The Four Color Media Monitor

I looked at another ICV2 column by store manager Steve Bennett, who's blabbering about a TV adaptation of Werewolf by Night, and he tells the following, which involves Elsa Bloodstone, the daughter of the demon hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, who'd originally been co-created by Marv Wolfman in the mid-70s, and the daughter was created by Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett in 2001, at a time when Marvel was on the verge of self-destructing artistically:

Generally, I don’t mind it when the MCU makes changes to Marvel characters because it's almost always an improvement on the source material, made to make them more appealing to a wider audience. This is mostly the case for Marvel’s first “Special Presentation” Werewolf By Night. In the comics, Jack Russell has always been a rather nondescript young white guy; the MCU cast thirty-something Mexican actor Gael García Bernal for the role, who has given the character a measure of tragic gravitas. And, I was ok with director Michael Giacchino’s decision to eliminate the guns and “shoot first and quip something awful afterward” persona writer Warren Ellis first gave her in the 2016 miniseries Nextwave to make Elsa Bloodstone “less hypersexual and more of a ‘real person”.

Interesting the site discusses the now marginalized Ellis' writings, because here, Ellis was accused of "grooming" several adult women for sexual relations (although one woman he'd led an affair with was 17 when they began), yet you don't see hardcore leftists complain about children being groomed for LGBT ideology. Recalling what a leftist Ellis was in his time, there's surely some irony that somebody who presumably opposes the 2nd Amendment had no problem writing a character with guns, though it wouldn't be surprising if he'd toned down Elsa's sexuality in the past decade. And what's this, the director, Giacchino, wanted to make Elsa Bloodstone more "realistic? On which note, let's take a closer look at what's in the AV Club article:

“When you see Elsa—I love that character, but when you see her in the comics, it’s really this hypersexualized version of this person with shotguns and all of this,” director Michael Giacchino says in a new interview with Phase Zero. “When we started this project, I was like ‘Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president], I don’t want any guns in this, no guns.’ I think we can tell the story without guns, we don’t need them. I certainly don’t want Elsa to be the kind of character that’s just a gun-toting—you know what I mean. I was so against that.”

As much as progressive ideals have guided Marvel Comics since the beginning, there is still plenty of content that has decidedly not aged well. Elsa was first introduced in 2001 and was, for example, supposed to be combat-ready in high heels and a cleavage-baring crop top. In Werewolf By Night, she’s wearing a turtleneck and fully covered up from chin to practical boots.

“I wanted her to be badass, of course, but I wanted her to be smart, I wanted her to be vulnerable, I just wanted her to be a real person,” Giacchino continues. “Laura Donnelly embodies all of that in spades.”

He's echoing the same kind of abuse Gal Gadot received when she was making the 1st Wonder Woman movie in 2017: she said she'd been told on social media WW "can't be smart because she's attractive". How is this any different? And AV Club's unshockingly making everything worse by lecturing everybody that Marvel's older content hasn't aged well, without even giving a clear explanation what they think is problematic. Yet this laziness was to be expected, coming as it does from such a dreadful news site. The whole claim he wants her to be a "real" person is also laughable, ditto the claim of vulnerability, because most superheroes and other similar characters haven't been depicted as completely immortal for a long time.

That aside, all this opposition to guns, coming as it does from such obviously liberal ideologues, is pathetic, as it's not based on entertainment merit, and just amounts to virtue-signaling, much like a previous moment involving WB's Looney Tunes. And before I forget, interesting Bennett makes it sound like being white makes one nondescript, rather than the ascribed personality, or lack thereof. As a result, Bennett's fandom is in question.

Labels: censorship issues, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics, women of marvel