Tag: Internet

In a sense, Thanos has accomplished more good deeds—helping heroes overcome their differences and learning to work together as a team—than bad ones. His master plan better explain why he wanted to create all these groups to stand against him, otherwise he’s officially a dope. At this point, a better comparison for Thanos than Emperor Palpatine is Dr. Claw, the shadowy puppet master from the Inspector Gadget cartoon, who spent the entire series ordering people around while he sat in a chair, and was repeatedly outsmarted by a little girl and her dog. Thanos even kind of sounds like Dr. Claw.

Thanos’ incompetence wouldn’t be so problematic if every Marvel villain besides Loki wasn’t a complete and total dud. From Iron Monger to Abomination to Whiplash to Ronan The Accuser to the guy from Thor: The Dark World whose name I couldn’t even remember until I looked it up on Wikipedia just now (it’s Malekith), they’re all interchangeably generic evildoers with interchangeably generic evil plans. The glimpses of Thanos are used to paper over their blandness with the promise of excitement down the road. These bad guys might be bad, they insist, but just hang in there; this purple guy will be really nasty.

And focusing on Marvel and DC at the expense of the dozens of other publishers in comics, and then declaring comics a failure at San Diego Comic-Con, is incredibly myopic. It’s a mistake to think that Marvel and DC are all that mattered, that their new events or announcements dictate the future of capital-c Comics. Marvel and DC are comics, just like the other publishers, and they make some great ones when they let the creators do their own thing. But at this point? You can’t treat them like the entirety of the comics industry, or even two companies that can dictate the future of comics. They run the movies, and that’s cool, but running comics? It’s just not true any more. Image in particular outsells Marvel in the book market as far as trade paperbacks go, and that holds true in the comics market lately, too. That’s no coincidence. People enjoy Marvel and DC, but they want more than Marvel and DC.

If the announcements from the Big Two felt lackluster, but the fans still had a great time, how did comics fail? That sounds like a Marvel & DC problem. Vertical debuted Moyoco Anno’s brand new book In Clothes Called Fat at the show, a comic geared toward adult women. They sold out of Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday?, a romance/cooking comic. At Image, we sold out of Greg Tocchini & Rick Remender’s Low, an aquatic sci-fi tale, and Nick Dragotta & team’s Howtoons, a comic geared toward getting kids interested in the science through practical play. Boom! burned through Lumberjanes, a comic about girls at camp. These aren’t your normal comics, and people were eating them up.

When women create superhero comics, though—as with G. Willow Wilson on Ms. Marvel—they’ve had success attracting a female audience. So Marvel’s decision to make Thor a woman, and the company’s general effort to reach out to female readers, seem like canny business moves.