"What if …" – the Disney+ series … is kind of 'meh' ?

[odinsgrandsonParticipant 4288xp 1]

I could probably talk about how screwed up IP rights are all day, but you’re right about us digressing.

– I am still not certain what I think about tying all of those stories together. I think there’s plenty of space to make more What If one shot stories -which can be fine if you can get over the truncated format. But now I also expect that they’d do another multiverse team up at the end of it with Watcher playing as the multi-verse Nick Fury. I kind of think that it is fun to have the big multiverse team up like that, but I also agree that it represents a failure to live up to its lofty premise.

I also find it odd that our prime continuity can never have any of the best that the multiverse has to offer.

– I think the What If… Zombies! episode is going to serve as a back-door pilot for a Marvel Zombies series. I wonder if they’re planning to spin off any of the other characters into their own stories as well.

– Captain Carter still stands out to me a a character that they’ll want to continue (which I think is great if she can leave the shadow of the Captain America films).

[limburger 21681xp 0]

The problem with continueing a ‘What if’ storyline is that it is no longer a ‘if’ …

Kind of like replacing Thor with a woman … and pretending nothing weird happened.

There’s nothing inherenntly ‘wrong’ with the team up / finale, but again … it turns those universes into solid facts.

The point of a ‘what if’ would be to provide just enough food for thought to make it interesting, but add enough downsides to make the prime version of the character the one that needs to exist.

Like I said : where’s the danger/threat if you can simply switch to a different version of the character when things go wrong ?

I’m not familliar enough with the superhero genre, but I’d guess that there have been plenty of threats that were similar enough to zombies. And as we’ve seen with ‘the walking dead’ (or any zombie movie/story) the zombies merely exist to provide context for the story that is happening. They rarely are the active threat.

[odinsgrandsonParticipant 4288xp 1]

In the comics, quite a few different characters get to be Thor for a while, Jane among them. From the fans I’ve talked to, the problem they had with her was that the whole thing was presented to feel like a temporary thing which ended with a return to the status quo.

Overall, that’s the general complaint about comics. They tend to do lots of cool stories for a while, but some writer comes along who preferred the status quo from years back so stuff gets reset with some helter-skelter retroactive continuity.

I find it most interesting when the comics don’t return to the status quo. That’s most frequent outside of shared universe comics- when you only have one writer working on a book for a long time, they tend to evolve it well past its premise.

[bvandewalkerParticipant 2077xp 0]

Actually,with the Marvel (and to a lesser extant DC) a  hero’s personality, past and relationships depends on which era and universe (both major lines have multiverses) of comics you are reading.

The Hank Pym that I was introduced to  in the 2000’s through cartoons and comics was a peace nick scientist who had issues with hurting flies and was a very strong family man, and like Tony Stark kept making the “Frankenstein’s monster” mistakes in new and innovative ways that you wouldn’t think a grown man with a doctorate would make.  And according to my mother that was essentially how he was back when she was kid.

That said I also know from my Mom that sometime in the  70’s or 80’s (likely the 70’s), a lot messy stuff happened in the Marvel comics from what I have heard it was due mostly to a single editor in a major gatekeeper position. Lots of characters that had been married got divorces (including Ant man and Wasp) for different reasons, language use became more crude,  superstition and witchcraft became more prevalent story elements, etc. This also seems to have happened with DC either at the same time or a bit later on.

[limburger 21681xp 0]

all art is related to the era it is created in …

especially if there is a commercial incentive to create it, because it needs to sell … and to sell stuff you need to follow the trends (or create the trends).

which is why we get a comic batman that is super silly in the 60’s and a dark and broody batman in the 90’s era Nolan movies
it’s why we got all those spiderman variants to begin with

yet more reasons why comics get rebooted every so often.
it’s not for the art, it’s for the money

and before all that there was the comic code that enforced censorship (which killed a lot of potential as ‘thought crime’ became an offense), which current companies do without having the law force them to because being seen as ‘clean’ is as important as it was previously.

Good art should cause offense.

[odinsgrandsonParticipant 4288xp 0]

A lot of comics now would fail the comics code pretty hard. Especially since gay characters were prohibited by the comics code.

As with all censor boards, the pr0-censorship crowd never really understand subversion and nuance, so writers who want to are going to get around that (like how Clairemont presented gay characters like Destiny and Mistique). And when Spider-Man wanted to do a story involving drugs, they just did it and the Comics Code changed their rules because they knew that they’d become obsolete if they didn’t.

The thing that’s happening right now is that a lot of writers are intentionally including minority groups or at least trying to avoid being unintentionally terrible to them. I don’t really find that to be the same thing as censorship.

[Author]

Posts