We’ve watched companies make moves that haven’t turned out well for them.
The big one was Bud Light, followed by Disney, and even Target has taken a hit.
Now, it appears that Marvel Comics is next to take a serious dive.
Fans have spoken out and are not happy with the company’s direction. The recent X-Men cartoon show received a lot of negative reactions, and people are calling it woke.
Sales are down and fans are turning away so what does Marvel Comic senior VP and executive Tom Brevoort do? Attack the fans.
On his personal substack, he answered a long question posed to him by a reader. Notice that it’s a set up question for him to rant about critics who oppose his direction.
“With the new X-Men ’97 show coming out, a lot of mainstream attention has been put on the x-men, and all the usual suspects are making their rounds, accusing it of being wOkE garbage before it’s even released, and it’s prompted a lot of conversation about the role that progressivism and so called ‘wOkEnEsS’ does and should play in the X-Men,” wrote a reader referred to herself as Callie. “Do you believe that the X-Men and their comics should be taking a stand and making a statement on current issues minorities face, in spirit with their history and origins? I personally feel like that’s a very important thing to keep, as nearly all of the X-Men’s best stories were made through that lens, such as God Loves, Man Kills, Days of Future Past, the original Sentinel sagas, and even a lot of the stuff in the Krakoan era.”
Right off the bat, Brevoort went attacked the critics.
“First off, I think the ill-defined accusation of being ‘woke’ is nonsense, and I tend to turn off and tune out whenever it comes up in almost any context,” he wrote. “The people who are using it, and who brandish it like a sword to attack whatever they don’t like, tend to be mostly, well, cretins,” he then declared. “They aren’t making a good faith argument, they’ve just come up with an all-purpose term, an infinitely adaptable scarlet letter that they can hang on anything they don’t like for any reason.”
All fans want is an X-Men comic about adventures, not a soap opera about a character in a thrupple relationship with other superheroes.
So if you are failing as a company, it’s the fan’s fault.
However, Brevoort is dead wrong, as explained by Stan Lee during an interview. He didn’t create the X-Men to make a cultural statement. He created them because he ran out of ideas.
“Anyway I wanted to do another group, another group of superheroes, but I was getting tired now of figuring out how they get their superpowers,” he explained. “I couldn’t have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a gamma ray explosion.”
“And I took the cowardly way out,” he continued. “I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I just say they’re mutants. They were born that way.’ We all know there are mutants in real life. There’s a frog with five legs, things like that. So I won’t have to think of new excuses. I’ll get as many as I want and yeah, he’s a mutant, that’s all.”
I guess now we’ll watch another great American company destroy itself.
