The Four Color Media Monitor

Fandom Wire pointed to an interview by Think McFly Think from 2010 with Claremont and the late Wein at the Calgary Expo, where they provided a viewpoint that could've predicted where comicdom's gotten to in the past decade. Let's begin with what Wein says about Nightcrawler:

Len, How did creating Nightcrawler come about?

The thing about Nightcrawler is he started out just as a visual. We had a bunch of characters drawn up, that hadn't been developed yet. We wanted him to be the nicest guy on the team as well as the most Christian, partly just due to the fact that he looks like a very demonic character. We also thought it would be great for him to be best friends with Wolverine, just to really throw people off. Sometimes we would do ridiculous things just for the fun of it, no story arch, no plan, just for fun.

As far as Nightcrawler's ethnicity and his origin, that relates back to the Marketing people wanting every hero to be ethnically diverse and from all over the world.

Since that time, however, Kurt Wagner's religious background has been throughly desecrated, as has how he was birthed, and has there ever been a cast member in X-Men, or other Marvel/DC comics, who comes from a Bulgarian background? Guess not, and today's contributors are so narrow minded, they'd never accept a proposal by a new writer to develop characters like those. That's why the whole "DEI" propaganda that's become commonplace today is hugely phony, and has practically led comicdom into stagnation. Claremont and Wein also addressed the following issue, which has been just as troubling:

What kind of decision making goes into killing off a character?

In some cases it's just a lazy writer, someone who doesn't care about that character. I'll notice someone is killing off a character, and I'll ask them why, they tell me because I hate them, so I say don't use that character anymore. One writer may hate a character they're writing and want to kill them off, but that doesn't mean that when they're done someone else isn't going to come along and love that character, but look now that character is dead.

Other times we'll plan to kill someone off right from the start. It can be for different reasons, they're popularity starts to fade off, or it serves a story arch that may last several months or years. A lot of factors are usually taken into consideration before killing someone off.

Back in the day, Marvel said if they're dead they stay dead, but now you can kill a character today and bring them back next week.

Well I hope they don't think resurrection is inherently wrong. Even then, however, "factors" weren't always taken into consideration, or, it was done very irresponsibly, and very poorly. This part alludes to the offensive illogic of denigrating fictional characters instead of how they're written and characterized. There's only so many bad writers who almost literally got away with their shoddy efforts because some birdbrains chose to bash fictional creations instead of asking for improved writing efforts, on said creations, and even the ongoing series themselves. Unfortunately, this interview doesn't go far enough in making the point, and that's decidedly regrettable. And then, here's what was said about movie adaptations:

What do you think about Hollywood's current infatuation with comic book movies?

It all has to do with the studio executives. Their number one job is to keep their job. They pick books and characters that people will know, and then hire actors that at the same time are "hot", and if the movie fails, they can say how could I have known this would fail.

It's plausible Denial ability!

I've noticed this issue discussed a number of times before: a very aggravating problem with how comics-based products are increasingly sold as films and video games is that they do it according to recognizability, not entertainment value, and hiring actors who're supposedly a big deal to boot can be another fault. This is why we may never see a movie based on some of the "lesser" characters from mainstream, like DC's Atom and Marvel's Killraven, and even if we do, chances are very high now they'll be wokefied for woke's sake. And then we wonder how the quality of entertainment got so bad, because the film producers aren't really interested.

What was in discussion by Claremont and Wein almost 15 years ago still makes for very valid arguments now. But if the past decade says anything, it's that most moviemakers and comics writers have no interest in taking their advice.

Labels: conventions, dc comics, golden calf of death, history, marvel comics, msm propaganda, X-Men