The Four Color Media Monitor

Movie Pilot's spoken about how Civil War 2 turned out to be a flop - much like anything else in sales receipts these days - with readers who're thankfully tired of Marvel/DC alike turning out company wide crossover after company wide crossover every year, often at least twice in one. But in stressing how they should recover, they cite some pretty weak, dishonest, and politicized material, they screwed up the real impact this could've had. In fact, at the beginning, they say:

Marvel's Civil War was a massively successful comic that inspired an even more successful movie.

Umm, did it sell in the absolute millions? Then please, kindly quit claiming the 2006 ultra-leftist intellect-insulter had stratospheric sales. Heck, if I were new to comics and found out what the crossover was like after seeing the movie, I'd feel depressed and/or embarrassed, because the scriptwriters sure weren't choosing the best source material.

Marvel's Civil War II was...not.

Actually, it was a disaster on the scale of the ending that saw Iron Man and Captain Marvel come to blows at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Instead of recapturing the original arc's bold storytelling, Marvel saw a backlash from fans and critics who felt the company was just trying to cash in on another event comic.

At least they're more accurate about this part. Worst, Marvel's hack writers were doing it for practically the same reasons they did the first: as little more than leftist propaganda with which to attack the Patriot Act. Don't be shocked if they have plans to attack any policy Donald Trump wants to draft in the coming year with yet another crossover. And the first crossover was not bold if it's only intention was to depict heroes fighting each other. It wasn't even bold if it was going to connect with dozens of other Marvel ongoing series and miniseries and crowd out stand-alone storytelling.

Civil War II needed to be a win in order to keep some momentum going forward for Marvel Comics in 2017. Sadly, Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez failed to live up to expectations, almost solely because of the tired premise: heroes fighting heroes over a philosophical debate. (Spoilers follow!)

In this case, some of Earth's Mightiest believed it was better to stop crimes before they were committed; others believed that punishing pre-crime (to borrow a phrase from Minority Report) would be unjust. This led to various characters being on either Team Iron Man or Team Captain Marvel.

It simply wasn't a fresh enough idea to warrant an event comic of this magnitude. Also, Captain Marvel was written extremely poorly and it was hard to see where she was coming from with her acting more like a villain than the wonderful person that we know she is.

First it was Iron Man depicted more like a villain, and now it's Carol Danvers, who should've remained in the Ms. Marvel role. They're correct about heroes vs heroes being done to death. But then, it already was when the first crossover came out, so why don't they think of reevaluating that for a change?

And they botch their suggestions for how to mend their image when they start citing the Muslim Ms. Marvel as an example of "great" writing:

Comic books are finally heading back in a direction where hope and compassion take center stage. Ms. Marvel does this extremely well by balancing out Kamala's duties as a superhero and as a Muslim teenager from New Jersey. By showing her struggles to maintain normalcy with her family and keep her friendships intact, it allows us to truly care about her because everyone can relate to those situations.

Yes, everyone can relate to a religion of violence, can't they? A religion that also sanctions "honor" killings when a daughter even dares suggest she's willing to do something the parents disapprove of, like dating a boy they're against. Movie Pilot's not doing any service at all if they uphold pushing propaganda down the readers' throats. If this is what it's come down to, that's just one more reason why it's ill-advised to think hope and compassion are returning, especially when it's selective at worst. At least the website admits there's too many titles and spinoff series being published:

Do the Avengers really need two different books with two different teams? Can you tell me the difference between the All-New Avengers and the Uncanny Avengers?

Indeed, there's no need. A lesson that should've been learned after sans-adjective X-Men turned out to be less successful than claimed in 1991, with huge crates of copies stacked up in many stores. Today, at nearly 4 dollars a pamphlet issue, it's even more of a ripoff than before. They also agree that replacing established heroes deliberately with new characters of different race/sexual orientation is unnecessary and doesn't improve story quality or sales:

No offense to Riri Williams, but people read an Iron Man comic to see what crazy thing Tony Stark will do next. Riri is a cool character and she would've proved popular enough to receive her own book without Tony getting sidelined. We'll see how receptive readers are to the A.I. version of him.

Marvel's capable of this. Kate Bishop's Hawkeye and Jane Foster's Thor have been well-received by both fans and critics, and Miles Morales is a breakout star...but we still have Clint Barton, Thor Odinson and Peter Parker. So, was it really necessary to kill Bruce Banner and War Machine in Civil War II?

Absolutely not. Something's certainly wrong when they're willing to wipe out a character of black background (Jim Rhodes) just as much as a character of white (or even green) background.

One hates to keep bringing up DC, but they went back to legacy characters with DC Universe: Rebirth, and that's currently working out extremely well both critically and commercially. [...]

Umm, is it? Sales certainly don't back up their claim of commercial success, and even now, artistic results are far from magnificent.

They also cite how comics are being used to sell movie tickets (but not the other way around):

This was one of the biggest complaints that fans had for Civil War II. The integrity of the story felt sacrificed in order have more connections to the heroes' on-screen counterparts. Honestly, what were the Guardians of the Galaxy doing taking part in some war on Earth when their best stories come from these epic space operas?

Which brings us back to the plague of crossovers: how do they expect moviegoers to feel up to buying any of their products, let alone comics readers, if they charge 4 dollars? Or, why should readers be encouraged to buy movies when the crossovers are such junk? And as they mentioned, the Civil War sequel was far less successful than the first, and even that was nothing to crow over.

The website makes some good points, but dampens a lot of them thanks to their leftist politics.

Labels: crossoverloading, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, sales, violence