BW Media Spotlight

I’m not a huge Silver Surfer fan. I always found too many writers focus on his isolation and guilt that came with being a former herald of Galactus. However, I certainly know more about him than the people defending the latest news from Marvel Studios. Fresh from surviving an attempt to fix the damages at Disney by getting someone on the board that might be an advocate of the shareholders (let’s face it, none of them care about the fans unless they’re smart enough to see the money in it), the first thing Bob Iger announced is that the next Silver Surfer, the first for the MCU, would be female, played by Julia Garner.

Of course the usual suspects on both sides chimed in. The actual comic fans complained that it’s not Norrin Radd, the Silver Surfer from the main comics, every previous Fantastic Four movie and TV show, The Super Hero Squad, his own cartoon series, and numerous video games. Instead they went with Shalla-Bal, using Earth-X as their example of why it totally works because it’s in the comics.

A lot of things were in the comics. Some you don’t want to show up again anywhere, inside or outside of comics. The sad part is, I could easily find more than the five I wrote about in that linked to article, the point being that “it was in the comics” isn’t enough. Especially when we’re talking about a Marvel Studios that insists creators and performers stay oblivious to the comics so they can make their stories instead of doing an adaptation or doing their own stories as unique IP. In their minds they’re trying to show they can make better stories than the comics. The media pecking order and snobbery in action, though studios not wanting to take risks and are satisfied with cheap marketing gimmicks isn’t helping.

What the defenders of girl Surfer fail to realise is that the fans are geeks. They know more about superheroes than your average sports nut knows the RBI average of their favorite baseball teams, and that knowledge goes back decades. They can tell when someone specifically went looking for wikipedia and fan wiki entries that prove their case, or in the case of Marvel Studios to make the story they really want to make. Of course, it’s all surface level. Going solely by the Marvel Database fan wiki I can show how terrible their research is, and I’m going to, but don’t forget as I go through this that the studios don’t care. They’re using intellectual properties of a form of media they look down upon as a cheap marketing gimmick. Any research I, the defenders, or even the comic fans who aren’t heavy into Marvel lore did in this whole TwitterX and blogging debate surpasses the folks happy about changes in something they aren’t going to spend time and money on anyway or the people working on it. WE care more than THEY do, and that already says little about the stewards of decades of history.

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