While Marvel may certainly be dominating at the box office, it could be argued that things haven’t gone as well for them in recent years on the comic book side. To put it mildly, fans have become frustrated with the publisher’s decision to replace their favorite heroes with younger characters, the controversial move to make Captain America an agent of Hydra, and the massive dump that the House of Ideas has taken on its “first family,” the Fantastic Four.
According to a Marvel intern who’s now voiced his concerns and is operating under the name of “The Whisperer,” the situation is becoming pretty dire. Not surprisingly, there’s a push by Marvel big wigs to get back to meat and potatoes as it were, but they risk putting themselves on a slippery slope by casting aside diversity characters.
Editorial is miserable. Understaffed, under experienced and overworked. The direction at the top corporate level is a mess of politics and in-fighting. They all look the fool to Disney because of Feige’s split and the bad PR & constant gaming of their declining sales is wearing on them. Top brass want to make a hard left back to what worked with Steve, Thor, Tony, Banner and other recognizable faces. Editorial knows how bad it’s going to look to push all their diversity celebrations to the side. Reality is those books didn’t sell. A lot of it had to do with Marvel’s chincy practices finally reaching a breaking point with fans but the internal editorial spin is that comic shop fans aren’t ready to embrace change.
Something else that’s irked longtime True Believers has been the annual relaunches that have followed major crossover events, resulting in a myriad of #1s. Well, as The Whisperer adds, this has also caused a lot of internal friction, citing that the upcoming Marvel Legacy initiative is a “rush-job”:
Legacy is a rush-job. They can’t afford to take the classic characters off the table like that for so long but they also don’t want to piss off the new diverse audience they’ve been trying to court. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it too, and please all masters. It’s a scattershot way to buy time while they right the course on several books. It’s not going to be about “new number 1s” but milestone 500, 600, 800 issues. A lot of these big volume numbers are really stretching the definition but the constant relaunches have started to seriously damage the trade department’s ability to plan out long-term marketing.
While some may contest the validity of the above statements, it’s important as always to take it with a grain of salt. Still, this aligns with various other woes Marvel‘s experienced in recent years, so we can only hope they find a way to get their affairs in order before long.
