The Four Color Media Monitor

The New Yorker published a history review of Penguin books' Marvel compilations, and along the way, they made sure it wouldn't be free of politicized ingredients:

Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before.

One must wonder why they can't just say "punk subculturists" rather than "nonbinary" which is insulting to the intellect, and was entirely unnecessary to put in there. Yet this serves as an example of MSM stealth tactics employed for insulting the readers' intellects, and dumbing down the news, and it's my least favorite article about these classics so far. Though it does tell the following:

Black Panther’s journey into this canon started later and took a different path. Penguin’s edition opens in 1966 with the first appearance of Wakanda, a techno-utopia “in the heart of Equatorial Africa,” in a Fantastic Four comic. Then it skips ahead to sixteen comics published between 1973 and 1976. All were scripted by Don McGregor, who developed the mythology—Killmonger, Warrior Falls, the Palace Royal—that later scripters and screenwriters would use. (“When I was taken off the Panther,” McGregor has said, “I was told it was because I was too close to the black experience. I looked at my white hands.”) McGregor and the penciller Billy Graham fashioned a warrior-king who could be a superhero outside Wakanda, but had to learn to be a decisive ruler and a romantic leading man at home. Wakanda existed at a distance from the rest of the Marvel Universe—conceptually and literally another country. It had to wait decades, and get a boost from Hollywood, before it could become more than a cult sort of classic.

First, as somebody who happens to own all 3 Epic Collection archives for BP, it sure doesn't sound like I'll need to buy this format, because I've already got all relevant stories at home. Indeed, is this new? The Epic Collection series of archives has been around for about a decade now, so why only when Penguin releases editions that're otherwise the same thing, does the press suddenly take notice? Next, is that really so that McGregor was ever removed as BP writer because they didn't want it to be solely about the black experience? Or because he was white? Well if it were the latter, that would be idiotic, and echo the kind of ghetto mentalities that've become a sad staple in the past decade. And the following is another troubling suggestion of what drove the narrative in this piece:

Lee, Kirby, and Ditko are now dead white men. Classics, by definition, have aged, and some parts of these books aged badly. Despite the Thing’s example, conventionally ugly or visibly disfigured characters are usually villains, from the scarred and vengeful Madame Hydra to the big, round, glum Blob. Attempts to address the civil-rights struggle suffer from a milquetoast centrism. Villains explain their plans for no good reason; everything comes with exclamation points. Women (or “girls,” like the Invisible Girl) have feminine powers, like shrinking, or espionage, or invisibility; rarely do two or more women converse. Some plots make little sense. But these comics share such flaws with almost every other product of popular culture from that era, and many from our own; we keep reading them for what makes them stand out.

And just what's the big deal about the 3 aforementioned creators being white? If anybody wrote that way about different races, that'd surely spark offense. The cliched claim these classics are now dated is decidedly also insulting, but not a shock. They seem to forget Hank Pym as Ant-Man (and later Scott Lang) developed shrinking equipment, and it wasn't the Wasp who actually began the inventions; she just took up her career after Hank provided her with the experiments needed. The writer also seems oblivious to the creation of Lorelei, the Enchantress, who was a crook at the time, but wasn't physically ugly. In any event, this is such idiocy, disrespecting Lee/Kirby/Ditko no matter what they say. And it gets no better with the following:

Silver Age Marvel meant feelings (Cyclops and Marvel Girl’s lovesickness in the X-Men; the Thing’s depression in the Fantastic Four) and spectacle: a world to astonish the eyes, with new perspectives, shiny interstellar gadgets, and heroes always in motion. But that world, in comics, was able to do more, for more readers, in the absence of competition. Before modern digital graphics, before “Star Wars,” before video games, only in the pages of four-color comics could such cosmic deeds and superhuman feats find appropriate visual form. The special effects from sixties movies look kitschy today, but the visuals from early-sixties comics translate surprisingly well to modern screens.

For modern superhero comics, that’s a problem. Longtime Marvel characters now fit into epic movies, from “X-Men” to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” Like other classic stories that are being reinvented today, they work on TV, at least sometimes (“She-Hulk,” “Ms. Marvel”), and they inspire literary fiction, from Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” (2000) to Bob Proehl’s overlooked and heartbreaking novels about superpowered mutants, “The Nobody People” and “The Somebody People” (2019-20). In short, today’s superhero comics have competition. Although the broader medium is doing fine—see Alison Bechdel’s slice-of-life graphic memoirs or Raina Telgemeier’s comics about kids—staple-bound serials now have an identity crisis. Drugstores no longer sell them; only specialized comics shops do. (You can also pay to read them online.) The best-selling comic book of all time, an issue of X-Men from 1991, hit sales figures that will probably never be equalled. Video games may better fulfill our fantasies; Netflix is easier to navigate.

What superhero comics still have are ongoing stories about ever-evolving characters and the worlds they share. They’re a locus of community for fans who want more stories, or different stories, than Hollywood can offer, and they have room for new artists, new writers, and new heroes on old teams. Because they’re so much cheaper to make than film or TV, they sometimes let writers take more risks. You won’t find friendships between young, explicitly trans people taking center stage in a Marvel movie, or in Silver Age comics, but you can see exactly that in beautiful, intricate issues of Marvel’s New Mutants (2020-23), written by Vita Ayala and then by Charlie Jane Anders.

And so, from this we get a strong clue that for the New Yorker's writers, it's all about "inclusivity", not merit, when they take near the end to gushing over an allusion to transsexual ideology in a recent take on New Mutants. Which is a sad example of how the X-Men comics were hijacked by LGBT ideologues in the past 2 decades, and without a doubt, it doesn't stop there. Naturally, the columnist has no interest in acknowledging that the sans-adjective X-Men's premiere issue only really sold high in terms of copies printed, while tons of them gathered dust on shelves despite what's been blabbered over the years.

And risks? Only from a left-wing perspective; notice how for years already, issues like Islamic terrorism have been censored in the mainstream, and even stories about Islamic homphobia/transphobia aren't allowed. As Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine makes clear, just like feminism, LGBT ideology stops at the line in the sand drawn by the Religion of Peace, and it's obviously the same situation in the world of entertainment. So what's all this balderdash about risks being taken? This is a far different situation than WW2, where Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were taking risks creating Capt. America, and in contrast to today's entertainment producers, most at the time were willing to defend their scriptwriters. Today, they'd rather present whitewashed renditions of Islam, as the Muslim Ms. Marvel propaganda made clear for a decade now. On which note, chances are that's the only kind of premise currently pushed in mainstream comicdom where it's allowed exemption from the aforementioned LGBT ideology.

The article is also absurdly oblivious to how recent Marvel films took to injecting LGBT allusions into their screenplays, even in the Eternals and recent Thor sequel. It's probably deliberate, since these ideologues are never, ever satisfied, and only in this whole propaganda business for the sake of dragging the entire world down with them. Such an embarrassment, and if only they'd stop talking about comicdom, because it's clear, despite any claims they might make to the contrary, they're not and never have been comic fans. Even the mention of a far-left ideologue like Chabon is appalling.

Labels: Black Panther, Captain America, Fantastic Four, golden calf of LGBT, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, msm propaganda, Spider-Man, women of marvel, X-Men