. Westerns used to be the biggest movies. Now, unless you have a stellar cast, no one is going to see your Western.
That's going to be superhero movies one day.
Eventually, they'll have told all the stories they can tell with these types of movies and people will move on. The movies will still make money, but they won't be the titans they are right now. What happens then? Well, for one thing, Disney will drop them like a bad habit. Disney has no problem doing that sort of thing, either. Disney owned the Power Rangers for a while and when they stopped being as profitable, they got rid of them. So, who's left once the movie fans and Disney are gone?
Comic fans. And, as anyone who reads comics right now knows, Marvel isn't really treating us very well.
Marvel has spent the last few years trying to tailor their comic line to movie fans more and more, which to an extent is sort of smart- you want people to be able to walk out of the theater, walk into a comic store, and be able to pick up one of your books and see familiar things. The problem with that, though, is that vast, vast majority of movie fans who aren't doing that. See, it's not like comics are a new thing. If those people wanted to read comics, they would have been all these years. They don't want to. They never have and never will. So, why cater to an audience that 95% of them will never read a comic? For those of us who do read the comics, we kind of don't like when shit like this gets done, because they never do it in a smart way. It's always a dumb, rushed job that replaces something we like with something that works in a movie. I don't want to get into Nick Fury Jr, but I will.
It's so stupid.
So, way back in 2001, there was a comic called The Ultimates. It was set in another universe and their Nick Fury looked like Samuel L Jackson. It was fucking cool. It's also the reason the movie Nick Fury looks that way. Again, pretty fucking cool. Marvel decided they wanted the Nick Fury in the comics to look like movie Nick. Instead of doing something like, say, moving Ultimate Nick Fury over to the regular Marvel Universe (there was precedent for this- the character has went to another universe before), they created Marcus Johnson, the illegitimate son of the regular universe Nick Fury and some random black woman, scarred him up to look like movie Nick, had him abandon his given name, and named him Nick Fury Jr. They then spent a few years trying to make us like him. It didn't work. They had a Nick Fury who looked like movie Nick who we already liked and instead of using him, they created a character that most fans still don't care about.
See how stupid that is? That's how Marvel incorporates their movie stuff. It's insulting to their fans and they don't seem to care. Now, in recent years, they've cooled that shit down, but they still seem to have a casual disdain for their comic fans. If you look at the Twitter feeds of creators like Dan Slott and Nick Spencer, you can see the disdain they hold for any fans who question them or Marvel in general. Joe Quesada, former editor in chief and now Chief Creative Officer, has always had the idea that pissing fans off is better than making them happy, because it keeps them around, hoping you'll do something that makes them happy again. That attitude seems to have proliferated at Marvel.
Marvel has also began to blame fans for a lot of its problems right now. For the last two years, Marvel has been doing a more diversity based stuff- shifting character mantles around and such. Now, there has a been a vocal contingent of fans against this sort of thing, but racist shitheads always scream pretty loud. However, a lot of these stories have been really good. Sales, though, aren't what they have been in the past. So, Marvel, instead of looking inward and asking if they have been telling good stories, are blaming fans. They are saying fans don't want diversity, which isn't true- right now, the fan community is the most diverse its ever been. What we want is good stories and a lot of these books haven't been good or they've been way too preachy and back patting about it. Like, give me a feminist secret agent. Have her call out the patriarchy and beat people's asses. However, don't act like that's what everyone wants and get all mad when not enough people buy it. I'm super liberal- I'll read stuff like that. Not everyone else will, so you have to balance it. You can have the feminism and the ass-kicking. If you go too much in either direction, you're going to alienate part of the audience, when what you should be doing is finding ways to be subversive and use your secret agent book to get more people into feminism. You just need a better caliber of writer, which is something that is in short supply at Marvel right now, which is another problem.
Name five amazing writers at Marvel right now.
I can name one and that's Jason Aaron. The rest run the gamut from good (Spencer, Ewing) to hit or miss (Soule, Slott) to eh (waaay too many to name). Now, as far as it goes, Marvel has never been a writer driven company- the best writers have always either started at DC or did their best work there. However, it's a big problem when most of your contracted guys are so mediocre and that your main contract guy has made a career out of being the most hit or miss guy of them all- Brian Bendis. Say what you will about him, but I never knew the Avengers could be so boring until he wrote them. I never that an event book could be mostly talking head bullshit until he wrote them. I never thought there would be an X-Men run I would just lost interest in eventually until he came on the books. There are some Bendis books I like (Daredevil, Dark Avengers, Siege), but most of it is boring, talky bullshit with badly written action and jokes that just aren't funny. He's sort of set the tone for the company in the last fifteen years and it has started to sink the whole thing.
Right now, DC is a sales juggernaut. Since their Rebirth initiative, they haven't cancelled a single book. On the other hand, I can't even tell you how many Marvel books have been cancelled since then. Marvel's market share is still equivalent to DC's, though, because they publish way more books and they are more expensive. It's the kind of manipulative bullshit that someone who knows they are losing would do- artificially inflate the whole thing to make them look better and more competitive.
To combat all this, Marvel has announced their new Legacy initiative. Books are going back to their old numbering.... and that's really it. For the most part, the same creators we've complained about are on the same books. Marvel has released images of special lenticular covers for books.... but in some cases, retailers have to double orders on their books to get to order them, which screws over the retailers because these books aren't high selling books to begin with and it would stick them with a lot of product they can't get rid of. It feels like it's way too little, way too late, combined with a massive dick move to people who have been Marvel's retail partners.
So, what can be done? How can Marvel get back to being the sales leader? How can Marvel get back the love of people like me?
Well, it's really simple- fucking respect us a little. See, we like good stories that make us happy. We want to enjoy this shit, not keep getting pissed and hoping you make it up to us eventually. Catering to the audience completely in fiction isn't the best thing to do, but that doesn't mean you can't do it a bit. Hire better writers or work harder to find the right places for your existing writers. Dan Slott has been writing Amazing Spider-Man for almost a decade now and most fans agree it's time for him to move on. Slott is not a bad writer, but he's pretty much had his say on Spider-Man. Give him another high profile assignment to keep him from jumping ship and move someone else to Amazing. If you aren't going to hire new people, shake things up a little. While you're doing that, maybe look at the people at the top and think if maybe they deserve to keep their jobs. The head leads and it has been leading to a place where diehard fans are mad at it and sales are tanking. Maybe it's time to replace them.
Comic fans have stuck by Marvel through some hard times. It's because of us that Marvel even exists at all- we stuck by the company in the doldrums of the mid 90s. When everyone else is gone, we'll still be here. Alienating us and pissing us off is just going to make it so we don't want to come back. Marvel is a beautiful thing, full of amazing characters and great ideas and it doesn't deserve what is happening to it now- led by bad stewards, catering to an audience that will leave it behind when the next big thing hits, alienating its core, and generally being subpar.
I want Marvel to be the best it can be. It's better for the whole comic industry if Marvel is great, too. Right now, it's not, but that can always change. Put some money into hiring better writing talent, put out fewer books, and go back to being the House of Ideas, not just another room in the House of Mouse.
Next Issue: So, a lot of people say that event comics are ruining the industry. Well, I'm gonna look at the pros and cons of them next time here on...
Beyond The Panels!
Now, I don't read every Marvel book- most fans don't have the money to read all seven thousand books Marvel puts out a month (we're going to to talk about that in a bit, so hold on). However, I get this feeling from Marvel. Something is rotten there. Something is wrong. I speculated a bit about the whys of this in my second post, but let's go a little further.
For starters, I get the feeling Marvel doesn't care very much about its comic fans. See, right now, Marvel Entertainment is one of the biggest media companies of them all. Their movies make billions of dollars. Some of their TV shows are rather acclaimed. Kids buy Marvel toys. Adults wear Avengers shirts. The vast, vast majority of these people have never read a comic and they never will, yet they'll still give their money to Marvel and there are more of them there are comic fans. So, it would make sense for Marvel to cater to these people, right? Economically, you go where the money is.
There's a big problem with that, though.
Right now, Marvel as a whole is riding high off movie money. That money enticed Disney to come in and buy them up. Superhero movies are the biggest thing in Hollywood right now and Marvel, regardless of the quality of their movies (which, let's be real, is fair to middling for the most part), are the leaders there. Do you really think this state of affairs is going to stay forever? Do you really think an Avengers movie without RDJ, Chris Evans, Scarlet Johansson, or any of the others is going to make a billion dollars? Did Doctor Strange kill it? Shit, even Spider-Man: Homecoming wasn't the box office titan everyone hoped it would be. The popularity of types is cyclical. Westerns used to be the biggest movies. Now, unless you have a stellar cast, no one is going to see your Western.
That's going to be superhero movies one day.
Eventually, they'll have told all the stories they can tell with these types of movies and people will move on. The movies will still make money, but they won't be the titans they are right now. What happens then? Well, for one thing, Disney will drop them like a bad habit. Disney has no problem doing that sort of thing, either. Disney owned the Power Rangers for a while and when they stopped being as profitable, they got rid of them. So, who's left once the movie fans and Disney are gone?
Comic fans. And, as anyone who reads comics right now knows, Marvel isn't really treating us very well.
Marvel has spent the last few years trying to tailor their comic line to movie fans more and more, which to an extent is sort of smart- you want people to be able to walk out of the theater, walk into a comic store, and be able to pick up one of your books and see familiar things. The problem with that, though, is that vast, vast majority of movie fans who aren't doing that. See, it's not like comics are a new thing. If those people wanted to read comics, they would have been all these years. They don't want to. They never have and never will. So, why cater to an audience that 95% of them will never read a comic? For those of us who do read the comics, we kind of don't like when shit like this gets done, because they never do it in a smart way. It's always a dumb, rushed job that replaces something we like with something that works in a movie. I don't want to get into Nick Fury Jr, but I will.
It's so stupid.
So, way back in 2001, there was a comic called The Ultimates. It was set in another universe and their Nick Fury looked like Samuel L Jackson. It was fucking cool. It's also the reason the movie Nick Fury looks that way. Again, pretty fucking cool. Marvel decided they wanted the Nick Fury in the comics to look like movie Nick. Instead of doing something like, say, moving Ultimate Nick Fury over to the regular Marvel Universe (there was precedent for this- the character has went to another universe before), they created Marcus Johnson, the illegitimate son of the regular universe Nick Fury and some random black woman, scarred him up to look like movie Nick, had him abandon his given name, and named him Nick Fury Jr. They then spent a few years trying to make us like him. It didn't work. They had a Nick Fury who looked like movie Nick who we already liked and instead of using him, they created a character that most fans still don't care about.
See how stupid that is? That's how Marvel incorporates their movie stuff. It's insulting to their fans and they don't seem to care. Now, in recent years, they've cooled that shit down, but they still seem to have a casual disdain for their comic fans. If you look at the Twitter feeds of creators like Dan Slott and Nick Spencer, you can see the disdain they hold for any fans who question them or Marvel in general. Joe Quesada, former editor in chief and now Chief Creative Officer, has always had the idea that pissing fans off is better than making them happy, because it keeps them around, hoping you'll do something that makes them happy again. That attitude seems to have proliferated at Marvel.
Marvel has also began to blame fans for a lot of its problems right now. For the last two years, Marvel has been doing a more diversity based stuff- shifting character mantles around and such. Now, there has a been a vocal contingent of fans against this sort of thing, but racist shitheads always scream pretty loud. However, a lot of these stories have been really good. Sales, though, aren't what they have been in the past. So, Marvel, instead of looking inward and asking if they have been telling good stories, are blaming fans. They are saying fans don't want diversity, which isn't true- right now, the fan community is the most diverse its ever been. What we want is good stories and a lot of these books haven't been good or they've been way too preachy and back patting about it. Like, give me a feminist secret agent. Have her call out the patriarchy and beat people's asses. However, don't act like that's what everyone wants and get all mad when not enough people buy it. I'm super liberal- I'll read stuff like that. Not everyone else will, so you have to balance it. You can have the feminism and the ass-kicking. If you go too much in either direction, you're going to alienate part of the audience, when what you should be doing is finding ways to be subversive and use your secret agent book to get more people into feminism. You just need a better caliber of writer, which is something that is in short supply at Marvel right now, which is another problem.
Name five amazing writers at Marvel right now.
I can name one and that's Jason Aaron. The rest run the gamut from good (Spencer, Ewing) to hit or miss (Soule, Slott) to eh (waaay too many to name). Now, as far as it goes, Marvel has never been a writer driven company- the best writers have always either started at DC or did their best work there. However, it's a big problem when most of your contracted guys are so mediocre and that your main contract guy has made a career out of being the most hit or miss guy of them all- Brian Bendis. Say what you will about him, but I never knew the Avengers could be so boring until he wrote them. I never that an event book could be mostly talking head bullshit until he wrote them. I never thought there would be an X-Men run I would just lost interest in eventually until he came on the books. There are some Bendis books I like (Daredevil, Dark Avengers, Siege), but most of it is boring, talky bullshit with badly written action and jokes that just aren't funny. He's sort of set the tone for the company in the last fifteen years and it has started to sink the whole thing.
Right now, DC is a sales juggernaut. Since their Rebirth initiative, they haven't cancelled a single book. On the other hand, I can't even tell you how many Marvel books have been cancelled since then. Marvel's market share is still equivalent to DC's, though, because they publish way more books and they are more expensive. It's the kind of manipulative bullshit that someone who knows they are losing would do- artificially inflate the whole thing to make them look better and more competitive.
To combat all this, Marvel has announced their new Legacy initiative. Books are going back to their old numbering.... and that's really it. For the most part, the same creators we've complained about are on the same books. Marvel has released images of special lenticular covers for books.... but in some cases, retailers have to double orders on their books to get to order them, which screws over the retailers because these books aren't high selling books to begin with and it would stick them with a lot of product they can't get rid of. It feels like it's way too little, way too late, combined with a massive dick move to people who have been Marvel's retail partners.
So, what can be done? How can Marvel get back to being the sales leader? How can Marvel get back the love of people like me?
Well, it's really simple- fucking respect us a little. See, we like good stories that make us happy. We want to enjoy this shit, not keep getting pissed and hoping you make it up to us eventually. Catering to the audience completely in fiction isn't the best thing to do, but that doesn't mean you can't do it a bit. Hire better writers or work harder to find the right places for your existing writers. Dan Slott has been writing Amazing Spider-Man for almost a decade now and most fans agree it's time for him to move on. Slott is not a bad writer, but he's pretty much had his say on Spider-Man. Give him another high profile assignment to keep him from jumping ship and move someone else to Amazing. If you aren't going to hire new people, shake things up a little. While you're doing that, maybe look at the people at the top and think if maybe they deserve to keep their jobs. The head leads and it has been leading to a place where diehard fans are mad at it and sales are tanking. Maybe it's time to replace them.
Comic fans have stuck by Marvel through some hard times. It's because of us that Marvel even exists at all- we stuck by the company in the doldrums of the mid 90s. When everyone else is gone, we'll still be here. Alienating us and pissing us off is just going to make it so we don't want to come back. Marvel is a beautiful thing, full of amazing characters and great ideas and it doesn't deserve what is happening to it now- led by bad stewards, catering to an audience that will leave it behind when the next big thing hits, alienating its core, and generally being subpar.
I want Marvel to be the best it can be. It's better for the whole comic industry if Marvel is great, too. Right now, it's not, but that can always change. Put some money into hiring better writing talent, put out fewer books, and go back to being the House of Ideas, not just another room in the House of Mouse.
Next Issue: So, a lot of people say that event comics are ruining the industry. Well, I'm gonna look at the pros and cons of them next time here on...
Beyond The Panels!
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