Oliver Willis

Like Kryptonite To Stupid

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9 Responses to “Does The Marvel Universe Hate Hippies?”

1. soullite says:

   December 26, 2008 at 7:37 am

   This is pretty much all about Joe Quesada.

   He’s done his best to turn the Marvel universe into an unreadable, unrecognizable reality. He erases years of continuity for characters he doesn’t like. Hell, he wiped out most mutants because he always hated the X-Men. He killed Captain America because he didn’t like the way he represented America. Hell, he banned all characters from smoking due to a personal issue.

   Odd that a right wing-nut like him has taken it upon himself to centrally plan every character in his universe, and plan them extremely badly. Well, given the right’s tendency towards authoritarianism, it isn’t that odd.
2. Sean D. Martin says:

   December 26, 2008 at 7:40 pm

   Does The Marvel Universe Hate Hippies?

   No idea. I stopped reading Marvel years ago when they started their 17th annual unending mega-event crossover.

   I found myself instead trying out collections of Fables, Y the Last Man, 100 Bullets, and a few others and have never looked back. It’s nice to enjoy reading comics again.
3. Tyro says:

   December 26, 2008 at 9:10 pm

   This is pretty much all about Joe Quesada. He’s done his best to turn the Marvel universe into an unreadable, unrecognizable reality. He erases years of continuity for characters he doesn’t like. Hell, he wiped out most mutants because he always hated the X-Men.

   I was wondering whose idea that was. Marvel is really taking a “destroy the Marvel universe in order to save it” direction, but they’re not doing it intentionally. They’re simply becoming so determined to alienate and drive away their audience that the only thing left to do in the future will be to start publishing interesting stories that people want to read again. At least, in the meantime, they’ll be able to stay afloat with the money from the movies.

   That said, Quesada did give us the MAX imprint, and it did produce a lot of good work… but it’s one thing to introduce some new elements to Marvel that make it more interesting, and it’s another thing to take an active disdain for the Marvel Universe which Quesada seems to have done over the past few years.

   I miss the Marvel universe. I liked it. But, like Sean, I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention because there are other comics with writers doing a lot more interesting work out there.
4. Oliver Willis says:

   December 27, 2008 at 5:44 am

   Do you guys really think that Quesada is a right-wing demagogue injecting ideology into the Marvel Universe? As I’ve noted before, I’m not a Marvel reader (besides the Ultimates line) but I’m skeptical.

   Right now for me comics have become so expensive I just get the essentials, which means the Superman universe, JLA (which sucks right now) and Ultimate Spider-Man in trades. I read the whole Y The Last Man saga this summer and its one of the top 5 comics I’ve ever read. I was so sad when it was over but it ended just right.
5. Tyro says:

   December 27, 2008 at 9:34 am

   Do you guys really think that Quesada is a right-wing demagogue injecting ideology into the Marvel Universe?

   I cannot speak for the other commenters, but I don’t believe that. I do believe that Quesada is wedded to certain formulaic and, dare I say, conservative conventions of comic book stories that lead him down some bad paths.
6. Jay Tea says:

   December 27, 2008 at 10:11 am

   No need to inject real-world politics into the situation. Just note that Quesada is probably the worst type of EIC at this point (although DiDio might contest that). God help us, what they need is a Jim Shooter type who actually plays middleman between the talent and the suits, who understands that his loyalty is to the brand, and rigidly enforces that on the talent on things like deadline, threatening to kill the franchise (look at Spider-Man over the last few years, with Gwen Stacy boinking Norman Osborne and his marriage getting erased).

   J.
7. bryan says:

   December 27, 2008 at 8:46 pm

   I remember seeing a documentary about Steve Ditko which said that Stan Lee would’ve had Spidey shouting “I’m with you!” to people demonstrating against the Vietnam war, whist Ditko would’ve preferred him to say “Damn those hippies!” to himself.
8. Nate says:

   December 27, 2008 at 10:30 pm

   He’s not a right-wing idealist (see his fondness for Stephen Colbert) but he’s just a moron that thinks the current kind of storytelling is what the fans want.

   Apparently we’ve all been begging for Tony Stark to be a fascist.

   And it should be pointed out that the death of Steve Rogers was the best thing to happen to that book in a decade. The storyline since then has been amazing.
9. Big Nate says:

   January 6, 2009 at 4:22 pm

   Why’s he in trouble with you guys? Because he had the left protest accepting the “embracing of change” in Secret Invasion?… In reality, if this Skrull Invasion did exist, wouldn’t hippies protest?? Of course. We’d hear about how we trampled over the skrulls right to change. And all these crocodile-teared whiners would look at it as the Rich Right-Wing U.S. Government vs. Alien Invaders looking to make change.

   Iron Man saves an airplane mid-flight with European travelers before it could get blown up by a terrorist suited with a bomb. He shoots through the roof of the plane with the terrorist in tow, tosses him away from the plane, terrorist blows up, problem solved and the European travelers start lambasting Iron Man with “you didn’t even give him a trial” “you just killed him??” “Typical American”…It reflects the naive and stupidity of these people today.