How is Elektra suddenly "scarier" than Punisher and Wolverine?

According to this brief on Softonic about new Daredevil issues, Elektra takes out a whole villainous mob without killing them:

In Daredevil #6 and #7, Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett fold Elektra into this new Marvel run by making one thing immediately clear: she’s dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with piling up the highest body count. “Of Moles & Owls” doesn’t sell her as deadlier than the Punisher or Wolverine in the usual numbers game. What’s unnerving about her is something else. She’s so exact, so disciplined, so tactical that she cuts through Mister Negative’s Inner Demons and leaves every last one of them alive. That’s the real point. Elektra decides exactly how much damage gets done, and she never loses control of it.

The issues also have her outplaying multiple factions as she works to secure Wilson Fisk’s ledger during a Hell’s Kitchen war that pulls in Silvermane, Tombstone, Hammerhead’s goons, and the Inner Demons. It makes the city feel like a live-fire chessboard, with Elektra still thinking several moves ahead of everyone else on it. If you’ve been following the noir-leaning, street-level direction Daredevil has taken since Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett launched their run in March 2026, these issues are easy to recommend. Even if Elektra’s return reads more like a sharp cameo than a full-blown comeback, issue #8 is already lining up Mister Fear, a drug threat at Empire State University (E.S.U.), and more questions tied to Wilson Fisk’s ledger.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make the story immediately entertaining. There's plenty of other superheroines who could've been written doing the same thing too, like Wonder Woman, Jesse Quick, Spider-Woman, Donna Troy, Invisible Girl, Psylocke, and Kitty Pryde. All that matters is whether it's written well, and at Marvel today, it's much too late for that. Plus, what if it turns out the artwork in this DD run is as terrible as some of the past decade's offerings?

This brief also ignores that there were times when the Punisher refrained from killing in order to appease Spider-Man, and it's not like Wolverine was depicted killing in all instances either. So why does Softonic think this news is going to automatically impress anybody, especially when the article doesn't seem written on merit?

New X-Men film director appears to be adapting writings of Jonathan Hickman

According to this IGN article, Jason Schreier, the director of a new X-Men movie (and previously the Thunderbolts), is basing his screenplay on not one, but two sources, the 2nd not a good one:

The filmmaker leading the charge on what seems to be the first post-Avengers: Secret Wars movie spoke about some of the corners of the mutant universe he and MCU boss Kevin Feige have already started digging through during an interview with Good Morning America. The conversation followed the film's explosive D23 2026 X-Men cast reveal, which included announcements for characters like Rogue, Storm, Professor X, and Mister Sinister.

With its May 2028 release still almost two years away, Schreier, who previously helmed Marvel's Thunderbolts*, stopped short of revealing too much about the movie's plot. Instead, his comments suggested fans may want to brush up on the work of comic book authors Chris Claremont and Jonathan Hickman.

"One of the great things about the comics is there is such a rich and broad history," he said. "That was one of the first things that Kevin and I talked about when I came in; they made many great movies in this world, and they've made so many great things. Let's find the things that haven't recently been done well. All these other corners of the universe…"

"Digging back into those comics like 20 years, the whole Chris Claremont run, the newer Jonathan Hickman stuff. There are so many stories that are still untold, to honor and to reach into, and then to meet this cast and try to do something new, I think you always want to see something that reveres where it came from and then is still taking a new spin on where we want to go."

Considering the Thunderbolts movie, spelled as it is with an asterisk, is one of those things that hasn't been done well, I'm not sure what Schreier's point is. Hickman's run was overrated, right down to the part where he turned Moira MacTaggart into yet another mutant, which takes away the uniqueness of the character as a civilian co-star. Does Schreier intend to make use of that?

In any case, I've long grown weary of these non-stop live action adaptations, and Schreier's claim there's a rich and broad history is another example of failing to make distinctions between any era. He likely doesn't care that X-Men began to lose mileage when crossovers like Age of Apocalypse came about. Or that Scott Lobdell was considered a very mediocre writer back in the day. Or that the X-books overall began to lose any meaning or significance by the turn of the century, and even Claremont's talent plummeted post-2000. So what's the use of keeping on with the films, when the comics are in such bad shape as it is due to editors like Joe Quesada bringing them down years ago?

Frank Miller tells more to the Wash. Post

One of Miller's interviewers said in one of the recent articles about him that he's got no intention of slowing down with his career, even as he's reaching 70, and as the following interview from the Washington Post makes clear, he's not done with his current promotional tour yet:

The pages of a Frank Miller work are filled with crooked cops, murderers, desperate men and unhinged dark knights. You might expect the creator behind all that darkness to be a bit gloomy himself. Maybe he would be a recluse, like his hero, “Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson.

As it turns out, Miller seems to like people. I watched him sign hundreds of autographs at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in D.C. on Saturday. He was gentle, chatty and generous with his time despite the crowd overflowing past its designated space inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Unfortunately, Miller doesn't seem to like conservatives, and one in particular by the name of Donald Trump. You could reasonably wonder if any attendants are right-wing themselves, and if they let know this, what does Miller think of them?

Miller helped redefine the modern superhero with Daredevil and Batman before creating celebrated original works such as “Sin City” and “300.” Pop milestones like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies may not exist without Frank Miller.

His book isn’t a conventional autobiography but a collection of 16 lessons Miller learned while becoming one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Those lessons include knowing your ending, getting your hero into trouble fast and pushing against whatever it is that’s keeping you from what you want to make.

The lessons also include making mistakes: Miller would sketch out many drawings for months before he finally made something that pleased the old master.

But those mistakes don't include apologizing for writing Holy Terror 7 years after its publishing, or blatant attacks on right-wingers, do they? If not, what's his point about trying to stand your ground on the subject of those who'd try to prevent you from developing what you want to make?

“It’s created new opportunities for me to speak more freely to new people who are coming up,” Miller said. “One of the real joys is for me to be looking at drawings and hearing story ideas that people are working on themselves, and to give them some advice on where to go with it.”

I wonder what he'd say to known conservatives? Or anybody who wants to tackle challenging issues? Again, that's not something dwelled upon here.

Miller writes about how his own lessons come from everywhere. He writes lovingly about Adams and his other mentor, Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit,” but he reaches just as readily toward painters such as Francisco de Goya, Japanese manga writers like Kazuo Koike and music.

If memory serves, he wasn't so loving in his take on Eisner when he produced the American Genius documentary. After "cementing" a putdown in a recording, why now is he suddenly and seemingly talking positively about Eisner again? There was even another certain leftist who came from Israel working in video games at the convention Miller attended:

Onstage, I relayed a question to Miller from Neil Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us” game series and HBO adaptation, who said his story wouldn’t exist without “Sin City.” He wanted to know how Miller selects collaborators, particularly when someone is adapting his work. How does he make sure they won’t abandon the spirit of his stories?

“Friendships,” Miller said. “Most of them come from getting to know somebody … and getting a kernel of an idea that I know would be something both of us could feed each other on.”

Wonder what that left-wing Israeli expatriate was doing there, recalling Druckmann exploited the Last of Us sequel for political propaganda? And to think, that he drew "inspiration" from a series of GNs like Miller's. It makes me think of how, not only does nobody like them seem to consider Superman inspirational material, they don't consider the Fantastic Four inspiration either. Miller may have done some illustrations for at least one story in both of the above, but as the bulk of his work since makes clear, he has a darkness problem, and so do some of the folks who say they're inspired by his work from the 1990s.

In the memoir, he describes learning to respect film and its differences from comics. His early comics success led to work as a Hollywood screenwriter. While he appreciated the medium, he would later write his biggest original book, “Sin City,” as a black-and-white novel, in the hope that it was unadaptable to film. He didn’t want it better known as a movie.

And yet, it was adapted in the mid-2000s, though the sequel was a failure, and it doesn't seem to have been revisited on celluloid since. I do think there's only so much from even standard literature that shouldn't have to be known far more cinematically, so some could wonder if Miller sadly failed to resist the tug of Hollywood influence. And then, a certain matter of defeatism comes up in the discussion again:

Before Miller’s memoir, his comics provided the clearest insight into his mind, but his book makes those thoughts explicit, including his regrets. He looks back on “Holy Terror,” a much-criticized story written out of Miller’s anger after the 9/11 attacks. He now describes it as a rant. Would he ever write another such story?

“I hope I’m never inspired to do so again,” he writes.

Miller urges readers to push walls, especially the ones he helped build. He writes that it drives him “crazy” to see that his version of Batman is now enshrined as foundational.

Once again, Miller, in a way, continues talking out of both sides of his mouth - he urges wall-pushing, but he doesn't want to push it any longer with a GN that took on a challenging issue. But what's this, does he really think it's a shame DKR's vision wound up practically ruining the general take on Bruce Wayne in comics proper? Well he sure hasn't done enough to complain about it. Probably because, as I've guessed before, he doesn't seem to care much about most other takes on Batman save for his own. And to date, I can't even recall him ever chatting about Denny O'Neil and Steve Englehart's writings.

“For one thing, the title ‘Dark Knight’ started appearing in all kinds of comic books,” Miller said in our interview. “Beyond that, he became the unpleasant superhero for a long time. I essentially felt that I was in the business of knocking down walls, and I felt like people had used my work to construct new ones.”

Interesting he should tell this, because again, by the turn of the century, DC editors were practically forcing such a personality upon the Masked Manhunter, and only now, long after Batman's potential was ruined along with countless other mainstream creations, does he have the audacity to tell us this? It's too little, too late.

One more thing I thought of regarding Miller's early writings in Daredevil is the negative take he may have had on the Punisher, and the contrasting take he had when he drew an early Wolverine miniseries co-written with Chris Claremont in 1982. Which would make Miller another scribe with a bewildering double-standard on vigilante-style characters who kill, and it's something else he may not have addressed so far, and probably never will. For now, it's a shame that Miller continues to give signs he sticks with a defeatist position, and some could wonder if his recent positive comments on a movie or two drawing from his writings is another sign of the same. And his continued veering towards the darkness, save for certain challenging issues, is another problem he's got that makes much of his resume since the 1990s so unappealing.

Stars of Marvel movies are making it hard to watch them in hindsight based on their anti-Israel attacks

Mark Ruffalo's easily the most well known actor to appear in comics adaptations like the Avengers movies (as the Hulk), who's recently been viciously attacking the land of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's ancestry. He's done it again in his attack on Paramount over his opposition to a merger with Warner Brothers, as told in this Jerusalem Post article:

US multimedia giant Paramount slammed Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo for invoking antisemitic tropes in an Instagram post on Friday in which he accused Israel of genocide and apartheid.

The outspoken anti-Israel ACTOR, known for his roles in the Avengers films, accused Paramount moguls David and Larry Ellison of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” and warned of the danger of David Ellison’s bid to combine Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery.

A spokesperson for Paramount said the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong – they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind – and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”

In his post, Ruffalo referred to Larry Ellison as a “classic oligarch,” and he shared a video of Safra Catz, vice chair of Oracle, discussing the technological assistance the company provided to Israel following the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

Ruffalo encouraged his followers to “look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

What Ruffalo's been up to gets even worse with his and several other actors' support for a jihadist:

Over 20 actors who have appeared in Marvel films have joined a campaign calling for the release of convicted Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, according to an Instagram post published on Friday by the group, freemarwannow.

Among the actors who have joined the "Freedom for Marwan" campaign are Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Doctor Strange; Mark Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk; Ian McKellen, who plays Magneto; and Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and others. [...]

Barghouti is a former leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist organization that carried out many suicide bombings and shooting attacks during the Second Intifada.

According to Israel, Barghouti orchestrated or was responsible for, among others, the following attacks between 2001 and 2002: the murder of a Greek Orthodox monk on the road to Ma’aleh Adumim; the shooting attack during a bat mitzva celebration at a banquet hall in Hadera that killed six Israelis; a shooting spree on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem during which two Israelis were killed and 37 people wounded; a shooting attack in Neve Ya’acov in which an Israeli policewoman was killed; the murder of an Israeli at the Bashkevitz coffee and spice factory in the Atarot industrial zone of Jerusalem; the suicide attack perpetrated by Daryan Abu Aysha at the Maccabim checkpoint in which two policeman were wounded; the shooting spree at the Seafood Market restaurant which killed three Israelis.

It's going to be very hard watching these performers from live action Marvel movies playing their roles for a long time now, based on what they've just done in the now, even if they're playing villains. Their ignorance is stunning, and most chilling is, what if they fully know what Barghouti did years ago?

A rabbi writing for VIN News described the whole repellent case as follows:

Imagine that the Superheroes known as the “Avengers” were fighting for the wrong side. Say, for example, for the Nazis. Well, it is not such a stretch anymore. But it is not the Superheroes – it is the actors who play them.

Somewhere in a publicist’s office, likely, in Hollywood – a decision was made. A list circulated. Names were added, one by one, each signatory presumably assured that the others had already looked into it.

Nobody looked into it.

More than twenty actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, and a supporting cast long enough to fill a closing credit scroll — have signed their names to a demand that the United Nations and the governments of the world work to free mass-murderer Marwan Barghouti from an Israeli prison.

The statement voices grave concern for his imprisonment and his treatment inside it. Grave concern. That is the entire emotional range on offer, and it is expended in full on behalf of the man serving five consecutive life sentences for murder.

For the five people he was convicted of murdering, the statement has nothing. No sentence. No clause. No name. Twenty-plus celebrated artists, working presumably with the assistance of professional wordsmiths, produced a document about a quintuple murder conviction that manages never to acknowledge that anyone died.

I'll never be able to watch a lot of these particular movies ever again, realizing just how far into the abyss the twisted perspective of the actors in the Marvel movies goes. They've desecrated the memory of many Jewish comics creators with this abominable act of theirs, and it's stunning they'd even take the roles they did in comics adaptations to begin with. The Marvel live action movies aren't aging well, as a result of what the actors who played the casts in the films have been doing lately.

Update: VIN News announced the Israeli foreign ministry condemns the Hollywooders glorifying Barghouti:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday denounced a Hollywood-backed campaign calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah figure serving five life sentences for directing terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, saying celebrities cannot rewrite his criminal record.

“Hollywood can manufacture superheroes. It cannot manufacture Marwan Barghouti’s innocence,” the ministry said in a statement posted on social media. “Five murder convictions. Five life sentences. Five victims of his terrorist plots.”

The ministry urged the public to remember the victims rather than “glorify their murderer.”

The rebuke followed a new wave of support for the “Free Marwan” campaign from more than 20 actors linked to Marvel films and television productions, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton and Ian McKellen. Campaign organizers say more than 200 cultural figures — actors, musicians, writers and directors — have signed on since Barghouti’s family launched the effort late last year with groups in the United Kingdom. [...]

The Foreign Ministry’s statement did not name individual actors but framed the celebrity drive as an attempt to recast a convicted terrorist as a political prisoner. “Remember the names of the victims,” the ministry said, “instead of glorifying their murderer.”

An absolutely correct point to make.

Animation can be a great spot for superheroes, but only if they aren't subject to PC

Indiewire says there's animated series based on superhero fare that's more interesting than the live action film adaptations, but unshockingly, they sugarcoat the presentations, beginning with what the Supergirl movie was adapted from:

“Supergirl,” the second film in James Gunn’s developing DCU and one of the biggest box office bombs of an otherwise strong year for movie theaters, isn’t the worse movie I watched in 2026. But it’s probably the most disappointing. An adaptation of an acclaimed standalone series called “Woman of Tomorrow,” “Supergirl” has a great lead in Milly Alcock and nothing else worth remembering. Whereas the comic it is based on is stunningly bright and beautiful to look at, “Supergirl” is a murky, brown-tinted eyesore. Its generic plot strands the character in a sci-fi universe that feels microscopically small, populated by third-rate archetypes the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies would barely have time for. There are interesting threads to unravel regarding Kara’s grief and anger, but the story she’s stranded in doesn’t have time to do that in any meaningful way.

I just don't understand why we keep getting lectured about why the overrated Tom King's tale is a modern "classic". The artwork I've seen is certainly overrated. And King's stories about "trauma" are forced and contrived. And we're not told anything in regards to that.

Even more galling: as “Supergirl” was tarnishing the character’s reputation in movie theaters, a great adaptation of the character was airing on Adult Swim. “My Adventures With Superman,” an animated series reimagining the early career of the most famous superhero on the planet. Ostensibly, Clark Kent is the main character, but Season 2 introduced Kara (voiced in the show by Kiana Madeira), and the currently airing Season 3 — which airs its season finale this Sunday — sees her take center stage. And she rules: reimagined as a former brainwashed intergalactic conquerer attempting to atone for her misdeeds, the show’s Kara is charming, funny, badass, with a meaty arc about atoning for her misdeeds and a super cute romance with Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) that slots right in with the show’s bright, optimistic tone and focus on these character’s day-to-day struggles contrasted with the sci-fi operatics. If “Supergirl” the movie only scratched the surface of the character’s potential, “My Adventures With Superman” takes the time to really examine what makes her tick.

“My Adventures With Superman” is one of three animated shows adapting popular comic book superheroes that ran over the course of this summer, along with “X-Men ’97” on Disney+, which concluded its second season earlier this week, and “Batman: Caped Crusader” on Amazon Prime, which premiered its second season in late July. Pitched to a slightly older audience than usual for an animated comic book series, teenage up as opposed to for children, these shows aren’t flawless. But as comic book film studios continues to struggle to adjust to a world where they are no longer the center of the entertainment landscape (give or take “Spider-Man”), these shows demonstrate that these characters are better suited for serialized storytelling in the first place.

Would this be the cartoon where Jimmy was changed from white to black? And where Lois Lane's turned into a short-cropped tomboy? In that case, I regret to say, but this puff piece amounts to little more than misleading the audience by obscuring how the production is allegedly optimistic with strings attached. It's also worth considering that, if Kara Zor-El was changed from an innocent girl to a former conqueror, brainwashed or not, that too, unfortunately, is tasteless. It's also symbolic of the modern era's inability to appreciate a simpler concept of a character who could be written with flaws and mistakes, but doesn't have to be written as that guilty of wrongdoing as Kara sounds characterized here.

One of the major criticisms of superhero cinema for the past decade has been its resolute sameness: while certain MCU movies may have loose genre window-dressing, they’re fundamentally tonally similar in their quippy characters and excess spectacle. But all three of these series have strong art direction and visions for these characters that feels spiritually true to the source material but also provides something fresh and new that fans haven’t seen before, and are all radically different from one another.

Heavily inspired by early 2000s anime, “My Adventures With Superman” is the bright, zippy, lighthearted offering. The show takes the characters and their battles seriously, but it provides a wonderfully comforting take on Superman that also heavily foregrounds the love story between Clark and Lois; it’s a rom-com as much as it is a series about fighting invading aliens. It works because of how well-drawn these versions of the characters are, and because his relationship with Lois was always what made the seemingly invulnerable Clark feel most human. If the 2025 James Gunn “Superman” film sometimes strained to reinvent the character’s optimism for modern audiences, “My Adventures With Superman” makes that challenge look effortless.

But again, we're not being told about the character design, and that's being dishonest with the readership, for the sake of virtue-signaling. They may not have done to Kara's hair what they did Lois', but that's still no excuse, and that Lois' ethnicity may have also been changed only further (she looks darker complected in the cartoon) confirms the disrespect the producers actually have for Siegel and Shuster's creations. The writer also made sure to take a biased look at the aforementioned Marvel cartoon:

“X-Men ’97” is another successor of a ’90s kids’ cartoon, albeit a direct sequel. The 1992 “X-Men” animated series that aired on Fox during the decade was a foundational series for fans of the Marvel superhero team, providing definitive versions of the mutant protectors in all their messy, soapy excess. “’97” picks up where the series left off, but again ages up the content for adults who grew up with the series for a much darker tone. The animation emphasizes fidelity to the original show and the time period’s garish aesthetic in general, for a show that, more than almost any film, truly feels like picking up and reading five random issues of a comic run from 30 years ago.

Not all of these series are of equal quality. “My Adventures with Superman” has been the most consistent of the three, a nice good time throughout all three seasons without ever being exceptional. “Caped Crusader” Season 1 was a promising start, but Season 2 ramped up the stakes and serialized storytelling for a much improved follow-up. “X-Men ’97,” meanwhile, had a near flawless debut season, but a divisive Season 2 that struggled with unfocused storytelling and weaker stakes, albeit with a standout fourth episode that ranks among the best of the series (the show’s production was likely marred by the firing of head writer Beau DeMayo during work on Season 2 for allegations of sexual harrasment).

No surprise they'd sugarcoat X-Men 97 as well. They made Rogue otherwise sexless, drew Storm with a mohawk forcibly, and even the treatment of Morph was reprehensible. The part about the darkness predictably goes by without objectivity, and seriously, what "fidelity" is there truly here? And why does the writer talk about being "unexceptional" when Jimmy's ethnicity was changed, while Lois was made to look unattractive, and Supergirl gets a questionable premise shoehorned onto her? Such dishonesty indeed.

I'd spoken before about why brightness and optimism can't come with strings attached, yet that's exactly what the producers of My Adventures With Superman did, and it's disgraceful how Indiewire's writer doesn't have the courage to admit it's ludicrous, divisive, and conflicts with entertainment value. Animation can certainly be a great venue for superheroics, but not if woke changes are forced onto established creations. There was once a saying that change must be consistent with what came before, and the Hollywood phonies who turned out these items certainly aren't proving much different from the live action moviemakers who race-swapped and sex-swapped any of the characters in specific adaptations.

Marvel failed the X-Men long ago, yet Collider thinks it's only recently this happened

Collider argues that Marvel is now failing the X-Men, as if it hadn't already happened, though it's interesting they take issue with one of the most overrated, pretentious leftist writers of modern times, Gail Simone, in their look at what she wrote in recent X-Men stories. The article doesn't begin well:

Comic books have come a long way since their advent in 1933, but they have evolved significantly over the last ten years as the industry has grappled with writing stories in a post-Comicsgate era. Still, some of the most celebrated titles have found themselves falling into familiar and oftentimes uncomfortable patterns.

When the writer starts subtly blaming Comicsgate, something's obviously gone wrong. That's just a distraction reducing the seriousness of the subject.

Few writers embody this evolution more uniquely than Gail Simone, whose early commentary helped redefine how gender and agency are understood in mainstream superhero media. In 1999, prior to her professional writing debut, Simone launched the website "Women in Refrigerators," coining a phrase that forever altered comic book criticism. Sparked by the infamous death of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt (who was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54) the term described a pervasive industry trope where female characters were routinely killed, maimed, or otherwise de-powered purely to advance the emotional arcs of male heroes.

Simone’s sharp critique propelled her into the industry itself, where she swiftly became a powerhouse writer for both DC and Marvel, crafting acclaimed runs on titles like Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and even Deadpool while proving that female characters could anchor the same complex narratives as their male peers.

That legacy makes the last two years of her run on Uncanny X-Men all the more jarring. As the first woman to be the mainline’s sole writer, Simone benefited from a degree of “plot armor,” so to say, which allowed her early missteps to be given a pass. However, this run has slowly become a depressing descent into the very creative pitfalls she spent decades dismantling.

Rather than propelling the mutant flagship forward, Simone's work succumbs to clunky prose, dated characterizations, and a frustrating reliance on regressive tropes that feel out of character for not only the franchise, but Simone as a writer. Perhaps most glaring is how the narrative falters under the weight of subtle microaggressions and tone-deaf interpersonal dynamics, which begets the question of how an icon of feminist comic commentary could deliver a story so strangely out of step with her own established standard.

Unfortunately, she continued to work with DC even as they performed many of the same offensive acts she was supposedly against, and even her work on Birds of Prey may have contained allusions to Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, which dampens the impact of whatever she was supposedly trying to reverse. It's also worth considering her real life politics are another contradiction that make a joke out of her alleged mission. Even the artwork in some of her later projects became noticeably bad. So why do they suddenly say she's stumbled into "creative pitfalls"? She was sadly always a left-wing phony, and her attacks on J.K. Rowling only made things worse. And the writer appears to have forgotten one more chilling trope: when a girl is turned into a villainess for the sake of it. Another something I don't think Simone ever made a convincing effort to dismantle in her scriptwriting, and she never made a convincing effort to give ladies a complex narrative to rival the male cast members.

The most immediate, and perhaps least egregious, casualty of this run is the regression of Rogue and Gambit, whose iconic relationship is flattened into a hollow caricature. Rather than leading the team as a formidable leader in her own right, Rogue is reduced to little more than a domestic "tradwife" existing solely in relation to her husband. It quickly becomes evident that the narrative prioritizes making Gambit look effortless and cool instead of allowing Rogue to command respect as an actual leader.

Let me get this straight. The writer believes Simone turned Rogue into a "conservative" stereotype? Something tells me the columnist's not being altruistic. Besides, Rogue's potential as a character was damaged 3 decades ago, and Scott Lobdell could be considered the culprit. It's one thing to pair up 2 superhero figures, but another to do it in such sloppy fashion as Lobdell did it, which undermined characterization. It's interesting though, that the woman who wrote this Collider item actually feels Simone's doing stuff that's allegedly anathema to a leftist agenda, when she claims there's "microaggressions" in the script, and the talk of a "tradwife" also gives strong clues where this is really going.

Rogue's dialogue (and Remy's, admittedly) is weighed down by heavy-handed, exaggerated Southern phonetics that read more like mocking stereotypes than authentic regional voices. Compounding this domestic imbalance is the awkward insertion of Calico; forcing an infantilized teenage mutant into their immediate living situation pushes Rogue further into a suburban foster-parent trope, taking her even further away from the frontlines of mutant leadership. The narrative comes across as off-putting as Calico is written in a deeply juvenile way which includes seeing the teenage mutant crawling into bed with Rogue and Remy — a couple she has only known for a few months.

This superficial obsession with making Gambit look cool constantly sacrifices basic narrative logic for cheap, unearned hype. A glaring example occurs during a major battle sequence in Uncanny X-Men #32, where Remy abruptly transforms into the "Wyvern" — a monstrous form that has been teased relentlessly for nearly ten issues and hyped up on promotional art. Instead of delivering a dramatic, satisfying payoff to all of that teasing, the transformation arrives suddenly at a moment that makes little sense within the flow of the story.

The panel they presented doesn't show Gambit in bed while Calico's there, and Rogue's role in that segment is clearly meant to play something like a big sister figure who cheers up a protege who'd been suffering from a nightmare. I don't find Simone's writing appealing today, but it sounds like the columnist's looking for cheap excuses to tear down on motherhood/sisterhood. Nor does it show Gambit looking cool, which I assume means he's battling baddies. But that's not what happens in the material I've seen so far. In any case, if the writer's delegitimizing Gambit as a character by acting as though he's a real person, she's just perpetuating the rock bottom lapse in logic that's been going on for decades.

Most striking is the treatment of Monet St. Croix, a Black Muslim woman whose established characterization has always centered on bodily autonomy and a fierce opposition to incarceration. Reducing her to the temporary warden of Graymalkin — a fascist concentration camp where mutants are detained until human authorities arrive — completely guts the core of her identity, reframing a hero of liberation as an enforcer of state-sanctioned violence.

Monet, from what I know, was not created as a Muslim adherent in 1994. I think it was Peter David who was allowed to force that retcon onto the former Generation X cast member, 15 years ago. What occurred is similar to how heterosexual characters like Obsidian in Infinity Inc. were retconned into homosexual characters. What happened to Monet is atrocious in the extreme, and that the columnist appears to be fine with that also speaks volumes. In the Islamic world, women are treated as 2nd class citizens, and we're being lectured about "bodily autonomy" and opposition to incarceration? I'm sorry, but what's written sounds so deliberate, and again, like a lecture. If the writer's going to take such an accepting view of the Religion of Peace, then this article is politically motivated, though it does have some eyebrow raising details to tell:

Another recurring pattern in Simone’s Uncanny X-Men run is the abundance of cultural insensitivity and subtle microaggressions woven into the dialogue. Asian characters are routinely subjected to lazy, exoticized tropes. Of note, Logan casually refers to the young Japanese mutant Deathdream as a "manga kid,” which Simone glibly responded to criticism by framing it as Wolverine “incorrectly” calling him that. This casual bias rears its head again with Calico’s most recent interactions with Pietro Maximoff. Calico treats Pietro — a character of Romani heritage and a man of color — with a smug, condescending superiority (despite being in a moment of crisis), dismissively refusing to even view him as a true mutant.

Rather than celebrating the rich diversity that has long defined the franchise, these characterizations alienate readers, reducing an ambitious flagship era to a series of uncomfortable missteps. While there is some narrative explanation for Calico’s behavior, it is nevertheless jarring to see a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman othering a character who is, historically, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Coupled with the optics of tethering her to the franchise’s most cookie-cutter Southern couple, it feels as though Simone is doubling down on an inherent and accepted bias about Southern ideals.

Watching an industry titan like Gail Simone, whose entire legacy was built on dismantling harmful tropes, fall into these exact creative traps is a deeply disheartening turn for modern comic criticism — especially as she argues with fans of her writing on social media. Yet this failure does not rest solely on her shoulders; Marvel shares equal responsibility for allowing one of its most iconic flagships to languish without editorial discipline or vision.

Honestly, it's hardly a surprise if Simone doesn't respect any of the better qualities of X-Men from the past. Let's recall said quality definitely collapsed since the early 2000s, along with cohesion of continuity, and characterization. But truly, Simone never "dismantled" any harmful tropes, and she added insult to injury for the Atom by fully accepting the assignment of writing a DEI-pandering character of Asian background shoehorned into Ray Palmer's costume in 2006. It was cancelled about 2 years later, and 2 decades later still, nobody cares about a social justice pandering production. But if Simone really is resorting to harmful tropes, should this be a surprise? What it can suggest is that, if she was part and parcel of DC and Marvel's earlier embarrassments, and never took issue with what DC did to any female character not written by her, then she never had faith in her alleged positions to begin with. No wonder she's so overrated.

Since the X-Men is a subject, here's also an article on IGN telling why the X-Men don't have a role in a Wolverine video game:

While there are many mutants famous for being members of the X-Men in Marvel’s Wolverine, in the video game’s story the X-Men do not exist. Rather, Logan is a former member of Team X, the mutant black ops unit that includes the likes of Sabretooth and Mystique. Yes, Jean Grey is in the game, but she is not part of any group called the X-Men because it hasn't been formed yet. Put simply, don’t expect Cyclops to turn up in his comic accurate suit, dropping from the Blackbird under orders from Professor X back at the X Mansion.

But why? Why not have the X-Men exist in Marvel’s Wolverine? In an interview with IGN, narrative director Walt Williams said Insomniac was keen for the mutants in the game to not have a safe place to go to, to not benefit from being superheroes, but rather remind players that mutants exist on the outside — and Wolverine himself, who this game is all about, is perhaps the biggest outsider of them all.

“So Team X is canonical,” Williams began. “It is Logan's first team in his history. It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.

Well that's part of the problem with the comics since the early to mid-2000s, if we take the terrible Brian Michael Bendis' work on Avengers as an example. Several mainstay characters were dropped in favor of hilariously obvious choices like Wolvie and Spider-Man, with Scarlet Witch the biggest victim of jettisoning, yet the same people doing these interviews don't take an objective view of that, and it's no excuse for forcibly omitting his own team from reference. If they want to make this game a solo adventure, so be it, but I don't see why the X-Men have to be downplayed, or written out that forcibly.

“But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe.

He acts like this has to be the norm at all times, and cannot be changed. Another decided problem. It's exactly what led to the Spider-marriage being thrown out with bath water 2 decades ago, and Mary Jane Watson paying a heavy price in the process.

It’s a detailed answer to a question that fans have been wondering about ever since Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed. And so, while you’ll get co-op gameplay with Jean Grey, she’s not in the story as Marvel Girl or wearing a suit we’ve seen from the X-Men comics. And without the X-Men knocking about, Logan and Jean are free to explore their own romantic relationship — assuming the game itself goes that far — free from Cyclops’ death stare.

Indeed, Williams confirmed to IGN that there is no Logan, Jean, and Scott Summers love triangle at play in Marvel’s Wolverine.

“I don't want to get too much into spoilers because obviously there's a whole story that we want everyone to experience as they play through it,” Williams said. “But I think it's safe to say that we are focusing on just Logan and Jean's relationship in Marvel's Wolverine.”

Gee, so that's what is considered a big deal? Up to the turn of the century, I can't recall if Wolverine was ever seriously seen pursuing a relationship with Jean, and Chris Claremont wrote Logan noticing she and Scott were an item in the late 70s, to the point where Logan quietly discarded some flowers he'd brought her in a trash bin at a hospital when Cyclops was around. It was only when Mark Millar being helming Ultimate X-Men that all of a sudden, exploring a love triangle became a big deal, because in this alternate universe, practically depicting Logan as morally bankrupt was somehow a great idea. But that alternate universe line was little more than one of the most overblown tales of its sort, and came at a time when mainstream was declining.

And it's a shame we once again have examples of MSM sources not admitting the X-Men went downhill long ago.

The style of Barry Windsor-Smith

Cartoonist Jim Rugg wrote a review on Literary Hub of artist Barry Windsor-Smith's work on Wolverine's Weapon X story from the 1988-95 Marvel Comics Presents anthology:

Barry Windsor-Smith was one of the most popular creators at Marvel Comics. Part of his popularity was due to his style. His comics did not look like or read like other comic books. It is important to clarify that Windsor-Smith’s style was not defined exclusively by his artwork. Windsor-Smith approached storytelling very differently than the standard Marvel house style approach.

The average age of comic book readers in the 1960s was seven. The storytelling style of Marvel as well as many other comic book publishers was “show and tell.” Captions often described the drawing in the panel. This redundancy made sense for young, inexperienced readers. But by 1991, readers were older and hopefully better readers.

The 1980s saw the rise of creators who felt that comics were an art form and were not inherently limited to young readers. These creators challenged misconceptions about comics being for kids with complex, sophisticated works like Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Love and Rockets. The growth of storytelling in the art form meant that creators like Barry Windsor-Smith could use different techniques to engage and challenge their readers.

One of the more obvious storytelling choices in Weapon X is the lack of narrative captions. Without literal explanations, readers must pay close attention to Smith’s artwork in each panel to follow Weapon X’s story. This one choice dramatically changes the reading experience. It places much more value on the artwork. One cannot understand the story only by reading the words. The art in each panel provides critical information. In order to understand what is happening, the reader must interpret the images and the character’s dialogue. This was a radical departure from most Marvel comics of 1991. This kind of reading requires time, attention, and thought in order to process what we see and how it fits with other panels. It also creates an experience where the reader’s knowledge is similar to Logan’s—limited. We do not always know what is happening. We often piece together the story from a subjective, fragmented vantage point. At times, this effect makes Logan’s character more relatable.

Well that was then, and this is now, and while sophisticated writing/art may have been common at the time, it most unfortunately has turned into a lost art as of today, if we take Brian Bendis' writing as an example. And while Rugg may be right about how Windsor-Smith approached the writing/art in Weapon X, I'm going to have to disagree with Dark Knight Returns, if only because Frank Miller sowed the seeds that brought down the Masked Manhunter in the mainstream DCU proper over time though DKR.

And if Rugg believes what came about in the early 90s makes good art, what does he think of modern "art"? Seriously, I think anybody who can't apply an objective view to modern storytelling as much as older stuff is not providing enough to challenge the readers either. Rugg's review of Windsor-Smith's Wolverine tale from MCP is impressive, but it still doesn't substitute for explaining why modern mainstream comics aren't delivering. In fact, there's a valid argument to make that if narrative captions were thrown away by later writers, that's honestly not good, because they do still have use even in modern times, though what's really bad is when thought balloons suffer the same fate. Without those, how can you know what's on the superhero's mind? If Superman and Spider-Man were written without thought balloons, they'd be getting nowhere in past decades as a storytelling vehicle. That's why, while I don't doubt Windsor-Smith's talent in the past, narrative captions and thought balloons still shouldn't be thrown away as storytelling tools.

John Byrne pens yet another Phoenix-related story

Popverse tells the veteran artist Byrne has put together yet another story building off the Phoenix saga from X-Men, a story that was regurgitated far too many times:

It is a story that has been in the making for over 40 years. After very publicly walking away from Marvel Comics 25 years ago, John Byrne is returning to publish his own version of what happened after his iconic Dark Phoenix Saga. In his version, Jean Grey doesn’t die, and X-Men history takes a very different turn.

X-Men Elsewhen started as a webcomic that John Byrne published on his website starting in 2018, but it is set to get a physical release later this month. That release is remarkable not just because it is John Byrne returning to one of the most iconic storylines in comic book history, but also because Marvel Comics is putting its official stamp on it. They are involved as licensors while Abrams ComicArts is publishing.

The problem is that it's also one of the most way overused story premises and plotlines in publishing history, and I think Claremont himself once recycled elements from it in a Justice League tale he wrote in the 2000s for DC. Why is this such a big deal, and is fandom actually looking forward to this? There's only so many other story ideas from past history that would make great setups for a science-fantasy tale today, and this is what we keep hearing about? Sorry, but this is just insulting to the intellect when they keep regurgitating a storyline that wound up emphasizing mass death and destruction, and while the late editor Jim Shooter may have decided it better to have Jean put to death than be let off the hook for wiping out a whole alien space colony (Jean's fate was retconned 5 years later with an alien lifeform becoming the actual culprit), it doesn't explain why he approved of making Jean the scapegoat who's destined to be turned evil in the first place.

If there's any storyline the medium has to stop relying upon so heavily for a setup, it's the Phoenix Saga. It did no good in the long run for comicdom, and was the kind of tale that should've been left in the past long ago. Why Byrne himself sees this as great is beyond me.

Veteran actor from X-Men films made offensive comments about Donald Trump and his residence

Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart says veteran actor Ian McKellan, who played Magneto in the live action X-Men films in the past quarter century, is the latest performer with comics-to-movie connections who's made offensive comments about the USA president:

Disney’s Marvel film star Sir Ian McKellen is boasting about fantasizing about destroying President Donald Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago resort during his scenes in the upcoming superhero blockbuster, Avengers: Doomsday.

McKellen will reprise his X-Men role as Magneto, the mutant with the power over metals, in the film set to be released in December. And in comments made in Rome, the 87-year-old actor said that directors Anthony and Joe Russo told him to envision something personal when he was wreaking havoc as Magneto, according to The Guardian.

McKellen told his audience that “they got me at one point to destroy New Jersey.”

The actor then rose from his chair onstage to give a dramatic recreation of his thoughts during the scene, and said that the Russos “told me to look more furious: make it look as if you hate what you’re destroying. So, I stood there and I shouted: ‘Mar-a-Lago!'”

And the filmmakers had no complaints? Well, they have indicated they're leftists, so I guess that explains something. This does not make me look forward to watching whatever new films they're producing any more than anything else, and it says quite a bit more about the actors who were part of the X-Men movies as well. The Marvel movieverse has been on the decline for the past several years, and this kind of PR is not going to improve fortunes by much either.

Rob Liefeld whines again

Popverse says dreadful artist Liefeld is complaining that he's not listed as a writer/artist in one of Marvel's latest archives for New Mutants:

Rob Liefeld has never been shy about his opinions on... er, anything, really. But for our purposes, he's never held back on his opinions over how the work he did at Marvel has been handled by the company. Take, for example, a recent expression of his frustration regarding his work on the '90s X-Men title The New Mutants, in which Liefeld introduced perhaps his most famous creations, Deadpool and Cable. According to the seminal artist and Image Comics co-founder, a new collection of said comics miscredits him egregiously.

Liefeld's thoughts came via a social media post made June 6, in conjunction with Marvel's advertisement for an upcoming comic book omnibus. Specifically, that omnibus is The New Mutants Volume 4, which as some fans brought to Liefeld's attention, only credits him as an artist.

"Yes," said Liefeld, "despite writing the best selling issues of New Mutants ever published I am not listed [as a writer]."

But wasn't Louise Simonson the writer at the time? The only issues where he appeared to have credit as writer - or perhaps more precisely, as plotter - were the last 3, issues 98-100, and even there, it wasn't alone. It was with Fabian Nicieza. And I also noticed, interestingly enough, that issues 92 and 97 had Bob Hall and Guang Yap, respectively, credited as artists, not Liefeld. So it sounds like Liefeld's once again trying to give tabloid news sites like Popverse more material they can exploit for trivial matters, and simultaneously, Liefeld's trying to pretend he's one of the finest artists around, even though he's not. Rather hiliariously, he even admits he only "wrote" the last 3 issues in 1983-91's New Mutants:

Thus began a series of posts in which Liefeld not only voiced his annoyance of the oversight, but reminded readers of the success of the comic book the omnibus collects.

"It was through my writing that issues #98-100 sold 2.2 million copies," Liefeld said in another post. "That is more than the entire year previous to my joining. New Mutants was selling 110.000 copies in a sea of X-books selling 350k and above."

No kidding. It sold that much with his otherwise awful art? Well, I do recall the P.T. Barnum phrase "a sucker is born every minute", but even so, if anybody actually bought stories where it's not clear he was the writer per se as Nicieza was, it's a terrible shame they had to help prolong the dreadful career of such a pretentious artist.

Finally, Liefeld stepped back from his own experience to point at other artists who've conveyed their exasperation not just with the comic book industry, but with Marvel itself.

"In closing, Marvel treats creators like shit," Liefeld concluded, "They always have. Jack Kirby sued them. For two decades. The estate wants to sweep it under the rug now that they settled, but it turned Jack’s stomach. Steve Ditko sued Marvel. They can’t help but create the magic makers like shit."

Oops, did he really say "create" instead of "treat"? And since when was Liefeld a "magic maker" with that awful art of his, where he couldn't draw feet, let alone consistent panels with coherent art? Liefeld, alas, appears to be pretty arrogant, and with that kind of approach, is it any wonder he's otherwise on the sidelines now? It's a real shame Marvel had to hire him to work on at least 2 comics in their unsuccessful Heroes Reborn "experiment", which was like a textbook example of how mainstream publishers aren't marketing and selling on merit. Liefeld's only making clear he doesn't think his sloppy, derivative art is an embarrassment to the whole concept of artmaking. Yet all these pretentious news sites see fit to lavish attention on him they likely wouldn't give to writers like Chuck Dixon, or even artists like Brandon Peterson and Kirby himself, who're more talented than Liefeld ever was back in the day.

All we learn from this is that Liefeld's got a pointless grudge against Marvel, proving they shouldn't have ever done business with him in the first place. And Image shouldn't have let him take part in the company's founding.

Without merit, USA comics won't have "everlasting" appeal

The North State Journal (Raleigh, NC) wrote about why American comics are so great:

Pick one up. Be seduced by its glossy cover. Gaze upon the impossibly muscular body clad in a skin-tight suit. Our hero or heroine will surely be soaring, shouting, blasting a villain into next week.

They are ridiculous. They are addictively great. Comic books, of the superhero variety, are 100% American.

Compare the thin comic book to Europe’s graphic novels, and they come off looking flimsy, infantile. Compare the American comic to Japanese Manga and they appear innocent in their fixation with heroism; they hark back to a departed American age.

Once a nickel, a dime, a quarter, now the price of a latte, they are objects of American consumer capitalism. The comic is literature in junk-food version.

Well it used to be, but that doesn't mean it was always perfect even back in the Golden Age. And if you consider how, by the turn of the century, they were on their way to putting far more forced emphasis on leftist ideologies, that's why it doesn't make much sense now to say they're objects of capitalism. The American age in question has sadly departed, and they're not fixed on heroism like they were before.

Yet what truly makes them American objects is what plays out in their 32 pages month after month, decade upon decade.

When the Fantastic Four took their fateful space journey in 1961 and “cosmic rays” transformed the quartet into unwilling superheroes, comics entered a weird realm where the all-powerful were also the unwilling, decidedly modern victims of science and circumstance.

Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine (the list goes on) were given supernatural abilities that made them outcasts, obliging them to be flawed messiahs.

They were, by some quirk of the American character, bound to Peter Parker’s moral imperative: “With great power comes great responsibility.” They are versions of an American Sisyphus, bound to saving us over and over again.

What could be more American — that might, when lashed to a sense of justice, eventually, makes right? So honorable, so naïve.

Well now even the phrase from Spidey's 1962 premiere has been throughly trashed for the sake of pointless directions, not the least being the erasure of the Spider-marriage. When the paper, possibly a college-type one, won't get into any of those issues, something is decidedly and terribly wrong. There's no justice to be found in modern comics when they force in so much leftist ideologies at the expense of coherency.

To this day, though the tone is darker, Marvel and DC, the two mammoths of comics, continue to reimagine the American character.

Once side attractions in a world of leading white men, Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey and Susan Storm have in recent years emerged as leaders to reinvigorate the Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four sagas. Absolute Wonder Woman has broken ground with beautiful art. Miles Morales is Spidey for a new generation.

And when they make such ambiguous statements about these leading ladies, something is wrong here too. Note the absurdity of bringing up what I assume is Spider-Gwen, some kind of otherworldly take on the 616 universe Gwen, without even making anything clear, or asking if it really does favors for the Spidey franchise. Also, not all art is good today, what with the woke damage of the past decade still being felt, and the Titans' title in the DCU is one that's suffered as a result. And they don't have a problem with the darker tone? That's practically what brought down comicdom in the long run. Also, do they have a problem with white men? One can only wonder if the writer's saying he considers Peter Parker expendable.

Yet the central fissures remain.

Bruce Wayne can’t connect with anyone other than his butler; he is the lonely individual in an atomized America. Steve Rogers bears the burden of representing the “Greatest Generation” from World War II. He is a Captain America forever out of place, even in his own land.

And could there be a more iconic tech magnate toying with humanity’s fate than Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor and his delusions of grandeur? If only our world had a bespectacled Clark Kent keeping an eye on things. Just in case.

Umm, even this is flawed if they'd consider there were stories where Bruce had affairs with ladies like Vicky Vale, Silver St. Cloud and even Catwoman. Where do they get off using that kind of laughable lecture anyway? The writer's also oblivious to how there were several stories over the years where Marvel tried to replace and harm the reputation of Capt. America for the sake of publicity stunts, and it goes without saying that today's dialogue for a lot of the regular cast doesn't feel like that of the older comics anymore.

So what's the point of this article? Practically nothing, since like a lot of other such modern articles, it won't explore what went wrong over past decades, nor will it take an objective view of Marvel/DC in their modern form. Once again, comicdom's getting nowhere fast as a result of all these phonies writing about what's hardly coverage of history.

The speculator joke continues in the UK

The BBC announced more old pamphlets are being sold on auction over in Britain:

Two Marvel comic books have sold for a total of £11,440 at an auction house in Surrey.

A copy of the first edition of The Incredible Hulk, featuring the first appearance of the superhero, sold for £7,800 after going on auction at Ewbank's in Woking on Wednesday.

Another 1974 edition of the comic which features the first appearance of X-Men superhero Wolverine, also sold for £3,640.

The auction's big ticket item, a first edition of Amazing Spider-Man which featured the character's first appearance, failed to sell having been listed for between £10,000 and £15,000.

Well that's certainly amazing some buyers gave pause based on 5-digit sums, but this still isn't good there's consumers in Europe who're making a farce out of the medium by perpetuating the speculator nonsense that's been a sad staple in the USA for a long time. Why won't even they stop to consider this is only depriving many museums of history projects that would be better off stored under their auspices? And why won't the history community itself speak out about how the speculator market is doing more harm than good? It's totally depressing nobody cares.

Jack Kirby gets a street named after him

Much like Stan Lee received a street named in his memory a few years ago, JNS reports the late Jack Kirby has now received a street named after him, part of a project the law firm agent Roy Schwartz and the American Jewish Historical Society worked on getting approval for:

It is no small thing to get a street in Manhattan named after you, but the creator of such timeless superheroes as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man received that honor on Monday, when the Lower East Side block where he was born was named “Jack Kirby Way.” [...]

“Widely recognized as the most prolific and arguably most important creator in the history of the comic book medium, Jack Kirby is also one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century,” according to a new exhibit on his life and work at Manhattan’s American Jewish Historical Society.

The exhibition, “The Jack Kirby Way: How a boy from the Lower East Side became the King of Comics,” is co-produced by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. It will be on view through Nov. 30.

One of the artifacts on display in the show is the original “Captain America” comic books, issues 1 through 10. Joe Simon, who co-created the character and many more with Kirby, owned the issues on display.

The iconic first issue of “Captain America,” published in March 1941, shows the superhero punching Hitler in the face, before the United States entered the war. Many Americans had not yet come to support the idea that the Nazis needed to be vanquished.

Based on this report from Breitbart from last year, some could reasonably argue the same sadly holds true for today when it comes to the Islamic Iranian regime, in example. If Kirby and Joe Simon were alive today and created Cap in modern times, the sad but possible reality is that the Star Spangled Avenger wouldn't get the same kind of positive regard seen in the Golden Age any more than any other Marvel/DC heroes created since.

Its publication led to death threats to both men by the German-American Bund, Roy Schwartz, a board member of AJHS and the person who drove the effort to get the street co-named in Kirby’s honor, told JNS.

The police, when contacted by Kirby and Simon, refused to do anything to help, according to Schwartz.

Then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia contacted the comic book artists and promised them personally that they would be kept safe. LaGuardia’s mother, Irene Luzzatto-Coen, was a Sephardic Jew.

And on this, it's vital to note that even today, that's not always the case in NYC, where this stuff has become a particularly sad staple ever since Zohran Mamdani was elected the 1st Muslim mayor in the Big Apple, and what he's been doing now would be hurtful to Kirby. Do the organizers of the campaign to have Jack Kirby's birthplace named after him realize that, if they don't have any concerns over what came about even before October 7, 2023 and Mamdani's election, then this whole campaign's otherwise meaningless?

As a little boy growing up in Tel Aviv, Schwartz was obsessed with comics, including Kirby’s, he told JNS.

American relatives would mail him new releases, and he learned English by reading them.

Now employed by day as “a mild-mannered chief marketing agency for a large law firm,” as he told JNS, he is the author of “Was Superman Circumcised?” and other books and essays exploring Jewish aspects of comic book history.

Schwartz was the driving force behind the labyrinthine bureaucratic process by which city agencies approved a co-named New York City street.

“There was enough red tape to circle Galactus several times,” Schwartz told JNS.

Captain America was and remains his favorite superhero, Schwartz told JNS, a few feet away from the newly-renamed street sign.

But predictably, they won't get into how, less than a decade after Kirby's passing, Marvel under Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas spared no expense taking apart much of what made Cap work in the first place, lacing the series published under the Knights imprint with anti-American propaganda, something that's continued until even recently. Equally bad is how they repeatedly tried to "replace" Steve Rogers with PC tokens. So what good does it do for Schwartz to just make the statement without bringing up how sad it is that Cap, along with tons of other Marvel/DC properties, major and minor, were effectively destroyed for the sake of woke leftist propaganda? Why, what if Mamdani had anything to do with the red tape encountered? In that case, Schwartz would be wallowing in the exact cowardice that all but victimized Kirby in his time by not showing the courage to discuss anything.

Golin, executive director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, is a long-time, major Kirby fan.

“I love all of his work. It continues to blow me away, and he was so prolific,” he told JNS. “He is so Jewish, so if you take pride in the accomplishment of fellow Jews, then he’s someone you should know about.”

But does this guy appreciate where Marvel/DC went with Kirby's creations post-2000, including the New Gods? I seem to recall Jim Starlin wrote a miniseries called The Death of the New Gods 2 decades ago, and that wasn't exactly what Kirby got into the business to do. Such a story was a slap in the face to his legacy, just as much as what became of Cap, because if memory serves, Big Barda was meant as a tribute to Kirby's wife. I recently bought an archive of Kirby's work on the New Gods from the early 70s, and that's the kind of work that counts. I will not waste time and money on the post-2000 stories that did a terrible disservice to Kirby's efforts. Also, look who turned up as guests at the event:

Less elaborately dressed but honored with seats on the dais were Schwartz, Tom Brevoort, executive editor and senior vice president of publishing at Marvel Comics; Marvel artist and writer Jim Steranko; and former DC Comics president and publisher Paul Levitz.

While Steranko's a decent visitor, that a leftist like Brevoort, who actively defended Marvel's deconstruction of Kirby and Lee's work, would attend is disgraceful and embarrassing. Even Levitz, who fulfilled quite a bit of the same when he was a leading executive at DC (and was an apologist for Planned Parenthood), isn't exactly somebody I'd consider welcome there. Yes, I do recall he was willing to sign a petition in defense of victims of October 7, 2023, but there's still no telling if he's fully reevaluated his past mistakes, and so far, he's never publicly said so. Worse, both Marvel and DC continue to employ people throughly unsuited for the jobs, and that certainly doesn't reflect well on Brevoort, considering he still works for Marvel.

Kirby certainly is worthy of a street named after him. But not all the people involved are worthy of backing his legacy.

Why would this local collector consider Magneto a favorite?

Ynetnews interviewed an Israeli comics reader and merchandise collector, and while his reasons for buying memorabilia and merchandise are interesting, which character happens to be his favorite?

When speaking to Etan, one thing becomes clear: he does not collect for resale. Yes, some items in his collection range from a few shekels to several thousand. Yes, he owns rare pieces, including a massive handcrafted Wolverine head sculpture of which only two exist worldwide, but market speculation does not drive him.

“I don’t buy something because it might be worth more one day,” he says. “I buy it because I love the design.”

His favorite character is Magneto. The choice is personal. Magneto, a Holocaust survivor in Marvel canon, carries ideological complexity. Etan connects deeply to that narrative weight. Still, he does not buy every Magneto piece available. Only the ones that visually resonate.

Granted, he may only collect memorabilia out of respect for art in general, not for money's sake. But as for Magneto, while I know there was a time during the 1980s when Chris Claremont wrote Erik Lensherr reforming and joining Charles Xavier's academy to lead the New Mutants, should a guy who was written committing serious criminal offenses be considered a favorite? In UXM #150, he almost slew Kitty Pryde, who was characterized as being of even more ethnic Jewish background than Magneto was, and in the Fatal Attractions storyline of the early 90s, circa sans-adjective X-Men #25, Magneto ripped all the adamantium out of Wolverine's body. If you go by what's told in this CBR item, Magneto also unleashed a electromagnetic pulse blast that could've resulted in thousands of deaths. Years later though, when crossovers like House of M were published, that's when the real abuse-of-character really came to the fore, as under Brian Bendis's writing, Magneto led to the death of Quicksilver, and the article also notes there was a storyline where he caused the death of Charles Xavier. Viewed within the specific contexts, is somebody like the Master of Magnetism somebody to admire? No, although the writers who brought his characterization down to abysmal levels certainly aren't. Near the Ynet article's end, it's told that:

Collectors live in contradiction. “I’m never satisfied,” he says. “I’m not satisfied that I don’t have enough. And I’m not satisfied that I have too much.”

His home contains six or seven large boxes filled with comics alone. Shelves of Marvel, DC, Alien, Ghostbusters. Pops protected in cases.

And yet, he contemplates selling everything from time to time. The offers have come. Significant ones. He always says no. [...]

He emphasizes discipline over impulse, focus over frenzy, and above all, community. “If someone needs help finding something,” he says, “I’ll help. A collector understands another collector.”

Well I do give him credit for not taking the exact same path as other collectors who do it in hopes of producing millions of dollars worth in classics to be sold cyclically on the speculator market. Even so, if he hoards the comics without reading them, and keeps them wrapped in eternal plastic, then what good is it to collect them at all? Especially in an era where mainstream comics sunk to dismal levels? And I think it's a shame he'd choose Magneto over say, Kitty Pryde, or even Nuklon of Infinity Inc, Moon Knight, Doc Samson from the Hulk, and even Colossal Boy from Legion of Super-Heroes, whom I think was written with a Jewish background too. I suppose it could be worse though: what if the collector in focus considered Harley Quinn a number one favorite? Based on how she was written in the comics after she was shoehorned into the DCU proper at the turn of the century, to make her a major pick would be atrocious in the extreme. Making a fictional character your favorite choice based on the ethnic background alone is not the way to go, and that's a vital lesson some would do well to consider.

What a Catholic commentator has to say about Marvel/DC history while discussing Voyage Comics' contributions to the medium

A writer at the Catholic World Report discusses Voyage Comics, the publisher specializing in religiously-themed stories, and along the way, has what to say about past Marvel/DC publications with allusions to leftist ideology. Some of which are admittedly quite interesting to ponder, including a certain aforementioned tale from 1986 that led to a disturbing form of editorial mandate the following decade or so:

Back in the late 80s and into the 90s, even as an unphilosophical teenager and avid consumer of comic books, I was well aware of flaws in the fantasy worlds of Marvel and DC.

I can, for instance, recall seeing through the thinly veiled propaganda of an “X-Men” graphic novel entitled God’s Country, the villain of which was a small-minded religious bigot who refused to tolerate super-powered mutants. One storyline of The Legion of Super-Heroes depicted a xenophobic dictator taking over the Earth, resulting in a terrible regime whereby hapless space aliens were persecuted.

Quite aside from the obvious virtue-signaling, I was also put off by the superficial and trite conflation of issues such as trans-humanism and extra-terrestrial life with the “gay rights” movement. Do slogans like Coexist! and Can’t we all get along? really represent the only response to the presence among us of alien beings endowed with godlike powers?

In any event, an issue of The Incredible Hulk would finally cut to the chase by featuring S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury bragging about his organization’s acceptance of homosexuals.

To be sure, even in the mainstream comic book industry, there have been exceptions that veer from the reservation of liberal ideology. I still have an old issue of Batman, wherein the hero tracks down an insane criminal who would solve the homelessness problem … by killing off all the homeless. Unfortunately, some of the most interesting comics that part ways with leftist ideology are excessively dark. For example, Frank Miller’s iconic The Dark Knight Returns is laced with gratuitous obscenity and over-the-top violence, making it impossible to recommend this otherwise fascinating account of an indomitable, haunted man resuming his obligation to protect his home city from chaos.

Interesting the guy does have a problem with Miller's resort to jarring violence in the story, though I hardly consider DKR a title worth the time, if only because of what it led to years later, though of course I realize it's not Miller and his story who're literally and/or solely to blame, but rather, any editors and publishers who came within even miles of forcing successive writers to adopt a path where Bruce Wayne would be portrayed as a nasty control freak, almost entirely lacking a sense of humor or any kind of happiness amid the darkness. That direction also led to the horrific mistreatment of Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, because if memory serves, there were storylines where it was implied superhero missions are unsuited for younger protagonists, and all this in a world that was otherwise meant to be surreal. IIRC, even in Geoff Johns' Teen Titans title, this shoddy path was alluded to at one point.

I think the columnist goofed with the title of the X-Men GN, which I believe is actually "God Loves, Man Kills", originally published around 1982, and was the 5th in the Marvel Graphic Novel series that lasted until about 1993, comprising at least 75 stories. And since that came up, one can only wonder if Chris Claremont would've written up a villain who was a Muslim adherent? IIRC, when Claremont later wrote an unsuccessful 2nd volume of Gen13 that came after September 11, 2001, he added a character who was a Muslim to the cast, indicating Claremont was an early example of a writer who went woke in comicdom. And where exactly in the Hulk was Nick Fury boasting about welcoming LGBT agents into S.H.I.E.L.D? Perhaps in the 1990s, when it was more likely such propaganda would turn up, and the late Peter David was known to be a supporter of such ideologies. It is a shame he had to make such a big deal about it, even if at the time, most writers like him originally did it more subtly, unlike the very disturbingly contrived and forced way it's been handled since. Although, lest we forget, the disgraced Gerard Jones was one shoddy writer of his sort from the times who did it, as mentioned, in a very contrived and forced manner, at the expense of a more talented writer (Roy Thomas)'s creation from Infinity Inc. And that was definitely wrong. For all we know, what Jones did may have precipitated the alarming trend among leftist writers of changing a heterosexual character to homosexual, and it eventually led to the damage even X-Men's cast underwent. And even before all that, there was a time when William Messner-Loebs changed the Pied Piper from the Flash to gay in 1990. Just because this was a reformed crook who underwent an alteration of personality, does that make it inherently acceptable? Of course not.

Happily, Voyage Comics avoids political correctness on the one hand and runaway sex and violence on the other, instead opting to celebrate heroes both more down-to-earth and more wholesome than what we typically find in Marvel and DC. Also, intriguingly, heroes are placed not in the immediate “now” but are situated within historical fiction; the “Lionette” and “Phantom Phoenix” titles are set in America in the period between the World Wars.

...A sick popular culture very much needs a Catholic presence, and one way to maintain such a presence is by imprinting artifacts of that popular culture with a Catholic vision. Certainly, our history and culture are replete with real-life heroism, protagonists, and images, which warrant our children’s attention more than do Spider-Man or Green Lantern.

On this, I would disagree just in how he implies Spidey and GL in and of themselves aren't worth our children's time. There was once a time they were relevant, and when most writers/editors didn't force extreme political beliefs into the stories under the confidence that, because these were corporate-owned, they could get away with it. But that began to collapse over time, with GL an early victim of PC post-1988, and Spidey the next victim years later in the early 2000s, when J. Michael Straczynski got his mitts on the writing assignment. I think back to that time and feel disgust at all the apologists who defended and justified JMS' writing, at least until the whole Sins Past debacle came around, and only then may they finally have conceded it wasn't worth the paper wasted to print it. Today, it's definitely aged poorly.

So it's great to have religious stories to tell from that specific perspective of what figures can be considered heroic. Even so, I don't think the columnist should be telling all this at the expense of the hard work figures like Stan Lee did in his time. That kind of bias never helps.

Writer Alyssa Wong's leftist view

Geekdad interviewed writer Alyssa Wong, who's worked on Star Wars comics, for example, and even a Psylocke miniseries for Marvel, and along the way, she alluded to her leftist viewpoints, which also apparently includes implying she's "non-binary", having noticed some pronoun nonsense she put on her own sites, and the interviewer, predictably, went along with it, using the word "theirs" in reference to a woman who's making herself sound like she's ashamed to be one. Along the way, the exchange includes the following:

GD: Yes! I love Captain Marvel. I love Doc Aphra. I was going to show you a picture of this because I made this for a friend of mine…(shows them a photo of White Fox)

AW: *gasps*

GD: This is my friend’s costume, but I made the mask, and I actually modeled it, and I made a mold of it so I can make more, and I was going to ask if I could send you one.

AW: I would love that. She’s my girl! I was working for Blizzard on Overwatch – another thing that I wasn’t expecting to do, but I wanted to learn so let’s go! I was working at Blizzard on Overwatch, and Greg Pak, who I know from Asian American Activism called me, and he was like, ‘Hey, I’m writing these B-stories for the back of (I believe it was) the Aero comics. I’m looking for a co-writer. It’s Wave and Aero.’ I was like, ‘oh my God! Wave?! Filipina superhero, Wave?! Wave, who every Filipino person is excited about?’ My mom’s Filipino, so I was like, ‘That’s a hard yes!’ I actually told Blizzard that I was doing it and that if they weren’t okay with that, it was too bad. I was going to do it. I would just quit. Which is crazy but-

GD: It was that important to you.

AW: It was that important to me. This kind of work is the most important to me. That was the first thing I did for Marvel, and then the first comic that I wrote by myself was a one shot White Fox origin story, so she’s my forever girl. I love White Fox. I would love to have one.

No doubt, the interviewer's referring to the take on Carol Danvers where she's turned inside out, all for the sake of producing a female variant on Mar-Vell of the Kree, and they went out of their way to practically retcon Carol's whole background from when she originally became Ms. Marvel in the late 1970s, to the point where she'd been changed to a Kree herself. As for Wong knowing Pak as an activist, what kind of activism would it be? The left-wing variety?

GD: I also love Psylocke, so when I saw your name on the guest list I had to ask for an interview.

AW: Thank you for asking because cons are so busy, and I know it’s a sacrifice of your time as well, so I really appreciate it.

Does he love any woke modifications that could've been made to Psylocke as well? If Wong did any such thing, that's deplorable, and what's told further on gives no reason to assume her renditions of Psylocke are much better:

GD: I remember when the very first Solo trailers came out and Val was in there but didn’t mention who she was, I was like, ‘Are we going to get Sana!?’ And then it wasn’t, which is fine. But then they killed her off so unceremoniously.

AW: That was so sad. Writing Aphra is so special, and let me put it this way. The first time I saw someone like me in Star Wars was The Force Awakens. And there is a pilot named Jessika Pava. She is in the middle of the battle. She is in an X-wing. She’s in the starfighter, and she’s in the middle of this battle, and I remember seeing her, and my heart just swelled. I was like, “Oh my God. An Asian woman!” And then immediately dropped because the next thing I thought was, “Oh, she’s going to die.” Because you have an extra who is going to die, so it’s no risk to have an Asian person. It’s no risk at all. And then she didn’t die! And I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ Getting to write someone like Doctor Aphra, who is Asian like me and also queer, like me, is incredible because I feel like I’m finally getting to see people like me in Star Wars, but it’s more magical that I get to give that to other people. I’ve had so many Asian people come up to me and be like, “That’s my girl. She means everything to me!” I just love that. I love it so much. And it’s so sad that my first thought when I saw Jessika Pava was, “Oh she’s here, and she’s going to die immediately” because that’s usually what happens to people like us. To be fair, I have killed Aphra, BUT she’s back! With Aphra, I got to write a lot of people who remind me of people I know, and it’s so special.

Why is it such a big deal that every new character pushed for prominency be a LGBT practitioner? And there have been plenty of Asian characters in entertainment for decades already, so it's very silly to act like it all just happened overnight. And if it is such a big deal, how come it's only "Asian", but not backgrounds like Thai or Burmese? She's not thinking very hard, and if she has no interest in emphasizing characters with Danish or Bulgarian backgrounds in her comics, she's accomplished nothing.

GD: Related to that, did you watch The Acolyte? With such a diverse cast and being treated the way it was treated despite being amazing and an awesome show, I don’t know a single person in real life who actually doesn’t love it so the fact that it was like, “Oh yeah, it’s not doing well. We’re not gonna do the second season.” How did you feel about it?

AW: I was very disappointed with the way that the The Acolyte was treated. I love it. I think it’s fun and it’s daring. I’m a High Republic stan as you know. I was so disappointed with the way it was treated. I think, for me, The Acolyte was a little spark of hope because, again, it was trying something new and trying a bunch of different ways that we can see the Jedi. They were bringing in villains that we’ve never seen. There were people, again, like the people I know in real life, and the fact that it was shut down, is really disappointing. And we all know why. We all know why it was shut down. Something I’ve gotten, and that a number of people have gotten in Star Wars and in other media that I’ve written for, is this angry backlash of, “You’re writing this thing I don’t like it. You’re going to destroy the thing I love.” What people don’t understand, and they should, is that the thing they love still exists. Also, I don’t have the power to destroy anything! It’s not being shut down, it’s welcoming more people in, and the fact that that is so threatening to people is really disappointing to me. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop trying though!

GD: That’s good! I love all Star Wars. It doesn’t matter what it is. There are things I like less, but there’s nothing I do not like. A lot of people seem to go into things looking for reasons not to like it. But for me, it’s a new Star Wars. I’m going to go in expecting to enjoy it and that makes me enjoy it every time even if there are things that I’m not thrilled about. It’s more Star Wars, why complain? The Acolyte has some of the best lightsaber fight scenes we’ve ever seen.

AW: Oh, beautiful! Absolutely beautiful. Stunning. It’s really sad. I think it can be very discouraging too on the creative side, but, at the same time, we keep fighting because the other option is giving up and that’s what a lot of people who don’t want change and don’t like diverse casts and diverse writing rooms and diverse creators want. They want us to give up. If I gave up that’s okay, but I won’t because I personally am not going to let them win. I understand it when people leave, and I would never judge them for that, but me personally, I’m staying, and I’m going to keep fighting.

While I don't deny such a mindset exists where somebody looks for a reason to dislike a particular product, no matter the quality, I will say this is incredibly stupid to say there's nothing about a franchise that doesn't disappoint. Especially today, after all the woke garbage forced into franchises like these, and Wong doesn't have the courage to admit it. Since when don't we like diverse casts? She's not even clear what she means by that. The problem is that much of what she calls "diversity" has become very, very forced, with less concern taken on whether the screenplay and comics scripts have entertainment value. That's what she otherwise fails to acknowledge here, and so, it's pretty apparent she's more interested in implying the entire fanbase of Star Wars, for instance, is nothing more than racist. Nor does she admit the shoehorning of LGBT ideology into these franchises is what's really alienated many filmgoers, who don't want to be lectured.

GD: On a related note, going back to Carol, one of my favorites, when the first Captain Marvel movie came out I saw a lot of people talking about, especially her relationship with Maria, being a little queer coded, but in the comics she’s definitely the opposite. Did you see that? Did you enjoy the Captain Marvel movie?

AW: I love the Captain Marvel movie. When I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to read comics, so I came to comics pretty late, and, in a lot of ways, that was kind of my first exposure to Captain Marvel, which I know is kind of wild, and after that I was like, ‘I’m reading everything!’ So, I love that movie. I love me a little sapphic energy. I love it.

GD: And then the Marvels movie which kind of got the same reception as The Acolyte, but I thought was amazing and loved. Especially the energy and the relationship between all three of them (Carol, Monica, and Kamala) was so beautiful and so much fun. Have you seen it?

AW: This is a bit embarrassing. I’ve seen part of it, but I haven’t seen all of it. What I will also say is that what I saw, I loved. I think it’s so fun, and not every movie should be a very serious intense drama where everybody is just going through it all the time – people are fighting, they are dying, and it’s not like The Marvels didn’t have that kind of energy, but it’s fun. It’s exciting, and we need that kind of energy, absolutely. So again I’m also disappointed at the treatment of The Marvels.

This is beginning to sound more like somebody was predisposed to liking the movie no matter how poor the screenplay/acting/direction was in the end, which is little better than being predisposed to disliking a film even if it turns out it's not the worst of its kind. What otherwise turned off audiences was how the movie was built on wokeness, to which we could also add how Carol Danvers was horrifyingly abused by Marvel staff in the past decade, all for the sake of remaking her for a woke agenda that included drawing her looking more masculine. I noticed most press sources didn't seem to use those kind of illustrations for promoting the 1st movie, as they probably realized it was embarrassing, or knew that, even in the past decade, not everybody approves of denigrating women's femininity, which is what the Capt. Marvel movie did. Nor does everyone approve of creating the teenage Ms. Marvel to serve an Islamic agenda, and interesting how both LGBT ideology and Islam are "played against the middle" without acknowledging the former's considered anathema to the latter.

GD: Are there any other characters, Marvel or not, that you’ve written that you’d like to see on the big screen?

AW: I want to see Psylocke. I know that’s a tricky one, but I would love to see Psylocke. I want to see Cassandra Kane in a big way not just briefly but comics Cassandra Kane. I want to see her lethal and emotionally vulnerable and compassionate and just absolutely stunning, in terms of character work, absolutely stunning. That’s what I want.

Wasn't Psylocke already in at least one of the live action X-Men movies? And wasn't Kane in the disastrous Birds of Prey film? I guess among the things Wong didn't read or watch, it was the earlier X-Men films, and BoP. What good is all this then?

GD: Of all of your characters, is there any that you feel represents you the most – that have the most of you in them?

AW: Oh that’s a tough one because, for me, when I’m writing a new character, the first thing I do is a ton of research. For example, when I got tapped for Iron Fist, I read 2700 pages of Iron Fist in three days. For me, getting into the head of a character is the most important, so I read a lot. I find the things that speak to me, pull them in, and I build a character around that – who they are but also what parts I’m most invested in and the parts that most resonate with me. So in a lot of ways, everybody is representative of me. But if I had to pick, I’ll give you two.

Doctor Aphra, of course, because I wrote her for four years, and it’s hard not to put pieces of yourself into that. She’s also a mess and, like Marie Kondo, I love mess. But I feel like there’s a running thing in a lot of my work that has to do with emotional vulnerability and how terrifying that is. It’s something that I think about a lot, and it’s something that I write about a lot.

Most people would not guess this for the second character I’m about to tell you, but it’s Deadpool. Absolutely, it’s Deadpool. I think everyone writes characters differently, and for me, I was trying to figure out my angle for Deadpool. It’s Deadpool, and he’s so down bad and that’s his thing. He is so, so down bad and so open about that, but he is also terrified of the person that he’s into seeing him for who he is and actually liking him. That is something that I think a lot of us have felt. But in finding Deadpool’s voice, when I was writing, it was this horrible, horrible amalgamation of Ryan Reynolds and me and my most intrusive thoughts. So that’s my secret, which is that people are like, ‘Which character is most like you?’ and most people pick Aphra and, yes, that’s true, but it might actually be Deadpool.

Looks like somebody's making it sound like Wade Wilson's a real person, and the way she talks about "getting into heads" echoes something J. Michael Straczynski once said about Spider-Man and Captain America. Even "finding voices" isn't much different. What matters is crafting the best possible personality you can for a fictional character, and I vaguely recall Jack Kirby telling in history books how he tried to develop personalities and other such traits when he first created Cap with Joe Simon. The way modern writers have approached characterization over the years, by contrast, is laughable as it's detached from reality.

GD: I have not read your Deadpool run, so I’m gonna go do that.

AW: Thank you. It’s a body horror romcom.

GD: I do like Deadpool. I have read some Deadpool before, but mostly I just enjoy him in the movies, but I will go read it because that sounds amazing.

AW: Thank you. I never fault anybody for not liking a character in general. Sometimes people will be like, ‘Oh, I don’t care about Psylocke.’ and that’s totally fine. I’m not going to be like, ‘How dare you not care about Psylocke?!’ or Doctor Aphra or Iron Fist or Captain Marvel, but I care, and it’s okay if you don’t. If you want to give it a chance that’d be cool.

Not sure why somebody who already acts like fictional characters are real people is complaining about people allegedly disliking Betsy Braddock. What's definitely missing is a point about why merit is what matters, not recognition and ranking. I guess Wong is so self-important she's not willing to acknowledge the talent of the writers/artists is what matters, not the character. So again, we have a case here of somebody ignoring the point made in Who Framed Roger Rabbit by his humanoid wife Jessica, that "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way". Though actually, she wasn't drawn badly at all, and her character design was pretty good for an animated character pasted onto the live action backdrop of a movie. Ironically, in the past decade in comicdom, there were quite a few examples of below-rock-bottom artwork turning up, increasingly sexless, and made all the worse by the still surviving failure to distinguish between fiction and reality in regards to non-existent cartoon characters.

GD: That’s ok. I have Marvel Unlimited, so I can find it pretty easily. We mentioned Psylocke. You started writing after they finally split them (Betsy and Kwannon) apart. Were you a Psylocke fan before or knew much about her before you started writing? I know you said you do a lot of research when you start writing, but how much did you know about Psylocke before you started?

AW: Psylocke is one of those characters we talked about a lot in college. My friends talked about Psylocke a lot. She is a big, big topic in Asian American media discussions. Her history is controversial.

No doubt, this alludes to the science-fiction idea of body swapping, and apparently, somebody thought it was literally wrong to change the race of a fictional character because one was white and the other Asian. Is that it? Although note that the interviewer appears to have confused what occurred in the late-80s-early 90s story from UXM #256, making it sound almost like 2 characters were merged in the same body literally. Or something like that. But no, it was basically Betsy Braddock having her brainwaves moved into another body belonging to a girl named Kwannon, although Fabian Nicieza established this more officially in 1993, in X-Men #31. If they believe that Braddock should be restored to her own body and Kwannon to hers, okay, but beyond that, why this has to be so controversial is silly, and an attack on creativity. All by the same people who have no problem with race/sex swapping in modern times, and seem particularly okay with changing sexual preference of established characters like Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott, and X-Man Iceman. Wong makes her beliefs clearer in the following:

GD: How important, or big of a deal, was it for you when they finally actually fixed it – split them back apart and gave her herself back?

AW: The way I felt this wave of joy and triumph and relief. Oh my God. It was so good. The other thing too is, there’s a very strong history, and, you know, present, of Asian women’s bodies being a commodity and an object for people to have, to look at. This lack of agency that people assume then strips it away from real Asian people. That’s another thing about Psylocke’s origin that is messy and complicated. We see these things happen. We see them in real life. We see them in our histories – these patterns that repeat. That’s part of why her story and her origin both resonate and are very complicated. So getting to write Psylocke was really interesting, and when I found out that she and Betsy had finally split, that they had their own bodies, I was like, ‘Thank God. Thank God.” Because they both need their own agency, and they both need their own bodies. To give Psylocke herself back, that’s a major, major victory. Not just for Psylocke, not just for comics fans (sometimes they think it’s victory but who can say…)

GD: Depends on if they are The Acolyte fans or not.

AW: Oh God, it’s so true! But also Asian people who don’t read comics who might know about Psylocke who might think, ‘Oh my God. I am never reading that. That is horrifying,’ but to hear, ‘Oh, I can read an Asian hero who’s finally actually Asian again!’ That’s so key! So when they asked if I would write Psylocke, I said absolutely. My first question was which Psylocke, and my second question was are you sure, and the third thing I said was, ‘Absolutely.’ It’s really nice. The questions of agency and bodies is built entirely into this book as well as identity. Who are you after all these things happen to you? Who do you choose to be? And do you believe you can be that person?

Oh good grief. What does this mean? That it's okay to read about a sex-change switcheroo, but not about an alleged race-change switcheroo? Of course, let's also consider how in the past decade, Marvel tried to race-swap Bruce Banner as the Hulk by introducing an Asian man who made absurd stereotypical comments like "totally awesome Hulk". Now, that may not have been Banner himself whose ethnicity/race was changed, but even so, that didn't make the woke replacement any more merit-based, let alone enjoyable. Something curiously unmentioned in this puff piece. Seriously, if anybody, Asian or otherwise, can't read a story about character who undergo science-fiction switcheroos because it's supposedly a slight or just too embarrassing, then what's the whole point of science fiction anyway? I also recall there's a Superman story from around 1970 where Lois Lane used a science fiction machine to disguise herself as black, in order to blend in and get a story about race relations, and some modern PC advocates seem to denigrate that story too as though it were literally the worst thing that could happen. Yet they're perfectly okay with today's forced and contrived race-swapping, regardless of whether it's sci-fi based or not, and regardless of whether white protagonists are denigrated along the way. Indeed, what do these PC advocates think of anti-white racism and discrimination? By their logic, even Superman's creation as a white guy would've been a crime to start with. Towards the end:

GD: So the last question I have is kind of just a fun one. Aphra, Indy, and Lara Croft are all competing for the same thing – who wins and how weird is it for Aphra that Indiana Jones kind of looks like Han Solo?

AW: Lara Croft wins. Aphra comes in second. Indy comes in last. Indy’s so tired. He’s so tired. Does he even wanna be here? Who can say, but he doesn’t have a choice, so he’s here. You just can’t beat Lara Croft. Aphra, I think, is the person who’s like, ‘I’m gonna get that thing,’ looks like she’s gonna get that thing, gets the thing, and then fumbles it because, I feel like, she fumbles everything. She managed to fumble several very incredible, very invested women in her life. It’s remarkable. Aphra is peak girl failure, Lara is peak girl boss, and Indy is like, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m an exhausted dad. I’m so tired.’ I love that.

Something tells me she's not referring to Harrison Ford when discussing Indy. His political positions are certainly tired. But to say Indiana Jones as a character is tired? Sorry, but that alone is illogical, because what matters is whether the screenplays, acting and directing are tired. And the Dial of Destiny movie from a few years ago sure buried the franchise in an artistic fiasco. Say, is Wong implying Lara's the bizarre "girlboss" stereotype? Well that's decidedly also appalling, mainly because I don't think she was created that way. And how curious Wong's putting down Aphra. Or, she really wrote the Star Wars doctor as such a failure? Gee, how weird indeed. This is not helping any.

It's regrettable Wong's got to be one of the wokest advocates in comicdom today, and it won't be a shock if her writing is rock bottom as a result of the politics she follows. The beliefs she upholds are those of hysteria, and explain perfectly how mainstream entertainment and comicdom became so bad. Lara Croft may be a great creation, but if Wong's writing anything starring the Tomb Raider adventuress in the forseeable future, it'd be best to avoid it. I'm also skeptical she's really a comics fan, based on how she didn't read any growing up, and it's not hard to guess she only sees them as a means for political promotion. It's also a shame she wants to follow a LGBT pronoun gimmick, which only makes things worse, though it does explain some of her ideological positions that she apparently goes by.