As I've remarked many times, I've been reading comic books most of my life. I've loved the medium and tales told in pictures. As with most things you stay in touch with on a weekly basis, it's harder to see things in the moment, as they're happening, so when you realize what's gone on, you feel blind sided. It's rarely out of the blue. There are always signs that we tend to ignore because they are easily explained away. Like they say, hindsight is 20/20.
I was listening to That Umbrella Guy on YouTube this morning and had a literal epiphany. We've all been operating on the presumption that the fall of the comic book industry has been in this millennium. That's so, no right. It begins much earlier, decades earlier. And something that was said in TUG's video brought it into focus so sharply I saw staring at the wall, nodding like a medicated idiot.
I can remember the moment vividly. It was when I read the 1968 Wonder Woman #178 when Wonder Woman lost her powers in a bid by DC comics to make heros more human, less one dimensional. They thought Women's Libbers would turn to a dis-empowered Diana Prince who then because a martial arts master in no time. She didn't really lose her powers, she just said she wasn't going to be using them anymore. I read this comic book in 1975 and saw it for the feminist pandering piece of shit it was. I treated it just like the Ms. Marvel comic book I'd gotten. It went into the burn pile. If I loathed the new Wonder Woman, I completely despised Carol Danvers. Still do.
This was DC's always behind the lead attempt to make their superheros more like Marvel's Spiderman and characters who were just trying to get by while also being superheros. See, Stan Lee had made a very conscious decision with Peter Parker. Peter Parker is your every man hero. He has to work to help support his widowed aunt and pay his way through college. It made him real to many comic book readers. It legitimized Spiderman and what he had to do to survive.
DC Comics, always running a few steps behind Marvel, decided in the late 60s to humanize Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman. But it wasn't a huge, "Oh God, Bobby, you're GAY!". It was subtle. You don't even notice it until it's too late and then entire house of cards has come tumbling down.
Here's what lit that light bulb brightly above my head this morning. I realized that in the industry's attempt to court a wider audience, to get new customers and retain them as they grew older, we began getting more and more slice of life BS and less and less of superheros being superheros.
And then Watchmen came out and the birth of the antihero as a thing in comics. And this is how things began going downhill, steadily and inexorably.
After Watchmen hit the industry like a cinder block. And then a few years down that road, after unprecedented success Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, Wilce Portacio, Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefield left Marvel and formed Image comics. It was a blow, a very hard blow to Marvel, who was flying very high with X-Men and Spiderman, with cartoons ever Saturday morning on Fox Kids. Then Image happened. Marvel figured that Image was just too flashy. They had to be flashier with better page stock and colors! They needed the new computerized color saturations that Malibu comics had a lock on, so Marvel overextended themselves and bought Malibu to own Malibu Hues. It didn't matter that all of their creative talent was gone, even Chris Claremont was gone by this time, busy writing his Beyond Willow books about Elora Dannon. (I highly recommend them. I loved them.)
Marvel was forced to declare bankruptcy and reorganized, and they sold the rights to a lot of shit they later regretted, Hello Spiderman to Sony and X-Men to Fox. It took them a while to get their footing back, but after Fox's disastrous run with X-Men, I think they just wrote the whole damned line away. First sign was when they sent Rogue off with a very horny for a woman Iceman, well before Jean's oh so subtle thought inside Bobby's head suggesting he was gay. Yeah, Rogue was dealing with some demons in the aftermath of finding out that Gambit had been a very eager horseman for Apocalypse and had been running Summers intel to Mr. Sinister. But seriously? Bobby? It was ham handed and forced I canceled my pull list at my local comic book shop. I would go into the shop periodically over the past 20 years looking for certain books or searching for books to fill holes in my collection. Bankston's is one of the best damned shops I've ever been in. If you're ever in Central Texas, stop by, they are right off I-35.
Between killing off Jean Grey, Cyclops taking up with the White Queen, and all of the DC Crisis on Infinite Earths and New 52 piles of shit, the comics were dead to almost everyone, without exception. Then in 2008 a little, almost unknown film happened. You may remember Ironman. Yeah? It was such a huge success that the new Marvel Masters, Disney, got Kevin Feige to helm the 21 movie juggernauts that was culminated in Avengers: End Game.
However, by 2008, it was already too late to turn that train around and it wrecked fabulously when boys all over the nation ran to comic book stores and realized the Tony Stark in the movies wasn't the one on the racks in the stores. God I miss Spinners. Little boys don't know back issues. I didn't learn that secret until I was well into adulthood, then I felt like an idiot. So when kids and teens didn't find the Avenger of their choice in their comic book stores, they stayed away from anything having to do with comic books and stuck to watching the movies.
And then came the death blow. I call it the Gail Simone Whale Harpoon of Comic Death. The water retaining sea cow, Gail Simone insisted that comics only used women to kill to propel plots in their books on her website called Women in Refrigerators, after the death of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend was killed and put inside a fridge. Evidently, this is what it takes to get Gail off her fat ass. She spouted outrage into clout in the industry and started a cottage industry among the pussy hat set before that was a thing. You could say, she's the Fairy Godmonster of Heather Antos and her Milkshake Brigade of Blue haired, mouth breathing retards only barely conscious enough to to spout the shit they're told to scream. Cum dumpster indeed, although I prefer Havok's alternate reality opinion of Jean Grey... DNA repository.
So now we have Ironman as a teen girl, written by a woman who'd only written YA and never read comic books, because that's how you get jobs in the industry now, you use your identity and sexuality. Wow, Gail Simone had to scream and cry. Ann Nocenti has got to be grinding her teeth. Now there as talent, and she started out as a secretary at Marvel. No, now you just say you're trans, and boom, you've got a job and Netflix offers. All the while whining about how oppressed you are for something you just decided you were to get a job you don't have the talent to hold or deserve.
No, this is not a recent happening at all. It's was a very slow slide into disgust. Someone asked me what ComicsGate was and I told them, "It's customers who got tired of being screamed at, told their all sorts of bad things and then having hands held out, palm up, demanding our money. We chose to walk away." I walked away over 20 years ago. I was done. I saw what was happening. I didn't expect it to play out this spectacularly this fast, but it's been fun to watch. I'd write more but my cats are playing in the new long boxes I just bought.
I was listening to That Umbrella Guy on YouTube this morning and had a literal epiphany. We've all been operating on the presumption that the fall of the comic book industry has been in this millennium. That's so, no right. It begins much earlier, decades earlier. And something that was said in TUG's video brought it into focus so sharply I saw staring at the wall, nodding like a medicated idiot.
I can remember the moment vividly. It was when I read the 1968 Wonder Woman #178 when Wonder Woman lost her powers in a bid by DC comics to make heros more human, less one dimensional. They thought Women's Libbers would turn to a dis-empowered Diana Prince who then because a martial arts master in no time. She didn't really lose her powers, she just said she wasn't going to be using them anymore. I read this comic book in 1975 and saw it for the feminist pandering piece of shit it was. I treated it just like the Ms. Marvel comic book I'd gotten. It went into the burn pile. If I loathed the new Wonder Woman, I completely despised Carol Danvers. Still do.
This was DC's always behind the lead attempt to make their superheros more like Marvel's Spiderman and characters who were just trying to get by while also being superheros. See, Stan Lee had made a very conscious decision with Peter Parker. Peter Parker is your every man hero. He has to work to help support his widowed aunt and pay his way through college. It made him real to many comic book readers. It legitimized Spiderman and what he had to do to survive.
DC Comics, always running a few steps behind Marvel, decided in the late 60s to humanize Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman. But it wasn't a huge, "Oh God, Bobby, you're GAY!". It was subtle. You don't even notice it until it's too late and then entire house of cards has come tumbling down.
Here's what lit that light bulb brightly above my head this morning. I realized that in the industry's attempt to court a wider audience, to get new customers and retain them as they grew older, we began getting more and more slice of life BS and less and less of superheros being superheros.
And then Watchmen came out and the birth of the antihero as a thing in comics. And this is how things began going downhill, steadily and inexorably.
After Watchmen hit the industry like a cinder block. And then a few years down that road, after unprecedented success Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, Wilce Portacio, Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefield left Marvel and formed Image comics. It was a blow, a very hard blow to Marvel, who was flying very high with X-Men and Spiderman, with cartoons ever Saturday morning on Fox Kids. Then Image happened. Marvel figured that Image was just too flashy. They had to be flashier with better page stock and colors! They needed the new computerized color saturations that Malibu comics had a lock on, so Marvel overextended themselves and bought Malibu to own Malibu Hues. It didn't matter that all of their creative talent was gone, even Chris Claremont was gone by this time, busy writing his Beyond Willow books about Elora Dannon. (I highly recommend them. I loved them.)
Marvel was forced to declare bankruptcy and reorganized, and they sold the rights to a lot of shit they later regretted, Hello Spiderman to Sony and X-Men to Fox. It took them a while to get their footing back, but after Fox's disastrous run with X-Men, I think they just wrote the whole damned line away. First sign was when they sent Rogue off with a very horny for a woman Iceman, well before Jean's oh so subtle thought inside Bobby's head suggesting he was gay. Yeah, Rogue was dealing with some demons in the aftermath of finding out that Gambit had been a very eager horseman for Apocalypse and had been running Summers intel to Mr. Sinister. But seriously? Bobby? It was ham handed and forced I canceled my pull list at my local comic book shop. I would go into the shop periodically over the past 20 years looking for certain books or searching for books to fill holes in my collection. Bankston's is one of the best damned shops I've ever been in. If you're ever in Central Texas, stop by, they are right off I-35.
Between killing off Jean Grey, Cyclops taking up with the White Queen, and all of the DC Crisis on Infinite Earths and New 52 piles of shit, the comics were dead to almost everyone, without exception. Then in 2008 a little, almost unknown film happened. You may remember Ironman. Yeah? It was such a huge success that the new Marvel Masters, Disney, got Kevin Feige to helm the 21 movie juggernauts that was culminated in Avengers: End Game.
However, by 2008, it was already too late to turn that train around and it wrecked fabulously when boys all over the nation ran to comic book stores and realized the Tony Stark in the movies wasn't the one on the racks in the stores. God I miss Spinners. Little boys don't know back issues. I didn't learn that secret until I was well into adulthood, then I felt like an idiot. So when kids and teens didn't find the Avenger of their choice in their comic book stores, they stayed away from anything having to do with comic books and stuck to watching the movies.
And then came the death blow. I call it the Gail Simone Whale Harpoon of Comic Death. The water retaining sea cow, Gail Simone insisted that comics only used women to kill to propel plots in their books on her website called Women in Refrigerators, after the death of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend was killed and put inside a fridge. Evidently, this is what it takes to get Gail off her fat ass. She spouted outrage into clout in the industry and started a cottage industry among the pussy hat set before that was a thing. You could say, she's the Fairy Godmonster of Heather Antos and her Milkshake Brigade of Blue haired, mouth breathing retards only barely conscious enough to to spout the shit they're told to scream. Cum dumpster indeed, although I prefer Havok's alternate reality opinion of Jean Grey... DNA repository.
So now we have Ironman as a teen girl, written by a woman who'd only written YA and never read comic books, because that's how you get jobs in the industry now, you use your identity and sexuality. Wow, Gail Simone had to scream and cry. Ann Nocenti has got to be grinding her teeth. Now there as talent, and she started out as a secretary at Marvel. No, now you just say you're trans, and boom, you've got a job and Netflix offers. All the while whining about how oppressed you are for something you just decided you were to get a job you don't have the talent to hold or deserve.
No, this is not a recent happening at all. It's was a very slow slide into disgust. Someone asked me what ComicsGate was and I told them, "It's customers who got tired of being screamed at, told their all sorts of bad things and then having hands held out, palm up, demanding our money. We chose to walk away." I walked away over 20 years ago. I was done. I saw what was happening. I didn't expect it to play out this spectacularly this fast, but it's been fun to watch. I'd write more but my cats are playing in the new long boxes I just bought.
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