By way of introduction
This article arises from the need to explain to myself what I feel nowadays when I read a new and different Marvel comic, but it also intends to air some ideas so that together we can reflect on the comics we read, how they have changed and if it is worth continuing with them. It should be noted that we will focus on the comics. The Marvel film and television universe is left on the sidelines; What I will comment on is the influence they may have on the paper Marvel universe, which they do.
I ask for your indulgence if someone detects an error in the data or in the chronological sequence of events because, although I have used Wikipedia to confirm my doubts, they start from my memory and this can be treacherous. Although it would be more accurate to say that, rather than from my memory, this article is based on my experience as a fan of Marvel comics, from what I remember and from the feelings I had at the time. It is evident that there is a lack of data and that it does not cover the entire scenario because it would be impossible to synthesize it in an article, but I do believe that the points that for me, as a reader, were the most relevant are touched on.
Before reaching the inevitable conclusion, it is also inevitable to remember where we came from, what we have read and why we now feel orphaned. That is why this article is also a very brief history of Marvel from the point of view of a fan, a journey through those events that marked my reading and those of my contemporaries. Again, excuse me if I omit facts that are more important to others. Surely I have left something but it has not been with intention but because of the inability to cover everything.
The Glory Years
The glory years of Marvel, for me and others, are in the late 20th century, between the second half of the 1970s and the early 1990s. We can even put a more or less precise date on them: from May 1975 to December 1991, that is to say from Chris Claremont helping Len Wein to script the mythical Giant Size X-Men 1 to X-Men vol. 2 no. 3, in which Claremont abandons the characters he dealt with for more than 15 years.
For 17 years, Chris Claremont wrote the publisher's best-selling collection and set the standard for the rest. His arguments and dialogues made us run to the kiosk to buy the next issue. As if that were not enough, Claremont showed that he knew the trade well: he adapted to all the cartoonists he had and wrote his stories with them in mind. From Dave Cockrum's space adventures to Paul Smith's urban stories.
However, Claremont's tenure on X-Men, while it may define an entire era, was not the only factor that led to the publisher's glory years. Claremont's X-Men coincided with two really important factors. The first of these was Star Wars. Marvel had the vision to get the rights to continue the adventures of Luke Skywalker and company where Episode IV ended and that saved the publisher from bankruptcy. Without Star Wars, Marvel would have been long gone.
The other factor was the presence of Jim Shooter as editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987. Jim Shooter is remembered for many things, almost all of them negative. He is accused of being a dictator, of imposing his criteria over that of the authors, of only thinking about selling toys, and of being a homophobe, among other things. But all that shouldn't matter to us. Jim Shooter, as editor-in-chief and therefore Marvel's top editorial manager at the time, was the man who brought about Claremont's continuity in X-Men and who put Frank Miller at the controls of Daredevil, who put Walter Simmonson in Thor, Roger Stern in Spiderman and John Byrne in The Fantastic Four. It is true that some of them went to the competition tired of their ways and of charging little, but Shooter must be given the recognition and merit it deserves. Without him, many of the stories we enjoy would not have happened. There would have been others but not those.
The beginning of the decadence
In 1991 Claremont got fed up and left Marvel. It is the example of what is happening. They have stopped valuing his work, the cartoonist Jim Lee passes over him without respecting his script and the editorial direction, in the hands of Tom DeFalco from 1987 to 1994, doesn't care. They believe that the spectacularity of the drawing is everything and that it is above good stories. Some dim-witted fans applaud the Claremont march and the arrival of Jim Lee, they applaud Rob Liefeld in X-Force and Todd McFarlane in Spiderman. The rest of us are aware that an era has ended and we cling to the remains of the shipwreck hoping for a miraculous resurrection.
Just a few years later, Lee, Liefeld, McFarlane and company give Marvel its due and leave to found Image. Marvel finds that they bet everything on that move and have been cheated right under their noses. It is time to try to redirect the situation as best as possible, with what is at hand. The position of editor-in-chief loses importance and the publishing house is divided into offices: one for the Spiderman line run by Bob Budiansky; another for the X-Men with Bob Harras at the helm; another for The Avengers and everything cosmic, which remains for Mark Gruenwald; meanwhile, Bobbie Chase and Carl Potts take care of Marvel Edge and Epic Comics. The feeling of a cohesive universe that existed since the days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby is lost. Now each one will go free and each office hold its candle.
In my opinion, the one who best exemplified the scenario we found ourselves in was Bob Harras. Bob Harras thought that the X-Men sold themselves, regardless of who wrote the stories and giving more importance to drawing. But someone had to appear as a screenwriter and, consistent with his thinking, Harras took the first ones that passed through his office door the day he needed someone to sign the X-Men scripts. The luckiest was Scott Lobdell. We will never know if he was going there looking for the bathroom door but he won the lottery and we readers had to suffer his scripts, full of insubstantial dialogues and empty of content, except in what was his best creation, Generation X. Even the most clumsy they get it right sometimes
As expected. With this mess, sales were in the doldrums. To remedy this, someone had a brilliant idea: to recover the authors who had left to found their own company, this is Jim Lee and the others, and to put the most emblematic characters of the publishing house, the Fantastic Four and The Avengers, in their hands. .
Hope strikes like lightning
Between 1996 and 1997, what became known as Heroes Reborn took place. The Fantastic Four and the Avengers were transported to what we later learned was a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards and there they relived their origins and adventures. This was the best thing that could happen to the publisher, although it was a rebound.
Without their greatest heroes and with the mutants accused of their demise, urban heroes like Daredevil and Spider-Man couldn't stand up to the big threats, so someone needed to step in. That someone was The Thunderbolts and their appearance marked the way forward. Its first issue smacked of inconsequential classicism, but when you reached the last page, a ray of hope struck you. In a time when there was no Internet and we did not know that the word spoiler existed, the final surprise was indescribable. For the first time in a long time we wanted to know what happened next thanks to an intelligent script that was not cheating at all, the work of an author who would return Marvel to the right path: Kurt Busiek. With his work, Busiek demonstrated the importance of having a good writer, as well as complementing him with a good cartoonist, which in his case was Mark Bagley. Kurt Busiek showed that, in a comic, one aspect should not take precedence over another, script over drawing or drawing over script, but both must go hand in hand to tell a good story. I don't even want to think what would have happened to us without Kurt Busiek.
After the return of the publisher's main heroes, Busiek took care of The Avengers and Iron Man; Thor was left in the hands of Dan Jurgens, who did a great job; Captain America returned to the hands of Mark Waid. A-class writers joining cartoonists like George Pérez, Ron Garney and Sean Chen. In a miscalculation, The Fantastic Four was awarded to Scott Lobdell but there was a moment of lucidity and it did not last more than three issues, after which they were left in the hands of… Chris Claremont. Poetic justice.
However, the situation was not entirely ideal. The flagship ship, the image of the company continued to lurch. Spider-Man was still in the hands of writers who had no idea what to do with the character. Everything had already been tried: make him darker, replace him with a clone, let John Byrne take care of him... from bad to worse. Salvation came again from pure rebound, with the creation of the Marvel Knights line in 1998, which would deal with the company's most urban heroes, a line that included a comic that would ultimately be the best for Spiderman: Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada's Daredevil.
The adult age
In Daredevil, Kevin Smith would develop Diablo Guardian, a story full of surprises and plot twists that rescued the character for the great public after a stage, that of D.G. Chichester and Scott McDaniel, with more pain than glory. Smith's great pull among the fandom (Smith is "one of us", a very careful geek) helped the collection but also helped his cartoonist, Joe Quesada, who along with his partner at the Event Comics publishing house, the inker Jimmy Palmioti, took care of the edition of the Marvel Knights line.
The enormous success of this line and more specifically of Daredevil, moved Marvel to trust Quesada and gave him the editorial direction of the entire company, occupying the position of editor-in-chief replacing Bob Harras, who had returned to encompass everything.
Joe Quesada has also been accused of everything but, like Jim Shooter, he must be given the recognition and credit he deserves. Because it was Joe Quesada who brought in the man who would save Spiderman, the former editor of DC's Vertigo line, Axel Alonso. And it was Axel Alonso who decided that Spiderman was going to be left in the hands of the one who would take him to adulthood and write the best stories ever written about the character: Joseph "Joe" Michael Straczynski.
Having come from the world of television, Babylon 5 television series writer Joe Michael Straczynski, JMS to friends, took Spider-Man and made him an adult, made him face himself and see who he was, pushed him away of the Daily Bugle without giving up on him and made him a high school teacher. He wrote the best Spider-Man issue ever written without Spider-Man: The Conversation (Amazing Spiderman, vol. 2, #38), in which Aunt May confronted Peter and his lies and forgave each other so they could move on . Since his absurd resurrection, no one knew what that character was painting until Straczynski justified his return in a single number. Peter's marriage to Mary Jane finally seemed like a marriage; the character was integrated into The Avengers and no longer looked like a teenager in tights. At last Peter Parker had caught up with us.
It is obligatory to mention what for some was a slip. Straczynski dared to deal with an almost taboo subject: Peter Parker's sexual relations with Gwen Stacy. A lot of fans were up in arms about the way JMS treated Santa Gwen but if we think about it, she was very brave. It was absurd to continue thinking that Gwen had died a virgin. When his death was narrated, it was a more pious time in which the subject could not be touched, but if we assume that Marvel time is not the same as real time, there comes a point where you have to be able to deal with things according to time in which you live Straczynski's solution was controversial but it had to be done and he dared. The cowards who came after decided to look the other way.
While this was happening in Spiderman, Joe Quesada, together with editor Bill Jemas, was also creating the Ultimate Line, which would retell the story of the publisher's characters from a totally modern point of view. Mark Millar would take care of Ultimate X-Men and Brian Michael Bendis would do the same with Ultimate Spiderman. Despite the rumors that the Ultimate line would replace the traditional Marvel universe, nothing could be further from the truth that ended up happening. Millar and Bendis would end up being in charge of giving a new approach to the traditional Marvel Universe.
In 2004 Bendis took over The Avengers and started a real revolution. Busiek's stage had become too long, with a great saga that was barely reflected in the rest of the titles. After a brief passage by Geoff Johns through the collection, Bendis completely destroys the Avengers and begins a series of cycles or sagas that would interconnect everyone, absolutely all the publisher's titles in a way that had not been seen since the days of Stan Lee.
We attended sagas like Dynasty of M, Civil War, Dark Kingdom, Siege and The Heroic Age. The Avengers would become the central axis of the Marvel Universe to the point that Spiderman and Wolverine ended up fully integrating into their ranks. We readers were hooked like never before and it seemed that the glory years of Marvel were returning. But in the end, things did not go as we expected.
Brian Michael Bendis is an author with brilliant ideas but his style prevails over them. His plots go on forever numbers and numbers without need and his dialogues take up pages and pages without the characters saying anything interesting but you realize this as time goes by. As the author of a use-and-don't-reread consumer product, Bendis is brilliant, a true seller of smoke that shoots sales and imitators have emerged from under the rocks, the most notable authors being Matt Fraction and Jonathan Hickman. , which in the long run turn out to be much worse than Bendis. Much more revolutionary and a better writer is Mark Millar but he has discovered that he is very good at what he does and that he can make more money by making his own stories, keeping the copyright and selling them to Hollywood to make more money.
Disneyland
In 2009, Disney announces the purchase of Marvel. The publisher had already shown that its film division was working and Joe Quesada began to perform new functions within the conglomerate, being replaced by Axel Alonso. What at first seemed like good news in the end has thrown me off balance and I don't know what to think. Is it possible that this is the same publisher that made Spiderman adult? Because the reality is that, under his baton, Marvel comics today have nothing to do with what he previously edited. As a fan who buys their comics and who doesn't have access to what happens inside the company, I only have one explanation and that is to cling to the theories that Marvel has been engulfed by the spirit of Mickey Mouse.
A few months ago, in 2015, Marvel announced a reboot event for their series, Secret Wars. In the end we don't know if it was a restart or not because each author has picked up their plots where they left off before said event. What does seem, after reading various statements by the authors of All New All Different Marvel, which appear, for example, in Marvel Age magazine, is that there is an effort to make us see that after the Secret Wars everything is going to be cooler , super cool and above all funny, as if what came before was boring and didn't interest anyone, as if it was agony to read Claremont, Miller, Busiek or Millar.
It's the Disney spirit applied to comics, from movies and TV: fun in abundance and jokes in every panel. "Jokes are everything," says one of the characters in All New All Different The New Avengers #1. The pages of Marvel comics have once again filled with teenagers in an attempt to get the youth who follow Disney Channel hooked on reading: the teenager Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man Miles Morales or Nova have joined the Avengers, along with the now famous Iron Man, who looks more and more like Robert Downey Jr., just as Hawkeye is traced to Jeremy Renner.
The feeling is that the direction has been lost. It seems that each series is going a different path from the other. Along with gems like Sam Wilson: Captain America or Thor, Goddess of Thunder, we have authentic tostones like The Extraordinary X Patrol and authentic nonsense like The Amazing Spiderman. If there is a collection that exemplifies what is happening, it is that of Spider-Man. As I already pointed out in the review of the new series, this Spiderman is not even recognized by Steve Ditko. Peter Parker is now a millionaire inventor with plenty to spare, who is a business and technological genius and is surrounded by characters of the new cast and others rescued from oblivion to make the series as politically correct as possible.
A Spiderman fan on Facebook told me that he didn't agree with my review and told me that Spiderman is still Spiderman only now he's a billionaire. It is the same as saying that Michael Jackson, in the end, was still Michael Jackson only that he was white when it was evident that he was not the same as Invincible as Thriller. In this case it is the same: although the character is called Spiderman, reading this All New All Different The Amazing Spiderman is not the same as Straczinsky's Spiderman.
Conclusion
Marvel doesn't write for me anymore. That is the tremendous conclusion I have come to after writing this article. I may never have done it or it may have been me who has changed and sees life differently, but I do believe that, although I have always considered comics as a product of popular culture for fast consumption and with no vocation to transcend more beyond the time they were published, at least authors such as Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, John Byrne or Mark Millar, to name a few, bothered that their creations had a double reading or a background that reached not only the public that they were intended in principle but for people who were looking for something more, who did not want to stay in the battles of characters stuffed in lycra and who asked for a greater treatment of the characters, cultural references, mythology or whatever, anything, something else. Now they don't give that feeling. Some new and different Marvel comics have as much depth and complexity as the mechanism of a pacifier. Luckily they are not all, there are exceptions.
My first impression as a reader, after looking at the first issues of All New All Different Marvel, was that we had gone back to the days of Bob Harras as editor-in-chief, the one in which some aspects prevailed to the detriment of others and that It marked the beginning of the decadence after the glorious years but in reality it is not like that. I think that Marvel is in the midst of a renewal process, it is reinventing itself, seeking to reach an audience that has Internet access at home and on their mobile, that has cable television and the latest generation of video game consoles, an audience that is used to immediacy, to the ephemeral spectacle empty of content. To reach this audience, the price to pay is to sacrifice along the way the readers who have been with them all their lives, readers who are mostly between 35 and 45 years of age, the survivors of that shipwreck that took place when Claremont abandoned ship.
It is very difficult for someone in that age group to understand Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel; It is very difficult to feel empathy for Amadeus Cho, the new Hulk, when the Hulk is no longer a curse, he is no longer that cancer that Peter David defined in his great stage; Hulk is no longer Bruce Banner, a hunted and harassed man. Now the Hulk is a teenager, the eighth smartest man in the world (or the ninth, because Peter Parker has caught up with him anyway) who enjoys being the Hulk. Hulk is now cool and cool and funny. It is seen that before it was not, before it was a glanders only suitable for floats.
Still, even if we are fully aware of that, we can still read Marvel comics. It is totally legit. Good comics are still made even if they are not expressly directed at us. We can read Jason Aaron in his great stage in Thor; Charles Soule in The Inhumans and whatever he does. It happens in comics and in any genre work that is well done, but you have to be aware of what you read: Divergent, intended for a specific audience and written with that audience in mind, is not the same as Harry Potter, written in a totally different way. In case someone is wondering and has not read it, the Harry Potter saga is one of the best that has ever been published in the field of fantasy, a work to which the movies do not do justice.
The paradox is that, as I write posts like this, Marvel stands out as the most important publisher in the American market. Last March, its profit share stood at 37.39%, above DC's profit share, located at 26.32%. Marvel's share of units sold is 42.71% compared to DC's share, located at 25.94%; the third publisher in the ranking is Image Cómics, with 8.63%. With these data, the difference between Marvel and the rest is significant, as can be seen in the following graphs.
However, these figures and these data, far from making me change my mind, reaffirm what I have written, which is that Marvel no longer directs its stories to someone like me, which does not mean that it does not have its audience. If you look at the 100 best-selling comics in the US last March, Marvel has most of the top 10, but mainly thanks to the Star Wars series, which I think are very high-end. To find the series that I liked in All New All Different Marvel, you have to go down to number 19, where Sam Wilson appears: Captain America, followed by Thor, The Avengers and Doctor Strange, coincidentally the ones I follow.
Source of sales data: Diamond Comic Distributors
Source of sales data: La Casa de El
I hope that, if you have made it this far, the article has made you reflect or at least entertained you. You can leave your opinion and your reflections in the comments. I am sure that I am not the only one who thinks that Marvel has abandoned him, just as I am sure that there are many who are delighted with this new stage. A greeting to all and we read in other posts.
