The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at ComicBook is recommending the Golden Age creation of Millie the Model be written into the Marvel movie franchise:

With Phase 5 about to kick off in a matter of weeks, it's time to address one Marvel Comics character who could be one of the franchise's oddest and most inspired additions yet — Millie the Model.

Who is Marvel's Millie the Model?

Created by Ruth Atkinson in 1945, Millie Collins is a young woman who moves from rural Kansas to New York City to pursue a career in modeling. Once in the Big Apple and employed by the Hanover Modeling Agency, she gets up to a wide array of hijinks alongside her boyfriend Clicker Holbrook, her best friend Toni Turner, and her nemesis Chili Storm. Those resulting adventures, which were told in Millie the Model and subsequent spinoffs, have the honor of being Marvel's longest-running humor title.

Well at least they admit this was a character created by a woman back in the Golden Age, and clearly one of the earliest women to work at Marvel at the time they were originally named Timely. And a girl who had a boyfriend. That's something most PC ignoramuses won't research or admit these days.

But they're making this suggestion awfully late, at a time when the Marvel movie franchise is losing whatever merit it once had, along with box office receipts, and they more or less contradict themselves when the writer says the following:

Beyond the narrative repercussions of telling the story of the MCU's Millie Collins, introducing her could further expand what the franchise is capable of. After years of complicated, male-gaze-friendly depictions of female heroines, Phase 4 of the MCU is gradually beginning to get more feminine. Not only is it putting more female characters in the spotlight, but it is giving them distinct approaches to their day-to-day life that go beyond half-hearted quips and inexplicably-perfect hairstyles — something that a modern take on characters like Millie and Chili could take that even further. An argument can be made that feminine, fashion-focused elements are beginning to be more unabashedly embraced on a blockbuster scale, if the hype surrounding Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie is any indication.

I must say, this is very confused in its emphasis, considering that the original material, including some of the later stories written by Stan Lee, were "male-gaze-friendly", and that's because the character design was...feminine! Practically all of what was written by Atkinson and illustrated by several artists in its time was virtually both. That's why this contradictory propaganda only amounts to an assault on what the original writers and artists had in mind when they crafted this humor series during the Golden/Silver Ages. If the Capt. Marvel movie is any suggestion, the movies have become anything but feminine, and a "modern" take on these creations could easily become something insulting to the intellect regardless. What if a modern movie rendition of Millie resulted in a story where she didn't have a boyfriend, and it was considered "toxic masculinity" for men to love her, or even the other way around?

The realization a movie proposal like this could end up resulting in something more insulting to the intellect is exactly why I want nothing to do with the Marvel movieverse or where it's going these days. They're not offering good examples or role models for women, any more than they're offering genuine entertainment for men. Plus, if the Millie stories were supposed to be comedic, that's a genre the PC crowd's been scuttling, or throughly getting rid of today, and it's only made things worse for movies in general. So, if there's no plans to make a Millie the Model movie, it's better that way. Leave Atkinson and Lee's creations in peace.

Labels: history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, women of marvel