The Four Color Media Monitor

Bounding Into Comics and Douglas Ernst posted some screencaps of messages written by Marvel editor Sana Amanat, just shortly after C.B. Cebulski boasted the former House of Ideas was behind alleged diversity:
She perpetuates the falsehood that Republicans are nothing but racists/sexists on the one hand, and babbles that one day everyone will be "brown". And even claims she supposedly doesn't advocate Islamic sharia. And Marvel continues to keep her on their payroll? This sure doesn't make me feel encouraged to buy their modern output again. BIC says:

Can Marvel really be 100% diverse when people like Sana Amanat are working at the company and believe “diversity is stupid.” Can Marvel be 100% committed to diversity when Sana Amanat claims she wants everyone to be “brown?” Can Marvel be diverse when their Director of Content and Character Development thinks Republicans hate “Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, women, native Americans, the environment, science, and KIDS?”

It doesn’t look like Marvel actually embraces diversity on any level. They don’t really want racial diversity. And they surely don’t want intellectual diversity. Like many people who share her point of view, they’re looking for lockstep conformity to their own worldview. It reminds me of a catchphrase from Star Trek’s Borg. “Resistance is Futile.”

They also spoke with artist Jon Malin about this, and he said:

Regarding the publishing end of Marvel, Cebulski needs to focus less on the color of his employees skin or cultural backgrounds and get down to stone cold f****** business. This PC s*** should have ran it’s course when he came on and it’d be laughable if peoples livelihoods weren’t on the line and retailers weren’t falling left and right. We (fans, distributors, retailers, artists, convention organizers, EVERYONE) need absolute KILLERS in Marvel from top to bottom to turn this ship around and it’s overflowing with f****** talks of race, gender representation of it’s employees and other nonsense while the damn ship is sinking. I’m reminded of a quote from it’s former EIC Joe Quesada, a KILLER, when he said years ago…. allow me to paraphrase to make my point…’What the f*** is MARVEL COMICS anyway? They’d be better off calling it PC Comics. At least people know what PC is. I mean, they have Wolverine and Spider-man, and they don’t know what to do with them. That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the f***?'

The mistake Cebulski made besides not cross-examining employees like Amanat was stating Marvel was focused on diversity instead of stating their focus was on entertainment and making the audience happy with decent escapism. However, Quesada's quote is hilarious considering within a short time of his ascension to EIC during 2001-2011, he turned the company very PC, barring depictions of smoking, for example, a very short time after Marvel stopped using the Comics Code Authority. One of the few who was allowed to depict anybody smoking at the time was Brian Bendis when he wrote Avengers. And let's not forget how PC Quesada was with the Spider-Man lore, tarnishing Gwen Stacy before going out of his way to break up Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane Watson through a pact with Mephisto. And that's just a few of the examples that took place when Quesada was EIC, and got considerably worse by the late 2000s.

For now, if something's clear, Amanat has to be held accountable for her crude garbage comments, and should be told to apologize, which so far, she doesn't seem to have done. Until then, the audience can vote with their wallets and avoid anything she's working on.

Update: here's more on the issue at Big League Politics (via Blunt Force Truth).

Labels: bad editors, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, politics