Will the Comic Book Survive?

Well, I was looking for what to post up on the last day of this wonderful month of August, and it was clear as soon as I logged on.

The headline on NPR was that Disney plans to purchase Marvel Comics and its nearly 5,000 characters pending an anti-trust authorization...

I want to be optimistic. I really do. I'm an optimistic guy. But I know that now it won't be the same reading my favorite Ghost Rider, Captain America, or even Iron Man. And you can be sure that Spiderman will be weinier than ever now. I am afraid that this new partnership will be part of the long trend of franchises gobbled up by mega media giants and then whored out to the point of irrelevance.

Now let me be clear. Marvel before this deal was certainly no bastion of independent artistic creation. Did you see the marketing and what not for Iron Man, Fantastic Four II and X 3? Shameless. And they were piss poor movies... Oh yeah, let's not forget Spiderman 3 as well. So clearly, Marvel was already a media monster in the comic book realm. But that is completely different from this new hypersphere of Disney. And Marvel may have been a media giant, but at least they were still a comic book company at heart. They understood what the real fans needed in the comic books and what we needed to see in the movies (although they had a hard time delivering there... anyone else vomit after Ghost Rider?). But now I'm afraid for the future of Marvel characters. Will they still be edgy? Will they still have character flaws, complex relationships, and the ability to wrestle with not just the best supervillans but also social/political problems. Would the "Civil War" series that Marvel just completed that had overt discussion of the rule of law, liberty vs. security, and the morality of vigilantism/the state have been as compelling under Disney ownership. Will Disney "clean up" the images of certain characters (i.e. Tony Stark no longer a recovering alcoholic)?

But at the end of the day, I'm not too worried about the comics because they know that if they change those, the fans will leave. What I am most saddened by is that you can count on a lot of crappy new Marvel movies to show up. Marvel will be plastered on more things now that it could have ever dreamed of.

The most interesting thing of all of this will be to see how DC acts. It seems to me like DC will be looking for a buyer if they aren't already part of a mega conglomerate, in order to keep up with the market value/recognition of Marvel. And in the end, this may produce a generation of kids who grow up thinking that lame comic book heroes and their movies aren't worth their time. I may have to write about what comic books mean to me sometime because I don't have the time to go into that, but I am trying to be optimistic about this deal...

Maybe Donald Duck and The Hulk will team-up for some hilarious... nope. Not working...