This weekend marked another successful outing of a new Marvel Studios super hero movie. According to Box Office Mojo, the new blockbuster film Doctor Strange debut at number one, bringing in an estimated $84.9 million domestically. That's after earning $240 million worldwide so far.
It's clear that the juggernaut of Marvel-based super hero movies is far from slowing down. Renewed interest in these classic characters continues to make Marvel/Disney a force to be reckoned with at the box office. It's a sign that audiences of all ages and backgrounds--from all over the world--will flock to theaters to watch even unusual heroes (like sorcerer Doctor Strange) come to life on the big screen.
Yet despite all this unprecedented success, the source material on which these characters are based has been under attack. By whom you may ask? Who else, but the left?
While super heroes have been doing very well in the theaters, a trend lasting over a decade, comic books sales are far from stellar. There are a variety of reasons for the decades-long sluggish sales of comic books, but it stems from a very simple premise. Most of the characters we are discovering for the first time on the big screen have been around for decades. Many, many decades.
Captain America did in fact debut in the 1940's during WWII. Batman and Superman a decade before that. And while most of the Marvel stable of characters are a few decades younger, making appearances in the early 60's, they have been around for over fifty years.
That makes it hard to come up with fresh ideas, year after year. Keeping readers hooked for over a lifetime is challenging. But there are two ways to keep your characters fresh and exciting for new and returning readers. One is really hard to do, the other much easier and terrible.
The first choice is to hire the very best writers to continue to invent new adventures for your characters. Push their creative powers to come up with new villains, challenges, and places for your heroes to explore. There may be some bumpy episodes that won't connect with readers, but in the long run the comics will continue to be great.
The other choice is to do drastic and radical things to your stories, in order to generate hype and hopefully sales. This includes ridiculous and exhausting "event" stories that pretend to reinvent the universes in which the characters live. Characters are killed off or switch sides. Planets are destroyed and "nothing will ever be the same" is promised.
These tactics work for a little while, before the writers reboot everything back to normal. This has been an overused scheme since the 80's and readers are getting wise to it.
So what are companies like DC Comics and Marvel to do? Start writing great stories to capture the spirit and adventure of the original themes and characters? Of course not! They double down on the radical changes to established characters, hoping this will excite SOMEBODY to pick up a comic.
At a time where the classic versions of these characters are setting box office records, the creators of the comic books are reinventing them in the most ridiculous ways. And guess who's behind these new imaginings of your favorite heroes? Social justice warriors!
Somehow the arrogant, talentless, joyless left have infiltrated comic books. In a pathetic attempt to pander to purple haired, nose-pieced, man-hating feminists, comic book creators are taking beloved characters and ruining them. The first two panels of my most recent comic were not a joke. These are the current iterations of two famous super heroes.
Iron Man is now a young, black social justice woman. Thor is a lady. There is a female Captain America (and a black Captain America), at least three Spider-Women, and recently it was announced that Wonder Woman is a lesbian (right on the heels of her first big movie release, good job guys).
Comic book characters aimed at inspiring and entertaining young readers are now fodder for the radical agenda of the left.
Make no mistake, this isn't some desperate attempt at winning over new readers. All the kids that go see the latest Avengers movie don't want to see bizarre reinterpretations of these characters in their comics. They want to see the classic heroes they've come to know and love on the big screen. This new social justice agenda is simply a small group of people's attempt at exploiting failing comic book sales to push their schemes.
But as you might imagine, it's not working.
“We’re seeing the worst falloff of Marvel and DC sales in the store’s 38-year history,” complained one comic book store owner in an industry forum. “Both companies are losing established readers who no longer feel that the company’s output reflects the sort of comics they enjoy.
“For the first time in store history, yesterday’s Marvel FOCs saw us ordering single digits on more than half of the line items in the Marvel section.”
Marvel’s readership is souring particularly fast. With the exception of some big-name comics whose characters have, thus far, escaped the SJW purge of anything remotely resembling a straight white male, Marvel readers are simply going elsewhere.
Marvel have radically altered their classic characters by giving in to calls for more diversity, leading to a black Spiderman and female Thor. This has effectively turned the company into a multi-billion dollar feminist zine publisher.
Here’s a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the “lack of diversity” in comic books don’t buy comic books. They’re interested in identity politics, not fun. (via Breitbart).
This is an agenda by the left to poison every aspect of our culture. Their goal is to destroy any institution that still exists that celebrates the strength of white men. Why? Doesn't diversity celebrate everyone, including white men (who by the way created Western civilization)?
Instead social justice warriors are under the delusion that by ruining music, movies, books, politics and even comics, they can erase our history and culture. Spoiler: white men aren't going anywhere. And while you continue to try to reinvent our culture through pathetic attempts, it will only blow up in your face.
According to sales records, Marvel is getting spanked by DC. The company that is pushing radical changes to their characters more than the other (surprise, surprise) is losing readers. DC has enjoyed growing sales in recent months thanks to Batman, a character who by and large, has avoided the social justice makeover. For now.
(An aside about Batman: outside of a few short-lived radical changes to the character, Batman has been spared the SJ remake thanks to the fact that there have already been at least a few female versions of the caped crusader. Batgirl has enjoyed her own recent success. And while there was a short-lived Batwoman comic, where the hero was an ex-Army lesbian, it didn't last long).
Considering that the comic book industry is a free market center, the social justice experiment won't last for long. Small numbers of critics will continue to bitch online, but as sales continue to plunge, publishers will have no choice but to back pedal on this new, ridiculous initiative.
Hey, maybe they'll take my advice and just try to tell good, compelling stories that don't ruin the characters!
A man can hope.
