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Who’s to blame for the neurotoxin that’s poisoning the Pacific?
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Comments
Fantastic piece. Thank you for taking your time on this one and not just writing a summary of the conclusion (as so many other sites have done) I love how the Verge is commenting on comic books, gives me another place to explore a passion of mine.
I think it’s a cop out for them to say "no one is reading it" after noting that it had a sales bump when Hickman wrote it. People read it then because he wrote it interesting, they stopped because it was less interesting when he left. I remember it was popular in the mid 00’s i think when Mark Waid wrote it. So…put a good/popular writer on it, it will sell, put someone less, it won’t. Easy!
Still think the X-Men treatment is far worse. Basically wiped them out down to 100 mutants, no more new mutants, mutants now forced to live in limbo…it’s pretty awful how they’d treat something that a lot of people love just because they don’t own movie rights.
Jokes on them, comic sales are so low anyway that it doesn’t actually hurt the movies. And the movies have plenty of mutants to use, and stories to tell. And…they are also allowed to make new stories.
I think he is referring to the fact that Disney Marvel don’t use the term mutants as it is still part of the original Marvel X Men Fox deal.
From memory there is a scene in the avengers where they are fighting the twins and they call them something like ‘enhanced’ instead of mutants as I don’t think they are allowed to.
I guess if you are speaking movies only. I was talking about comics though, but fair point. Disney can’t use "mutants", and could only use those two characters because they’d been in Avengers and the rights were weird. In the future, they’ll call them "special" or "Inhumans" to get around it. Not sure the Inhumans with their complicated back story will ever have the popularity of X-Men though. X-Men worked because of the simple alegory between civil rights and mutants. Inhumans doesn’t have that. We’ll see.
Actually, they called them "Enhanced" and they were given their powers by von Strucker/Hydra by using the tesseract to enhance them. They didn’t depict their powers as naturally occurring mutant gene.
That was definitely post Fox, it just happened last year, but I don’t think it mattered, Fox still has access to them because of their history as mutants in the comics. If that was all they had to do, they’d just say "uh…Wolverine was an Inhuman too" and take him back, but courts wouldn’t buy that.
Comic sales don’t matter at this point. They’re pretty much a break-even industry. They exist to produce content for their parent companies to use in other forums.
Exactly my point though. There is enough history in the X-Men that it doesn’t actually hurt Fox if Disney sabotages the comics. There is so much content for Fox to mine. And the characters are rich enough that they can make their own story lines. All they are hurting are the long time comic fans, that’s it.
There’s X-Men stories, but they are running out of good stories.
All this Marvel renaissance is product of one man, Brian Michael Bendis. Who had the balls to "disassemble" the Avengers. That started the chain reaction that led to this. Look at the movies, they are mostly based on newer stories.
The Avengers movie is more akin to The Ultimates. Winter Soldier is a Brubaker product, Extremis is Ellis. Even little elements like The Iron Pariot, are from the newer comics and newer writers.
What is X-Men going to go back to X-cutioner’s Song? Phallanx? Chuck Austen wrote a bunch of crap, and Chris Claremont only had a couple of things in him. Fox has already burned thru a lot of stories.
Are you saying they can’t come up with new stories? Hell, First Class did pretty damn well, and it’s not really based on any comic at all (they had a series in 2007/08 called first class, but this didn’t follow that at all).
It’s not hard to take a bunch of characters, throw them in a blender, and make a plot. And if your saying in 50 years, the X-Men franchise has 2 or 3 stories worth telling, you are selling it short. Hell, looking at the movies, they used 3 real ideas for the main X-Men movies,and even then didn’t really use them exactly like the comics (X2 was based on a comic, Last Stand was a very very very loose telling of Phoenix, but not really. DOFP was really the most faithful telling of an X-Men story).
Not to mention how successful something like Batman was telling it’s own stories that weren’t in the comics, or are just taking bits and pieces and forming them into their own stories.
Honestly, I think some people lack any sort of imagination, or understanding of how movies are written. "Oh no, they aren’t making any more X-Men…we have no more stories" is something no one in Fox will utter. Hell, they haven’t even touched stuff like X-Force, or say, a detective movie with the Multiple Man (which could be pretty damn cool!).
Fox has always used previous stories. Marvel films in general follow previous stories. First Class is based on bits and pieces of previous X-Men stories. A Multiple Man film would tank. Sucessful comic stories build sucessful comic movies.
Guardians was extremely successful. It came from Annihilation, lead to the War of Kings and right into Thanos Imperative. All those comics sold really well.
As a no-comic reader I would disagree. Guardians was a group that older relatives talked about regarding shows or comics from the 80’s. Ant Man I’ve heard about when referencing the Avengers in some form or another.
The kind of money those two movies pulled in was not from comic enthusiasts, but rather from the general populace going.
I disagree with the notion that successful comics make for successful movies.
And just looking at sales, Guardians was not extremly successful. It had a high selling #1, and then settled into the 10-20 range in sales, which is 60-70K range in sales, hardly enough to account for the huge hit the movie was.
One of the things people talked endlessly about was how it was B-level stars and what a risk it was. And when it was successful, it was "if Marvel can make a movie about a talking raccoon successful, they can make anything…" Hardly the talk you’d expect from what you describe as an extremely successful property.
Guardians was successful by its standards. It went into multiple printings. The problem was that it was not mainstream recognizable but it was well written and widely read in the comic world.
Selling 60K is good by comic book standards. IF every one of those comic buyers went to see Guardians once that would come out to about…$1M gross. So the comics sales, good for a comic book (kind of…) had absolutely nothing to do with the success of the film.
Comments
Fantastic piece. Thank you for taking your time on this one and not just writing a summary of the conclusion (as so many other sites have done) I love how the Verge is commenting on comic books, gives me another place to explore a passion of mine.
By Dube on 01.19.16 4:00pm
I think it’s a cop out for them to say "no one is reading it" after noting that it had a sales bump when Hickman wrote it. People read it then because he wrote it interesting, they stopped because it was less interesting when he left. I remember it was popular in the mid 00’s i think when Mark Waid wrote it. So…put a good/popular writer on it, it will sell, put someone less, it won’t. Easy!
Still think the X-Men treatment is far worse. Basically wiped them out down to 100 mutants, no more new mutants, mutants now forced to live in limbo…it’s pretty awful how they’d treat something that a lot of people love just because they don’t own movie rights.
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 4:38pm
That pretty much seems to be the game their going to play until Fox decides to sell them back the rights.
By Xzeno on 01.19.16 4:42pm
Jokes on them, comic sales are so low anyway that it doesn’t actually hurt the movies. And the movies have plenty of mutants to use, and stories to tell. And…they are also allowed to make new stories.
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 4:46pm
Marvel does not have Mutants to use
By Dube on 01.19.16 4:52pm
They’ve had plenty. The movies have barely scratched the surface of what they can use.
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 5:30pm
I think he is referring to the fact that Disney Marvel don’t use the term mutants as it is still part of the original Marvel X Men Fox deal.
From memory there is a scene in the avengers where they are fighting the twins and they call them something like ‘enhanced’ instead of mutants as I don’t think they are allowed to.
By K-C-B on 01.19.16 9:46pm
I guess if you are speaking movies only. I was talking about comics though, but fair point. Disney can’t use "mutants", and could only use those two characters because they’d been in Avengers and the rights were weird. In the future, they’ll call them "special" or "Inhumans" to get around it. Not sure the Inhumans with their complicated back story will ever have the popularity of X-Men though. X-Men worked because of the simple alegory between civil rights and mutants. Inhumans doesn’t have that. We’ll see.
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 11:01pm
Actually, they called them "Enhanced" and they were given their powers by von Strucker/Hydra by using the tesseract to enhance them. They didn’t depict their powers as naturally occurring mutant gene.
By UzEE on 01.20.16 8:12am
They actually retconned Wanda and Pietro to be Inhumans in newer comics, I don’t know if that was post Fox or pre.
By jonshipman on 01.20.16 9:28am
That was definitely post Fox, it just happened last year, but I don’t think it mattered, Fox still has access to them because of their history as mutants in the comics. If that was all they had to do, they’d just say "uh…Wolverine was an Inhuman too" and take him back, but courts wouldn’t buy that.
By thatdude2 on 01.20.16 9:31am
Comic sales don’t matter at this point. They’re pretty much a break-even industry. They exist to produce content for their parent companies to use in other forums.
By obviousguiri on 01.19.16 6:57pm
Exactly my point though. There is enough history in the X-Men that it doesn’t actually hurt Fox if Disney sabotages the comics. There is so much content for Fox to mine. And the characters are rich enough that they can make their own story lines. All they are hurting are the long time comic fans, that’s it.
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 7:11pm
There’s X-Men stories, but they are running out of good stories.
All this Marvel renaissance is product of one man, Brian Michael Bendis. Who had the balls to "disassemble" the Avengers. That started the chain reaction that led to this. Look at the movies, they are mostly based on newer stories.
The Avengers movie is more akin to The Ultimates. Winter Soldier is a Brubaker product, Extremis is Ellis. Even little elements like The Iron Pariot, are from the newer comics and newer writers.
What is X-Men going to go back to X-cutioner’s Song? Phallanx? Chuck Austen wrote a bunch of crap, and Chris Claremont only had a couple of things in him. Fox has already burned thru a lot of stories.
By captainatom on 01.19.16 10:28pm
Are you saying they can’t come up with new stories? Hell, First Class did pretty damn well, and it’s not really based on any comic at all (they had a series in 2007/08 called first class, but this didn’t follow that at all).
It’s not hard to take a bunch of characters, throw them in a blender, and make a plot. And if your saying in 50 years, the X-Men franchise has 2 or 3 stories worth telling, you are selling it short. Hell, looking at the movies, they used 3 real ideas for the main X-Men movies,and even then didn’t really use them exactly like the comics (X2 was based on a comic, Last Stand was a very very very loose telling of Phoenix, but not really. DOFP was really the most faithful telling of an X-Men story).
Not to mention how successful something like Batman was telling it’s own stories that weren’t in the comics, or are just taking bits and pieces and forming them into their own stories.
Honestly, I think some people lack any sort of imagination, or understanding of how movies are written. "Oh no, they aren’t making any more X-Men…we have no more stories" is something no one in Fox will utter. Hell, they haven’t even touched stuff like X-Force, or say, a detective movie with the Multiple Man (which could be pretty damn cool!).
By thatdude2 on 01.19.16 10:59pm
Fox has always used previous stories. Marvel films in general follow previous stories. First Class is based on bits and pieces of previous X-Men stories. A Multiple Man film would tank. Sucessful comic stories build sucessful comic movies.
By captainatom on 01.20.16 9:10pm
Sure. Like Ant Man and Guardians of the Galaxy.
By thatdude2 on 01.20.16 9:33pm
Guardians is a comic book, Do you read comics?
By captainatom on 01.20.16 9:39pm
A comic that wasn’t all that successful. Neither is Ant Man. I’m saying it doesn’t have to be a successful comic to make a successful movie.
By thatdude2 on 01.20.16 9:40pm
Guardians was extremely successful. It came from Annihilation, lead to the War of Kings and right into Thanos Imperative. All those comics sold really well.
By captainatom on 01.20.16 9:49pm
As a no-comic reader I would disagree. Guardians was a group that older relatives talked about regarding shows or comics from the 80’s. Ant Man I’ve heard about when referencing the Avengers in some form or another.
The kind of money those two movies pulled in was not from comic enthusiasts, but rather from the general populace going.
I disagree with the notion that successful comics make for successful movies.
By CyborgKungFu on 01.22.16 8:22am
And just looking at sales, Guardians was not extremly successful. It had a high selling #1, and then settled into the 10-20 range in sales, which is 60-70K range in sales, hardly enough to account for the huge hit the movie was.
One of the things people talked endlessly about was how it was B-level stars and what a risk it was. And when it was successful, it was "if Marvel can make a movie about a talking raccoon successful, they can make anything…" Hardly the talk you’d expect from what you describe as an extremely successful property.
By thatdude2 on 01.22.16 9:31am
Guardians was successful by its standards. It went into multiple printings. The problem was that it was not mainstream recognizable but it was well written and widely read in the comic world.
By captainatom on 01.25.16 8:34pm
Selling 60K is good by comic book standards. IF every one of those comic buyers went to see Guardians once that would come out to about…$1M gross. So the comics sales, good for a comic book (kind of…) had absolutely nothing to do with the success of the film.
By thatdude2 on 01.26.16 8:50am
But none of them do, so what is your point. It’s not about property visibility it’s about the fact that they had good source material.
By captainatom on 01.27.16 6:21am