Truth and Beauty Bombs

What is anything on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Ham

Or anything on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Zombies_(series)

I do not understand any of it unless comics are actually written by twelve year olds at sleepovers who are hopped up on Kool-Aid, Simon's Quest, and Leslie Nielson movies.

one is like, a bad 'random' parody and one is the whole

"zombies r kewl"

thing

not hard to grasp

marvel is going to be almost exclusively a movie and animation company in a few years anyway

print is dead

when you have that many writers writing in the same universe for that long with the aim of pleasing the sort of people who read superhero comics you end up with a big backlog of retarded shit

iirc there is a dc/marvel cross-over character who is half-wolverine, half-batman

but really it's no less insane than like the average standard comic book storyline

or especially the basic idea that all superhero comics from a particular publisher take place in the same universe in the first place

really would be pretty strange if we had pride and prejudice and zombies and didn't have marvel zombies imo

I guess I just figured that major corporations might care about the integrity of their intellectual property? The crossovers actually make sense to me -- "Marvel and DC together at last" might be stupid in its execution, but at least it's appropriately big. But "Spider-Man as a pig" or "Spider-Man as a zombie" is both stupid and appealing to almost nobody? Like, why would you whore out your most iconic characters for an extra few thousand dollars?

I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies only needed a couple of guys with no respect for the source material to exist. But Marvel Zombies had to have been debated by committees, presented to board members, attached to revenue projections, budgeted, and so on. Like at some point, somebody at Marvel said, "Based on the numbers, the best thing that you five people can do with your time for the next three months is to make a zombie version of the Marvel universe. That is the best thing that we, a major corporation, can think of for you to do with your time, which we are paying you for, and the best thing that can happen to our extremely valuable and iconic characters, who are loved by millions of people."

Spider-man as a pig was something that seemed comparatively normal if you read comics in the 70s. "Marvel Zombies" started out as a cheeky term that meant Marvel Fans who stuck with Marvel despite a long, shitty storyline -- but Marvel has since co-opted the term for this franchise. And I mean, zombies have really hit their saturation point of tolerability, but there was a good five years there where people wanted their hands on anything zombie, so you can't blame Marvel too much for wanting to tap into that.

Really Marvel and DC have collectively decided that alternate versions of characters are a good thing. When characters that are seventy hundred decades old have had every iteration of storyline told about them (but they are still your biggest moneymakers), the best compromise is to come up with alternate versions with new potential, then see what sticks. DC has told nearly every kind of story imaginable about Batman in Gotham City, but what if Batman decided to make a worldwide network? It's a bunch of new storylines and a "It's a Small World Batman" action figures.

Uh, basically, yeah, I'll go with what Justin said. To be honest, Boorishly seems to be overreacting here imo. I remember a good article about this same subject on the internet; I'll go see if I can dig it up.

I just felt like I finally understood comic books, and then this comes along.

Oh hey, I found it! Here is the article I was talking about. I'll quote the relevant bits here:

Honestly, this just brings up a more depressing reality which seems to be "we are basically out of stories to tell and also we have no good ideas for new characters but we still want to make money". At least I understand that though.

I don't really see why it's surprising. The point of huge corporations is kind of to make money. You just have to hope that enough good stuff comes out for you to enjoy it. But when it comes down to it, when a successful company brings out something extremely crappy, it's only because that's what the market will actually pay for. (EDIT: In most cases of course.)

Plus, it's not like they can say "We're out of ideas, let's just stop selling new things for a while," without going out of business and having everybody lose their jobs.

next week, boorishly p foundry expresses his profound discovery that "hollywood just keeps remaking old movies! where are the new ideas?"

Honestly, at this point, it's simple math.

Consider that as a rough guesstimate there are 10% of printed series still active, that means there are about 3,000 series currently running, with at least that many issues coming out at least monthly. Figure that each print run has to be editorially approved for the widest audience acceptance (lest we get a few months where Spidey takes on Doctor Doom on Iron Chef America), you kinda run out of ideas pretty fast.

Hell, nobody complains about how often storylines are copied on the soap operas they run on TV. (although, I for one, would welcome a nice little zombie apocalypse story on One Life to Live).

And yes, I would pay to read Spidey vs Doctor Doom on Iron Chef.

Well most companies are like "MUST PROTECT THE BRAND" which is why there hasn't been a Mickey Mouse cartoon for a hundred and fifty years. If he never does anything, then nobody can be offended and Disney can just keep selling more shit with mouse ears on it. Likewise, you don't see Garfield doing any zombie reboots.

And Hollywood remaking the same movie over and over again is pretty much exactly the opposite of whoring out your characters into every possible iteration. I am mostly just surprised that Marvel's attitude towards its characters seems to be, "Hey whatever bros! As long as it moves marginal units then whatever!"

Well, it's not exactly the opposite. They're both recycling existing properties. But most creative properties follow the line of "DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE" whereas Marvel is more like "GOSH LET'S HOPE NOBODY ASKS IF CUTE ROMANCE COMIC SPIDER-MAN IS THE SAME AS ULTRA GORY UNDEAD CANNIBAL SPIDER-MAN BECAUSE UH YEAH"

You know, if we wanted to reinvigorate our brand, Zombie Garfield wouldn't be a bad line.

where are you getting this idea from that DC and Marvel care about the integrity of anything

imo this sort of thing is actually good (in principle if not in execution) - if you're going to have the same character cropping up in comics for like 60 years then imo the goofy thing is trying to keep a consistent continuity going (and the idea of having all your superheroes existing in the same universe at once is just batshit crazy) and the rational thing is really to just have each comic or run of comics be its own, self-contained story that just pulls from the established style and tropes
so if in one self-contained run, spiderman is a zombie, then whatever, it's just a take on spiderman where he's a zombie, it doesn't really mean anything to the basic character any more than pride and prejudice and zombies has any effect on the original text

but anyway the actual reason they allow stuff like Marvel Zombies is because if you say to the average comics nerd from 4 years ago or whatever 'HEY WOULDN'T IT BE COOL IF LIKE IRON MAN AND HULK WERE ZOMBIES' their reply will be 'YEAH DUDE THAT SOUNDS RAD BUT HEY WOULDN'T IT BE EVEN COOLER IF ALSO WOLVERINE WAS IN IT BUT HE WAS A ROBOT'

it's largely not a demographic that resists the merging of different elements of pop culture because the Marvel and DC 'universes' are already huge mish-mashes of things. like really stop and think about the fact that superman, an alien, explicitly has a weakness to magic. he has fought enough fucking wizards for this to be an issue

most canadians are robots so it's redundant

Yeah I was kind of surprised towards the end there were I was apparently arguing against variety?

I think the underlying argument is why DC and Marvel bothers with 50+ year-old characters.

There were efforts to come up with some original stuff, which is how we ended up with characters like Sandman and the Watchmen. But then Image comics set a 1990s standard that every new character had to be the most badassed, unstoppably superpowered character in history. DC and Marvel didn't want to appear uncool, so they did the same thing.

Soon, roided-up heroes became repetitive, and readers stopped caring about them. A "comic book industry bubble" popped, which killed off a lot of small-time comics shops, and Marvel nearly went out of business (DC was nestled in Warner Bros). Then, pretty-good comic book movies like Spider-Man and X-Men started coming out, and the fanbase for these old dogs grew beyond basement nerds. This all added up to a mentality of "people just like the old heroes better" and there's been a fair amount of risk-aversion ever since.