Though I frequent a lot of YouTube sites that detail the devolution of commercial comics, I couldn't resist mentioning this one, the hyperbolically titled CAPTAIN MARVEL WRITER HAS A TOTAL MELTDOWN.
Years ago, I had a public argument with said writer Kelly Thompson, while I wrote (unpaid-for) online essays for a company I'm now ashamed to have dealt with. Thompson had authored for Comic Book Resources a highly politicized reading of the role of female characters in comics. I, a man, had the temerity to disagree. I'm not going to link to my own posts regarding that exchange. Any interested party can find them via Google, but the upshot was that the company "cancelled" me in deciding that they didn't want any more of my reactionary essays.
Thompson went on to get hired by Marvel editors, who wanted, then as now, to virtue signal about how liberal and forward-thinking they are. I naturally have read none of Thompson's work, and the YouTube site is only of interest to me in that the site Yellow Flash tags her as one of the many comics-writers to attack fans for their desire to be entertained rather than lectured to.
Her "meltdown," to be sure, isn't much of anything in itself; hence my rating of it as "soggy." Its only significance in the social sense is that it prompted Yellow Flash to break down just how well her heavily touted run (close to fifty issues) on the Current Captain Marvel is doing in terms of making money. Yellow Flash concludes that the only way Current Marvel manages to keep its numbers high is to regularly cancel and reboot comics-titles, which may mean that the allegedly long run of Current Captain Marvel is due for such a reboot.
I noted in a 2008 essay, EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, that comic books frequently have used "events" to goose their sales in one way or another, and I used a Silver Age "death of Superman" storyline as an example. I noted that the "story values" defended in another writer's essay might be somewhat deceptive when seen through the lens of what I then called "game theory." I won't rehash those observations now, but I did speak of a "shadow of didacticism" that made it possible for fictional narratives to take on the appearance of being "useful" rather than pure recreation.
I also found it interesting that Thompson follows the thinking of most SJW comics writers in claiming that if readers don't like their progressive ideals, they must be purblind reactionaries. "The more things change," eh?
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