Too Many Marvel Shows, True, but Comics Subsidiary Looks Good On Disney’s Balance Sheet
By Dan Brown Bob Iger spoke for many of us last week when he said, in essence, there’s too damn much Marvel content. The question is: How is this pronouncement by the Disney boss – and his plan to scale back spending by the corporation— going to affect the comics arm of the company? During an interview with CNBC, Iger, Disney’s CEO, said the sheer volume of Marvel streaming series and movies has reached the point where the audience has been “diluted,” meaning that Marvel fans haven’t been as excited about recent big-screen releases like this February’s Quantumania as they were back in the days of Endgame four years ago. And no wonder. The third instalment in the Ant-Man series is, for those keeping score at home, the 30th film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe following 2008’s Iron Man. I mean, I love Paul Rudd as much as the next straight guy, but at some point even I have had my fill of his brand of non-threatening charm. Deciphering Iger’s ire, he appeared to be putting the blame on the avalanche of shows that were released by his Disney+ streaming service during the pandemic. And he’s got a point. I don’t know about you, but there are no longer a lot of people in my life who get excited whenever a new superhero show materializes on the small screen. No sooner had I finished watching 2021’s WandaVision than we were drowning in Marvel characters: the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and they keep coming. They are making shows about characters I don’t even care about, which is saying something – I was raised on Marvel heroes in the 1970s and 1980s! Ah, the comics. I’m sure Marvel’s comics division won’t be spared from the billions of dollars in cuts that Iger signaled are in the offing, but there’s a simple fact of balance sheets that should shield it from excess financial pain. Simply stated, a comics company that is a subsidiary of a multibillion-dollar enterprise is going to appear on the financial statement as a cost-effective proposition because, compared with the investment required to make a movie, the cost of making a comic book or graphic novel is almost nothing – and the payoff is off the charts. As I’ve written elsewhere, my theory is that the purpose of Marvel’s comics is to serve as a kind of test kitchen where ideas can be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Whether it’s Tony Stark donning a suit of armour for the first time, or a set of cosmic jewels that gives their possessor infinite power over reality, or a civil war pitting superhero allies against one another – those things all happened first in the pages of the comics. Groot. Thanos. Peter Parker. There are decades of stories about these characters to be mined by the writers of Marvel movies and shows. (There are so many comic and other adaptations coming out of Hollywood, it’s enough to make you wonder, in these days of a strike by movie writers, just exactly what Tinseltown scribes do, apart from plundering existing properties.) Another way of saying it is, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn didn’t have to invent the Infinity Stones because artist/writer Jim Starlin did the hard part for him five decades ago. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but I feel as though the cheapest talent working for Disney – those artists and writers who come up with the concepts that percolate upward into movies and TV shows – are going to be just fine. Or think about it this way: Freelance comic creator Jack Kirby, who arguably invented more characters and concepts than any other figure in comics history, in all the decades he toiled for Marvel (and DC), never had health insurance. Even years after Kirby’s death, I’d say Disney is getting its money’s worth out of him. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Upcoming Omnibus Volumes Feature Comics from Marvel’s Michael Golden Age
By Dan Brown There’s a whole lotta classic Michael Golden art coming down the pipeline. I invite young comic fans who missed out on Golden’s most-celebrated work in the 1980s to check out two omnibus editions set to debut early next year. They feature reprinted issues from two series that kicked off in 1979 – ROM: Spaceknight and The Micronauts – then ran into the mid-1980s. If you want to understand why fiftysomething dudes like me always seem to be bellyaching about how comics reached perfection when we were kids, these books are Exhibit A. In my memory, Golden’s pencils leapt off the page with undeniable power and expressiveness. He could take obscure Marvel comic characters and make them memorable. He could make alien landscapes seem truly otherworldly, as few pencillers – think George Perez and Jack Kirby – did. Golden was never the interior artist on ROM, but he did contribute a series of amazing front covers in the title’s early going. A toy tie-in with Hasbro, ROM followed the exploits of a galactic do-gooder who comes to Earth to dispatch the evil Dire Wraiths. Having those shape-shifters as foes imbued the series with a vibe straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Of course, the ironic part is how another race of Marvel shape-shifters, the Skrulls, had already been trying to take over the planet, so the Wraiths were kind of redundant. I especially love the cover of issue 11, which shows the silver spaceknight ripping the wing from an F-16 in mid-air as a squad of the planes swarms him. Golden’s art had started to make an impression on me earlier in 1979 with the Micronauts. I was 11 years old. He illustrated the first 12 issues of that title, also designed to push the toy line of the same name, and I now view his pencils on the book as one of the great runs in comic history, in the same category as Perez’s time on New Teen Titans and John Byrne’s pencils for the Uncanny X-Men. The cover of each issue blared “They came from inner space” and the action took place on a sub-microscopic scale; what in our world are tiny molecules, were planet-sized in the Microverse. It’s true the premise wasn’t bursting with originality: A band of plucky rebels, including two robots, fights to free a galaxy in the iron grip of a villain clad in black armour. But Golden’s art elevated the material. Especially moving was issue 10, in which the warrior Acroyear race – as well as the conscious homeworld they inhabit, Spartak – repulses an army of Baron Karza’s dog soldiers. If the Microverse sounds familiar, it’s because it plays a huge role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where it’s known as the Quantum Realm. The biggest mystery to me was why, with the rare exception of standalones like Avengers Annual No. 10 in 1981, Golden wasn’t allowed by Marvel to play with the company’s marquee characters. I guess not every comic creator is destined to go down in history as being as prolific as Kirby. ROM: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Volume 1 includes the first 29 issues of ROM: Spaceknight, as well as Power Man and Iron Fist No. 73, in which he guest-starred. Micronauts: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus Volume 1 collects the first 29 issues of the series, plus the first two annuals. Both go on sale in January. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
