Interregnum: There Is Only Secret Wars
It’s been a while since we’ve had any updates with the X-Axis, for fairly obvious reasons. The entire line is currently doing Secret Wars tie-ins, and so the entire line consists of stand-in miniseries which are presently halfway through (aside from Magneto, which is doing a “Last Days” tie-in).
We’ll deal with the individual Secret Wars X-books in due course, but this seems like a good time to throw out a few thoughts on the line and the crossover as a whole, if only to open a comments thread for it.
Now that we can see where it’s actually going, it seems that Secret Wars isn’t going to be doing any sort of sweeping line-wide reboot, and certainly isn’t going to be picking up the “threat to the timeline” stuff from All-New X-Men which, with hindsight, sits pretty oddly alongside a line-wide story in which the universe is destroyed and, presumably, remade with that flaw intact.
Instead, the model here seems to be the original “Age of Apocalypse” crossover, in which all the X-books were put on hold for four months and replaced with stand-in titles bearing varying degrees of resemblance to their notional parents. Some of those books got to do things that were important to the main plot; others got to kill time for four issues with What If…? stories that were tenuously tied to the main plot by some sort of side quest that played peripherally into the finale.
Secret Wars takes this basic format and applies it to the whole line, using the standard technique of modern Marvel event books: the core story is contained in a single miniseries, but at the same time, the premise of that story is pressed into service as a backdrop or springboard for a whole load of solo stories. This, fundamentally, is what Marvel seem to be looking for in a crossover concept these days: something that has big margins for other people to work in.
In theory, Secret Wars provides maximum flexibility in this regard, because its central concept is a patchwork world consisting of stray bits of a multitude of alternate Earths. It’s the Multiverse in physical form, with the difference being that instead of the other worlds being on the other side of a dimensional barrier, they’re just over there, a bit to the west.
The tie-in books seem to be bracketed into two types. There are the ones which actually make use of the patchwork nature of Battleworld by giving prominent roles to the Thors, or interaction between domains, or whatever. Then there are the books that are confined to individual domains. These ones – which cover most of the X-books – are basically stories designed for alternate worlds, with some polite concessions being made to Secret Wars, most obviously a search-and-replace on “God” and “Doom”.
It largely hangs together if you’re prepared to concede the basic premise that it’s an artificial world which is only being held together through Doom’s efforts, which include some sort of global mind-control designed to make everyone think that it’s always been this way, and to accept it as it is. Presumably this is why Doom wants to minimise people travelling between domains – to keep the contradictions manageable. That said, there are problems even within this set-up – most obviously, there doesn’t seem to be a very consistent line about the degree of interaction that exists between domains. Sometimes Doom is rigorously prohibiting any involvement, sometimes people seem unaware that other domains even exist, sometimes they seem to have trading relationships, and off on the side somewhere, Ghost Riders says there’s a global TV network. (Who’s watching it?) Maybe the idea is that the level of interaction varies between domains depending on what the locals can handle without violating the rules of their story – if your world was ready to take the idea of inter dimensional travel, then you’re ready to speak to the guys over the wall – but it’s not exactly clear.
At any rate, we have here the current form of Marvel crossover taken to its logical extreme – an event where anything can qualify as a crossover, just as long as it isn’t in continuity. There’s pretty much nowhere further to go from there, unless you’re going to do a crossover called Shit Happens.
In “Age of Apocalypse”, the end result was that the event (or at least its core books) told a fairly coherent self-contained story, and the upshot was that the status quo ante was restored with a few extra refugee characters running about as new cast members. The end result of Secret Wars looks at this stage to be similar; characters like Miles Morales and the Old Man Logan version of Wolverine get folded into the regular Marvel Universe, and perhaps we’ll get a bit of tinkering around the edges of continuity to remove stuff that’s really problematic to reverse in any other way. But basically the effect on the X-books will be pretty minimal.
This makes the last year or so of X-books look even weaker in hindsight; they don’t even seem to have been marking time for anything in particular, but just desperately filling the pages. On the other hand, unlike (say) Silk, the X-books do find themselves in the happy position of seeing this hiatus fall before an editorial and creative shake-up. It’s a natural place for a season break to fall, and may well end up serving as a palate cleanser before normal service is resumed.
Now that we’ve seen the first wave of announcements for Marvel’s revamp, and the October solicitations, it’s striking how few X-books there are. Of course, “few” is a relative term here. When I started reading the X-books, there were three of them. But to put it in perspective, the February 2015 solicitations had All-New X-Men #39, Amazing X-Men #17, Black Vortex Alpha, Cyclops #10, Magneto #15, Nightcrawler #11, Spider-Man & The X-Men #3, Storm #8, Uncanny X-Men #32, Wolverines #5-8, X-Force #15, and X-Men #24 – a total of fifteen X-books.
The October solicitations, which straddle the end of Secret Wars and the start of the Marvel Universe relaunch, offer Age of Apocalypse #5, Extraordinary X-Men #1-2, House of M #4… and that’s it. Of course, that’s an odd month, and the complete “All-New All-Different” line promise more – All-New Wolverine, All-New X-Men, Extraordinary X-Men, Old Man Logan, and Uncanny X-Men. But that’s still only five books. Granted that we can expect some double-shipping, and that one suspects there are more announcements still to come, it’s still a significant scaling back in the size of the line.
This, let’s be clear, would be a good thing. If the driving force here is Marvel’s feud with Fox over the film rights, who cares? The line has been overextended for years and a depressingly large proportion of the line has consisted of blatant page-filler. If Marvel’s approach to the line has finally shifted from “how are we going to fill eleven ongoing titles” to “how many titles does the market actually want”, so much the better. Jeff Lemire is a good writer, even though nobody would claim that his superhero books are his passion projects. Cullen Bunn’s promotion from Magneto to an X-Men title is welcome, though pairing him with Greg Land seems extraordinarily ill-advised. I’m not especially sold on Dennis Hopeless, but I gather he’s done better work off the X-books. It would be going too far to say that any of the announced post-Secret Wars X-books look like surefire winners. But most of them at least have possibilities. (I struggle to imagine anyone overcoming Greg Land, quite honestly.)
In the meantime, we have the X-books in a rather strange What If…? Greatest Hits mode, which I’ll come back in the coming months. What’s abundantly obvious, though, is that the trawl through the X-archive for potential springboards has turned up a seemingly endless string of dystopias. There are a couple of exceptions, most obviously X-Men ’92 (the animated series), but a general grimness prevails. It’s more than a little same-y, and it would be nice to think the X-books had some other moves in their playbook beyond “unremitting misery with no end in sight”. Hopefully this is something the revamped line will try to move forward from, rather than taking as a template. We’ll know by the end of the year.
Funny. The way I see it, the days when comics overwhelming featured straight white men was the ultimate in pandering. It was just pandering in a way people were used to.
Ha. Well said.
Exactly. Having a situation where there are lots of characters who are gay, or black, or transgender only seems like pandering because lots of people think that “straight white dudes” are the default of the human race, and that anything else requires someone to go to the “create custom character” screen, and that’s just ridiculous effort.
I’d quite like to be told why “diversity for diversity’s sake” is a BAD thing. Every character has to be something, after all.
“Marvel’s gone nuts on this diversity thing, both in terms of creators and especially characters. I don’t understand the mentality of reading a book (or not) because the creators have the same genitals or skin tone as me (or not). Yeah, I’m a white male, but I’ve really never given a thought toward buying or skipping a book based on the genetics of the person writing it.”
You managed to ask and answer your own question there, didn’t you? “I don’t understand the mentality of reading a book written by someone who is a different race or gender to me. By an amazing coincidence, 90% of popular media is written by someone who is the same race and gender that I am.”
It’s because most comics have been written by and about straight white men (with the odd token) that most readers of comics are the same. As an Irish person, I’ve baulked at how we’ve been written (yes, Banshee, alcoholic Siryn, Black Tom, Shamrock, etc – I’m looking at you). I can only imagine what it must have been like to have been black, a woman or an LGBT person trying to get into comics.
Yeah, the phrase “diversity for the sake of diversity” in cringe worthy. It has a ring of entitlement to it. As if Brian K Vaughan is supposed to feel ashamed for making the Runaways a diverse group or something.
When I hear that phrase I’m actually more convinced that Marvel is making the right moves. I read at comicsbeat that women make up almost half of comics readers these days. The market for “Baseline white dudes” just doesn’t exist anymore.
Besides, It’s not like Sam Wilson, Jane Foster, and Amadeus Cho are characters that have come out of nowhere.
I disagree that Golden Age/Silver Age creators were “pandering” to the straight, white, male demographic. When Stan Lee created Peter Parker, whatever he was thinking, I can scarcely believe one of his thoughts was: “Well, this character should go over nicely with the straight, white, male crowd.”
“I read at comicsbeat that women make up almost half of comics readers these days.”
That site is operated by Heidi MacDonald, and she should be taken with a grain of salt.
Do you know how comicsbeat arrived to that conclusion? The methodology they used? They tallied up some Facebook “likes.” Seriously, that’s what they did. They tallied up likes in response to comic related material, and from this, they concluded that women make up half the audience.
And when commentors dared to suggest that counting Facebook likes probably isn’t the greatest way to obtain accurate information about anything at all, Heidi and the guy who did the “study” tried to paint them as sexists. Sexists. Because they questioned the methodology. Then Heidi did her usual shit where she took her last potshots at the commentors who pissed her off the most in thw thread and then closed it.
She’s a real piece of work.
Uh oh. Here come the defensiveness. It’s all down hill from here.
“I can scarcely believe one of his thoughts was: “Well, this character should go over nicely with the straight, white, male crowd.”
If you can scarcely believe that, then I scarcely believe you have much more than passing knowledge of the silver age and the tumultuous cultural climate they were produced in.
They hadn’t even passed the civil rights act yet. Separate water fountains was still a thing. Gays were unheard of in comics. Women were at best sidekicks that the male character leered at. Stan had to create a fictional African nation to introduce his first major black hero.
No one is suggesting Stan Lee is a bigot. That would be absurd. I read some rather gracious comments Stan made about Michael B Jordan today. Black creators like Christopher Priest have spoken very highly of Stan. But he surely understood the pressures of the market and when it was safe or not to rock the boat.
Max, I was born in the ’60s. And all I did was disagree with you. You’re the one who seems to be defensive.
I simply disagreed that “pandering” is the right term to describe what creators were doing back when they were creating, almost exclusively, straight, white, male heroes. They did that because that’s just the way it was done back then. That was the climate, just as you pointed out. It was a different time (and things haven’t improved as much as we like to think they have).
But I don’t see that as pandering to white male readers. I see it as them (the creators of the day) just writing what they themselves could relate to or understand at the time given the cultural climate.
So, either you can’t believe that they were writing for the straight white male or you concede “that’s the way it was done back then”. You can’t have both. Pick one, stay consistent.
Look, let’s go to another example here. We didn’t see an openly gay superhero until the ’90s when Northstar came out, correct?
Prior to that, at the very most, you could only imply a superhero might be gay (as Byrne did with Northstar in early issues of Alpha Flight) but having them come out and say it was taboo.
With that in mind, is it fair to Chris Claremont (for example) to assert that, throughout his X-Men run of the 70s and 80s, he was “pandering to straight readers?”
Barriers have come down since. Even more barriers existed in the ’60s. That’s my point.
Claremont and Byrne wrote what an 80’s comic book company would let them get away with just like Stan in the 60s. We covered this already. I can’t say what’s in their hearts (although Byrne has said some doozies but that’s another conversation altogether).
And why were there barriers? Because comics companies believed straight readers would be frightened away. Hence, they were filtering their stories to accommodate the sensibilities of the straight crowd. The very crowd you just claimed you could scarcely believe they were writing with in mind just a few posts ago. That’s the definition of pandering. Pandering doesn’t suddenly begin the moment those minority folk enter the room.
I like these silver age comics, but I don’t need to rationalize the inherent sense of privilege in them. I won’t handwave that away with “it was a different time” rhetoric.
Okay, so Claremont (as well as every other write prior to the 90s) was “pandering” to the straight crowd then. Because they weren’t allowed to write openly gay characters even if they wanted to, because their publisher forbade it. And this is therefore pandering to straight people. According to you.
I hope you understand, I’m not trying to defend discrimination. I simply disagree with your definition of pandering and that’s all.
Pandering, to me, where producing comics are concerned, is indulging your audience and complying with their requests and/or demands.
Now, if the main reason creators stuck with straight, white male characters back in the ’60s and earlier was because the fans, by and large, were demanding it that way (“Another great issue! Thanks again for keeping women in their place and for keeping blacks and homosexuals out of your titles!”) then I’d be agreeing with you.
But *not* doing something out of fear that your readers may reject it, or because you’re personally not comfortable with it, or because you don’t fully understand it (and any of those reasons could have been factors, lousy as they may be). Sorry, I wouldn’t call that pandering.
“Okay, so Claremont (as well as every other write prior to the 90s) was “pandering” to the straight crowd then”
I said no such thing. Waste of time.
So, who liked Ant Man?
Excuse me?
You said Claremont wrote what his publisher let him get away with back in the ’80s. That’s what you said.
His publisher at that time, wouldn’t permit openly gay superheroes and were “filtering their stories to accommodate the sensibilities of the straight crowd” which you then went on to say was the “very definition of pandering.”
So, what does that mean if not “Claremont pandered?” Or is it “Marvel pandered and Claremont just did some work for them, pandering on their behalf.” A freelance panderer. Actually, I think he was on staff. Doesn’t matter. He was an accessory to pandering in some fashion.
“Claremont and Byrne wrote what an 80’s comic book company would let them get away with just like Stan in the 60s.”
You may be giving Stan too much credit there. Stan Lee was in his 40s by the time of the Silver Age and he was somewhat behind the curve in terms of attitudes to women even at the time. There’s a very noticeable shift when younger writers like Roy Thomas come aboard and start trying to write the women as actual characters. Even in the late sixties, he was vetoing female antagonists because he didn’t think they were credible (which is why Banshee is a man).
“You may be giving Stan too much credit there. Stan Lee was in his 40s by the time of the Silver Age and he was somewhat behind the curve in terms of attitudes to women even at the time. There’s a very noticeable shift when younger writers like Roy Thomas come aboard and start trying to write the women as actual characters. Even in the late sixties, he was vetoing female antagonists because he didn’t think they were credible (which is why Banshee is a man).”
Perhaps so. I remember a time around the release of the Rawhide Kid mini that Stan was on Larry King or something saying it was okay to have gay characters appear in MAX books because kids wouldn’t see them. Oy….
Still, the point I’m trying to get at is there was systemic disenfranchisement at the time.
@Paul
I don’t believe that’s correct about the Banshee. I read an interview with Roy Thomas where he indicated that Banshee being a man was his choice (and one he later regretted) because he was partly basing the character on a leprechaun. Something to that effect. I don’t have the interview handy, but it appeared in “The X-Men Compendium Part 1” published back in ’81 or ’82 by Fantagraphics. I reread the interview just less than a year ago, and I’m certain he said it was his decision.
Correction: It was the X-Men “Companion” not “Compendium”
Okay i just found the quotes on a website and Thomas says two different things in two different interviews…
“One thing I felt bad about after (Banshee’s) first issue was that I thought he should have been a woman,” Thomas told The X-Men Companion. “But Stan felt it wouldnt look good for five X-Men to be fighting a supervillainess,” he added in Comics Creators On X-Men.
“I think I must have wanted to create an adult, leprechaunish character, which Werner and I did, and I think I let that overrule the fact that of course I knew that a Banshee was really a female,” Thomas confessed in The X-Men Companion. “I think I made a mistake there – one of a number I’ve made in my life. But the character seemed pretty popular from the beginning even among the people who knew it was supposed to be a woman.”
Anyone else remember when Joe Quesada said there wouldn’t be a gay solo character book unless it was MAX?
I think “pandering” is a very loaded word and does not advance the discussion
To call someone “pandering” if they were in the middle of the mainstream for a period makes no sense. Was NBC news “pandering” to the straight demographic by its lack of openly gay newscasters in the 1970s?
I think it’s quite accurate to say that Marvel in the 1970s was simply mainstream, that those who bucked this trend (e.g., underground comic, etc.) were progressive.
These days – in the 2010s – the reverse would be true. To have a comic book company deliberately include gays, representation minorities (especially in big cities where the minority is not!) and equal sexual representation is not pandering, it is mainstream. And to NOT include such representation is pandering to bigots.
If you want to find heroes and villains among comic creators, the 1990s and 2000s era is probably a period you can fairly look at those who stood in the way of progress.
But at the same time, in a era when, say, the Republic party in the USA has 18 candidates for president and only one is a woman, even in the 1970s comic books were somewhat progressive…
In regard to Secret Wars in general, I simply can’t get invested in the settings and relationships enough to care about a dozen or more alternative worlds and relationship dynamics that will vanish in a few months times. I’ve simply given up: I won’t buy any more of it until the crossover ends. That way I can enjoy whatever continuity changes appear, or not.
Also, I feel current comic book PR practices regarding events are a total buzz-kill for me. Years ago, the hype machine restricted to making a single creator interview. Nowadays any major development has to have a Big Title, is hyped often as much as 8 months in advance, has dozens of spoiler-leaking interviews, and if that doesn’t get you the Diamond solicitations give it away.
The man behind the curtain is just a bit too visible these days; the chance of pulling something interesting like, say, Thunderbolts, is kind of diminished. Yeah, I remember Marvel Age and so on – but they at least preserved SOME suspense.
Fewer X-books. All for the better. Probably the single biggest scourge for comics is too-many-cooks approach to specific _characters_ or _teams._ In the 80s, say, you had one creator writing a single team, or single main character; as a result their story could develop organically, and each issue was theoretically important. When you have six creator teams on the X-men (regardless of how you dice up the team) or worse, six creator teams writing, say, Wolverine, it’s usually a pointless mess.
Also, it might be rather nice for story purposes if there were no longer 100 combined x-men/avengers all of whom know each other and form a sort of giant super team. Rather unsporting for any villains to face. If I wanted to read Legion of Superheroes I would do so….
Somewhere along the line this devolved into pedantic debate about the definition of the word “pander” and an attempt to goad people into saying which creators are white hats and black hats in the diversity battle, which isn’t helpful at all. That’s why I started to walk away this conversation. Who has time for that noise?
The point that got lost somewhere is that Marvel’s push for diversity potentially allows them a wider chance to connect with a wider spectrum of the audience who may be able to see and invest themselves in the characters. This is by no means pandering. That claim is especially strange considering Sam Wilson and Jane Foster have been part of these narratives for decades.
There was a time not so long ago when I would bring up the need for more lgbt characters, and I was told that I was a weirdo who wanted to get into the sex lives of comic book characters. Oh wait… that time was this morning on Facebook. Nevermind. Alternatively, sometimes I was should just be happy I had Northstar.
“regard to Secret Wars in general, I simply can’t get invested in the settings and relationships enough to care about a dozen or more alternative worlds and relationship dynamics that will vanish in a few months times. I’ve simply given up: I won’t buy any more of it until the crossover ends. That way I can enjoy whatever continuity changes appear, or not.”
That’s sort of where I am. I probably buy the Secret Wars tbp as I do like Jonathan Hickman. I hear good things about Weirdworld and Infinity Gauntlet. Perhaps a few others. No way I’m jumping into this crossover full dingle.
“Somewhere along the line this devolved into pedantic debate about the definition of the word “pander”
It *started* by my simply disagreeing that “pandering” applied to what you were referring to, at which point you claimed I was being defensive, predicted things would go downhill, and then got that ball rolling yourself self-fulfilling prophecy-style by immediately being condescending (“I scarcely believe you have much more than passing knowledge of the silver age”)
Quote:
You managed to ask and answer your own question there, didn’t you? “I don’t understand the mentality of reading a book written by someone who is a different race or gender to me. By an amazing coincidence, 90% of popular media is written by someone who is the same race and gender that I am.”
That’s not a question I asked, though. I said that I didn’t understand the mentality of basing reading decisions on the [race/gender/sexual orientation/whatever] of the creator. That doesn’t cross my mind when I’m buying a comic. I’m all for anybody who can write or draw a good story.
However, it does seem like Marvel’s overcompensating a little for their past lack of diversity. “Let’s get a woman – no, TWO women! – to write a story about an Avengers team that’s ALL WOMEN!” That just seems like a gimmick – why not just have a woman write Iron Man or something? (She’d almost certainly do a better job than Bendis…)
Here’s what Wikipedia says about “pandering,” in the political sense, which is kind of the connotation I had in mind when I used the word:
“In pandering, the views one is expressing are merely for the purpose of drawing support up to and including votes and do not necessarily reflect one’s personal values.”
In other words, I doubt Marvel’s suddenly seen the inherent value of diversity of characters and creators so much as they’ve realized there’s probably a buck to be made off of people who are as interested “supporting diversity” as they are in actually reading comics. Perhaps the end justifies the means here, but it just feels kind of forced and inorganic to me that they’re trying to do so much all at once, and rather hamfistedly at that.
We should substitute Bendis into Godwin’s Law whenever the quality of a comic book is raised.
“So, either you can’t believe that they were writing for the straight white male or you concede ‘that’s the way it was done back then’. You can’t have both. Pick one, stay consistent.”
Eh, it’s completely consistent. The way things were done in the past was framed around writing for young white males. Girls read romance comics or school-based comics, boys read superheroes. Gender roles were strongly enforced and other ethnic groups barely got a look in.
Look at the core conflict in the X-Men, influenced by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Who represented those two Black figures? I rich white guy and a concentration camp survivor (Jewish experience was a huge part of post-war comic writing).
Things have changed since then, but comics have continued to a large degree, to maintain those same character sets. They don’t have the cultural excuse, it’s now clearly “pandering” and long past changing.
On Claremont, it’s worth remembering that he finished ten years before Marvel finally gave up on the Comics Code – one of the most conservative and restrictive codes in existence. He pushed the envelope, but he was working for a company that was happy to accept such restrictions. So, Northstar, Mystique and Destiny and others were coded until later comics, free from the code, could be explicit.
Also important about Claremont is his treatment of women. It’s now become a cliche, but his strong women characters were a huge part of his original run on X-Men.
“That’s not a question I asked, though. I said that I didn’t understand the mentality of basing reading decisions on the [race/gender/sexual orientation/whatever] of the creator. That doesn’t cross my mind when I’m buying a comic. I’m all for anybody who can write or draw a good story.”
But that’s the point… you are a straight white male. You are already represented by the vast majority of writers and artists out there.
I’m not having a go. I’m simply saying that you (or I) can’t comprehend the sitauton in the same way as someone who ISN’T represented in the same way. We can’t have the same thrill a little black boy might have upon seeing Miles Morales and realising that Spider-Man can look just like he does. We can’t imagine being a teenage girl seeing a woman’s name as a writer of a comic and thinking “I could do that!”. We have the privilege (and there’s another loaded term) that the majority of comic entertainment out there is written by people like us, for people like us.
Well this was long and ugly.
I think my problem with SECRET WARS is, appropriately, it feels like a comic I have already read some time ago.
Oddly enough I’m not sure I liked it then either
“In regard to Secret Wars in general, I simply can’t get invested in the settings and relationships enough to care about a dozen or more alternative worlds and relationship dynamics that will vanish in a few months times.”
This articulates my general feeling about the crossover pretty well. I’m picking and choosing the crossovers I read based on creators (Peter David) or curiosity (Ultimate End) or my lingering X-Men completist sickness, but I don’t really CARE about any of it (including the main miniseries – no interest in that plot) and I wish it was over.
I’m kind of a moderate when it comes to continuity – I’m not super slavish about it (but I do like stuff to be broadly consistent with regard to stuff like the current status quo of characters and such), but I guess I do like stories that “count.” None of these miniseries seem to “count” – they’re just What Ifs with a bunch of characters that are vaguely similar to their “real” versions, and like What Ifs, there are a fair number of unfamiliar scrub writers and artists on the books. I’m just left with a general sense of “what’s the point?”
One of the things about Secret Wars books i am not keen about is all the multiple versions. My inpression was one version of a perdon in whichever Battleworld the character was dropped.
But youve got old west rogers, teaming w devil dino rogers, civil war togers, …
Small ni
tpick admittedly.
@odessasteps – not really a nitpick, it’s a very valid complaint. A few are playing with the concept – Old Man Logan (who we know is staying around), Star Lord & Kitty Pride (616 Star Lord hiding and meeting the wrong Kitty), Ultimate End (known characters from 616 and 1610 clashing, if badly written). Others – like E for Extinction – are completely pointless and disconnected.
I’m looking at them as prolonged What-Ifs and Elseworlds. For me, it’s about exploring what a given character or storyline means in a new context.
That said, even then, with the best of intentions, there are some it’s hard to get behind. Was anyone clamoring for the return of Genoshan Magistrate Havok?
I was gonna,say I really like X-Tinction Agenda.
At last a what if whose change-point I remember
Well, there you go. Something for everybody. 🙂
This isn’t related to the X-Men, but when does Agents of Shield stop sucking? I’m willing to half-watch some bad television if I know where the light at the end of the tunnel is.
Agents of SHIELD never really stops sucking, but it gets more bearable when they get to the big reveal near the end of the first season.
I thought AoS got pretty good after the _Winter Soldier_ tie-in in the first season, and did a pretty good job of keeping the pace up through most of the second season. It’s never AMAZING, but it’s consistently pretty good.
People seem to be forgetting that most of the comic book heroes were created in an era when most countries barely started to allow women to vote, when homosexuality was officially considered a mental illness (in all psychology books at the time) and was tied to pedophilia (something that we still hear today) and the comic book authority was there to censor anything that may be considered offensive (horror, blood, sexuality, substance use etc). Even Batman comics were accused of promoting homosexuality with the friendship of batman and robin! Most of the things written at the time had to adhere to a very strict set of rules that still cast a shadow even today. If it can be called pandering, then it wasn’t to the straight white males at the time but at the conservative parents that believed that comics would make their kids violent or gay or whatever. Today similar arguments are used against video games and comics, only to the opposite effect.
Things are starting to change for the better. A Muslim Captain Marvel? Sure. A black Captain America? Why not. A black Spider-Man? Cool! Hulkling and Wiccan? Yay, more of them please! These are examples of organic diversity, they serve the story. I like diversity when it flows naturally and isn’t forced. Iceman retconned to be gay? A female Thor? These are diversity for the sake of diversity, that’s pandering! And Northstar’s wedding is more of a publicity stunt, it didn’t benefit nor harm any stories, imho, it could be explored more, instead of just being forgotten after it happened.
As for Stan Lee, recently he said that the only Spider-Man in his mind is Peter Parker who is white, and certain people jumped and started accusing him of being racist and sexist because he didn’t create (enough) female or POC heroes. Even if he is, he would be a product of his time. There’s a reason why he doesn’t write comics any more. To me he is irrelevant nowadays, his creations have taken a life of their own and are out of his hands anyway.
As for Secret War, honestly i don’t feel any of it will matter once it ends, apart from a few heroes that will make it into the main universe but I don’t feel the need to read most of that stuff to know what is happening down the road. I haven’t even read the death of Wolverine, I know he died there, I don’t care to see how it happened, I know it won’t stick in the long term. Once they need a young Wolverine back, they can bring the one that was left behind in AoUltron (and presumably killed by the duplicate Wolverine). Once the SW stories have been completed, I will read some of them for the sake of nostalgia (which is what they’re made for anyway)
“I like diversity when it flows naturally and isn’t forced. Iceman retconned to be gay? A female Thor? These are diversity for the sake of diversity, that’s pandering! ”
Yeah. It’s like that famously terrible Walt Simonson run on Thor. That was just pandering to Space Horses.
(I honestly can’t see how “long-time supporting character made into temporary main character” is “pandering” in the case of Thor, but perfectly fine in the case of Captain America.)
“People seem to be forgetting that most of the comic book heroes were created in an era when most countries barely started to allow women to vote.”
Women got the right to vote in the United States in 1920. Superman was created 18 years later. In terms of most of Marvel’s line-up, it was at least 43 years later. I don’t think that counts “barely started allowing women to vote”. Unless you’re talking about Zambia (where it was 1962) but I’m not sure why that would affect comic characters created in the US.
“However, it does seem like Marvel’s overcompensating a little for their past lack of diversity. “Let’s get a woman – no, TWO women! – to write a story about an Avengers team that’s ALL WOMEN!” That just seems like a gimmick – why not just have a woman write Iron Man or something?”
You know how when Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis (both men) wrote Ghostbusters and made all 4 of the titular characters men, they were accused of “pandering” because they were writing a team that was ALL MEN?
Again, I’m not getting your argument. You are saying that you have no problems with women writing comics, but that they shouldn’t write comics that star women because that’s… bad, for some reason? (And before you say “it’s a gimmick” again, I should point out to you that literally every single comic storyline could be called a gimmick. “Let’s bring Bucky back from the dead”, “let’s have Captain America and Iron Man fight over civil liberty rights”, “let’s have, like, a big war, but in secret!”
“I honestly can’t see how “long-time supporting character made into temporary main character” is “pandering” in the case of Thor, but perfectly fine in the case of Captain America”
Because Thor is not a mask one can put on. I would object to suddenly making Steve Rogers a black man, but a different person taking the mantle of Captain America, I’m ok with. I would also object to making Steve Rogers a woman. I wouldn’t object to a woman putting the Captain America mask and get the title. See the difference? Similarly, I would object to Carol Danvers suddenly becoming a man, but anyone can become Captain Marvel, just like Cap America.
You also need to consider that a lot of comic book readers or even writers were not born in your USA. You can look up when did women got the legal right to vote in each country. You also need to consider how long did it take for families to get in the program and allow women to vote based on their choice, rather than being told what to vote by their husbands or fathers, or even their sons! The law is not a switch that changes people’s thinking, there are still today people who follow the traditional patriarchal (yes, i used the p-word) ways of thinking. So, judging people’s actions all that time ago by today’s standards doesn’t really work. We can only make the future better, whining about the past doesn’t help anyone.
The rest of your comment refers to something someone else said, but in my opinion, i don’t care about the gender of either the writer or the character, as long as the story is good.
Not to restart this but, HR wrote:
“I disagree that Golden Age/Silver Age creators were “pandering” to the straight, white, male demographic. When Stan Lee created Peter Parker, whatever he was thinking, I can scarcely believe one of his thoughts was: “Well, this character should go over nicely with the straight, white, male crowd.””
and
“But I don’t see that as pandering to white male readers. I see it as them (the creators of the day) just writing what they themselves could relate to or understand at the time given the cultural climate.”
Perhaps “pandering” isn’t always the most precise term to describe the cis male white straight perspective of comic books that is still, by and large, the dominant perspective in mainstream comics. But on the other hand, what else were Jewish creators like Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber), Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg), Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster if not pandering to the status quo? As has been pointed out already, sure they worked themes of the outsider into their work, and in part because of this and in part because of the nature of serialized genre fiction being imaginative, sci-fi/fantssy in general became places where marginalized communities of all sorts could feel comfortable. So, my two cents, 1) those foundational creators did indeed “pander” to the market, even if it’s not the best term, in so far as they created primarily WASP characters despite their own perspective as children of immigrants, but 2) they were still able to capture something of their perspective in the essence of their creations, and 3) we are long overdue to see characters more representative of the sci-fi/fantasy fan bases, but 4) representation alone is insufficient, and ultimately 5) the industry needs to hire more diverse creators, because although we can reject essentialist identity politics, ultimately valid perspectives are not being given a place in the market.