Friday, March 31, 2017

Avengers Assemble.....wait.....you old white guys.....not so much.


I am too old for comic books. As I am sure you guys are as well. The thing is I notice that there is really a case of arrested development in the younger crowd. Guys into their 30's are still buying and reading comic books. I mean I gave that up when I got hair on  my balls. Now I do love me a good Superhero movie since they are recreating the origin stories from the Jack Kirby/Stan Lee era of Marvel.

Now I hear that they have become strictly Social Justice Warriors. They made Thor into a girl! I mean really. They have Spider-man agonizing over beating up a criminal because he was a minority!

Vox Day has an interesting post about this. In it he talks about the foolishness of diversity in comics. He has substantial quotes from another blogger who is also very interesting. Jon Del Arroz writes the following:

"Marvel has a diversity problem.  
In that they have none in terms of diversity of thought. They are a pure social justice propaganda arm. This is dangerous when it comes to creating art, as if you have everyone thinking in lockstep, unable to get outside the box, you’ll have creative stagnation. More than that, when you turn children’s adventure fiction into adult message browbeating, you lose any semblance of fun that a product formerly had. It’s no wonder that sales have dropped by about half, when they have an entire writing core of every single one of their monthly writers hell-bent on a crusade of alienating half of the country in some social engineering through comics.  I don’t exaggerate my numbers either, and I did some leg work for you all so you might better make educated purchases, or lack thereof, of Marvel Comics.

Just looking on the comics rack, you can see where Marvel has decided to make a foolish stand. No sane person would go and buy these comics anymore, there’s nothing of value there. All they have left is legacy purchasers who have made such a habit of picking them up that they can’t drop it. Even those have been dwindling because Marvel’s taken their political nonsense to more of an extreme than Tor Books or Hollywood itself. Stories themselves don’t exist in a vacuum, however, it stems from their editorial and who they hire to write, which are no longer the brightest creative minds, but SJWs who yell the loudest and who purposefully virtue signal at every turn.
According to marvel.com, there are 18 writers on the current releases. I went through each and every one of their twitter accounts to give you a summary of where they spend their time on social media in terms of politics. I don’t mind people getting political occasionally, or even necessarily holding left wing views, but when it’s constant beating the drum of anger and hate, that’s what makes an SJW, and that’s where one needs to stay away (and is a primary reason for Marvel’s steep sales decline in recent years). " 
You know who has the best business on Court Street these days. Not a bar. Not a restaurant. A storefront that brings in nerds to play games. Twenty and thirty something dudes with beards like ZZTop are playing board games and Dungeons and Dragons and all kinds of bullshit like that there. Instead of being out chasing pussy. Buying drinks for woman and trying to get in their pants. What is this world coming too? Their business is so good they took over the storefront next door and drilled through the wall to make a super store. These are your comic book customers. Social Justice Warriors to a man. I guess that is who Marvel is marketing their comics to and who they think are their audience. But they are leaving a lot of money on the table.
The rest of America is not that. Republicans buy sneakers too.

10 comments:

edutcher said...

What do you mean comic books?

Visual novels.

Ever since the late 60s when movies became films, the Lefty suedo-intellectuals have been giving kids' things pretentious names.

Rock 'n' roll stage shows became rock concerts.

Girl singers were rechristened divas.

Rock groups were now bands, just like the ones who played all the commercialized, homogenized Tin Pan Alley stuff their parents danced to before all those 60s poets came along

bagoh20 said...

Not a fan of gaming, or comic books, or any of that worn out fantasy crap, even though I'd appreciate it a lot if it wasn't so ubiquitous. The simple fact is: everything the left touches it ruins, and it it can't keep its hands off of anything. Its effects are far worse that the evil it believes it is fighting: greed, bigotry, inequality, because it solves none of it, but keeps it alive in new clothes.

chickelit said...

Imagine being a 20 or 30 something female having to put up with gamer- and comic book-obsessed boyfriends. Sex and The City did an episode on that.

Wait, is that what Girls is about?

rcommal said...

LOL and well I should, on behalf of my son,just a couple of months + a couple of weeks away from 17.

rcommal said...

bagoh20:

Wait. What?

Synova said...

Nicely said, bagoh. It's all as if the actual purpose was the process and not the outcomes. And the process serves little more than the self-image of those involved in it. If you oppose the process it's "you don't CARE" about this or that. But wouldn't caring require that the outcomes be the most important part? If all your effort to better the world solves nothing, than how can you claim to CARE?

If the purpose of making comics (or novels) more "inclusive" is to represent more different people and to introduce unifying themes then, with an eye on outcomes, the strategy and tactics would be to write a comic that Trooper wants to cheer for and which the "marginalized" teenager also wants to cheer for. Except that one suspects that "unifying themes" is code for racism of some sort and that the actual goal is division and side-taking, to prove that the writers CARE.

Trooper York said...

Exactly right Synova. This is another aspect of Gamer Gate and Rabid Puppies. I am sure you are following the Fall of the House of Tor and what is happening in the world of Science Fiction.

The thing is Superhero's can be white or black or green for that matter. We went through a spasm of extreme liberalism in the 1960's, Stan Lee was practically a commie. It was the influence of Jack Kirby a World War Two Vet who kept it with in bounds.

One of the most memorable series that I always think about is a storyline in Captain America. It seems that there were two Captain Americas. The one who was rescued from the ice by the Avengers. But there was another one who was around in the 1950's. He was super patriotic and anti-communist. Stan Lee had the original Cap beat him up and imprison him. Because anti-communism was wrong and stupid don't you know. That sensibility would fit in right now.

Synova said...

Tor isn't the only house having trouble. All of traditional publishing is in a bit of a crisis, so it's hard to determine what is due to political stupidity and what is due to the changing marketplace. An author I know, Sarah Hoyt, often explains that publications/organizations go through a process of becoming more leftist, and as they encounter problems from this, do a "turn hard left and die" as the last step. It seems to be true. There seems to be a weird notion that if what wasn't working before was just done with more passion, that it will work in the end.

Clearly "diversity" would bring a greater audience. But Del Arroz puts his finger on the problem with that. It's not actually diversity. It's not bringing more people in and having a really big party, it's this odd process of limiting the guest list to favor those who have been seen as excluded previously... while tightening down harder on the range of acceptable opinions and ideologies. Del Arroz is not impressed. Being "diverse" on more than one scale, he finds out which sort of forbidden diversity trumps the others. (I'm familiar with him from elsewhere.)

I'm not all up to speed on the comic world. When my kids were young I wanted to introduce them to comics (I had been a fan of Spider Man as a teen) but there was very little that was appealing or in any way appropriate for kids. The only thing was, oh, Teen Titans... because "kids" needed heroes who were also "kids" or something. But when we were young we loved Superman and Wonder Woman and whoever else and they were all grown-ups that we could dream about.

So comics might be having a crisis apart from the stupid they are trying to foist on us. And this may have been the "hard left and die" part of it.

Or maybe they'll start doing something different. Or other artists will.


rcommal said...

Hm. Keep close track of what you're saying.

You might see it born out in terms of my son.f

rcommal said...

@Synova

I can tell you this: In these times, there are far more kids and adults who know about and are into comics & etc. than there are teens who know how to fix brakes & etc. + who've been taught to focus on tools in order to be equipped to create, build, and fix things.