The Four Color Media Monitor

During the new Secret Wars, Marvel is launching a new Avengers title starring mainly women of the team. Unfortunately, one of the two co-writers is a bad lot:

Marvel Comics is unveiling a new group of female Avengers. And they've got a Hulk.

While Iron Man and Captain America hold down the team in the movies, She-Hulk, Dazzler, Medusa and Nico Minoru are Earth's mightiest superheroines in the pages of A-Force, a series written by G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel, X-Men) and Marguerite Bennett (Angela: Asgard's Assassin) and drawn by Jorge Molina (X-Men) that debuts during Marvel's massive Secret Wars event.

Once there was a time I would've been delighted to see Marvel launching a title like this, and if an old pro like Louise Simonson were assigned, that would've been good too. Even Ann Nocenti would've once been a great choice for a writer. But I stopped reading newer Marvel/DC products a decade ago as quality went down the drain, all for the sake of PC ideas for what superhero comics should be like, crossovers crowded out natural flow, and propagandists like Wilson give no reason to revise my opinion or feel encouraged to try again.

In Arcadia — what Wilson describes as "this feminist paradise" — a familiar threat to Marvel fans arises again and because of it, the new team of A-Force is formed to be the superhero standard bearer.

I wonder what kind of "feminist" paradise it'll be like? The leftist kind? Probably, and that only scuttles it further. And even if not, look who's talking about feminism, somebody upholding the Religion of Peace, an ideology that despises even leftist feminism.

A-Force marks the 15th female-led comic currently published by Marvel, and the company's new focus on women, both readers and characters, has been successful thus far.

While event books usually generate orders of around 100,000 units, according to Marvel, the female-specific titles are more than doubling that number: Thor No. 1, which introduced the new female thunder god last fall, and the upcoming March debut of the Star Wars series Princess Leia have sold more than 200,000 copies, and pre-orders of this month's Spider-Gwen comic are upward of 250,000.

And again, what do sales look like after a few issues? Judging from sales returns, it's pretty obvious why they aren't doing well with a female audience either, and most of them have already noted they prefer independent companies more, because they're not clogging up their arteries with stunts and crossovers at the expense of writing quality. 200,000 isn't much more than 100,000, and neither is 250,000, so I'm not sure what they're so enthused about here.

Wilson has been one of the faces of this movement toward diversity, writing Ms. Marvel and X-Men and inking a deal in December to be a Marvel-exclusive scribe, and "it's unexpectedly awesome," she says.

Nope, she's only been their idea what counts as "diverse", based more on her political standings. With people like Buckley/Quesada/Alonso in charge, there's no chance we'll ever see a conservative-leaning woman get the job, let alone receive creative freedom.

"We're having very interesting discussions in comics about gender, about competing ideologies, about how to be inclusive without making fans of the classic canon feel alienated. These are big questions for the whole industry right now and everybody is grappling to answer in fresh and relevant ways. So to be part of that is very, very cool for me."

In that case, why did they go to such lengths to have Nick Fury deprive Thor of access to his hammer? Why did they do such awful steps with Steve Rogers?

The Wall Street Journal's no less sugarcoated about sales:

Wilson, in a telephone interview with Speakeasy, said it is a great time to be a woman in the comic-book world, and the numbers back her up. Recent female-led “event books” have driven bigger orders than usual. The female Thor‘s debut issue had more than 200,000 orders, for example, and the first volume of collected issues for Ms. Marvel, which Wilson wrote, was a New York Times best-seller.

They sure don't tell what sales results were for any trades published. The WSJ's just made a joke of themselves by acting like 200,000 is a big deal, when it's not. And what are the books selling a few issues in? Most of them sink back down to far more mediocre numbers soon enough.

The words “gimmick” and “stunt” will be thrown at this latest announcement, and it is hard to dispute the logic behind this kind of skepticism. Yet, the comics business has always been about gimmicks and stunts, so there’s nothing new to see here in that regard. In fact, Marvel’s rival, the Time Warner-owned DC Comics, unveiled earlier this morning a broad set of changes for its comic-book universe, vowing to go “back to basics” with legendary heroes such as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, while promising a more diverse approach to appeal to a broad swath of fans. ”Whether you’ve been a DC fan your whole life, or whether you are new to comics — there will be a book for you beginning in June,” Dan DiDio, DC Entertainment’s co-publisher, said in a news release.

But that's just the problem: stunts have long crowded out reason and plausible storytelling. It's not being sold on the quality of writing, but on the premise of having racial minorities, women or LGBTs in the spotlight, and if it's a case where the original stars are forcibly, artificially supplanted by the same, then it just signals what to expect from the writers and editors assigned. One of the article commentors says:

It's a gimmick for one pure and simple reason - they're going out of their way to point out the gender. In any other event, the plot expectations, character backstories, powers, etc, are at the forefront. Here? "Check it out, women superheroes."

A superhero that shoots webs from his wrists or tosses fireballs from his eyeballs is a good premise.

"Being female" isn't a premise. This is why they usually turn out so badly.

If the gender of the character is the biggest selling point, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the writing.

Exactly. The same goes for replacing Captain America with Sam Wilson, based solely on his racial background, not whether it's plausible or the writing is talented.

And since we're talking about crossovers, does anyone really think Marvel will cease with their flood of company wide events even after this one? Neither do I. When they want to do a crossover, they'll do it, under the confidence the mindless addicts will give it their full, unquestioned backing, right till the bitter end, no matter how much the issue costs.

Labels: Avengers, crossoverloading, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, women of marvel