Guardians of the GalaxyFollow

Bleh, pointless rant. Spoiler

idiggory the Fussy wrote:

I wouldn't be surprised if Cap 2 introduced new female readers to the Black Widow series.

Not really. Black Widow's current book started January 2014, Winter Soldier premiered in April. First issue was 50k, March 27.3k, April 27k, May 26k, and as of August 24k. In fact, Cap's book has been hovering between 33k and 30k in the same time frame (January to August). Storm's book came out a few months after Days of Future Past, and the first two books have sold 27k and 25k. On the other side, Harley Quinn (DC) is regularly pulling around 60k. Overall sales are down 4% from this time last year. ^SOURCE

Films don't draw in readers, the numbers simply don't lie. Not exactly surprising, it is a pretty intimidating undertaking. You don't start Harry Potter from the third book, right? And this is 75 years of material. Thankfully not all of it has remained canon over the years so you can skip, but even then if you don't know anyone to make those suggestions or to help it's still tough. There are guides, though. You could also argue cost, but, you know, internet piracy ... erm, I mean, Marvel Unlimited is like $10 a month or $70 a year for unlimited reading so that's a pretty good option.

If the shops are intimidating, Marvel and DC both offer direct digital sales, and a lot of stores sell physical copy subscriptions mail order. A quick search shows Wisconsin has Collector's Edge that offers just that. There's also amazon.com and mycomicshop.com. I can't vouch for Wisconsin, but I know some of the bigger bookstores here sell comics as well, paperbacks and hardcopies.

The options are available, and I just can't take people serious when there are demands yet no support. And worse, we can't expect the businesses to take them serious either. Off the top of my head Storm, She-Hulk, Black Widow, Harley Quinn, Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), Ms Marvel (Kamala Khan) Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Electra all have solo books right now, and there's an all female X-Men team book. In the coming months the Female Thor debuts, and a Spider-Woman book that is destined to fail* comes out as well. Support these books and show the companies that there is actual demand for them. Otherwise it's just hot air.

Overall what I'm saying is that it's the consumer's responsibility to show interest. Oh, and to just drop one's opinions about the going-ons in comics from decades ago. A lot of it was stupid. Ridiculously so. Yes, and some of it was sexist and misogynist and all that stuff. Carol Danvers was raped by her future baby and gave birth to him in the 1980s. Complaining about it now does no one any good. Oh, and costumes. I don't think it's sexist that women are in impossibly skin tight costumes when the guys are as well. You know, assuming they even get to wear tops and those aren't destroyed. Everyone was anatomically impossible. Hell, everyone still is.

*Spoiler(It's destined to fail because Greg Land is the main artist and is known to regularly trace porn and "sexy people" like Pamela Anderson to cut corners. And a couple of Raiders fans. And not only is it not subtle, but the same few poses show up regularly. The writer is Dennis Hopeless, who's last two books were canceled almost immediately because they were just awful. Avengers Arena and Avengers Undercover. He truly lives up to his name. Or down to his name I guess. That's not even counting the current ****storm just over an optional variant cover of her posing exactly like Peter Parker. So bad artist, bad writer, and bad press. Doomed.)

After all that, I still think skipping Noh-Varr Mar-Vell is the best choice. He's only mildly interesting at best, and I still feel that most of his storyline could be covered in an episode or two of Agents of SHIELD which could lead right into her movie. So it ultimately kills two birds with one stand.

As long as they completely skip the Avengers #200 storyline.

Just to keep this kind of on topic, the Netflix lineup is Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Drew, Iron Fist, and The Defenders. Not much is known about most of these, but Daredevil is starring Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin. I don't know who any of these people are, and a quick search shows me that Vincent is tiny compared to Wilson's huge size.

Chris Pratt is in the new Jurassic Park movie.

Edit: Besides certain word asterisking, I can't believe I mixed up Noh-Varr with Mar-Vell. Noh-Varr is the newer guy, Mar-Vell was the original. I did it in the other post as well I think. That's just how uninteresting he really was to me.

Edited, Sep 16th 2014 12:48am by lolgaxe

He was the guy whose skin got stolen on MIB, if that helps.

If a company gives you what you say you want, it's up to you to prove that you weren't full of **** by actually buying it.

Edited, Sep 15th 2014 11:40pm by Poldaran

Charlie Cox was pretty good in Boardwalk Empire, so I have pretty high hopes for his Matt Murdock. I assume his Irish accent in Boardwalk was genuine, so I suppose it depends on how well he does an American one.

The Edgar suit? That is a strange choice.



Absolutely. Although Idiggory has some valid points:



This could also be a bit of chicken and egg though. Marketing groups tend to get pretty good at calculating how much monetary gain they'll get for each marketing dollar. It's possible that they know that certain titles, themes, character types, whatever just wont produce as much sales no matter how much more they spend on marketing. Or there's a different drop off calculation. So certain types of product will have a linear market to sales ratio for a larger total dollar range than others. Once you hit that point of diminishing returns, you stop spending more dollars on marketing.

Of course, as I mentioned, this is going to be based on historical patterns, so it's a tricky question as to how to break this cycle, or even if it can be. If they spend more money on marketing female leads, for example, and don't gain additional sales as a result, they're going to stop doing that. Which brings us right back to the "consumer has to actually buy the product" deal.

Now, as to whether the same focus on quality exists? Hard to say. Again though, the same phenomenon could be at play. If the sales for female lead products don't increase if you pay for your A team writers versus your C team, why spend the money/time/talent? if putting that team on a male lead product will increase sales by 20% versus say 5% on a female lead product, it's a pretty clear business choice. And yeah, once again, we're operating based on historical patterns, but that's what they have to work with, and you kinda can't blame them for going with what works.




Yeah. If I'm understanding this correctly, that makes sense. I think the issue is that white males leads, fair or not, are the "norm". So everyone will buy a title with a white male lead. Once you get into other types of leads, the target audience shrinks. And to be perfectly honest, quite often the folks pushing for other types of leads sabotage themselves by making the character about being some other type. So you put a black male lead and he has to "be black", including ghetto speak, heavy focus on black social issues, etc. And guess what? That's going to turn off about 80% of your potential market. Similarly, female characters have been most successful when they aren't portrayed as the "female character", but just "a character that is female". Unfortunately, the folks pushing for more of this type or that type of character tend to specifically want the character to be the poster child of blackness, or femaleness, or gayness, or what have you. And that immediately shrinks your target audience to people who want to read stories with a heavy social issues focus regarding whatever type of character has been chosen.

You want to see more female leads, stop making it about making it a female lead. IMO, that's the approach that will work. Characters like Storm work (and have for decades) because the character, despite being both female and black, was never portrayed in ways that pushed those aspects on the viewers. When they first started fleshing out Storm, they did not make any issue of her **** or color. They instead introduced the fact that she suffered from claustrophobia. Nothing at all to do with being black, or being female. She just happened to be those things in addition to being a fully fleshed out real character. I recall that one of the early stories that actually did deal with her skin color was done in an almost backwards manner. She encounters the idea of social inequality in America and is somewhat taken aback by it because she's from Africa and doesn't actually understand what the issues are. It was actually pretty cleverly done in that it got the message across but also highlighted the whole "international focus" that the New X-men had. The writers did not just portray her as a stereotypical black female, and that's precisely why the character was so successful.

I'm not sure how you capture that and put it on the page, but I'm reasonably sure that the way to *not* do it is to bow to pressure from various social groups demanding exactly the sort of stereotype character that people generally tend to abhor.

Edited, Sep 16th 2014 4:22pm by gbaji

Last season finale of Agents of SHIELD is on right now, and next week season 2 begins. It's been moved back an hour to 9pm. I imagine it's so they don't compete with the week after next's The Flash premiere on the CW, which will be on at 8pm. October 7th if the math is wonky.

There are no movies currently scheduled until May so the only real gripe I had with season one is pretty much eliminated. It started too slow and was held back because of it's links to Winter Soldier. Not that that wasn't eventually pretty awesome and the whole combined universe thing is still pretty neat, but the show itself was slow at first.

I feel I'm spoiled by the Guardian's soundtrack at the moment so I don't think anything will be good enough anymore.

I think it's more binding than expanding at the moment. As of season one the first half was more to remind the audience about Extremis, and to link Extremis elements with Super Serum, and at the end tied it all together with Hydra. I think season two is going to first need to juggle all those elements, along with drawing in the cosmic elements introduced in Guardians and lead eventually to Age of Ultron, and since there aren't any movies on the horizon they can actually expand into other movies, like Dr Strange and Ant Man, and maybe even draw in the Netflix shows.

I mean, this scale is pretty damn unprecedented and we're in a time that Marvel and DC can really take full advantage of it. It's a shame that DC has some decent TV shows, but are thus far reluctant to combine them with their movie universe so Arrow and Flash aren't, so far, part of the Dawn of Justice universe being grown.

Really, I'm just a excited little comic book geek over here.

If I had any faith in Fox, at all, I might be. But I don't.

I did read the Deadpool zombie apocalypse book yesterday (was it called Day of the Deadpool? If not, it should have been). Was in BN waiting for my tea to steep so I could add milk.

I enjoyed it well enough, I suppose, but I'd never pay for it. I think I just don't connect to art enough for me to want to pay for it.

Here's the going list of Deadpool books. I kind of agree with it. You should definitely avoid Daniel Way's run, but a few of the Deadpool Team-Ups issues are good. Like half good half bad. Overall, he's definitely been supersaturated into the market, and to me it's almost to the same issues I have with Wolverine.

On side note, one more issue and we find out whether it's a figurative or literal (and, let's face it, temporary) death of Wolverine.

While I would love the inclusion of Spiderman in the Marvel Movieverse, doing it with the Amazing Spiderman version would not fit, imo. In the latest Spiderman movies there's no mention of any superhero/-villain activity besides Spidey and his enemies. At the same time he was (of course) never mentioned in any of the Marvelverse movies.

Having that completely be handwaved away... I don't know.

Seriously though, I don't want Fox or Sony anywhere near the Marvel cinematic universe.

On the other hand, Spider-Man is a really well-known, well-established IP.

GotG was awesome, but it's definitely not really known.

Cap beat out TASM2 by just a bit (stronger domestic, weaker foreign, but within 50m on both). And Thor wasn't too far behind that. And Iron Man 3 wiped the floor with all of them - 400m domestic, 800m foreign.

While I think a connection with the expanded universe could only help Spidey, I don't necessarily think it would be healthy for the rest of the universe. Simply because I don't think letting Sony have any creative input, or adding to the insane amount of brand politics this would cause, would be even remotely likely to create better movies. I really want Spidey in the universe, but I definitely think it's Disney-Spidey > no Spidey > Sony-Spidey.

From what I've seen in interviews and such, one of the things that seems to be really helping the Marvel universe is that they know when to be controlling and when to give creative license to the writers/directors. They've also shown they're really good at learning from mistakes, since pretty much every movie (bar IM2) has been better than the earlier ones. Sony isn't really known for... any of that.


Re: rumors, as far as I know, Chris Evans is holding firm on his intention of taking a step back from acting once his 5 movie contract is up. So that leaves 2 or 3 more movies for him (can't remember whether or not the 5 includes the first CA). And since they only just scratched the surface with WS in the last movie, I'm definitely thinking we'll see SpoilerCaptain Bucky in endgame.