Am I the only one underwhelmed and slightly pissed at the Marvel movie announcements?

[beccatoria]

I think I probably am. Sorry.

I just... Marvel are in the unprecedented position of having succeeded in creating a shared superhero universe for a mainstream audience, of proving that it works, of establishing it well enough that now, in the wake of the insane success of the Avengers, they can actually start broadening it, building it, really showing what such a fictional construct can do.

And what do they do? Oh, right. More hetero white dudes. Of course.

Seriously, where is the Black Widow film? Why isn't it Ant-Man & Wasp? When do we get to meet Black Panther or Luke Cage or a freaking kick ass team-up with Misty Knight and Colleen Wing? Can we all be really surprised when it's Peggy, not Bucky, who turns out to be the Winter Soldier?

When you're making a movie about Ant-Man, who has basically no name recognition with the general public, and a powerset that inspires Aquaman level jokes, in addition to the fact that the two things he is best known for in popcultural terms are (a) beating his wife that one time and (b) spying on chicks in the shower without their consent that one time - so whether or not that's a fair reflection on the way his character is normally written I don't know but it doesn't change the fact he's got an image problem - the fact that he's historically associated with the Avengers in ways the other characters may not be (since Luke Cage is sometimes their freaking LEADER), and when you're already deviating from the classic Marvel Universe in your Movie Universe...that is a weak ass excuse for picking him instead of anyone else.

Look, I've read a few Marvel comics in my time but I make no secret of the fact I'm a DC fangirl first and foremost. A lot of my Marvel knowledge is from fandom osmosis, borrowed trades and the movies. But I like these movies. They don't rule my universe, but I go see them, I like them, I look forward to them. Like most of the world, this is the face of the Marvel Universe that I see most, this is their chance to impress me, to say to me, come read more of my stuff.

And this is what they show me.

I don't get all the squee.

No, wait, I do get all the squee and I do not begrudge it. I get psyched about a lot of things that probably could have been made with better representation, or fairer choices. It's entirely possible to be excited about something and acknowledge the parts of it that aren't ideal. Probably that's what a lot of people are doing. I don't want to be the asshole who draws lines and insists no one can have a complex response to a situation.

What I don't get is that I just...don't see anyone talking about this.

Probably I just don't know where to look, but pretty much the comics-related response to SDCC news seems to be that DC is the devil incarnate for having replaced a minor (hate to say it but it's true) cult female character who's taking on the role of a previously male character in a piece of minor (hate to say it but it's true) spinoff media, with another, slightly better known, female character still taking on the role of a previously male character, while Marvel shits kittens because they...are making some more films about straight white dudes?

And like, the Stephanie Brown switcheroo was capricious and honestly, because it's not even a mainstream product, pretty fucking fruitless and probably achieved nothing but upsetting loyal fans. It was dumb and disappointing, don't get me wrong, but given that Steph's ongoing situation is almost always linked to discussions about representation and gender in comics, I just can't help but feel there's a weird double standard going on here.

Then again, and without suggesting DC is some sort of bastion of feminism, because it's really not, I think in general DC gets given a much harder time about the way it treats its female characters than Marvel. Possibly because it actually has some. OOOH BURN. Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that, and as someone who's going to go out and buy the new Captain Marvel title, I should shut up and stop being unfair, Marvel have a lot of great women in their line-up, but I do think that DC has more women visibly soloing books and that means there's more opportunity to be critical.

Or something. Whatever. It's...petty of me but I'm sort of pissed about the whole thing.

Also I'm sick. So.

Comments

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I am also terrifically unthrilled about Antman (seriously. WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?), but I am...kind of okay with The Winter Soldier? I mean, obviously I am spoiled and kind of tricked into thinking that Whedon will write and direct everything now, and it won't be a Mess of Mainpain (which is stupid of me, because this is obviously not the case), but...I'm cautiously optimistic.

I do think, though, that it is HELLA STUPID for them not to be all "Hey, people really seemed to like THE HUNGER GAMES and BRAVE and maybe this is our window? Let's call that Whedon guy* before his schedule fills up." OR SOMETHING.

*Or Brannagh. Or, like, ANYONE.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean Ant-Man is what tipped me over the edge. Winter Soldier I feel complicated about. I don't have a problem with it in theory, and it might be a fantastic film. My issue is more contextual. It wasn't Iron Man 2: Black Widow, you know? So with Ant-Man I just...objectively don't understand why you'd choose him to make a movie about, it's bizarre. With Winter Soldier, I do understand, and I understand why people are excited, and I think it might well be a good movie, but I end up resenting it anyway because of the context. Whereas for other stuff, I'd recognise that contextual problem and look forward to it anyway, so I can see people doing the same for Winter Soldier, it's just...on its own merits, I don't care enough about it to do that. So I'm left going, "DAMMIT I HAVE A COLD, WHY AREN'T YOU BLACK WIDOW GET OFF MY LAWN!"

...I think I finally got old and bitter. ;)

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's pretty dumb.

[prozacpark.livejournal.com]

I talked about it a fair bit after the "Avengers" movie was first announced, back when Iron Man had just come out, and I realized that all the movies were establishing male heroes so of course "Avengers" was going to be all about men. I BRIEFLY had complicated feelings about Joss being on the project because as much as I dislike him, he is known for his female superheroes, and I mistakenly believed that that might mean that he would, you know, USE FEMALE SUPERHEROES.

I honestly don't know how the thing worked out, and I have read a million explanations for why Wasp or Wanda or whoever wasn't there, but YOU STILL GAVE ME A MOVIE WITH FIVE MEN AND ONE WOMAN, and just...no.

You already know my preference for Marvel over DC, but there's a very good reason I stopped buying Marvel comics a few years ago. And there are things here or there where I would get a few comics (and I can still get tempted into buying Omnibus editions of runs i have loved), but I dropped all my subscriptions following Marvel's utter refusal to pull the triggery rape imagery cover that Girl Wonder was trying to get them to pull. And then Joe Quesada pretty much said that if you're a woman or a person of color, he's really not trying to cater to you, so you might as well not read comics.

This industry CONSTANTLY alienates women (and people of color) and then turns around and complains about how women aren't loyal customers so they aren't catering to them, and I honestly don't know if it's ever going to change? And Hollywood in itself is a deeply misogynistic institution, and the combination of the two is not a good place for movies about women. Or people of color.

Marvel Max did a wonderful "Black Widow" series that was a bit like "Huntress/Batman: Cry for Blood" in that it told a story in the current continuity but with enough background info on her that it also served as a sort of an origins story, and i just really, REALLY wanted something like that for Black Widow in the movieverse.

And I will FOREVER be bitter about how Hulk technically has three movies while She-Hulk, who is infinitely more interesting and has a more easily marketable formula somehow doesn't even have one.

And you're probably right about the Marvel vs DC in terms of female-fronted books. I should say that I am not so much a Marvel girl as much as I am an X-men girl, so I mostly end up reading ensemble titles, which X-men comics tend to be. But within those, there are several female characters and friendships that I am invested in, and frankly, I am a bit afraid to wander into the Marvel universe at large.

Even so, X-men movies never would've gotten me to read the comics, as much as I enjoyed them. And I probably never would have picked up comics if I hadn't discovered "X-men: Evolution" animated series, which had multiple women, and multiple friendships between those women. Which, of course, then got canceled only to be replaced by "Wolverine and the X-men" of all things.

UM, I am sorry for all the bitterness that came across here. ;) I have a hard time not being bitter about comics these days, sigh.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I may keep my eye out for that Black Widow series if it's short; I really just don't even know where to start with Marvel characters, and while the two characters Marvel has I love most are Storm and Emma Frost, X-continuity scares the shit outta me (though I believe you have a list somewhere on your LJ of good Emma Frost recs, right? It IS on my "to read" list eventually, and I guess it's always good when that's full, right?)

Also, I really know NOTHING about She-Hulk - I would be interested in your thoughts?

Don't worry about the bitter - this whole post is one wad of bitter. I'm currently being bitter at myself for yet again, I don't know, thinking I ought to settle for second best or something. The reason this all pissed me off so bad was that, I don't know, it was like I accepted the whole, "oh, of course all the first movies will be about straight white men!" I mean, not accepted it, it pissed me off, a lot, but there was resignation, and like, when it WAS successful, then I was like...okay, now, now maybe they'll take some chances, and then this happens and I'm just so disappointed. Not just in them, also in me for having believed something different would happen. For having believed that fallacy, "it's just not the right time yet," like there'll ever be a "right time" without someone kicking something to get it. Argh. It's like the problems of the world writ small. Or large, perhaps, given it's the most successful media franchise on Earth right now.

It's not "just movies", it's never "just movies," or "just comics," anymore than it's "just representation".

And for all I want to wave Wonder Woman around on DC's behalf, they made a Green Lantern film before they commissioned a script to make hers. And I'm holding my breath to see whether somehow, mysteriously, that ends up in development hell again while The Flash makes it to the screen. For all I want to wave her existence around on DC's behalf, the fact she's an institution is largely down to William Moulton Marston, a dude I frankly have a bunch of issues with, but proved to be a dude of insane foresight when he signed her rights over to DC on the condition they reverted to him if she ever went out of publication - a situation that continued until the 80s. I have absolutely no doubt that she would have been canceled many times over if not for that, and that she wouldn't be anything like the mainstay of the company that she is now if she hadn't been in continuous print for 70 years. It's evidence that sticking with characters, and making sure they are visible, really DOES pay off in terms of profile, merchandise, popularity. And DC can't even take the freaking credit for their own success because they were blackmailed into it.

I just...gah. It leaves me feeling defeated and depressed.

I'm going to go eat noodles, remind myself that in a few months I get to read a Batwoman/Wonder Woman teamup drawn by JH Williams III, and attempt to feel better about life. ;)

Sorry for turning this reply into a gigantic, no-less-bitter-than-you rant, about things that were only vaguely related to what you were talking about!

[prozacpark.livejournal.com]

I need to reread that "Black Widow" series myself since I had somehow stopped reading in the middle, likely because it was around the time when Marvel alienated me. It was under their Marvel Max imprint, which also put out the "Alias" limited series.

I knew practically nothing of She-Hulk (besides that she's the favorite character of viciouswishes, who incidentally runs a wonderful blog about women in comics), and I was able to pick up the Dan Slott series starring her without needing much background at all. But she has a more easily controllable version of the mutuation that she got because the Hulk gave her blood at one point, i believe? But she's basically a superhero by night, and a Super Hero Law lawyer by day, where she tries cases that involve things like trying to figure out if someone from the future can come back to the present and press charges against someone who kills them in the future, or how dead is a dead superhero in terms of property laws. There's a lot of meta commentary on the nature of comics, which isn't something I have seen outside of this series.

Oh, and that's very interesting bit of DC/Wonder Woman history that I wasn't familiar with. But yeah, it's incredibly iffy that we have had a Green Lantern movie before we got one for Wonder Woman, who was apparently supposed to get one back in the 90s.

I think the main problem Hollywood/Comics industry have is that they still primarily market EVERYTHING to men, so they don't think "Would a movie starring a woman as lead do well with audiences?" as much as they wonder if MEN would watch it. And the problem we have as a soceity is that we do train half our population to disregard/dismiss the narratives of the other half, while women are automatically supposed to (and are CONDITIONED to) identify with men. Which means that those of us who prefer our stories fronted by women are always going to be screwed over by these industries.

And I'll never get this mentality of canceling things (on tv and in comics) as soon as they're launched and don't do well, because like you said, it does pay off to stick with something. As long as the numbers aren't dropping off, there's no reason to not wait and see. But, you know, Marvel has actually canceled series in the past because they were doing *too* well, better than their flagship books, so they figured that canceling them would bring people back to the core books.

Which is why I don't think that not making a Black Widow movie is about them doubting their profits if they did make one, but the fact is that Marvel as a industry is just more interested in telling the stories of men, and if that's selling well, why put effort into telling a story they're not all that interested in? /bitter.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

What announcements did DC and Marvel make? I found a list of upcoming Marvel movies (no Amazing Spider-Man sequel?), but the only thing from DC I could turn up was stuff about Green Lantern being gay, which happened, like, two months ago.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

They probably didn't announce the Spider-Man sequel because the original just came out the week before? I mean, I'm sure there'll be one, but maybe too soon for an official title, etc. Plus I know that the rights to Marvel movie properties are split between the stuff Marvel is directly responsible for (most stuff) and the X-Men and Spider-Man properties which are owned by Sony; one of the reasons they pushed out the Spider-Man reboot so quickly (and did X-Men First Class when they did) was because if they hadn't made those films, the rights would have reverted to Marvel. At least, there was something like that going on. It's why we probably won't see Spider-Man in the Avengers anytime soon.

DC didn't really make any announcements of substance. What I was talking about up there was a clarification of something that was fairly minor the scheme of things but a big deal to fandom. A character with a bit of a cult following (and I don't mean that pejoratively, I love her myself), Stephanie Brown, is currently not being used in the mainstream comics and people are upset about this. It was announced she'd show up in the Smallville Season 11 digital comic, but at SDCC, this was retracted saying she'd been replaced by a "more recognisable" character. Steph fans were understandably irked.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay, that helps. Thanks for explaining that. So it's sort of more of the fallout of Batgirl reverting to Barbara Gordon, then?

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Basically yes, especially since the person replacing Steph is Babs, again. So I think a lot of people are bitter about this in ways they wouldn't otherwise be?

[swatkat24.livejournal.com]

They also announced that Black Panther would be hard to make because, you know, a fictional nation in Africa is so much harder to create than Asgard.

I'm a DC fangirl first and foremost, though, like you, I've enjoyed the Marvel movieverse (and am amused that the Avengers has pretty much guaranteed that a Justice League movie will be made). And the reason I found DC a lot easier to get into is precisely this: they actually had titles with women in them. Marvel *does* have interesting women in their line-up, but they need to do a lot more with them. I don't see Storm or Jean Grey or Emma Frost or Mystique or Black Widow or Sif with their own titles at the moment, let alone movies of their own. (I will buy Captain Marvel too. X-23 was fun, before they of course cancelled it.)

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

They really said that? Bloody hell. o.O

Regarding the Justice League movie, I'm actually...really ambivalent about the way DC movies are likely to go. The Green Lantern film looked like a (failed, even though I actually kinda liked it for what it was) attempt to be more "Marvel-y" since that's what's selling right now, but it won't work for DC. Their successful franchise is Batman. If Man of Steel works, it will be because of that serious, mature Nolan veneer. And that's appropriate. Marvel is Whedon, all snark and raw emotion and bright colours and wild people all over the place. DC is modern myth, all archetypes and sombre tones. Problem is, I don't think that the DC style will be as popular as the Marvel one this decade, or next, or...I don't know. I wish they'd stop chasing someone else's success and look at what works for them. Because otherwise they'll only ever be the company that can't copy Marvel properly. In a lot of ways I'd rather not see a Justice League film than a bad one, but...obviously the notion thrills me anyway. ::puts on dork hat::

The excuse I always hear about Marvel is that they have more ensemble books so that's why there are fewer female solo leads. And to an extent I'm willing to consider that because they do have a different setup. But it doesn't get around the fact that having your own title is a visibility boost like no other. Rogue may lead the team in X-Men: Legacy, but it's not called Rogue and the X-Men, like Wolverine and the X-Men is, you know? And even so, it's not like they have a plethora of female leaders or majority female teams to make up for it, at least, the last time I got guilt pangs about being disinterested in the MU and went looking, they didn't, and that wasn't that long ago. Captain Marvel will be their only solo ongoing with a female lead, when the opposition is managing to field about seven or something, and they publish fewer comics in general.

And as I always want to make sure I say in situations like this, I don't in any way think that makes DC a bastion of feminism, it makes me sad that the damn bar is so low, you know? But very much like you, one of the things I love, conceptually, about female cape books, is that it's a guarantee that it's going to be a story about a WOMAN who is powerful, active and heroic. If there wasn't that thrill - the same thrill I get when I watch Olivia take down jerks in Fringe, or see Emma Swan swagger around in Storybrooke or see Laura Roslin airlock a cylon - that, "Big Damn Hero Who's Not A Boy!" thrill - I wouldn't have read anything like as many comics as I have. Girl Comics were my gateway drug to Boy Comics, and they were easy to identify because it was in the title, or on the cover. And DC had them when Marvel didn't.

My wallet doesn't agree, but if Captain Marvel is my gateway drug into more comics at Marvel that DO have awesome womenfolk in them, then...well actually then I'll probably just get EVEN SADDER that they don't have films, but at least I'll be better informed? ::wry grin::

[emmiere.livejournal.com]

Coming in late, but argh....that line up and the fact that every article I've come across is SO damn happy about Ant Man of all things (mostly for me because who?) gives me new pitchfork-rage that they continue to shelf the Runaways movie too. Which I'm probably using as partial distraction to the fact I was really looking forward to a Black Widow spy movie and will instead have to watch her fight for screen time in someone else's movie/big epic friendship/whatever. Again.

And it will probably be a pretty good movie, plus I'm actually kind of excited by the Thor sequel, but really, these are the stories you pick to tell? Be still my heart, Marvel.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Aaaaah, I really need to read Runaways, don't I? I want to, but I admit, I know it's unfinished and am worried it'll end on a cliffhanger/I'll need to know a lot about the Marvel Universe to get it (though I've been told it's pretty standaloney?)

The worst thing about all this is that I think I've heard that they've previously commissioned a Black Widow movie script, like in the last few years, and then mothballed it, so like, even the argument that they didn't know that Black Widow would be a breakout success from the Avengers (which you know, requires us to buy into the notion that it's SURPRISING in the first place, and that Marvel shouldn't, in their right minds, have planned for such a thing), becomes bogus. They just...went with ANT MAN.

Because you're right, I would have been complaining anyway, but ANT MAN is what really tips me over from being pissed about it to being, as you say, pitchfork ragey and/or laughing hysterically.

On the other hand, like you, I am looking forward to Thor. And not JUST because I hope they make him keep his hair long. :p

[ciaan]

I read Runaways knowing very little about the Marvel comicverse, and it stands on its own quite well. I've only read the original part of the series by Brian K. Vaughan and haven't moved on to the next writers yet, but that part of the story actually wraps up fine. Also it is a great excellent wonderful comic with good art, lovely story, nice demographic representation, and fantastic characters.