When I broke the story that Marvel Comics blackballed Trump supporters and Christian writers from their ranks, very few were paying attention to their steep decline. A FAKE NEWS comic website even took to mocking me about bringing it up. No one is laughing at the funny books now.
Within a couple of weeks story after story came out about Marvel’s disaster. We learned that they were having retailer summits trying to woo retailers back with promises to bring back classic characters and that they were getting rid of some of their social justice initiatives. It broke that Marvel hired a radical Muslim artist who layered anti-Jewish and anti-Christian messages into the backgrounds of his comics. Captain America turned out to be a literal nazi all along in their storylines. The trainwreck kept coming.
And then their big event Secret Empire #1 came out. It’s written by an extreme social justice warrior, Nick Spencer, who regularly posts his hatred of anyone conservative, and mocks the Bible regularly on his twitter account. The book just followed the same path as everything before it, despite all the promises that Marvel made. And so Marvel made a press release this last week after all of the negative reviews and backlash for their failed big event that was supposed to be their summer blockbuster seller.
“we want to assure all of our fans that we hear your concerns about aligning Captain America with Hydra and we politely ask you to allow the story to unfold before coming to any conclusion.”
Don’t judge a book by its book. It’ll get better later. We promise!
They’re beyond even spinning that there’s a good story involved. Beyond even trying to hype for the next thing. It’s damage control and damage control alone. But even when they bring the Marvel universe back to its “classic form” meaning just the characters that people know and love, they’ll still have these same writers and artists layering the lockstep, groupthink 1984-style messages into their comics. The fans are smart now. We follow writers and not just characters anymore– because the base characters don’t necessarily mean anything. In order to create real content people love, real diversity, they need real different perspectives in their writers, and will need someone in touch with Americans and American culture to get there. When will they learn? I imagine it’ll take yet more declining sales.
As the Injustice Gamer says at the end of all of his book reviews: when you play with social justice, the world loses.
I’m still waiting for that phone call from Axel Alonso asking me my thoughts on Spider-Man or Captain America or Fantastic Four. Maybe after For Steam And Country is an even bigger success than my last book, they’ll take notice.
“We follow writers and not just characters anymore– because the base characters don’t necessarily mean anything.”
Dead on. In fact, what is the real difference between most such stories and fanfic, other than legal considerations? Good comics, like good fanfic, strives to keep the main assumptions of who the characters are, respecting their strengths, weaknesses and personalities. Weak comics, like bad fanfic, use the established world and characters to get people to read a completely different story, based on the new author’s own passions.
I think I have an interesting comic premise that is both a fresh take on the superhero genre and thoroughly rips on the SJWs in Big Comics, but I’ve lost a great deal of confidence in my art skills since flunking out of animation school.
I wanna see your art!
What happened to Marvel? And how did the left become so powerful?
When I was a kid, I had a subscription to G.I. Joe comics for several years – and I recently rediscovered my books in a dusty box jammed in the rafters after they’d gone AWOL for over two decades. Not only was G.I. Joe very patriotic pro-American, pro-military, and possibly pro-Second Amendment, but many of the Joes – including Snake Eyes – were Vietnam veterans.
In the 80s, Marvel also put out The ‘Nam, a more realistic war comic from the perspective of an enlisted man in Vietnam. It was written by a Vietnam vet.
I have a co-worker who flew Hueys in ‘nam and in 1972 he came home in civilian clothes just to avoid the abuse he would have received from fellow Americans if he’d worn his uniform.
In the early 80s we were starting to see the American Vietnam vet as the good guy and Marvel was a part of that – and from my point of view as a kid, a BIG part.
What happened?
Yup. Those old GI Joe books are some of the best too. What happened was a complete takeover of the entertainment industry by SJWs.