The Four Color Media Monitor

In this sugary column at the Decateur Daily, it's revealed the new TV show based on Bill Mantlo's Cloak & Dagger doesn't use the challenging subject matter his original work did. First, here's one inaccuracy regarding their history:

The pair have a grudge against drug dealers, obviously, so that is their focus in the early Cloak & Dagger stories. The absence of colorful supervillains resulted in grittier stories than you usually find with Spider-Man (whom they ran into frequently) and other “street level” superheroes. [...]

Umm, that's not entirely true they didn't face off against supervillains: an evil wizard named Mister Jip was introduced to serve that purpose during the late 80s. So it's just another laughable reduction of telling history to superficial levels. There's also this fishy part to consider:

One welcome change is scrubbing of the 1982 clichés that informed the kids’ backgrounds. On TV, Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph) is upper-middle class, with a bright future ahead. It’s Tandy (Olivia Holt) who is the budding criminal, a pickpocket essentially abandoned by alcoholic parents. Sadly, one element remains intact, because it is still true in our culture: Tyrone feels guilt and shame from a close acquaintance gunned down by police (in this case, his brother).

If this is meant to allude to Ferguson and imply the white man is always the guilty party, that's horrific.

And then, here's what the TV origin is going to be like:

Also, the origin is shifted back to when Tandy and Tyrone are children, where an accident involving the Roxxon Corporation is the source of their super-powers. Roxxon is Marvel’s all-purpose evil corporation, and we see the accident and its effects in a series of flashbacks. (Evidently drug dealers as villains just don’t have the cachet they used to.)

They don't even feature drugs playing a role in the release of Tyrone and Tandy's mutant powers? Gee, what's the point of this adaptation then? IMO, that's lazy. Personally, I consider C&D one of Mantlo's strongest works at the time he was in the business, and it was even respectable to Judeo-Christianity: C&D turned to NYC-based Father Delgado's church to ask him for guidance, which he was pleased to provide. The TV show may have elements of that, as noted below, but I won't be shocked if the show's writers don't respect religion, given how disrespectful Hollywood's become towards Judeo-Christianity, particularly since the turn of the century. (Plus, what if Roxxon serves as a stand-in for right-wing businesses in this rendition?)

According to this interview with cast members, although the show may still feature drugs as subject matter along with a few other challenging issues, the bad news is the political ones they're putting in here:

The first few episodes alone tackle sociopolitical, economic and health issues with grace, and with an honesty and awareness that doesn’t pull its punches. From sexual assault and the lack of justice that comes to victims reporting the crimes, to police brutality and racism that results in the horrific trend of officers shooting unarmed black men, to addiction and the opioid epidemic currently plaguing our country, Cloak & Dagger is putting the spotlight on it all to give its younger audience respect and awareness of what’s going on in the world today.

So it's relying on the Ferguson narrative, which amounted to a blood libel? As National Review notes, it's a phony narrative. At least this proves Marvel's TV fare is no more immune to leftism than DC's. Did I mention Jeph Loeb is one of the producers? The interview footage continues with the following:

The first four episodes alone bring awareness to the lives and perspectives of marginalized youth like Tandy and Tyrone, a homeless girl and a young black man respectively. What does it mean to you, getting to tell these kinds of stories in the current climate especially on a show geared toward young people?

Aubrey Joseph (Tyrone, a.k.a. Cloak): It’s especially important right now just because we have two groups of people—black men who have been completely dehumanized in our media and society, period, and women are always minimized—they always have to fight for equal pay or ask to be represented as equals. So we have this show that brings humanity to these two groups of people and it’s just time. It’s time for this to come out. I think this is going to jumpstart the new normal.

Olivia Holt (Tandy, a.k.a. Dagger): [Cloak & Dagger has] been around for 30 plus years. It started in the late ’80s/early ’90s and it was perfect for that time. But changing it up a little bit and making it more current and talking about topics that are happening right now in 2018 makes it more relatable. The audience is going to connect to it in a way that they wouldn’t if it was based in a different era or if they were going through things that were happening back then. Now it’s more current and talking about what it’s like to be a young black male in America in 2018 and what it’s like to be a young white female in 2018 is something that we’re excited about. And they’re not just learning how to cope with real teenage life stuff. They’re also learning how to cope with powers on top of all of it, so they’ve got a lot on their plate.

And the production staff sure does have a lot of liberal-influenced politics on theirs. Though there is a certainly oddity and irony in reading them say the media's dehumanizing blacks, because the liberal outfits are, if they validate the notion it's okay for blacks to commit crimes. But I've got a feeling that's not what they mean, and what they're really implying is that the media industry is largely "conservative" when that's far from the case. Also, why doesn't it count to take a look at what it's like to be white guys and black women in today's America? Or Latino and Asian?

In the 1984 miniseries which featured their origins, Tyrone's fellow basketball player Billy was mistaken for a robber/murderer after a thief gunned down a store manager in close proximity, and he fled in fear, while Tyrone's stuttering prevented him from trying to tell the patrolman who shot after Billy that he was innocent (it should be noted the policeman didn't target Tyrone, but demanded he stay out of the way). If the TV show makes it look more like police just gun down anybody they choose as easy targets, that'll be as cheap as it's offensive.

This interview with producer Joe Pokaski (via Breitbart) gives some more insight to how deliberate their approach is with the political bent:

“When I was a kid and opened up my ‘Spectacular Spider-Man’ and saw these two people that didn’t look like me at all, I loved it,” showrunner Joe Pokaski said in an interview with TheWrap. “But for something that was so progressive in the time, it needed a little bit of an update for the now.”

In the original series, Tandy and Tyrone are a vigilante superhero duo — a young white woman from a fabulously wealthy family who wields daggers made of light, and a black man from the Bronx who literally consumes people with his darkness. In the 1980s, the characters marked a big step forward for representation in the Marvel library, but in hindsight, the series’s tone-deaf take on race and woefully impractical costume design leaves something to be desired.

Ah, so in other words, it's just not enough for them, and never is. I can only guess: Dagger's outfit is going to be "practical" in this rendition, or they're going to rely strictly on ordinary clothes. And what's this about the race relations being "tone deaf"? Sounds more to me like an insult to Mantlo, probably because they're confident that with the mental damage he's been suffering from for a quarter century now after the terrible hit-and-run accident he experienced in 1992, he'll never have any comment to make, as he can't think clearly or fully understand their mindsets. The article's definition of takes on race is also unclear. And Tyrone was from Boston, Massachusetts, not from the Bronx borough of New York City.

“So we made some adjustments to Tyrone and Tandy’s stories, in the same way the other MCU movies and television shows do right now, to update them for current times,” Pokaski said.

In it’s first two episodes, which premiered on Freeform on Thursday, “Cloak & Dagger” makes clear it’s out to tell a different story. In this iteration, Tandy is the one with a poor family and troubled home-life, while Tyrone comes from money and attends a posh Catholic private school. In place of the reductive gender and race stereotypes at work in the source material, “Cloak & Dagger” tackles issues like racial profiling, police brutality and the opioid epidemic sweeping across the country.

“Telling this story, particularly of a young man who lost his brother and grew up in a gilded cage surrounded by a world made of fear, felt like the best type of story to tell in 2018,” Pokaski said.

Do I sense he's suggesting wealthy people are all ignoramuses? It sounds ridiculous to me. I've read Marv Wolfman's origin for Cyborg from the special New Teen Titans miniseries printed in 1982, and as a guy who came from a pretty wealthy background via his scientist parents, Vic Stone was anything but uninformed. The C&D producer's reasoning is ludicrous.

Their backstories are almost reversed from the comics, with Tandy coming from this struggling household and Tyrone being much more well-off. Why did you approach it that way?

I don’t remember who it was, but during the election somebody was very much conflating race and socio-economics, and it raised an eyebrow for me. If we removed one from another, it allowed us to look at race independent of socio-economics. Telling this story, particularly of a young man who lost his brother and grew up in a gilded cage surrounded by a world made of fear, felt like the best type of story to tell in 2018.

Would that someone happen to be Donald Trump or another Republican? And why does race matter but not issues like terrorism and people who lazy about on socialism at the expense of the wider public?

How much input did Marvel have? Was there some amount of guidance or were you free to make the show you wanted to make?

A little of both, actually. They care in weird pockets, like the logos and stuff like that, but to be honest, the people at Marvel are very creative. Geoff Loeb is just a great collaborator and a person who’s a brilliant writer in his own right. So they were excited that we were telling a different story, and they were really supportive of what we were trying to do.

Oh please. Loeb, whose first name is spelled Jeph, was one of the most overrated writers when he worked in comicdom proper, all style and no substance. His presence doesn't inspire much confidence he knows what he's doing with the material.

I think this is another reminder that, if Marvel and their production partners for films and TV so desire, they'll shove heavy-handed politics down the viewers' throats at the drop of a hat, just as DC's TV adaptations like Supergirl are now. Much like with the Runaways adaptation, this too looks like it'll be a SJW-influenced vehicle.

Labels: marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics