As we reach the end of 2017 we find that Marvel is equally despised by progressive comics fans – who think Marvel is actively anti-diversity – and internet trolls who think any character who isn’t a white man is a “SJW tool.”
To have such opposite, yet passionate views on the very same thing takes some doing. It also takes, to be blunt, a complete lack of spin/messaging. When Nick Spencer is your loudest spokesman for an unpopular, misguided storyline that you insist on sticking with, things are not going to go well in general, but the lack of a spokesperson who could just acknowledge the outrage and flaming dumpster fires, bad tweets, awful statements, editorial missteps and the rest was painful to watch.
Indeed at one BarCon last year I had an off the record chat with a High Level Marvel Exec and I gently suggested, “You need to at least acknowledge to complaints.” The response was an even more anxious expression and a genuinely baffled “Acknowledge HOW????”
Watching Marvel get locked into its own fear bunker has been a huge slide for a company that was founded on a clubhouse atmosphere. After all, Stan Lee was and is The Great Communicator who can make ice seem fashionable to people who live in Siberia. NüMarvel of the Ultimate Era had Bendis, Millar and other nimble hypers. Agent M, aka Ryan Penagos was one of the very first twitter accounts to hit a million followers and in the early days of Twitter was a friendly, accessible voice for Marvel.
But in recent years, corporate message control has left things to Tom Brevoort – who love to talk about character stuff but isn’t the most nuanced spin doctor – and Axel Alonso, who had his own pitfalls. And it just went down a black hole. Even the fluff interviews with Marvel editors were ceased. And then a veil of secrecy seemed to descend. Retailer presentations were closed. Panels were members only. Marketing head honcho David Gabriel gave only one interview a year – to ICv2 – and turned down many requests to do more.
You see where this is going.
Given his ghastly gaffe in that epic ICv2 “behind the scenes”, you’d think maybe Gabriel shouldn’t do any interviews…and I doubt he will again. But nature and social media abhors a vacuum and hot takes become the narrative.
And of course, with the recent appointment of C.B. Cebulski to editor in chief, what looked like a nice clean slate turned into a bowl of rancid ramen with the Akira Yoshida revelations.
So what is Marvel to do? As a company they are obviously unaccustomed to public speaking, and seemingly unequipped to deal with how their comics have become a battleground for the alt-right “Comicsgate” movement. (Although giving more attention to this does fan the flames.)
There’s only one man who could ride to the rescue: chief creative officer, Joe Quesada.
Thanks but I don't see it as taking lumps. You guys pay the bills so I try to give you the straight answers and make it fun. Can't make everyone happy & can't help those that are stuck seeing what they want to see. https://t.co/tMlmdg3XKI
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 22, 2017
The former editor-in-chief is no stranger to being the public face of the company, having established his own “Cup o’Joe” brand during the Ultimate Era. And in he rides to a ruined hellscape of dumpser fires and remaindered lenticular covers. And this week’s “Legacy cancellations” is his first battle.
Let’s start out with Tom Brevoort’s own attempt to point out business realities.
It is worth pointing out again: Incredible Hulk was cancelled once. X-Men was cancelled once. Thor was cancelled once. Being cancelled is not necessarily the end of the story, nor does it necessarily reflect the value of the work.
— Tom Brevoort (@TomBrevoort) December 21, 2017
Nice try but let’s bring in Joe Q, with some time to kill while sitting on the tarmac in a plane. These may a little hard to follow since this embedding doesn’t show the tweets he’s answering, but you get the idea.
What I find interesting, and admittedly time and experience gives me a unique perspective of this, is how I’ve been hearing fans make comments like this even long before I was at Marvel. https://t.co/ugehzz5Fh8
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
If a comic finds an audience it will stick around regardless of the lead character or creator’s gender, ethnicity, sexual preference or identification. You can claim we’re tone deaf but we PUBLISHED those books but you guys ultimately decide what survives. https://t.co/Uvw9pNiaXL
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
I can see how it might look but if you look at sales numbers then you see the reality. But you’re coming at this all wrong. Cancellation is not the end. There will be other books down the road with diverse characters. https://t.co/DH01LkM6wZ
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
And maybe the books not catching on had nothing to do with diversity. Maybe we didn’t do a good job editing? Maybe the story or art wasn’t right for the book? Maybe the character itself isn’t strong enough to carry its own title? Maybe the timing wasn’t right? Tons of factors. https://t.co/DH01LkM6wZ
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
Everything is factored in trust me we want books to succeed. https://t.co/RDCMN9YHde
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
The only thing creators ultimately can and should do is go with their creative instinct and the story they want to tell that they feel will be the most entertaining to their audience. This is what they were hired to do. https://t.co/JGHY2SX4i4
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
Totally get that. But creators and fans have more access to each other than ever before. I’ve seen cases where creators changed storylines midway because of perceived online fan revolt. The inevitable changes made things worse and the stories weaker. https://t.co/q4sfayLakV
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
You guys are already dong that and we do listen. But what you may not see is that there’s another fan just as passionate as you who is telling us the exact opposite. So in that position what does a creative or publisher do? https://t.co/JGHY2SX4i4
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
And I believe creators do. The tough part is that if you ask 10 fans online you might get 5 different answers. You can’t even be sure if they’re actually 10 individual people, if they’ve read the book or piling on? However, at the register… https://t.co/R4TNrojwmQ
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 21, 2017
Were the waters quelled? Well Colin Spacetwinks (author of an essay called “Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel“) was having none of it, My hero, Cheryl Lynn Eaton, also responded with a very good take. One tweet:
"If a comic finds an audience…" Folks are going to ignore the first and most important part of his statement. FINDS. The company has to do the work of seeking out the proper audience and making said audience aware of the material. https://t.co/p8uBwQdenA
— Cheryl Lynn Eaton (@cheryllynneaton) December 21, 2017
My response to this is a bit “We tried that and it didn’t work!” fatalism though, Marvel’s marketing is pretty rudimentary on all their books. They have given a big push to POC written books Mosaic and Black Panther; the former died quickly and the latter is still going strong. I’ll let you decide if that has to do with marketing or the relative quality of the books and general awareness of the characters.
An interesting (to me) exchange took place where a fan brought up Kelly Sue DeConnick’s brilliant marketing strategy for the CarolCorps, a grassroots effort that built a passionate fanbase and has certainly kept the character so much in the forefront that she’s getting her own Oscar-winner starring movie. Quesada says he just didn’t know about the spiecifics; he was busy doing other things and didn’t have time to follow it.
Yes it is and we do the very best we can. A books failure can rely on many different circumstances. It could be marketing, it could be creative team, it could be story. There's plenty of blame to go around and we certainly accept our share of it. https://t.co/bccjGf60fa
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
We don't EXPECT fans to do the marketing for us, but fandom does have a lot of power especially when it comes to spreading the word if they dig something. However, If you feel like I'm being disingenuous then there's really nothing I can say to that. https://t.co/2mT7dEHetz
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
You make it sound like there is no marketing behind the books. And while Kelly Sue's idea seems like a cool one (first time I'm hearing about it), do you have empirical knowledge that that's what worked? Can you quantify by what percentage? https://t.co/GtlnlxoIKi
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
Again, these are incredible generalizations on your part like the one about me being disingenuous. At some point in our lives all of us have had our favorite title canceled. https://t.co/9ni5L0yl8v
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
Okay, got it, so you don't have access to the data, you're just saying it worked. You can see where I'm having a disconnect. But look I get it, we're all passionate about this stuff and I get yours totally. https://t.co/nZybU2VhkM
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
In my fantasy world I want everyone to succeed and want as many new readers as possible. Ultimately the readership decides what survives and what doesn't. https://t.co/FPr7zjmG5p
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
Why would I know, I was no longer Editor In Chief at the time. It's not like I know everything that's happening all the time or what every creator is doing… well except for the donuts. https://t.co/qw0o1RXUhu
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
I'm aware of the Carol Corps, just didn't know there was a postcard campaign? Who did these postcards go out to? How many thousands were sent? Were these to non comics folk? Seriously, I wouldn't know. https://t.co/CkPtGsHM7h
— JoeQuesada (@JoeQuesada) December 20, 2017
It is well to remember that busy working people don’t necessarily have time to follow everything on twitter, tumblr and reddit. When they do (anday ottslay, icknay encerspay) the results are generally not what we hoped. It is perhaps a better move to HIRE someone whose job it is to do such monitor duty and respond accordingly with the company line. Something that is probably beyond Marvel’s current two person PR dept.
But be that as it may, it has been decided that such a person must be brought on board, and it’s a very highly paid one, the Chief Creative Officer who had moved on to do other things, not tweet at fans.
In fact just as I was writing this the fight everyone has been waiting for kicked off: Quesada vs. Spacetwinks!
ON one thing Spacetwinks and I agree:
you guys desperately need some PR training
— Colin Spacetwinks (@spacetwinks) December 22, 2017
You can read more in the replies to that tweet but this isn’t ending any time soon.
Will Quesada’s charm offensive win hearts and minds? A few, I’m sure. The dumpster fire has raged out of control for a long time. It’s going to take a looong time to put it out. Marvel had better hope that Quesada has a lot of time on that tarmac.
The level of snark in this write-up was delightful (and deserved!)
“The only thing creators ultimately can and should do is go with their creative instinct and the story they want to tell that they feel will be the most entertaining to their audience. This is what they were hired to do.”
OK, for context, I’m a bit in the middle of this. I do want there to be lots of great inclusive characters, and the hard facts about a characters’ gender, race, sexuality, etc. don’t necessarily start or stop my interest. But I do sometimes wonder if the second part of that statement is really accurate, that the writer is really writing what they think will be most entertaining. Or if they do, I wonder if they really understand their audience. In other words, I do think the Marvel audience is a very conservative one, so really writing things that are outside their comfort zone is not an effort to entertain, but to educate. Which may or may not be a bad thing, but it is different from what Q says here.
I remember reading an interaction between Dan Slott and a fan during the “Superior” era, where the fan asked something along the lines of “Why don’t you just write stories about Peter Parker as Spider-Man?” and Slott’s reply was “That’s not the kind of story I am interested in writing. Don’t you want to read stories where the writer is passionate about the story they are telling?” And I really wasn’t sure where I came down on that one. The obviously extreme example is that while you might be passionate around writing a Spider-Man story, if you are hired to write Captain America, you can’t just have Captain America temporarily become Spider-Man.
One thing I always wondered about Mosaic: despite starring a tall black basketball player, is it really a POC book when the main character’s a disembodied spirit who possesses other people, is rarely seen as himself & spends a lot of his time passing for white guy after white guy?
I think as a random white guy I can’t say for sure, but if I understand the patterns correctly, Mosaic would probably count based on the foundations of his culture that were established, and the fact that his father and some of the other supporting characters were POC. This is as opposed to the whole “Kyle Rayner is half-Mexican” thing where sure, he’s walking around in his half-Mexican body the whole time, but that heritage had little to nothing to do with his day-to-day life. Or, for that matter, saying that Vision is a Person of Color because he’s red. There’s no cultural foundation for “Artificial American” to base it on.
Someone at Marvel needs to be appointed their public voice, and it should be someone who is personable, good with words, and able to convince comic readers that Marvel has a plan. All we’re hearing so far is double-talk, shade, and blame. That never works.
They can say anything they want, their comics are still too expensive and I’ve read fanfic with more of a grasp on the characters. When they turned the heroes into the villains with bad stories they made me an enemy and I’ve seen no reason to change that.
The diversity stuff always seemed half-assed at Marvel. They basically replaced all the old characters overnight with diverse new characters and were then shocked people were up in arms. They’ve played to old, white men for so long, it’s no wonder that group got furious when Marvel slowly changed the game. They needed to go slow on that and replace characters gradually.
But yeah, their PR is abysmal.
“The only thing creators ultimately can and should do is go with their creative instinct and the story they want to tell that they feel will be the most entertaining to their audience.”
That right there is the problem. “they want to tell.” “they feel.” “their audience.” Marvel is caught in this weird paradox in that at they same time they’ve basically become an intellectual property management service, they also seem to hand over the reigns to creators with no overall editorial or publishing vision to guide them.
Mike
@MBunge – that’s because with Webcomics and other ways that it is so easy to make comics, particularly with creator-owned options, there’s no reason for comics writers to work (for long) under conditions they don’t care for, i.e. being told every little thing to do. There are some, like Scott Lobdell, who thrive under those conditions, but you’ll notice nobody it overly fond of his work either.
“There are some, like Scott Lobdell, who thrive under those conditions, but you’ll notice nobody it overly fond of his work either.”
I’d take Lobdell’s writing over the vast majority of Marvel’s current writers.
Am I the only one who thinks that Marvel is actually making things worse by actually acknowledging the controversy?
I think they would just be best to completely ignore the “Colin Spacetwinks” and Brian Hibbs of the world. Their social media output should just be to schill upcoming events and stories, and either block or ignore comments from people that don’t agree with their world view.
Just do like Vince McMahon and the WWE and completely ignore negative stories unless you are absolutely forced to acknowledge them (i.e. an employee gets indicted or a lawsuit gets filed).
Marvel’s big problem is their failure to “control the narrative.”
Example: The NFL has turned the discussion about players kneeling for the national anthem from a discussion about how minorities are being discriminated against by the police, to a discussion on how said players are “disrespecting America” and “disrespecting the troops.”
Marvel would do better to dig up controversial statements that Colin Spacetwinks has made in the past and parade them around to turn the negative attention onto him/her.
I think this is an informative post and it is very useful and knowledgeable. I really enjoyed reading this post. big fan, thank you!
Thanks for sharing.I found a lot of interesting information here. A really good post, very thankful and hopeful that you will write many more posts like this one.
“there’s no reason for comics writers to work (for long) under conditions they don’t care for”
There is a reason. It’s called MONEY. How many people are making a living at comics outside Marvel or DC?
Mike
I am not familiar with Colin Spacetwinks, but he comes off as a complete douche in these tweets. And i feel bad for Joe who is obviously spending his free time doing those Q&A’s, people aren’t really looking for common sense, they just want someone to blame for the cancellation of titles.
That “brilliant marketing campaign” turned Captain Marvel into a book that needs a new number one every 18 months or so before the sales figures get too embarrassing.
And with each relaunch, sales fall below what they were before the cancellation and new No. 1 (as an article in The Atlantic pointed out). It’s not just Captain Marvel, it’s pretty much across the board. The perfect time for readers to jump off a book is when it’s cancelled, and Marvel is doing it a lot.
@Ian Scofield “I think they would just be best to completely ignore the “Colin Spacetwinks” and Brian Hibbs of the world. ”
I can assure you that Marvel ignores me roundly at each and every opportunity they have!
Though, having said that, Stan did phone me out of the blue 20+ years ago specifically to apologize for a Marvel action (that all these years later I can’t recall specifically what it was… but it was pre-Jemas, which lets out a lot) and I thought Stan was pretty much pure damn Class for that, because it for sure 100% wasn’t anything that he directly did himself.
-B
Great OpEd, Heidi. BTW, love the javascript with the snowfall.
Happy Holidays to everyone at the Beat.
It’s sad how telling the truth is now a “ghastly gaffe”.
I wish The Beat wouldn’t put all the controversy into two camps. I love Marvel’s diversity, but hate that they’ve don’t it at the original characters’ expense. I would much rather Mosaic succeed over Ms. Marvel, Miles or Lady Thor because it would be an original minority character. Unfortunately, I tried reading Mosaic and it sucked. Ms. Marvel, Lady Thor and Miles are better characters, written and drawn by better creators. I guess the main question should be is, why won’t Marvel put it’s A talent on new, diverse characters?
plenty of Trolling in that opening paragraph.
” … a battleground for the alt-right ‘Comicsgate’ movement.”
This all reminds me of an article by Willie Osterweil called “What Was the Nerd?” You can google it. He argues that nerds are the fascists of the 21st century. If you spend much time on sites devoted to comics, video games or superhero movies, you know there’s some truth to this.
Key point:
“Today’s American fascist youth is neither the strapping Aryan jock-patriot nor the skinheaded, jackbooted punk: The fascist millennial is a pasty nerd watching shitty meme videos on YouTube, listening to EDM, and harassing black women on Twitter. Self-styled ‘nerds’ are the core youth vanguard of crypto-populist fascist movements. And they are the ones most likely to seize the opportunities presented by the Trump presidency.”
And this:
“In the 1980s and ’90s, an obsession with comics, games, and anime might have made this suburban ‘nerd’ a bit of a weirdo. But today, with comic-book franchises keeping Hollywood afloat and video games a $100 billion global industry whose major launches are cultural events, nerd culture is culture. But the nerd myth — outcast, bullied, oppressed and lonely — persists, nowhere more insistently than in the embittered hearts of the little Mussolinis defending nerd-dom.”
“He argues that nerds are the fascists of the 21st century.”
Thereby demonstrating that he doesn’t understand what “fascism” means.
Mike
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