Marvel Comics is Being Killed by Radical Leftism – But there’s Still Hope

Marvel Comics has not had a good run in the news cycle lately. The most recent is not truly their fault, when one of their cartoonists inserted some ant-Semitic messages into a few strip panels. Marvel quickly acted and decisively, removing the panels from future printings and firing the artist. If they’re guilty of anything here, it’s poor proofreading. Unfortunately, Marvel faces far more serious problems, and these aren’t isolated to one employee and these are entirely Marvel’s fault. Via The Federalist’s Jon Del Arroz:

Marvel Comics is on a steep decline. For nearly two decades their sales have plummeted, as they’ve flooded the stands with too many books and variant covers, killing the collector’s market.

Marvel’s transition from fun superhero adventures to political shilling began in 2011. Brian Michael Bendis, Portland resident and rabid left-wing writer, announced that he would be writing a “half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man” in a relaunch of the reboot version of Marvel they call the Ultimate Universe.

A year later, Marvel went for marketing to the social justice crowd through clickbait news again, this time with the X-Men. They announced that they would have the first gay wedding in comics, and again received droves of media coverage, which propelled “Astonishing X-Men” from its lagging sales of approximately 31,000 units to over 82,000 units. “Astonishing X-Men” was cancelled a year later due to low sales.

Arroz also goes on to do some good research into the political leanings of its authors, and let’s just say that when it comes to political views their is a staunch lack of diversity. And that might be why we saw additional changes:
Other transformations that Marvel decided to force onto their fans are a black, female Iron Man, a female Thor, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, and a black Captain America. Not to be outdone, DC Comics decided to make Green Lantern gay.

But that’s not to say that all changes from white males are necessarily bad. To give my background with superheroes and comics, I’m a casual fan. When I was a kid my favorites were The Fantastic 4 and Captain America and Falcon. I got away from it in my teenage years, and later I liked the Batman and Superhero cartoons in the 90s, and later Justice League. In other words, in normal circles I’m a dork, while in comic book circles I don’t have the geek red to be more than a poser. Let’s just say that I’m not a hard line traditionalist. In the Justice League cartoons of the 00s Green Lantern was now black. Remembering some of the history of the “Green Lantern Corps” I knew that there could be changes, a later episode did include the Hal Jordan I knew from the Superfriends in the 70s, and, frankly, the new GL was cool. It worked. What Marvel’s doing isn’t. Drastically altering many of your major characters is a major “FU” to your fans. So what can they do now, besides hiring new writers, of course?

Here’s where this post will be new to most of you. Back in the 90s a new comic started called Astro City (AC). After an evening hanging out at a friend’s house who is into comic books, I found myself as the first one to come back to life the following morning. I looked for something on the book shelf that my hobbled brain could relatively easily digest, and came across a book with a Superman looking character on the cover. Within minutes I was hooked. Here is AC’s basic premise: instead of trying to make the superheroes more real, and more entwined (as I’m told was happening back then)with today’s society, why not create a world where superheroes are so ridiculously common that people walking down the street don’t even look up when one flies overhead? Some of their heroes are unique, while most are barely veiled rip-offs of ones that we know all too well. What also makes their stories interesting is that they’re told from different perspectives than what we’re used to. Here is what their first anthology, “Life in the City” contained:

•A day in the life of Samaritan (Superman clone), who is one of the members of Honor Guard (Justice League), and showing how tiring it is running from disaster to disaster and never being able to have a life of his own
•A newspaper editor tells a young reporter his personal story from the 1950s about how he stumbled into the first battle fought by the Honor Guard – different characters, and all drawn as 50s-style superheroes. That’s another neat feature of Astro City – everyone ages in real time, not comic book time
•A small time criminal catches a glimpse of Jack-in-the-Box’s face (Spider Man) as he’s changing out of his costume and ponders how to use this information
•A woman who lives in an Eastern-European styled part of town, one where magic works, rides the bus to her job downtown. Her building comes under attack by The Unholy Alliance, but luckily one of her coworkers is dating a member of the Furst Family (Fantastic Four) and has the means to call for help
•An old man living in a boarding home is actually an alien running recon for a potential invasion and decides to base his decision on surveilling one vain, grandstanding superhero, Crackerjack (no equivalent I can think of), for one evening
•Samaritan goes out on a date with Winged Victory (Wonder Woman)

AC went on to publish a number of stories, some stand-alone, some in six part series, including the interestingly pro-Christian “Confessions” anthology. and their 12 part “Dark Era” series that spanned the 70s and 80s. All of their individual comics were eventually released in the standard 6-issue bound format that I would buy, the quality of the stories varied, but overall they were enjoyable and at worst were worth the read. In the mid 00s AC went offline, and re-emerged a few years later with a new publisher. The first anthology was a collection of six marginal stories – worth the read but not a good trend. Their next six-parter, “Private Lives”, went completely off the rails, where each story featured some piece of SJW rhetoric forced onto the fans:

•A day at work for The Silver Adept’s (a sorceress who works for the forces of good) admin assistant. Nothing interesting happens, and the main purpose of this story seems to have been to pass the Bechdel Test.
•The story of a dapper criminal who explains the importance of styles, fabrics, and shoes. There is a small part of a story where he briefly mentions that some of his partners in crime are gay, and while not necessarily an SJW thing, fashion is generally not the kind of talk you hear among straight guys
•A strange entity starts causing the residents of AC to let their romantic feelings come out, leading to panels where we see various couples kissing, including two guys (but no hot babes, which would probably have appealed to most of their demographic!)
•A two-parter about an elderly woman who’s a brilliant scientist who tries to figure out why robots she built are being used for crimes. She eventually finds that the guilty party is her old best friend and student, a jealous and evil woman. Yay STEM! This story was actually pretty good, though
•And finally, the Supervillain harassing the local high school turns out to be the school’s bullied tranny, and when the schools superhero, one of the non-bullying jocks dies the tranny assumes his super-identity and becomes AC’s first Trans hero!

I was almost done with AC, and decided to give them one more chance. Thankfully sanity was restored, and they came back strong. The next anthology, “Lover’s Quarrel”, gave the back story of one of the Honor Guard members, Quarrel (a female Green Arrow), and why she was dating a jerk like Crackerjack since the 90s. This story did a great job of fleshing out two characters who had otherwise been relatively shallow up to this point. It still had some SJW sprinkled in, with the few doctors and scientists they met all being female. One scientist who Crackerjack tried charming with his girlfriend standing nearby happened to be named Daria – I’ll forgive a lot when one drops a Beavis and Butthead reference. And the trend continued – their subsequent stories have been good. AC never had to fix their re-imaged favorites though, unlike Marvel. But Marvel reboots their old favorites often enough to erase these mistakes.

Or not. And maybe DC will follow the same suicidal path and try rebooting the Green Lantern movies with a gay GL. And that’s probably the one thing that will make me want to watch a GL movie even less than Ryan Reynolds in the starring role.

Or Marvel could try being daring in the other direction – make Black Widow a man, but still hailing from some Leftist-dominated Hell Hole, like Cuba, Venezuela, or Chicago, make Falcon white, and make Captain Planet straight!

And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve been wanting to get this Astro City rant out for a while now and used the Marvel story as an excuse. Thanks for indulging me. A more relevant piece to today’s news is coming tomorrow – I promise.

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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog

And that creepy image at the top of the page wasn’t from Marvel, but the old Saturday Night Live skit, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”

Brother Bob

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