"QUESADA!"
"Yes Dark Lord?"
"I told you to 'MANGLE' Marvel Comics, not 'MANGA' it!"
"Potato, potahto. Here, look through these."
(Dark Lord flips through comics)
"I see your point. Carry on."
WILL SOMEONE
SHOOT QUESADA ALREADY?!?!?!?!
Dear GOD, when will the madness end??
-Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------
Um.
I'd actually be willing to forgive him for his past misdeeds if he was offering us sanctioned tentacle porn. ^.^
--Sam
"Yes, evil comes in many forms, whether it be a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin, but you can't let the package hide the pudding! Evil is just plain bad! You don't cotton to it. You gotta smack it in the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!"
Quote:
"It even has a cat girl!" quipped Joe Quesada, during an interview about the change in style. "We've rated Heroes for Hire 'T', for ages 9 and up. As Japanese comics are becoming increasingly popular among young girls and boys, it's important that Marvel create family friendly titles that appeal to our culture's changing tastes in visual storytelling."
Nine? NINE?!?!?! I wouldn't let a nine year old NEAR this! If I was running a comic store and saw that cover, it would go in the roped off adult section. Jeez!
Either Joey Cheese is finally losing that last shred of sanity, or he's putting us on. And given the abomination he's made of Marvel Comics lately, I think it's the former.
Edit: Oh - and one more thing - marketing for girls? With THAT cover?? -Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------
I see Marvel hasn't come any closer to understanding what makes manga "manga" then their last time, where they thought:
"Look! Ninjas! A girl with giant boobs! And we're killing people left and right!"
...made it a "manga".
Quote:
"Look! Ninjas! A girl with giant boobs! And we're killing people left and right!"
Doesn't that describe half the comics made after 1990?---------------
-Jon
Leo (July 23-Aug. 22)
The population density of Wyoming is very low, but that doesn't mean the people there aren't also out to kill you.
---
Jon
"And that must have caused my dad's brain to break in half, replaced by a purely mechanical engine of revenge!"
Pretty much.
Marvel has failed to grasp what makes manga appeal more than their comics do. The appeal comes from the fact that manga is done on a completely different production style than mainstream comics is done. As long as they aren't willing to change their production type they'll never be manga style.
Marvel (and DC etc) are based around short (22 page) monthy titles with high production values (ie, qualoity paper, digital colours etc) and teams of artists/writers/editors/etc that are shuffled constantly between products.
Manga is done in either long monthly or short weekly titles with low production values done by one artist or creative team that does the title exclusively for its entire run. Also, manga over here is sold mainly in anthologies or graphic novel format.
This allows for a greater diversity than you will ever get from mainstream comics, which have a lot of oversight. It also allows for works that have unified theme and continuing storyarcs that you couldn't do in comics. Heck, one of the major acheivement of say, 52, was that it did one storyarc over the course of one year. That was pretty much unheard of. Can you imagine trying to do that over three or four years? Marvel is too busy shuffling its "star" talent from book to book to ever have them concentrate on just producing a fantastic single title.
Also "tentacle porn = appeals to girls"? WTF?
If Marvel wants to appeal to girls who buy manga, they need to make Heroes for Hire about Luke Cage and Iron Fist again. Make Iron Fist a bishounen and have him and Luke Cage have constant are they/aren't they homoerotic tension.
--------------
Epsilon
Websnark raises another interesting point about the stupidity of the Quesada administration...
--Sam
"You know, when a tomato grows out of your forehead, it gets you thinking. What do we know about anything? Life is just a big, wild, crazy tossed salad, but you don't eat it. No sir. You live it!"
Good point at the websnark. Aside from his failings in actually understanding the Marvel Universe, Quesada is a piss-poor brand manager. The comics may sell moderately well or even better than they have in past years. But I think that's as much for the "train wreck" factor. As in - there's a certain segment of fandom that's shallow enough not to understand how badly the stories are written, but don't care as long as stuff gets blown up and shit. The Marvel Universe is being written into a corner. You have heroes who can't be heroes without government sanction. Captain America is dead. Arguably America itself is dead. Iron Man and Reed Richards are super-villains. What's left? How much lower can things get? This utter blindness and shallowness... to think that what's on that cover is marketable as mainstream... I think it indicates we've got worse yet to come. Much worse.
-Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------
This came up in the irc channel I hang out in, along with a couple interesting links... (Which both may be considered nsfw for language.)
Lea Hernandez's opinion of the cover.
Lea Hernandez's retouches of the cover.
Personally, I think the second remix, where she's edited the facial expressions, they look just a little *too* nonchalant. More like they might look if they weren't tied up and the tentacles weren't there. Which a friend of mine pointed out might be sort of the *point*, but... it just looks off to me. And Black Cat's mouth looks *really* weird...
Somewhere in there, I found
this link to another remix, which took a different tack - trying to make them look *angry*. Which seems a lot more believable to me, at least in concept. And it keeps the bell, which I just like. '.'
On a side issue, I wonder who the red hair on the right belongs to. That looks like really nice hair...
-Morgan, isn't worried about the tentacles, she's worried about the things with the glowing eyes and claws that seem to be trying to get in...
"Once people turned to the sapphire heavens to fulfill their dreams. But their thirst for power turned the dreams to nightmares, and the people were driven to the brink of destruction... and then all was silent."
-From "Rise R to the Second Power"
I'm really not just a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian . . . really.
(No, really).
Anybody looked at the cover for Heroes for Hire 12? It's . . . actually kind of cute (in an exploitation kind of way), which is to be expected from future manga-ka Takeshi Miyazawa, formerly of Spider-Man loves Mary Jane and the much underappreciated Sidekicks.
Anyway. Joe Quesada. I actually think that comics from Marvel haven't been this consistently across the majority of the board good since . . . Shooter.
Let's list the Marvel (not Icon) titles that are just really damn enjoyable (to me, at least. Please, please, please feel free to argue). I'm going to try to make as much of this list as argument free but, once again, please feel free to argue.
X-Men (. . . because it's Mike Carey and Mike Carey is our atheist god).
X-Factor (because it's Peter David and Peter David is our 'Hey, every one of his characters sounds exactly like their analogues from Star Trek New Frontier' god).
Punisher (it's Garth Ennis telling hard-boiled crime/war stories. The only way it could get better is if he did a crossover with Dougie and Ivor from Troubles and Dicks . . . god)
Ultimate Spider-Man (It's been going on for 110 issues of the same creators.)
Captain America (it's Ed Brubaker. Pretty much the only way it could be better than Ed Brubaker is if Marvel got Greg Rucka to write the adventures of Sharon Carter. But then we'd have less issues of Queen and Country)
Daredevil.
Ultimate Fantastic Four (it's Mike Carey again. With Pascual 'Gave up doing Mister Miracle for this' Ferry).
She-Hulk.
Immortal Iron Fist.
Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius.
The Incredible Hulk.
Nextwave, gosh darn it.
And so on, and so on.
Not sure where all this hatred is coming from really. The only real complaint is that they haven't done anything as bold as the new Minx line from DC. Course, don't think that the Minx books are creator owned either.
-murmur
I really like New Avengers. And Mighty Avengers. Ultimates, Civil War, House of M. Basically anything done by Bendis and Millar is fine by me. Even liked Trouble.