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Old 09-14-2013, 08:39 PM   #76
Talon87
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Seems DC's New 52 has been running into more and more problems with massive number of their creative staff leaving left and right.

The newest set of departures are J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman. They cite DC's refusal to allow Batwoman to get married as one of the reasons. Many members of the LGBT community have taken offense to this, but they've stated it was not because of the same-sex marriage, but marriage in general.

Many writers have cited the DC Editors being indecisive, calling for last minute changes which screws up large story arcs, uncertainty of details within their new rebooted world, stress and unprofessional behavior from management and editors, and lots of dumb shit from a company that seemingly doesn't know what the hell they're doing.

Going back to the issue of marriage though, it seems rather weird how anti-marriage comics have been. Not just DC, Marvel has shown this attitude as well. I would think that since both companies have allowed their characters to grow and mature along with their customers, they would continue to keep allowing their characters to do the same. But now it seems that marriage is automatically going to ruin a hero.
In the absence of any incriminating evidence (e.g. homophobic e-mails from upper management making fun of the requests to have Batwoman marry a woman), I would actually believe DC on this one. And that of course brings us to your question, which is why they have such a stick up their ass regarding their most famous characters getting married. I believe it's got to do with artistic license. How so? Well, think of it this way. If one writer has Batman dating Selena Kyle, but another writer wants him to have a fling with Pamela Isley, and a third writer still wants to have him go on an Indiana Jones-style romantic escapade with Ra's al Ghul's daughter, readers aren't really going to question it too much if Batman is a bachelor. It's that whole "oh Indy, you ladies' man, you! " mentality. We're okay with the charming, handsome, strong intellectual getting all da ladies and being a bachelor. Doesn't mean he can't marry! Just that we're okay with his bachelorhood. Well, now imagine if they have Batman marry Selena. Now he's hitched. Now if you try to come along and have Batman being romantic with Ra's' daughter you've turned Batman into an adulterous asshole. Now you've pissed off many of your readers. And you've created canon drama for the character. No one wants that baggage. So what's end up having to happen is like what we had with Spider-Man -- everyone has to agree on who Peter Parker is with right now. If that's Mary Jane Watson, then it's Mary Jane Watson. If that's Gwen Stacy, then it's Gwen Stacy. Everyone's gotta be on the same page or else (blegh) go off into an alternate universe no one cares about. Well that's no fun. So in a nutshell ... writers' creative liberties have been restricted by the marriage. And that, I think, is why you tend to see so few of the biggest names in comics being married or in super-famous long-term relationships. Superman's an easy example of the counterargument. Spider-Man too. But Wolverine, Batman, the Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) ... as far as I know, these guys have only had occasional backstory romances (like Wolverine's thing with Lady Deathstrike), not prolonged forward-moving romances that have spanned decades' worth of comics.

BTW: I'm not saying that I am for this policy. I don't really have strong feelings one way or another about it, but I personally would lean towards marriage for any character who'd been written to have a long-time romantic partner. (Like Superman and Lois Lane.) And I certainly don't have any objections to a LGBT superhero getting married. I'm just saying that I think I can see where they are coming from artistically. When you marry a character off, you really do shackle him/her down. You close a whole lotta doors that other writers may have wanted to explore. And while there's always alternate universe shit to consider, that's exactly how they and we both see it: shit.
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Old 09-14-2013, 09:40 PM   #77
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I also don't believe DC necessarily did it due to gay rights either. It just so happens that this situation involved a lesbian character. But to first allow the entire situation, have several issues where the characters propose and accept TWICE, and then say "No, she's not getting married even though you've devoted over a year to this and the future of this character" is really stupid about DC's involvement. And it's fairly evident from all the other departures from DC in the years since the new reboot that it's not a handful of editors, but the entire company's structure and upper management.

As for the issue of marriage, I don't think it has to do with the whole "James Bond" issue. Superheroes aren't going out there and nail every hot piece of ass they find. If anything, most superheroes have difficulty maintaining a love life. But when the writers are able to evolve past that point and create two characters who work together to make their relationship work despite the horrible things involved with superhero work, it feels extremely stupid to shoot it down.

Luke Cage and Jessica Jones were married after meeting in the Avengers. They continue to be Avengers and have had a daughter together. Marvel then continued by having a special mini-event where they had to find a super-nanny for their baby.

The problem with this isn't that Luke Cage can't be the sexual stud a large muscular black man can be, but rather, this child now puts an age on him. If the child is five years old, Luke Cage is now 5 years and 9 months older than before his baby was even thought up. So when she's 10 and Luke still looks like he's in his 30s when she was born in his 30s, it creates issues with the readers that the hero hasn't aged at all. A hero can't be classic and kept around for the next 50 years when this living symbol of the hero's age is breaking his character. Luke Cage and Jessica Jones is a nice sign that Marvel is willing to step forward with their characters into a different stage of life along with their aging readers.

Unfortunately this very problem is completely ignored by DC when they decided to allow Bruce to conceive a son with Talia in the previous DC Universe, then reboot the universe to make Bruce like 20 years younger, but still maintain his son who is a young teenager. What? Bruce went from like 50 to 30 and we're supposed to still somehow believe he has a son in his teens. It would mean he himself would have had been a teenager when he shacked up with Talia... I guess it's possible... still dumb though. His son was killed off pretty quickly soon after the reboot (in the first story arc I think).

The other problem is that Batwoman being a lesbian wouldn't even be able to have a child with her partner in the traditional sense, so there wouldn't really be a clock issue of allowing her to get married.

It feels like the comic companies keep thinking their readers are teens who wouldn't connect with a more adult storyline. While it is somewhat true, the constantly rising mature content of comics (extreme violence, grim/dark tones, sex) contradict who they want as their target market. And the fact that some of their characters are in fact targeted at older audiences or at least more mature audiences who would understand something like marriage. It gives off the impression that the comic companies just don't want to allow their characters to mature and can't find a balance between mature readers and possible new young readers and end up alienating the older one.
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Old 09-16-2013, 04:17 AM   #78
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In fairness the most popular super heroes are difficult to do marriage with. It's a justified fear I think.
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Old 09-17-2013, 02:16 PM   #79
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Saying it's difficult without citing examples isn't really a justification. It just further emphasizes that comic executives still this that comics are kids' stuff. I honestly could have had seen the marriage between Batwoman and Maggie Sawyer to work out.

A) Batwoman is Batwoman. Sure she's being blackmailed by an evil anti-metahuman government group, but she's still Batwoman.
B) Maggie is a Homicide Detective. One of Gotham's finest.

Hmmmm. I wonder if this would work out in any way to create both adventure and drama for their relationship. Hell, even if it ended in divorce, it still probably would have been a good story to follow.

And how do we really know it would have been difficult to do if they don't ever try.

Before hearing of this entire debacle, I did read Batwoman to see how DC would handle the character. As a media where any LGBT character can easily be done wrong, it ended up nice to see it wasn't. Aside from a stupid story arc involving mythological creatures and Wonder Woman, it was actually really good. Then WHAMMO! Let's cancel the big upcoming story.

Even if it is difficult to do a marriage with superheroes, to have had green flagged it months in advanced, then in the last moment pull the plug and tell everyone in creative, "We don't want married off heroes," is an absolute disaster for people who have devoted countless hours into the continuation.

It's like the staff at 3DRealms working on Duke Nukem Forever. Work on stage. Get the thumbs up. Finish the entire level. Show it to management, "The whole thing is wrong. Start all over again!"

Actions like that completely demoralizes the staff to the point of outright giving up. Which is why so many DC creative staff members have left.

Titles and creative which left:
Static Shock - John Rozum (Left out of writing decisions for the entire comic and pretty much insulted the entire time)
Superman - Andy Diggle (Left before he started)
Superman - George Perez (DC could not answer basic questions about the rebooted universe)
Grifter, Deathstroke, Hawkman - Rob Liefeld ("Massive indecision, last minute and I mean LAST minute changes that alter everything. Editor pissing contests... No thanx")
Earth 2 - James Robinson (Head Writer and creator of the entire Earth 2 universe, no reasons cited despite having told people during interviews he had big plans)
Batwoman - J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman (Again, citing last minute decision to stop a long planned marriage)

That's 8 titles which lost their writers/artists all because of horrible decision making from DC Editors. Kori Gotcha even cited terrible tracking of their own stories as a huge problem with the New 52 about a year ago. Now it's exploded beyond fan outrage and into writer's outrage. Not sure how long DC can last when so much of their creative staff (especially the good ones) have left.

EDIT: You know what Kush, now after sitting for a bit, your post bothers me even more. Not pushing the envelope is how things become stagnant and die. If humans didn't push forward we'd still be living in the Stone Age. Comics are arguably a dying media and has been dying for almost 20 years now. With New 52 being a 'fresh start', by completely shutting down the idea of something new like a superhero getting married is like going against their own reasoning for resetting. THERE'S NOTHING NEW. ITS JUST CONFUSION NOW!

Last edited by Loki; 09-17-2013 at 02:25 PM.
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Old 09-17-2013, 04:11 PM   #80
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Yeah I was simply acknowledging a potential point of view of theirs as opposed to saying they were right (they probably aren't but I can't honestly say I know too much about current Batwoman). I generally agree with your essay there.
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Old 09-21-2013, 04:53 PM   #81
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I was under the (perhaps mistaken, being entirely second hand) impression that Civil War got slammed due to various things such as the writing staff not agreeing on who was right or wrong (producing to wildly inconsistent portrayals of the characters between titles and generally each author portrayed whichever side they agreed with as perfect and the other side as outright villains) and lead to Iron Man losing a ton of popularity because his actions in said arc caused people to cease to care what happens to him.
To not completely derail the Webcomic thread with Superhero Comic talk, we'll keep it going here...

Yes, Iron Man lost a lot of popularity during Civil War. It was during the Bush administration and as we all know, America wasn't very happy with the state of the nation. Iron Man lead the way with the Pro-Government stance and while it should have had been ambiguous who was in the right, it was pretty clear how readers felt about his stance, even if Bush wasn't the Marvel Universe President.

It didn't help that Iron Man won the Civil War, which indirectly lead to Captain America's death, continued to get worse during the Skrull Invasion and then insanely worse that Iron Man's Pro Registration stance allowed Norman Osborn to use it to bring in the Dark Reign where Registered Supervillains posed as Superheroes and the actual heroes became outlaws.

Iron Man has since been slowly rebuilding himself in the comic universe and enjoyed some pretty good popularity in movies.
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Old 09-21-2013, 04:56 PM   #82
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I'd be interested to hear you address Concept's primary challenge, which was that Civil War period proved an unpopular comic series. I had always thought fans loved it, even if it may have made them learn to hate heroes they'd once loved (as you're expressing that many fans did with Iron Man). Granted, I would've thought Civil War'd have made Iron Man more popular too, but that was more a secondary challenge from Concept, the primary one being that the entire experiment was a failed one.

I remember back in college seeing Civil War posters everywhere and people online were all "this is fuckin' amazing T_T" and drawing fanart and fan comics that had to do with the series. I don't think I've ever caught wind of any fan love quite so big as I did that back around '06, '07.
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Old 09-21-2013, 05:28 PM   #83
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The only revolutionary moment which wowed myself and my friends was Spider-Man revealing himself to the public. Spider-Man had kept his secret identity for pretty much 40 some-odd years (real time), went from poor teenager to poor adult to married man and now came out and told the world his secret. This was the pivotal point in Spider-Man's and Marvel's history.

This was then ERASED FROM ALL HISTORY by a storyline pretty much right after Civil War.

So yeah, Civil War wasn't that popular, especially with hindsight. The only hallmark moment was quickly negated, Captain America was dead, many popular superheroes were still outlaws, and everyone understood the Superhuman Registration Act and use of the Negative Zone as a prison was a mirror for the Patriot Act and the use of Guantanamo Bay, which are pretty dark subjects about the US Policy during the Bush Administration.
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Old 09-21-2013, 05:34 PM   #84
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This was then ERASED FROM ALL HISTORY by a storyline pretty much right after Civil War.

So yeah, Civil War wasn't that popular, especially with hindsight. The only hallmark moment was quickly negated, Captain America was dead, many popular superheroes were still outlaws, and everyone understood the Superhuman Registration Act and use of the Negative Zone as a prison was a mirror for the Patriot Act and the use of Guantanamo Bay, which are pretty dark subjects about the US Policy during the Bush Administration.
This might explain the different vibes Talon and I've picked up on it. I only heard about it years later when the full effects of hindsight had set in, whilst Talon is saying he was hearing about it at the time, when people were hyped on the potential of the series.
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Old 09-21-2013, 05:41 PM   #85
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This might explain the different vibes Talon and I've picked up on it. I only heard about it years later when the full effects of hindsight had set in, whilst Talon is saying he was hearing about it at the time, when people were hyped on the potential of the series.
It's quite possible. I'm still surprised though, as like I say, I've never seen anything again like the excitement I saw those years. Even if people wound up colossally disappointed with how it ended up, I'd still think that people'd speak about it the same way we speak of the first Matrix movie in spite of the second and third.
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Old 09-21-2013, 05:52 PM   #86
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There was definitely hype for it prior to and during the Civil War. But that's not the same as The Matrix and The Matrix 2. I think a closer analogy would be Neon Genesis Evangelion and then how the fanbase ended up hating the entire series despite enjoying most of it because of the final two episodes.
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Old 09-23-2013, 04:54 AM   #87
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I enjoyed Civil War, I thought it was a good idea for a big event even if they did spectacularly cock it up.
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Old 09-26-2013, 03:14 PM   #88
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Imma just leave this here:

Spoiler: show
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Old 09-28-2013, 02:01 PM   #89
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Watched the new SHIELD series opener through the good fortune of it being on TV as I walked in. I wasn't particularly impressed, it's derivative, predictable and unsubtle, which makes sense as so was Avengers. Though, I'm a harsh critic and will likely never watch it again so that's not a particularly important opinion.

Better than Iron Man 2, though.
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Old 10-31-2013, 06:26 PM   #90
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So I was looking up stuff following watching the new Thor film earlier, and saw that the next Avengers film (Age of Ultron) is to have Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in it.

Can someone with greater understanding than I tell me how this is possible? I thought that Fox had all the rights to X-Men and their characters, rendering their appearance in MCU content impossible. Same for Spidey and Sony but obviously there's a less massive cast there.
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Old 10-31-2013, 06:57 PM   #91
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Fox only owns the rights to the following X-Men:

Spoiler: show
[Agent Zero/Maverick/David North], Angel/Warren Worthington III, Arclight/Phillippa Sontag, Beast/Dr. Henry Phillip “Hank” McCoy, [Blob/Frederick J. Dukes], [Bolt/Christopher Bradley], Callisto, Colossus/Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, Cyclops/Scott Summers, [Deadpool/Wade Wilson], Emma (Grace) Frost, Jean Grey/Phoenix, Juggernaut/Cain Marko, Gambit/Remy LeBeau, Glob Herman/Herman Gardner, Iceman/Bobby Drake, Jubilee/Jubilation Lee, Katherine “Kitty” Anne Pryde, [Kestrel/John Wraith], Lady Deathstrike/Yuriko Oyama, Leech, Magneto/Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, Mastermind/Jason (Wyngarde), Multiple Man/James Arthur Madrox, Mystique/Raven Darkholme, Nightcrawler/Kurt Wagner, Phat/William Robert “Billy-Bob” Reilly, Professor Charles Xavier, Psylocke/Elizabeth “Betsy” Braddock, Pyro/St. John Allerdyce, Quill/Max Jordan, Rogue/(Anna) Marie, Sabretooth/Victor Creed, Sebastian Hiram Shaw, [Silver Fox], Siryn/Theresa Rourke Cassidy, (The) Spike, Storm/Ororo Munroe, Wolverine/Logan
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:00 PM   #92
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Ah, alright. Good to know, cheers.
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:03 PM   #93
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That's a pretty powerful list though. Guess I'll defer to your judgment and spoiler tag my response ...

Spoiler: show
There are some obvious ones like Wolverine, Cyclops, Beast, and so forth.

There are some ever-so-slightly less obvious but still obvious ones like Gambit, Jubilee, and Emma Frost.

But then there are the big deals like Colossus (haven't seen past X-3 so if he's been in films then I didn't know) ...

And the really big deals I wouldn't have expected like Deadpool.

Yeah. Pretty much that last mention alone is a huge boon for Fox but a huge blow for Disney-Marvel.
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:04 PM   #94
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I only spoilered it because of length, but yeah, that last one is important. They basically needed those rights in order to have Wolverine's origin story introduced at all, since that character does play even a minor role in it. Even if they never make the screen or are mentioned, they are part of the same series of experiments that Wolverine was, so... yeah. Whether they plan to do anything beyond that is up to them, though they'll obviously need to acquire more rights to do so.

Colossus was in X-3, and I think even X-2.
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:05 PM   #95
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Yeah 'Deadpool' was in the Wolverine Origin film. Ryan Reynolds is a huge fan and says he wants to do another film more faithful to the character (which I can't wait for).
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:09 PM   #96
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Tspoiler]
But then there are the big deals like Colossus (haven't seen past X-3 so if he's been in films then I didn't know) ...

And the really big deals I wouldn't have expected like Deadpool.[/spoiler]
Colossus was in the second and third films, and was barely even used, and Deadpool was in the Wolverine Origins film, which was worse than X-Men 3, and was so poorly used it was a massive traversty.

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Old 10-31-2013, 07:10 PM   #97
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Wait, what? Ryan Reynolds is both Deadpool and Hal Jordan? O_o
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:11 PM   #98
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Wait, what? Ryan Reynolds is both Deadpool and Hal Jordan? O_o
Yeah, and I swear he was cursed because so far he hasn't managed to actually be in a good superhero movie.
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:11 PM   #99
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Yeah I also laughed when that happened.

But then Ben Affleck is going to be Batman and Daredevil {machinegunned}
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Old 10-31-2013, 07:12 PM   #100
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Whilst he should have been wearing the costume, I actually didn't mind the Ryan Reynolds Deadpool purely from the perspective of his performance. Everything else about that Deadpool was awful, but he was good within it.
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