The BBC's sugarcoated coverage of Marvel's 80th anniversary
The BBC published a pretty biased item about Marvel's 80th year, which even celebrates some of the recent propaganda tactics they've engaged in this past decade:
At the end of the puff piece:
In the end, what also matters is that, due to the machinations of Quesada and company, Marvel's latest anniversaries aren't worth celebrating.
Recent movies like Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame made more than a billion dollars each at the global box office.It's just like them to gloss over the pretentious of the CM movie to boot, without acknowledging that, at the US box office, at least, it underperformed. It didn't take in quite as much as the Wonder Woman adaptation starring Gal Gadot.
Which isn't bad going for a company that nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s.
But Marvel's characters and stories tried to do more than just relate to its readers. They also reflected social change taking place in America.Ah, look at that, they're even perpetuating the LGBT hijack of the X-Men. It's not enough the mutant team serve as metaphors for race relations, it just has to be homosexuality as well. No wonder the citation of social justice, even for its time, conveys a sense of dismay at this point. One of the reasons why comics were an early victory for social justice propagandists was not only because it's an overlooked medium, but also because practically everyone involved allowed it to be. Now, here's where the article really goes sugary:
"There was an emphasis on quite important issues of the time, issues of social justice, fighting prejudice," says Chris.
"Characters like X-Men and the Black Panther were challenging issues of prejudice in a divided nation."
The X-Men, hated for powers they were born with and have no control over, have been seen as a metaphor for prejudice against minority groups such as the LGBT community.
In recent years, it has introduced more diverse characters like the first black Spider Man, Miles Morales and Ms Marvel (Kamala Khan) the first Muslim character to have her own Marvel comic book.Just like them to fawn over that propaganda, that's for sure. What they don't even dwell on is how untested the Muslim Ms. Marvel was to begin with, if she got her own solo book straight out of the gate, and it sold little more than 20,000 copies or less most of the time. The Muslim Ms. Marvel, Dust, Hulkling and Wiccan are not even challenging stereotypes so much as they are pushing propaganda in favor of corruption and perversion. There's more:
"These newer characters are bringing a breath of fresh air into the superhero genre as a whole," says Chris.
"They have started to redefine what it means to be a superhero for the 21st century, in a similar way that the heroes Marvel presented in the early 1960s felt like a breath of fresh air. It feels like they are challenging conventions and stereotypes."
There are also characters like Hulkling and Wiccan - both members of the Young Avengers - who are in a gay relationship and X-Men member Dust, who is from Afghanistan and wears a niqab.
So far, these diverse characters haven't appeared in Marvel's on-screen offerings, but there are plans to bring Kamala Khan to the small screen in her own TV series on Disney's new streaming service.
And then there's Squirrel Girl, a plus-sized computer science student who has a tail, can chew through wood and control an army of rodents.But why does it sound like she's pushing "obesity acceptance"? And since when did most crimefighters battle oppression or anything with the shape of their body? It was with their battle skills and brains, not physique. This sounds awfully stupid, which is par for the course among people like these.
Doreen Green made her first appearance back in 1991, and was eventually given her own series, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, in 2014.
"In some ways, working for Marvel was better than I hoped because Squirrel Girl was a strange book that nobody had many expectations of. There weren't a lot of rules," Erica Henderson, who drew the first 37 issues of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, says.
"I think for a lot of people, they liked seeing a character that didn't look like a traditional superhero.
"I wasn't trying to make a character who was fighting oppression with the shape of her body, it was literally just the introduction of a character who's weird and doesn't seem like a superhero."
But that universe could have been lost forever when Marvel hit financial problems in the 1990s.Well today it's still way overvalued, and to be sure, some of the propaganda books Marvel's published since are too. They certainly aren't bound to gain value on the stock market as a result.
"The comics industry had been massively overvalued for years," says Chris.
"Comic collectors had been buying multiple copies of issues, believing that they were going to be valuable in 10-20 years time so they were investing."
The first appearance of Spider Man, in 1962's issue 15 of Amazing Fantasy, once sold for $1.1m (£895,000) and the first appearance of characters like X-Men, Iron-Man and The Incredible Hulk have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that wasn't the case for comics being printed in the 1990s, because Marvel - and other companies - were printing millions of copies of titles.
The 1991 X-Men relaunch was published with five different covers - none of which would ever be rare.
Chris adds that Marvel had also taken risks by moving into the toy and merchandising business - which didn't pay off at the time.
At the end of the puff piece:
Chris admits comic book sales "aren't what they were" but says he believe there's little chance of them disappearing from shelves.Oh, that depends. If Marvel's still going to even remotely publish books that are meant to shove bad ideologies down people's throats, they won't have a significant stake in anything in the future. At least somebody's willing to admit sales are a far cry from the past, though based on all my own past findings, who knows if they ever were a true success story when a lot of individual titles never sold over a million for years? And if the industry keeps relying on monthly/weekly pamphlet formats and doesn't make a shift to paperback/hardcovers, it never will be.
"The comic book remains culturally significant and relevant. It's a way that people like to consume stories," Chris says.
"I think there will always be comics, and I'm sure as long as there are comics Marvel will have a stake in that world."
In the end, what also matters is that, due to the machinations of Quesada and company, Marvel's latest anniversaries aren't worth celebrating.
Labels: bad editors, islam and jihad, licensed products, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, sales, X-Men
The hot market is educated liberal women--that is who is the real audience for one of the only growing segments of the entire publishing industry-- "young adult" fiction.
Buzzfeed has an article where it states that "young adult" fiction has been bolstered by an exodus of authors and readers from "chick lit" to "young adult" books that are supposedly read by middle-school girls.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/is-young-adult-fiction-the-new-chick-lit
The comic industry, doing its darnest to appeal to this demographic makes sense since culturally, we are moving towards a matriarchy. *
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom-of-women-the-tibetan-tribe-where-a-man-is-never-the-boss
"The comic book remains culturally significant and relevant.
What they mean by culture is High Culture. The people who decide what is part of High Culture are increasingly liberal women with academic degrees and come upper class families.
What is deemed "culturally significant" by liberal women with academic degrees and come upper class families will be supported by academia--by colleges and librarians, by taxpayer money, by college tuition, regardless of sales or interest from the public.
The vast majority of people going to see superhero films do not read comic books.
Much ado is made about manga readers. Manga is still relatively a niche in the United States, it is not widely acceptable or read like it is in Japan.
*"Imagine a society without fathers; without marriage (or divorce); one in which nuclear families don’t exist. Grandmother sits at the head of the table; her sons and daughters live with her, along with the children of those daughters, following the maternal bloodline. Men are little more than studs, sperm donors who inseminate women but have, more often than not, little involvement in their children’s upbringing.
This progressive, feminist world – or anachronistic matriarchy,"
The goal for progressives is never equality it is inverted roles.
The description above fits African American communities to tee.
https://obsidiantea.com/2018/05/22/the-hierarchy-of-black-culture/
So much for the we're all the same on the inside and our differences shouldn't lead to different outcomes in life--that's a result of discrimination theory.
Posted by
Saber Tooth Tiger Mike |
12:20 PM
Writers like JK Rowling and SE Hinton used their initials rather than their first names so as not to turn off boys who might not want to read a book written by a girl. Apart from writers of romance fiction, how many male writers adopt a neutral or female pen name to avoid turning off women readers?
Somehow, I don't see the latest x-men or batman book being aimed primarily at female readers. Marvel and DC published far more books aimed at girls in the 1950s and early 1960s than they do now.
Posted by
Anonymous |
2:11 PM
Men will never take the same amount of interest in stuff aimed at women. It's always women who want to get into male hobbies and interest--sometimes not out of genuine interest but to turn it into a female thing." It's not a coincidence that after women have become the vast majority of workers in publishing they are saying things like "boys don't read".
JK Rowling's short story about hiding her gender is red herring because the vast majority of HP fans were female from the get-go. Despite her various pen-names, she has had her greatest success with a her Harry Potter books, books that appeal more to women than men.
Superheroes weren't primarily aimed women for the same reason romance novels were never marketed to men.
Pretending there aren't gender differences in interests is delusional.
Posted by
Saber Tooth Tiger Mike |
4:02 PM
"It's just like them to gloss over the pretentious of the CM movie to boot, without acknowledging that, at the US box office, at least, it underperformed. It didn't take in quite as much as the Wonder Woman adaptation starring Gal Gadot"
Wonder Woman grossed domestic $412,563,408.
Captain Marvel grossed domestic $426,829,839.
A higher percentage of Wonder Woman's gross came from domestic sales, but in dollars Capt Marvel grossed more. CM earned a little more domestically, and about 300 million more in foreign sales.
Posted by
Anonymous |
7:48 PM
Blabber Mouth Whiner mike wrote:
"The description above fits African American communities to tee.
https://obsidiantea.com/2018/05/22/the-hierarchy-of-black-culture/"
The obsidian tea post doesn't actually describe black families in the way you say it does. It says black people respect their elders, and that in the extended family old women get more respect than old men. But men as studs only, absence of marriage? Not in the obsidian tea post. And then of course you would have to get into the difference in family structure between African families, Caribbean families, generations-back-American black families, between say Sudanese Muslim and Sudanese Christian immigrants and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants and......
Posted by
Anonymous |
10:51 AM
"JK Rowling's short story about hiding her gender is red herring because the vast majority of HP fans were female from the get-go. Despite her various pen-names, she has had her greatest success with a her Harry Potter books, books that appeal more to women than men."
I would be curious to know where you get this info; nobody has to check off M or F when they buy a Harry Potter book, and a lot of them are shared among brothers and sisters anyway. Boys really like Harry Potter. The main audience is boys and girls, but it is true that a lot of men and women read them as well.
Posted by
Anonymous |
7:29 PM
You guys are missing the bigger picture. Wayback old cloth American people, black and white, are becoming increasingly atomized, less likely to form part of a traditional nuclear and extended family structure. Immigrants and ethnics, by contrast, black and white, are more likely to form and stay in traditional families, something that gives them a leg up in surviving crises and starting small businesses, for example.
Posted by
Anonymous |
7:06 AM