The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at Tech Radar gushes all about redicovering his love for comics using a computer tablet for reading them, and it turns out he began reading at least a dozen years ago, at a time when some of the wokest products were coming about:

It all started in 2011 when I picked up issue #649 of Amazing Spider-Man – the second issue in Dan Slott’s ‘Big Time’ story – because I was going on holiday with my parents and I wanted something to entertain me on the journey.

From then, I’d regularly visit my local comic book shop to spend my allowance on the next chapter of Spidey’s adventures – through his No One Dies crusade, Otto Octavius’s run as the Superior Spider-Man, and Spider-Verse, which would partly inspire the films (though there’s a lot of differences between the original and adaptation).

When my allowance wasn’t enough to fund my fix, I started working part-time at a local supermarket stacking shelves and checking product dates – my monthly paycheck allowed me to branch out into X-Men, X-Force, and Avengers stories, as well as other series when a crossover event called for it.

Oh my, so not only did this guy begin his ostensible fandom based on what some of the worst modern writers were turning out, he's got no qualms with crossovers either, despite how they can take up only so much space at the expense of stand-alone storytelling, and haven't improved superhero comics at all? This is such an insult to the intellect. If he really wanted to impress upon everybody, he'd discuss the classic Spidey tales first begun in 1962, over 60 years ago, and not give us a sugarcoated take on what awful writers like Slott have turned out in the years he regrettably got the assignments to write these comics. Even worse is pondering the likelihood this guy not only had no complaints about Spidey's marriage to Mary Jane Watson being kicked to the curb, but also no objections to how Slott and other such writers kept trolling the audience with the notion they'd be reunited, yet it never happened, and now, years later, that problem still continues unrelentingly while various other issues like wokeness continue to affect the MCU in ways that would make even a reunification between Spidey and Mary not worth paying for, regardless of whether it happens or not. The columnist continues:

Then I went to university.

The last series I read was the Secret Wars arc in which Doctor Doom runs a world of different universes all mashed together – the finale of which sees the Marvel continuity semi-rebooted in an all-new all-different universe (which mostly combines aspects of the original 616 and Ultimates continuities). I had nothing against the reboot, I even picked up a few of the first issues and loved them, but comic books were, unfortunately, the most sensible hobby to drop when my schedule became too busy and something had to give.

Post-reboot, if I wanted to keep up with my favorite Spider-Folk (Peter, Miles, Gwen, and Cindy Moon, a.k.a. Silk), the plethora of X-Men, and various Avengers teams, I’d have to follow no fewer than 10 series – with some releasing fortnightly rather than monthly – and I just lacked the space and disposable income to keep my habit up.

In 2024, after an eight-year break, I’m returning to the wonderful world of comics with the help of the cheap tablet I bought on Black Friday – my trusty Lenovo M10 3rd gen – and learning a lesson that my tech doesn’t need to be perfect, just perfect for me.

Thanks in part to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, my love for comics hasn’t waned. If anything, it's grown stronger since I stopped reading them religiously in 2016. But the problems of space and cost that I had at university remained – or at least I thought they did.

Earlier this year, I was chatting with friends about my long-lost love of comic books and one of them told me about Marvel Unlimited – basically a Netflix for Marvel comics. Since then, I’ve been on the lookout for a tablet: something large enough to make it a worthwhile upgrade to reading on my phone but cheap enough to justify using it to only read comics. I found what I needed during the Black Friday sales, and as soon as it arrived, I bought a year-long subscription to Marvel Unlimited.

And no doubt, he's keeping on with all the newest stories by some of the most dreadful scribes to sully the scene since the mid-2000s, right? That he'd compare the online Marvel store to Netflix has got to be telling too, as does how he sugarcoats the milking of the Spidey franchise for the sake of endless imitations that were intended to pander to an audience that doesn't put a high value on merit-based writing and artwork. Interesting he admits all these series that were being launched non-stop are expensive to buy and read (though not clear is the 5 dollar price tag that's since become the norm), yet he won't admit it's ultimately been for naught from an artistic perspective.

And it's pretty appparent he doesn't care how pointless the constant flow of crossovers has turned out to be either, or he'd complain it's ridiculous we have to read all these interconnecting stories and buy so much in the first place for only so much money. One could argue the main problem is that we have here a writer for a technology site who's clearly not interested in artistic merit, and maybe his decision to buy a cheap tablet could explain why he'd have no issue with cheap storytelling either. A real shame how there's whole generations out there today who can't appreciate older storytelling up to the turn of the century, which had some gems far better than what we're seeing now from the mainstream.

Labels: Avengers, crossoverloading, dreadful writers, history, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, sales, Spider-Man, technology, women of marvel, X-Men