Comic Empire Building

Asked by a non-comics reading friend what I thought about Disney acquiring Marvel Comics, I was accosted as being perhaps coy in my response. But I wasn’t. I said, ‘Marvel has a great stable of characters, of course Disney would like to acquire them.’ I wasn’t hiding my thoughts behind words. I am correct in them. But, ... there is, in fact, more to consider. Disney is acquiring a great stable of characters, true, but Marvel is now in the hands of marketing genius. Is that a good thing for Marvel? If money is a good thing, yes. Probably a very good thing. But I do not think money is going to improve the works of Marvel, instead, I believe the intellectual properties of Marvel will be treated with the same “care” as other Disney properties... which is, whatever it takes to make money from them. That isn’t in itself a bad thing. As before, when I spoke of the effect upon the industry of the Direct Market, I say bless them, if that is what they desire.

Becoming a fixture in American or world consumer culture, as toys, or cartoons, or movies, or toothbrushes or children’s books... is meaningless outside of monetary reward. So I need to ask, how many Disney movies or books or product in general are anything but regurgitative vomit? They also bowdlerize what they adapt. In their stories they also make into nice what was historically mean. They also create happy falsism in their false morality tales taken from classics and rewritten for modern audiences. I expect Marvel to be inhaled by Disney, and poured back to the readers and consumers from a Disney perspective. Don’t read this as angry, I still have all the great Marvel stories I’ve enjoyed in the past, still like all the creative people I liked before who have worked at Marvel. I just think this is another step, even a big one, towards the consumption of comics as a creative medium, and transforming the medium into a monetized ghetto in order to test market ideas.

Alex Ness is a writer, a poet, and reader. You can find links to all his work: here