The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at the Moose Jaw Times Herald in Saskatchewan addressed mainstream PC's influence on established heroes and co-stars, and how it's led to replacing the original white heroes with "diverse" ones in the original roles and costumes. At the start, she makes a good point:

Strong characters are fundamental to a strong story.

This is true in any kind of storytelling. The more interesting a person or character is, the more substance a story will have and the more interest it will generate. Regardless of sexual orientation or ethnicity, as long as the characters and stories are compelling with substance, the better and more engaging the result will be.

Then she'd do a lot better if she were more critical of how poor modern writing is compared to the old.

In the comic industry, we’ve started to see a trend of more diverse characters in comics, but what we don’t see is new diverse comic characters as much. That needs to change.

Yep, she's got that right. Nearly all of recent come at the expense of earlier characters who're white males, and even white females. She seems to be slipping though, with a bit of the following:

For years, many of the most famous and prominent heroes were straight white males such as Superman, Captain America, Batman and Spider-Man. In an attempt to bring more diversity to comics, we’ve seen many comic publishers – including Marvel and DC – introduce more leading female, LGBTQ+ and multicultural characters and this is a good thing.

For instance, in 2014, Marvel Comics introduced a female incarnation of Thor. In 2015, Miles Morales, who is half-black and half-Hispanic, stepped up as Marvel’s new Spider-Man. Super genius Korean-American Amadeus Cho absorbed the radiation that turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk. Sam Wilson, who is black, is the latest Captain America.

On the DC Comics side, there has been a Hispanic version of Green Lantern, a gay Batwoman and a gay Catwoman, Cyborg, who is an African American, has his own ongoing series and in 2015, Wonder Woman officiated a gay wedding, to name a few.

If there's something we could do with far less, it's all the homosexuality propaganda that's been forced down the audience's throats. The part about Catwoman neglects to note that DC's assigned writers contrived the whole alteration of Selina Kyle to bisexual. So that's one character who was certainly tampered with.

And it's not a good thing if it all comes at the expense of the earlier established heroes.

Just this week, Marvel Comics announced that a 15-year-old black girl, Riri Williams, would be the new Iron Man, taking over from Tony Stark starting this fall. Williams is a science genius who enrolled at MIT at the age of 15 and she gets Tony’s attention after building an Iron Man suit in her dorm.

Many of the comments online when the news broke were positive. After all, we live in a diverse world and we all want to see characters we can relate that accurately represent our diverse reality.

However, several online comments also called Marvel out for being lazy by simply replacing well-established male characters with a diverse incarnation of the character.

I think any step in terms of increasing diversity in comics deserves to be applauded. I think it’s all a step in the right direction, but what I think would be even better is to create new, strong characters and put them into the mix with our classic favourites. Instead of making every white male superhero a different ethnicity or gender, I’d like to see new, diverse female, LGBTQ+ and male characters of many different ethnicities play a central role in comic stories. I want to see new characters who are LGBTQ+ from many different ethnicities join in with our traditional heroes. I think that’s what readers are looking for.

While she's right that creating new cast members to work alongside the old makes more sense, I think she's goofing when she says "any", and "all" works. It would be far better if she said she's welcoming for new creations, but that it fails if it's all done at the expense of the earlier cast. Especially when, in the end, what really matters isn't the characters and/or their racial background, but the costumes. The following, however, is where she really screws up big time:

Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel is truly a groundbreaking character. Kamala is an ordinary girl from Jersey City until she gets shapeshifting abilities and adopts the codename Ms. Marvel. Since Kamala took over the comic series in 2014, she has become an international hit. Kamala also is Marvel’s first Muslim character to headline her own comic book. The first volume of Ms. Marvel won the Hugo Award for best graphic story in 2015.

In that case, I'm not so sure the writer of this piece is sincere. If she sees nothing wrong with the Religion of Peace, then it's rather funny she supposedly agrees diversity at the established heroes' expense does more harm than good. She seems oblivious to how the current Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, first began as Ms. Marvel, and the current PC-laden character was conceived with the deliberate intention of serving as a propaganda vehicle, whereas Danvers was shoved into the role once taken by Mar-Vell of the Kree, and later a son named Genis-Vell in the late 1990s.

In addition to new, diverse comic characters, we also need more diverse comic book writers and illustrators. According to Adam Sorice, a writer for pop culture blog The Mary Sue, as of 2015, of the 89 illustrators for Marvel, only eight were women. This just shows that we still have a ways to go.

Oh, we need more than just that. I have no doubt a woman who supports conservative politics won't ever get a job in the mainstream, no matter how talented she is. Yep, we have a long ways to go indeed. Also consider that Marvel/DC are still very male-dominated, and the former is surely less willing to offer a woman the job of CEO. Those who are employed by them now are all just people who conform to their narrow ideas of what superhero comics should be like.

Take what writer Steve Orlando said in an article on hopesandfears.com: “My hope is that eventually diversity will become the norm, so we don’t have to label books as such. And that happen through better representations, which lead to acceptance as audiences get to know characters who are more well-rounded, fuller people, instead of surface level depictions.” Orlando says. “By spreading more and more narratives into fiction, we’re bringing to life the community’s many faces, and deepening richness and diversity within the way the community is depicted.”

I'm afraid for now, it's very, very limited forms of faces. Any Romanians emphasized in the mainstream's visions? Well there you have it, that's far from what I call diversity, and it's regrettable how they keep shoving LGBT ideology down everybody's throats, ditto if they're villifying right-wingers. Like I said, whatever "diversity" they're touting is a very limited, selective form.

Labels: islam and jihad, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics