The idea still flows around that the X-Men are stand-ins for minorities, first in the race war, and now the large culture war of the LGBTQ+etc movements. There are people out there who really don’t care about any other kind of social outcast. I’m a straight white male, but ask me if I felt like an outcast in school and you’ll get a very sad tale of isolation. They even try to insist Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did it on purpose when really Stan just wanted a quick origin for superpowers and he and Kirby tried to come up with a good idea for drama.
Chris Claremont, a name as synonymous with the X-Men as Lee and Kirby, recently did an interview withPopverse saying the same thing, that the X-Men aren’t stand-ins for any one group and are just a concept for good drama and superhero action. For a bonus article, Bounding Into Comics is where I heard of the interview and expands on Claremont’s interview as well as what Lee and Kirby themselves have said in the past.
In Marvel Comics, Thanos was clearly the villain. In love the conceptual being Death, Thanos wanted to kill half the universe to win her approval. (Short version: didn’t work, and Thanos was played like a piano in a public space.) In the Marvel Cinematic Universe fun ideas like that aren’t allowed, and every villain has to be “complex”, an often misused term that means sympathetic villains and scumbag heroes. In the MCU, Thanos believed that killing off half a planet would end a draw on resources.
Ignoring how morally abhorrent it is to kill half a planet or half a universe’s population, Thanos in the MCU believes he’s doing the right thing, short term horror for long term reward, as he believes his people would have been saved if they had killed off half of its population, and believes he was proven right when he became the last survivor. What’s scary is that some people actually push Thanos’ perspective.
Here’s a point/counterpoint, though even the guy arguing Thanos might have had a point had a better solution. That would be MatPat back when the movie came out and he still hosted Film Theory. I bring this up for a counterpoint video that doubles down on his solution, courtesy of Multiversal Wisdom, a channel that evolved into an AI voiced Batman (not representing any one voice actor) usually going over how he’d defeat every hero (should they turn bad) and villain (not often enough) in the multiverse. Sometimes he also just explores a character and in a recent video he took on MCU Thanos’ plan and shown that his plan is actually quite stupid. I thought it only fair to play both sides, and MatPat isn’t the monster some other promoters might be, so here we go.
Well, last issue was unimpressive, and if I wasn’t curious to see how Charlie Chan and Jane Arden’s stories ended I probably would be moving on. We’ll see Charlie Chan again in Comic Book Plus’ “virtual newsstand”, but is time running out for The Clock and other characters in this book? Let’s find out.
What they need to do is find writers who care about accurately continuing a hero’s story rather than trying to be an important contributor to a backstory that was perfectly fine without your “better idea”. The writers don’t have to be fans necessarily, and being fans might push them towards “pet characters syndrome”, though a fan who isn’t considering one character too precious to harm–while also not thrilled about torturing fictional characters and draining everything fans like about them because they want to be Watchmen–might be a really good choice. They need to be fans of the story, not the brand or the money they think comes with it just by existing. Understand why the brand has a fanbase and continue doing that. Save your own stories for your own IP.
They also need editors who want to push the medium instead of allowing themselves to be the ostracized in the pecking order and prove what comics can do that no other form of media can, a publisher and distributor who can get comics where people can find them, and a company willing to promote them not just as “where this movie came from” when they’re not going to properly adapt the comic anyway because their media is superior to those “silly comics”. To be fair, not being woke is a decent goal, considering it leads to bad writing and insulting the people you claim to be pushing for, but that’s just a symptom of a larger problem.
Turns out replacing Doctor Strange with Doctor Doom as Sorcerer Supreme was a very bad idea. Who knew? Anyone who has heard of both characters.
Yes, as Marvel Comics joins Marvel Studios in continuing to ruin the reputation of Stephen Strange, they decided Steven was so unable to stop an evil force that he turned the title of Sorcerer Supreme over to Victor Von Doom. You know, the tyrant dictator who puts on a facade of a perfect community (or else) and is probably the pettiest person in the Marvel Universe as he quests for the ultimate power that he should rightly have by nature of being him. No wonder the usual suspects seem to love him so much. I’ve seen a Facebook page that seems to exist only to show Doom is so totes awesome you guys and better than that Reed jerk.
What does it have to do with Spider-Man? Apparently Doom is also what the British call a “lazy git”.
As shown in the trailer, Doctor Strange made a deal to undergo a trial to convince Cyttorak, the guy Juggernaut gets his powers from, to protect the mortal realm from his kin. If you ever read the Eighth Day storyline from the 1990s you know why we need it. Not wanting to do things like give a crap about anything that Doom doesn’t claim as his own (a very short list), he makes Peter do everything instead, giving him a bunch of 1-Ups like a video game because each challenge ends with dead Peter. Like Peter hasn’t died and come back enough. Dude’s another challenger for Optimus Prime’s title.
At the end of this “Eight Deaths Of Spider-Man” storyline, Peter has apparently had enough and decides to quit, after one of the challenges, as described in Fansided’s Bam! Smack! Pow!‘s article, one of the trials leads to Peter seeing the deaths of so many people that he turns into that broody emo kid who says nothing matters because death in inevitable, and this is his latest reason to quit being Spider-Man.
“But Tronix, that same article point to yet another unnecessary relaunch in April stating that Peter is still Spider-Man so clearly he’ll change his mind like he did any other time the continuity didn’t end because MTV didn’t renew the series.”
An anthology preview of comics released by Afterburn Press. I’m not really sure what else to say. This is one of the those publishers I haven’t heard of so I don’t know anything about them. That’s one interesting thing about going through Drive Thru Comics’ free side library. The biggest name they have on the comic side is maybe Top Cow. Anything with the big names are RPG sourcebooks. So I’m learning about comics I have never heard of before, like I do on Fridays with the Golden Age comics.
I think that’s enough padding for the homepage. Let’s get these reviews started. I’m doing a lot of anthology style comics this week.
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What they need to do is find writers who care about accurately continuing a hero’s story rather than trying to be an important contributor to a backstory that was perfectly fine without your “better idea”. The writers don’t have to be fans necessarily, and being fans might push them towards “pet characters syndrome”, though a fan who isn’t considering one character too precious to harm–while also not thrilled about torturing fictional characters and draining everything fans like about them because they want to be Watchmen–might be a really good choice. They need to be fans of the story, not the brand or the money they think comes with it just by existing. Understand why the brand has a fanbase and continue doing that. Save your own stories for your own IP.
They also need editors who want to push the medium instead of allowing themselves to be the ostracized in the pecking order and prove what comics can do that no other form of media can, a publisher and distributor who can get comics where people can find them, and a company willing to promote them not just as “where this movie came from” when they’re not going to properly adapt the comic anyway because their media is superior to those “silly comics”. To be fair, not being woke is a decent goal, considering it leads to bad writing and insulting the people you claim to be pushing for, but that’s just a symptom of a larger problem.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on February 14, 2025 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comics, commentary.
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