Superman is bisexual now!!!

CriticalGaming

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No, DC's best stuff is their animated series/movies. Those tend to be really really good.
To be fair, The Injustice games were okay. I don't watch much animation because I never liked teh characters to begin with.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
To be fair, The Injustice games were okay. I don't watch much animation because I never liked teh characters to begin with.
You should, the Batman and Superman animated series are top tier, Justice League is close by also, plus their animated movies like Suicide Squad or Batman meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are great.
 
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Hawki

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That's a new one for me, what does that mean?
Status Quo Warrior.

Most people use the phrase "anti-SJW" as a term, but I feel "SQW" is better, as they'd still exist in a world without SJWs.

TBH, I'm not overly fond of either of these terms, but they get the job done.
 
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BrawlMan

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TBH, I'm not overly fond of either of these terms, but they get the job done.
I rarely use them at all, because they're nor wroth wasting on my tongue over. The idiots that go out of their way to be racist and sexists jackasses, yet pretending "it's not about race", I call assholes. SJW became nothing more than a hollow insult for those who actually be human and not a total butt fuck. These terms are only done to divide those and draw constant lines in the sand.
 
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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
I rarely use them at all, because they're nor wroth wasting on my tongue at all. The idiots that go out of their way to be racist and sexists jackasses, yet pretending "it's not about race", I call assholes. SJW became nothing more than a hollow insult for those who actually be human and not a total butt fuck. These terms are only done to divide those and craw constant lines in the sand.
Not to mention that even those that do use sjw as an insult, don't have much of an idea what it means beyond "I don't like this thing that this person believes in."
 

Gordon_4

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This is true. I can't fathom how many times I've said to comic book friends that DC characters are terrible pretty much all around. Either overpowered and dumb, or bland and pointless. One need to only look at The Suicide Squad which actively has two different characters that are basically the same as each other, and even they are the exact same thing as Deadshot from the first fucking movie.

DC's best stuff is a couple of Batman Villains and that's it.
I disagree emphatically with this.
 

Xprimentyl

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Um...

Look, I'm not going to get into this too much, but isn't there a case for a colour-blind approach? Because you're right about the Human Torch for instance, but on the other hand, we have Jackson's Nick Fury, or Deadpool 2's Domino (forget the actress).

Usually wary about this, as it carries the assumption that any deviation from the 'norm' is inherently pandering. Again, using the Nick Fury example, the assumption that it's "pandering" is iffy to both the people who Fury could be said to represent, and those who he doesn't - the assumption one's attachment to a character is going to be linked to their appearance ipso facto. To flip back to FanFstic, one can point to many issues in that movie, but Johnny Storm being black isn't one of them. It introduces a few lines of dialogue (explaining that he and Sue are foster siblings), and that's it. The movie doesn't change for better or worse with this.
I'm not saying it's offensive; I'm saying cursory inclusion shouldn't be enough to sate underrepresented groups. Wouldn't you rather be asked out because someone actually is interested in you versus getting asked out because their first choice said "no," so their settling for what they can get?

Off the top of my head, Static Shock, Blade, Vixen, Black Panther, Black Lightning, Luke Cage, White Tiger

You can argue that's too few (probably is), but however one feels about the issue of representation, I don't think one can argue that such heroes can't be successful.
I didn't say they can't succeed or don't exist; I'm well aware of the examples you've cited. I was simply pointing out that those sorts of efforts, ground-up representation, are more meaningful than changing existing characters to sate minority quotas, often to the ire of purists who want the characters exactly as they typically are.
 
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CriticalGaming

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I saw Youngrippa on Youtube talking about the comic book industry a while back and i think i linked a video in another thread a while ago. But he made a point that I think really stood out to me.

He said, "Comic books should be bigger than they have ever been right now. Especially thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they aren't. Comic book sales are declining."

And the big reason for that, I think, is that someone who watches Endgame can't go to the comic book store and find those heroes as they are in the movie. You go look for a Thor book and instead you see a female Thor. The latest Iron Man is a black teenage girl. Hulk is an new guy who's glad to be the Hulk.

While these characters are fine, it's not what people are going to the comicbook store to find. They expect the heroes and the character that are shown in other media, and you can't really find that right now because the industry is driving this agenda fueled narrative that is too much in your face. Social issues have been at the forefront of comic for a long time but never have they been so shallowly presented.

Meanwhile you have Manga in which the writers are just writing good stories with crazy plots and wild adventures and any messaging is left in the background to be presented subtly. In a way Manga is a lot like old school kids cartoons, in which the lessons they are trying to present to the audience are done through the narrative. When the protag of Food Wars beats an arrogant cocky chef who tried to cheat, lie and steal their way to victory, ultimately in the end the protag wins and then explains why those backhanded tactics are no good and never can replace good honest hard work which sends an overall positive message to the reader without it being removed from the overall story. I remember old school Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles shows would be very anti-theft, anti-bullying, etc and a lot of cartoons would have messages like that throughout to try and teach not only the bad guys but also the kids watching the overall message.

These days with the CW shows and modern comic books, it feels like they putting the progressive agenda first above everything else. And the result is a garbage character, in a garbage story that nobody wants to read.
 

Hawki

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I'm not saying it's offensive; I'm saying cursory inclusion shouldn't be enough to sate underrepresented groups. Wouldn't you rather be asked out because someone actually is interested in you versus getting asked out because their first choice said "no," so their settling for what they can get?
Heh...

...honestly, I'd almost settle for what I could get as far as relationships went. :(

I didn't say they can't succeed or don't exist; I'm well aware of the examples you've cited. I was simply pointing out that those sorts of efforts, ground-up representation, are more meaningful than changing existing characters to sate minority quotas, often to the ire of purists who want the characters exactly as they typically are.
Not sure whether one should worry about purists though. Not as far as skin colour goes.

I saw Youngrippa on Youtube talking about the comic book industry a while back and i think i linked a video in another thread a while ago. But he made a point that I think really stood out to me.

He said, "Comic books should be bigger than they have ever been right now. Especially thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they aren't. Comic book sales are declining."

And the big reason for that, I think, is that someone who watches Endgame can't go to the comic book store and find those heroes as they are in the movie. You go look for a Thor book and instead you see a female Thor. The latest Iron Man is a black teenage girl. Hulk is an new guy who's glad to be the Hulk.

While these characters are fine, it's not what people are going to the comicbook store to find. They expect the heroes and the character that are shown in other media, and you can't really find that right now because the industry is driving this agenda fueled narrative that is too much in your face. Social issues have been at the forefront of comic for a long time but never have they been so shallowly presented.

Meanwhile you have Manga in which the writers are just writing good stories with crazy plots and wild adventures and any messaging is left in the background to be presented subtly. In a way Manga is a lot like old school kids cartoons, in which the lessons they are trying to present to the audience are done through the narrative. When the protag of Food Wars beats an arrogant cocky chef who tried to cheat, lie and steal their way to victory, ultimately in the end the protag wins and then explains why those backhanded tactics are no good and never can replace good honest hard work which sends an overall positive message to the reader without it being removed from the overall story. I remember old school Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles shows would be very anti-theft, anti-bullying, etc and a lot of cartoons would have messages like that throughout to try and teach not only the bad guys but also the kids watching the overall message.

These days with the CW shows and modern comic books, it feels like they putting the progressive agenda first above everything else. And the result is a garbage character, in a garbage story that nobody wants to read.
There's a number of issues here though.

First, saying comic books should be bigger than they are is a counterfactual, and counterfactuals, almost by definition, are difficult to prove.

Second, I think you've got the logic backwards. Like, I get the idea of "people see Character X in the MCU, so they go to the comics, and instead find Character Y." So yes, the person introduced to these characters in the MCU might be disappointed, but what are you suggesting? That the comics contort themselves to match the MCU? That Tony Stark should become Iron Man instead of Riri Williams, because Tony Stark is really popular now? There's a financial argument to be made there, but not an artistic one. I've seen comics contort themselves to match media outside their medium (e.g. the Archie Sonic 'adaptation' of Sonic Adventure 2), and it's not something that has artistic merit, IMO.

Third, what "agenda" do the Arrowverse CW shows have? There's certainly individual episodes I can point to that try (and fail) to present a political message, such as Arrow's 'gun control episode,' or the Flash's 'feminism episode', but as a whole? Not really. Supergirl season 2, maybe, but that's really about it.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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There's not an eye-roll emoji big enough.

Comic book sales aren't declining. A specific subsection of comic book sales are declining because, as I pointed out earlier, superhero comics are less coherent story lines and more collections of themed anthologies. It's not comic's fault that Hollywood decided to have three different Peter Parkers in high school. It's not comic's fault that Hollywood made a movie about brand new Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Or Newly Emergent Superman and Brand New Crimefighter Batman. Hollywood movies showing classic heroes as they were 40-60 years ago isn't what's making new comics bad unless you think all these characters should've stagnated since before I was born.

I mean, fucks sake, "any messaging is left in the background to be presented subtly" and then you cite old school cartoons and a manga where the moral is presented directly to the camera? Words mean things and that's the opposite of subtle.
 
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BrawlMan

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Superman is such a bland character, and this doesn't change that. His powers are bland, his weakness is a rock.
Superman is only bland in the hands of bad, apathetic, and careless writers. Not the character himself.


Time stamped for the point I am making.


 

TheMysteriousGX

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Honestly, it's the idea that Marvel and DC comics should have a vast, connected, chronologically contiguous meta-world that needs to die. Going back to pre-Disney copyright laws and letting most of the big ones be public domain would solve a lot of that problem. Let writers and artists have some characters and make a story with them that has a beginning, middle, and end without the expectation that it's going to slot cleanly between Action Comics #1215 and #1232 and won't get hijacked by Prelude To The Big Summer Crossover Universe Eraser. You don't have to check is a character is tied up in another story, or in space, or currently fucking dead. And then, you'll have that run of superhero books you can point to fans of movies and whatever. People who like the Spider-Man movies wanting to read more Spider-Man won't be blindsided by the fact that Peter Parker graduated high school in fucking 1965.

Thats hurting Marvel and DC superhero comic books way more than a bare minimum of clumsily handled progressive stuff.
 
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Hawki

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Honestly, it's the idea that Marvel and DC comics should have a vast, connected, chronologically contiguous meta-world that needs to die.

Thats hurting Marvel and DC superhero comic books way more than a bare minimum of clumsily handled progressive stuff.
So, I'm not a DC or Marvel fan in any real sense, but what I AM a fan of is continuity in general.

I think that the DC and Marvel comic universes can be fairly impenetrable, but that hasn't stopped other continuity-heavy series from succeeding. If the comics are in decline, I think it has more to do than just continuity issues. I mean, the MCU itself is still going strong despite being very continuity-heavy, to the point that you can't really stick to a single sub-series within it and get the full picture (e.g. you can't go from Iron Man 2 to 3 without seeing Avengers, and you can't see Avengers without seeing the films leading up to it).
 

TheMysteriousGX

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So, I'm not a DC or Marvel fan in any real sense, but what I AM a fan of is continuity in general.

I think that the DC and Marvel comic universes can be fairly impenetrable, but that hasn't stopped other continuity-heavy series from succeeding. If the comics are in decline, I think it has more to do than just continuity issues. I mean, the MCU itself is still going strong despite being very continuity-heavy, to the point that you can't really stick to a single sub-series within it and get the full picture (e.g. you can't go from Iron Man 2 to 3 without seeing Avengers, and you can't see Avengers without seeing the films leading up to it).
Continuity is fine...to a point.
But *this* was briefly and shallowly summed up in one movie:
and every comic in the entire Marvel line had to be storyline compliant

The MCU was, essentially, a rebooted universe. And it probably needs to end before they resurrect (and recast) Iron Man and Black Panther. It's working just fine, for now, but the new Spider-Man movie is gonna have a hard time shifting people to read the Spider-Man comic in which Peter Parker graduated from high school 56 years ago

And that's fine, honestly. It's what I want the comics to shift to: multiple self-contained AUs with beginnings, middles, and ends that happen to sometimes share the same basic characters. Give them unique titles and you can steer people towards the kinds of stories they want.
 
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