[NS]: NYCC: Marvel’s Retailer-Only Panel Erupts into Anti-Diversity Chaos

[cygnia]

*RAGE*

NYCC: Marvel’s Retailer-Only Panel Erupts into Anti-Diversity Chaos

CW: racism, misogyny, homophobia

Comments

[sarahnewlin]

Goddamnit.

[informationgeek]

Well... that's... unpleasant. I mean, I got problems with a bunch of Marvel's decisions recently, but crap man... what the f**k? :\

[crabby_lioness]

I'm glad to hear there was pushback from other retailers. Personally, after event fatigue killed my interest, our family only got back into comics because of all the "freaking female" role models for my daughters.

[nyadnar17]

Yeah, glad I read to see there was pushback.

FF is no longer sold, X-men are second class citizens, Cyclops, Wolverine, Tony Stark, and until a few weeks ago Stever Rogers were all dead/MIA.

wtf did they expect sales were going to do taking that many heavy hitters off the market at once? Honestly I thought that plan was to move those guys out of the way for like a year to give new properties a chance and then bring them back. Its been what 3 years since wolverine bought it? Of course sales have slumped.

[crabby_lioness]

TBH, I'd like a ten-year rule on resurrections. If you're dead, you stay dead for at least ten years. Otherwise it doesn't mean anything; it's just a ride on a horror funfest merrygoround.

[balbanes]

Such horseshit. Steve Rogers is still around. Thor (errr... Odinson) is still around. So is Tony Stark, in holographic form. If you want to buy books with those characters, you can!

I honestly can't wrap my mind around this whiny entitled mentality. There are whole genres of books and movies and music that don't appeal to me, but I don't run around asserting that travelogues or romcoms or country music shouldn't exist. I just don't read/watch/listen to them. Why the hell would things be any different for comic books and video games?

[nyadnar17]

The fact that I can't buy a book with Cyclops in it made it very difficulty to connect with Tyke!Clops. I eventually came around(kinda) but they didn't exactly make it easy.

[candyangelo]

I don't understand that either, it's like they're looking for something to complain about not because it offends them, it's just because they can.

[janegray]

“His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.” -of Smaug, The Hobbit.

[cyberghostface]

Up until recently Cap was a fascist to prop up as Sam as being the 'real' Cap and Thor and Stark are in supporting roles as opposed to having their own ongoing series.

[jlbarnett]

because you only have one publisher of a copyrighted character that are rarely sold outside of specialty stores?

This isn't much similar to music types or movie types. A character you loved being replaced is more like your favorite performer being fired by their label and blackballed so that you will not see or hear of them again

[candyangelo]

This is solid proof that skeptics/anti-sjws are far more worse than extremist sjws.

[dcbanacek]

Would that be the same extremist sjws who threw a fit when a white man was chosen to play Iron Fist?

[flint_marko]

Like the ones who drove a tumblr user to attempt suicide with their harassment (zamii070) because they thought her fan art was offensive, or sending death threats to another (a fanartist who drew gender swapped versions of the dream daddies)?

[joetuss]

No...they're both horrible, and counter productive.

[kd_the_movie]

Marvel has been spinning its wheels since Secret Wars and that has jack shit to do with the diversity initiative.

Hell I honestly feel that Marvel NOW! 1.0 was the last really fresh thing Marvel did. So many great books came from that event.

[deh_tommy]

To be honest, I kind of miss All-New, All Different MARVEL and wish that lasted a bit longer before Civil War II happened (that actually burned me out on MARVEL in general, and I didn't really get back into the comics untul Secret Empire.

[spider_man6]

I like pushback too, but devolving into bigotry? Uh, no.

[leoboiko]

I find it interesting how Marvel always seems to echo social tendencies the real world, with some delay. I don't think this is deliberate propaganda, not even conscious cash-in, but just an emergent zeitgeist kind of thing.

The Obama era was, mutatis mutandi, something of a softer, lighter Weimar Republic or Taishō Democracy. Significant social progress in the U.S. was followed, belatedly, by Marvel's diversity initiatives (and progress in pop-cultural representation in general: Netflix series, etc.). It's fascinating how the diversity characters were introduced tentatively, half-assedly; the old white/male characters never really retired for good, and there was a sense that they'd eventually would retake their mantles anyway, so that all new characters felt temporary or second-rate. This directly reflects the ambivalence of part of the public (if you actually really replaced whites by blacks, straights by gays, there would be too much outcry from certain sectors).

As in the precedents of Weimar and Taishō, reactionary pushback swang the pendulum back hard in the U.S., and eventually Marvel followed suit.

While analysts have pointed to a number of causes for Marvel’s sales slump (too many “events,” the constant cancellation and resolicitation of books with a new #1), the idea that “diversity” is what has caused a sales slump at Marvel has been a staple among the “angry white male” demographic for a while — but it’s almost always prefaced with the caveat that they just “really respect the original characters,” and that they aren’t “sexist or racist or anything.”

The parallel to the general rhetoric of present-day reactionaries is self-evident.

[joetuss]

This isn't really news. We've been hearing all this stuff for years now. Personally, I hope this leads Marvel to purge some of it's Spider people...way to many of those guys running around.

[deh_tommy]

I don't think one can have too many Spider heroes running around. I take issue more with multiple books dedicated to one character (like how, if I'm not mistaken, at one point we had Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Astonishing Soider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man all running at the same time).

[commodus]

One could say, perhaps with some justification, that the diversity initiative of Marvel was heavy-handed in its execution. But I maintain that it is only right and proper that comic books, a medium we all love, should appeal to a broad audience and that all people deserve to see themselves represented.

A lot of the resistance, however, far from being based on problems with the narrative, seems to emerge from this barely concealed undercurrent of bigotry. The reactions are almost hysterical. As soon as there's more female heroes or POC heroes or LGBT heroes, people start shrieking about it all being some grand conspiracy.
They never make a conscious effort to enjoy the stories and get to know the characters, because they've got a political narrative they want to push.

It has really made the subject of comics very toxic in certain environments.

[icon_uk]

Ruth Bader-Ginsberg has said that she is often asked how many women on the Supreme Court would be "enough."

Her answer? "When there are nine."

"For most of the country's history, there were nine and they were all men. Nobody thought that was strange."

[katefan]

I think we have to take into consideration that so far only one source, Bleeding Cool, has said what happened at the con. Perhaps Dan Slott and others have taken to Twitter (I've been blocked by some of these guys due to my associations so if they did say anything I wouldn't know.) but we've got one "reporter" saying what happened, giving their interpretation.

I'd like to get more verification as to what went down before assuming a bunch of retailers used that sort of language at a panel like that.

[sadoeuphemist]

What? Newsarama and Comicsbeat made similar reports yesterday. You can just google 'marvel retailer panel' and find this stuff out.

https://www.newsarama.com/36750-retailers-become-heated-over-marvel-variants-diversity-in-closed-doors-nycc-panel.html
http://www.comicsbeat.com/nycc-17-retailer-outrage-at-the-marvel-retailer-panel/