You got it. This makes a lot of the guys complaining about the dreaded SJWs and feminists invading their industries so humorous to me. They’re offering you “strong women” full of male gaze pandering shots and you’re complaining?
I guess some guys would prefer to look at hulking ripped dudes. Like wrestling.
Something wrong with that?
Do you like movies with gladiators?
People like me were buying comics when people who LOOKED like me were nothing but sidekicks and stereotypes. Not that different from now, actually.
You think because someone slaps the word Black or Ms in front of a name we should all be “thank ya, massa, us sho is lucky you’s lookin out for we’uns”
If the comics companies actually bothered to try to put out a product that we wanted to read they’d get those sales. Instead they try to hold on to people like you. The people that bitch all over the net because Jessica Alba played Sue Storm.
:rolleyes:
“White dudes” didn’t create the industry. Specific people, who were white and male, created it.
Nobody’s fucking stealing the industry. New specific people, often who aren’t white and male, are being hired into the industry.
The only way your claim works is if White Dudes are incorporated, and women and minorities belong to some separate rival corporation engaged in espionage and high-level theft. That’s bizarro world.
If you don’t like what Marvel is doing, just do what I’m doing. Stop buying Marvel. Haven’t bought a Marvel in over 2 years when I saw the direction they were going. Was a long-time collector with complete runs back to FF#1 and Amazing fantasy #15. There’s too much other stuff to buy. DC, which recently is kicking Marvels butt. Valiant. Other independents. Found I’m not missing Marvel at all. Maybe one day Marvel will go back to its roots and stop the PC preaching, but I doubt it.
So, where’s the “male gaze pandering” in this? Or this? Or this? This? Stop me when I get to the sexism!
These are the comics the Fedora Brigade are complaining about. The comics they aren’t complaining about are like this, and this, and this.
See the difference?
Nice. Real nice.
Wanna buy a hat?
I’m not sure how “recently” you mean, but DC’s New 52 was failing miserably, which is why they decided to reboot everything again after only five years. Marvel was routinely holding ~18 of the top 25 titles every month until DC’s Rebirth the last few months. Granted DC has been selling great since the reboot, but how much of that is just #1 issue newness?
In addition to some of the reasons mentioned here, there’s the simple and perennial favourite of comic book writers of novelty. That’s the simple reason for there being multiple universes, reboots, actual deaths, fake deaths, retcons, and so on, and changing a character’s gender or appearance fits right in there even without any other reasoning.
I love the entitlement here. “Steal”. Yeah, because when people make changes to established characters, that’s “stealing” the industry. I almost get the logic here, but it’s just too bizarre to reall be applicable.
I’m not sure about the current run, but in Thor’s original origin story, he was just some wimpy white dude who found a staff that turned out to be the hammer of Thor and granted him the powers of the god of thunder. Ergo, it makes perfect sense for this to be a mantle one could pass, including to a woman. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with movie Thor, but my knowledge of the modern comic editions is lacking, to put it kindly. 
“PC preaching”? You mean having characters who aren’t straight white men?
Didn’t the Falcon wear the flag for a while? But yeah, there are some changes which are easily doable by changing the person who wears the mantle, others which involve a huge change not just to the body inside the duds but to the background story of the character and their culture. The first ones I’m fine with, the second not so much, and yet everybody is now perfectly happy to have always-has-been-black Nick Fury lead an always-has-been-multiracial squad in WWII.
Are these accurate representations of modern female comic characters or do they find excuses to get them wet, tear off pieces of their costumes, put them in bent over action poses, and show them dressing or showering and so on? If not, I’ll apologize for being too cynical and going off hasty stereotypes I formed years ago.
Hulked out male physiques are for men, not women. Do you disagree? They made them like that back when the audience was predominately male. Whether guys like this stuff because of the so called power fantasy or latent homosexuality, I dunno. Whatever melts their butter.
The hammer says right on it that whoever is worthy who holds the hammer will have the power of Thor. So if a worthy woman picks it up…
And if you want to go back to the actual Norse myths (which Marvel has always played fast and loose with) both Loki and Odin spent time as women. Thor never did, but the mythos does hold out the possibility of a sex-change.
So you’re arguing that if this is true, Marvel shouldn’t have any female or non-white superheroes? Or that they shouldn’t ever have a woman take up the mantle of a previously male superhero? If not, what are you arguing?
There was that one time he dressed as a woman.
Falcon is currently Captain America, with both the shield and his wings. Old timey Nick Fury has been quietly written out (he’s subbing for the Watcher while raising the Watcher’s kid, IIRC), and Nick Fury Jr. is the guy you see in SHIELD; he looks like a young Samuel Jackson.
Also, there are now three Spider-Men (not counting the other-dimension Spider-Men); Parker is the only white guy among them. And Amadeus Cho is currently the Hulk, although Jennifer Walters is soon to also be the Hulk (with no She-; she might be gray, too).
Marvel is moving into the legacy hero thing that used to be DC’s. Except, when DC used to change out legacy heroes for newer heroes, they always replaced them with white guys - all the Flashes were white guys, golden age & silver age Green Lantern were white guys, there was a series of white guy Dr. Fates (tho one was a kid), etc. Eventually DC got with the program and swapped out white guy Green Lanterns for some minority heroes, but the white guys keep popping back up with their recent reboots.
After reading through the responses on the thread, I think I should probably clarify a few things about my OP and add some further thoughts.
I wasn’t *complaining *about the comics companies having female/black/Muslim/whatever characters. Those are fine. I was questioning the idea of replacing *established *characters with (in this case) women. They can make all the new female characters they can sell comics for; I might even buy some of them. But there’s just this thing in my mind that says that “Iron Man” should be, you know, a man.
The constant replacing of characters seems a bit unrealistic to me anyway, even when gender-bending isn’t an issue. I’m talking about things like Rhodey becoming Iron Man, Miles Morales and (heaven help us) Doc Octopus becoming Spider-Man and the like. I mean, the musician Prince just died several months ago. Nobody is going to step up and take over the mantle of Prince. He’s dead, and he is the only one. If there’s another musician who was strongly influenced by Prince and who starts to hit the big time, he will operate under his own name or pseudonym, he won’t go around calling himself Prince. I mean, they called Bruce Springsteen “the next Bob Dylan” when he was getting started, but he didn’t go around *calling *himself Bob Dylan. And Dylan didn’t step aside and take a new name so that Springsteen could be Bob Dylan. But that’s the sort of thing that happens all the time with superheroes.
If superheroes really existed, I can’t imagine that there would be a dozen different people who were all Captain America (as **Miller **noted). If Steve Rogers died/retired/disappeared/whatever and someone else gained similar powers, I’d expect that they would take on a new name and not piggyback on someone else’s fame. One of my biggest pet peeves about Batman over the years has been the almost constant string of story arcs in which Batman/Bruce Wayne disappears or appears to die and someone else has to become Batman for a while. I’ve never liked any of those arcs; I much prefer Bruce Wayne as Batman. I must admit, however, that there has been a long string of good characters who bore the title of Robin, but that makes more sense to me - the Robins are kids, and they will grow up and move on to something else, while Batman persists.
I suppose the phenomenon of replacing a superhero with a new character of the same name has much to do with the recognizability of the superhero names. Inventing what is essentially a completely new character and calling him (or her) “Captain America” carries a lot more sales potential than calling them “The All-New Power Person” or something like that.
Anyway, those were just a few more thoughts to clarify my previous post and to move the discussion along.
Not to nit-pick (well, yeah, to nit-pick just a bit; what can I say, I’m anal-retentive), I’m pretty sure in my foggy old-guy memory that John Stewart was the second GL from earth, preceding Guy Gardner. And Stewart was, of course African-American. So that black character goes back quite a way.
But, race notwithstanding, GL will always be Hal Jordan in my book.
Oh, I don’t mind nit-picking. Like this: the golden age Green Lantern was Alan Scott, a white guy.* In the silver age, Green Lantern was rebooted into white guy Hal Jordan.
Get off my lawn, you kids!
So, I’m guessing you didn’t read the Superior Spider-Man? (it was awesome, BTW). Doc Ock became Peter Parker. Peter Parker remained Spider-Man; he was just Octavius inside. And then he got better.
Miles replaced Ultimate Peter Parker as Ultimate Spider-Man; the 717 Peter Parker as Spider-Man was still around. It was never really a replacement - more like how DC brought back their golden age heroes to meet their silver age counterparts. And, of course, as I said there’s three Spider-Men running around nowadays (plus Spider-Woman, Silk, Spider-Gwen, and all the Web Warriors in alternate universes); none of them have been replaced.
