I’d bet the Starjammers are wrapped up in the X-Men rights and owned by Fox, though. Which is honestly okay with me… while I like the X-Men getting to do space stories, none of the actual Starjammers really stick out. There’s Corsair (important mainly due to being Cyclops’ dad, otherwise he’s just your typical Errol Flynn type), the cat lady, the dude with the sword and the ponytail, uh, the big lizard dude, Shi’ar Cloud Strife…
I’d love an Illuminati, if only to give us a Planet Hulk movie. I think that could be awesome… just start it with Hulk getting shot off into space, landing on a far-away planet, and then basically make a Conan the Barbarian movie with the big green guy.
So they came up with this convoluted plan. Convoluted even by comic book standards. Follow along:/QUOTE]
That was pretty convoluted. Mind you, it does say a lot about the comic book genre that swapping out a Nick Fury from an alternate universe would have seemed a much more sensible solution. Instead, they went with a storyline appropriate to the soap opera genre.
I’ve always loved the Fantastic Four, too, since I collected the 12 cent comics back in the 60’s. But I LOVED the Inhumans, at least back then. I thought they had a bit of class. Crystal and Black Bolt were my favorites, but Medusa with the living hair! OMG, a comic strip artist’s dream! (I spent hours drawing my own version of Medusa, giving her different costumes, and that glorious hair!).
(I’m a bit sorry FF never translated well to movies. I’ve seen pretty much all of X-men movies, they were my second favorite Marvel series back in the day.)
I just last night finally got around to watching the latest FF crapfest. I hope Marvel gets the movie rights back someday. I also read that Marvel is being careful not to introduce new characters in the FF and X-men comics because Fox gets the rights to them. I also heard the FF comic has been canceled? Is that true?
Anyway, does Marvel have the rights to Medusa? I know they can do Inhumans, but Medusa was a member of the FF for awhile. Can Marvel use her? I suppose it’d be like Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch.
Marvel is suppressing franchises to which someone else owns the movie rights – no new mutants, Wolverine dead, no Fantastic 4 trading cards.
Original writers, even Stan Lee, don’t get paid a dime
Comics retrofitted to fit the movies (including the Nick Fury deal Little Nemo mentioned earlier; clearly I had forgotten that detail from the article).
Comic sales are going down, not up
Indie comics are getting the shaft (I’m surprised they ever didn’t)
It was #2 that really struck me. It’s not leading people back to the comics themselves? Crap.
There isn’t a Fantastic Four comic right now. After the events of Secret War, Reed and Sue are MIA. I don’t think they’ve said explicitly where they are, but the implication is that they’re out in the galaxy somewhere, doing cosmic stuff. Ben and Johnny are on other teams.
I haven’t heard anything about them not introducing new mutant characters. There’s at least two new clones of Laura Kinney (the current Wolverine, herself a clone of the original) running around. Not sure if those count as “new” characters, precisely.
Yeah, Marvel has the rights to her. The licensing deal for the Fantastic Four included the original line up, their most iconic villains, and some number of ancillary characters that are specifically tied to the FF. If it included everyone who’d ever been on the team, in any capacity, they’d have lost Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Luke Cage, and Fox and Sony would be duking it out over who got Spider-Man.
Comic books died two decades ago. The only thing keeping them alive are the movies and tv shows and cartoons and McDonald’s premiums. If that writer likes the comics he’s got more reason to complain about the idiotic continual rebooting and killing off/resurrecting of characters and multi-series special events that require fans to buy 50 or 60 titles and not know what order to read them in and all the other idiocies that comics have dumped on readers since Secret Wars (the first of umpteen) started it off in 1986. DC and Marvel comics have made themselves impossible to read without any need to bring in the movies as an excuse.
In raw numbers, the entire comic book industry for any given year is less than the worldwide gross for any single major comic book movie. Which are the corporate execs going to care about? But the writer is also wrong about the industry. Here are the numbers from Diamond, the leading distributor.
It makes zero sense for Marvel to make comic books for properties they don’t own the movie rights to, comic book sales are meaningless when compared to movie profits.
The issue where they intervened with the Kree (I believe it was) was impressive as blazes. (Well, yeah, it was more brawn than brain.) I love the concept…although in “real world” terms, it’s scarier than hell. It’s such a small step from Illuminati to “Let’s just rule the world.”
That’s my view too! WOW! What a magnificent character design! And what impressive character growth, from a two-bit hood to the Queen of an entire race. From hanging out with Paste-Pot-Pete to a true Galactic Power. And…wow! That hair! The character-design has IMMENSE “fetish” value!
(I was fairly young when I read the FF issue with her first appearance, but I was old enough to be turned on by it! Wowza!)
Super nifty that you do your own fan art! Do you ever post it on DeviantArt? (I’ve been halfway tempted to put up some of my amateurish scratchings there: as bad as it might be, they’ve seen worse!)
I never really looked into the Inhumans when I was collecting comics. Were they like in the TV show, people who had been given unlockable mutant powers by the Kree?
Except they are two completely different realms and that’s the problem.
The number of people who see a movie and then go to the buy the comic is teeeeny. The number of people who buy the comics and then go to the movie would have done so anyway. There’s no reason for the movies to effect the comics other than pride and pettiness.
That’s the downside of the Disney purchase. There’s a bizarre mindset of “we’re paying to advertise a rivals product.” When that’s idiotic and not actually what’s happening.
Maximus was my favorite Inhuman. He was such unmitigated slime. He was convinced he was the rightful king of the Inhumans, and when the others didn’t think that way, he’d blackmail or cajole or poison relationships between them, or he’d wholeheartedly sell out to some other supervillain out of spite.
Karnak or Gorgon would occasionally lose it and smack him around, then Black Bolt would stop them and they’d get all weepy and apologetic. “Forgive me, my king! I dared forget… he was your brother!” Maximus would keep simpering “They all hate me, but you’ll protect me, my brother! You know I should be king!” He always took advantage of the fact the Black Bolt couldn’t speak to deny his delusions.
I’ve seen a lot of X-Men/F4/Spider-Man fans talk about this… but it’s very much overblown. First, it’s completely false that there haven’t been any new mutants. For example, under Bendis’ recent run on X-Men, Cyclops started a new school with completely new student characters like Goldballs, Tempus, Triage, Hijack, and Morph. We also got new villains from the future like Raze and Xavier II (though I’d prefer to forget they exist).
As for Wolverine being dead, yeah, 616 Wolverine is dead right now… but they’ve got a different one (Old Man Logan) running around right now, and X-23 carrying the Wolverine title. It’s just typical comic book marketing… Wolverine being dead is no different than Cap or Superman or Batman being dead.
I agree that this is quite annoying, especially since it’s pretty clear that there’s no real appreciable bump in comic sales from movies… so stop trying to pander to an audience that isn’t there!
This is silly reasoning. Comic books still make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t be sold. Yeah, the profit margin might not be as large, but that’s not a reason to stop making them.
It has nothing to do with people buying the comics and then watching the movies or vice versa, it’s about doing the competitions work for them. If Marvel comes up with a new super popular X-Men character it is Fox that benefits by a factor of several magnitudes, if they write an amazing new Fantastic Four story they sell a few hundred thousand comics maybe while Fox gets a billion dollar movie. It makes no sense to continue wasting talent on those properties when you don’t see any of the real profits.
Yep, pretty much. For a while their hidden city was on a mountain (was it Wundagore?) in Europe, then on the Moon, then in deep space, then hovering over New York…
It isn’t the best mythic cycle in the Marvel Universe…but it really is a pretty good one. Every now and then, they do something truly Homeric.
I’m going to assume you made up Goldballs to see if I was paying attention. Very sneaky.
Interestingly, upon refreshing my memory about Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch after Age of Ultron I realized that I did in fact know these characters – as mutants. But they were apparently already retconned as not really being the children of Magneto before the movie. As to why the fuck they thought that was necessary, Wikipedia is silent.