The Four Color Media Monitor: Only one male Avenger will be white in the post-Secret Wars MCU

And that's Tony Stark as Iron Man, the one superhero whom Marvel editorial doesn't seem to have tampered with. The Wall Street Journal's written an uncritical look at how the Avengers have been turned into a not so mighty bunch of "more diverse" cast members:

Marvel Comics fans are used to the Avengers lineup changing every so often. In the fall, an “all-new, all-different” Avengers will debut, this time with a new wrinkle that marks the company’s latest push for more diversity within its pages.

But they're not used to it changing without substance to back it up, and this new take is unlikely to be successful with Mark Waid writing it as only a PC-advocate can:

“I like the fact that we ended up with an Avengers team with one white guy on it,” said Mark Waid, who will be writing the new Avengers series.

That one white guy will be Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, a core Avengers member. The new team will also include usual cohorts Thor and Captain America, but not the versions of the characters so many have grown up with. Instead, the female Thor (Jane Foster) and the black Captain America (Sam Wilson, otherwise known as Falcon), who debuted to much controversy last year, will join the crew.

“We got lucky by happenstance in that Thor was the way Thor was and Cap was the way Cap was,” said editor Tom Brevoort. “The fact that we were so balanced that there’s only one white guy is more than we would have expected when we started out. It’s pretty cool.”

"Balanced"?!? They may not think so, but if there's only one white man on the team, then I don't see how it can be that balanced.

The new Avengers, which were featured in a special story for this year’s Free Comic Book Day, will include other fresh faces beyond the new versions of Captain America and Thor. Marvel is looking to capitalize on the breakout success of Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-Muslim teenager from Jersey City named Kamala Khan, whose comics were the company’s top digital sellers last year. Another new member, Nova (Sam Alexander, who has a Latino background), is also enjoying mainstream exposure as a key character on the popular Disney Infinity 2.0 videogame.

Here they go with the comedy again, failing to bring up any sales figures to fortify what they say about the Muslim Ms. Marvel. Even digital sales need clear figures, and they haven't offered those either. As this article also tells, Richard Rider's been replaced as Nova, but anyone who's not a history expert with Marvel's past products wouldn't know from this article who Nova originally was (a creation of Marv Wolfman and John Buscema's in 1976 who later joined the New Warriors).

The article also reveals they're going with a direction that Brian Bendis may have already taken:

This Avengers team won’t have the seemingly unlimited funding from Tony Stark or S.H.I.E.L.D. “They’re poor, and they have to manage their assets,” Brevoort said. “Another new wrinkle: Half the team goes to school. They’ve got hours of operation, and if they get stuck in Zimbabwe, somebody’s going to have to write the absentee slips.”

It sounds like they're taking the whole poverty aspect quite a bit far. When Bendis wrote the now notorious Disassembled storyline in 2004, it was written that Tony ran low on funding for the team HQ. Some Spider-Man writers of recent years have gone out of their way to shove the poverty background back into Peter Parker's life as well, and it's gotten pretty ludicrous already.

In the end, I'd say the new Avengers series is saddled with a mandate that makes white men out to be worthless, and actually diminishes the effectiveness of some of the roles involved for the other cast members too by putting such heavy emphasis on diversity that scriptwriting merits are rendered meaningless. And the high cover prices seen today don't guarantee many will buy the books either, since in this day and age of economic slumps, not many people have unlimited funding to buy comics either.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, Captain America, Iron Man, islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat writers, politics, Thor

I'm impressed they're even bothering with one, anymore. And while Tony is naturally off-putting, he'll be more of a jerk, as we can't have as flawed minority characters in comparison. Or they'll roll their eyes, 'of course, the white male is a jerk.'

They also tried that "we're broke" angle with the Fantastic Four, too. I don't mind it in theory, as there are times you have to ask, "where does their funding come from," but Marvel overplays it, as usual.

Posted by Killer Moth | 12:44 PM