Diversity AND Imagination

(040917) Something occurred to me as I was writing my recent blog that compared Thor, King Arthur, Hercules, and Jesus.

Well first off I started writing about Arthur and I got into how the comic Thor’s origin story by Lee/Kirby /Lieber in Journey into Mystery #83 reminded me slightly of the King Arthur story. King Arthur proved he was worthy of being the British ruler by taking his sword out a stone.

In the Thor story the lame physician Donald Blake had low self-esteem and he thought he was unworthy of the love of his nurse, Jane Foster (played by the great Natalie Portman in the Thor films). Then he stumbled upon a hammer, and when he picked it up he became worthy of wielding the power of Thor and perhaps he finally would think he was worthy of Jane’s love.  Jane eventually learned that Blake was Thor, and the two actually became a romantic couple. But when Odin found out that his son loved a mortal, he was angered because thought that Jane Foster was unworthy of Thor because she was a mere mortal. Odin tried to keep them apart, and he kept punishing Thor. Eventually perhaps out of desperation he turned Jane into a goddess so she could be with Thor. However Jane did not like being immortal and she asked Odin to change her back into a normal human. Thor eventually ended up with the goddess Lady Sif as his consort, and he remained friends with Jane.

Years later in the imaginative What If #10 by Don Glut (I still think he is underrated) and Rick Hoberg, the watcher told a tale of an alternate universe which Jane Foster picked up the hammer instead of Don Blake and she became Thor. At the end of the story Blake became Thor again and married Sif while Jane Foster ended up as a goddess married to his father, Odin???

But recently in an issue of a miniseries Civil War II, Nick Fury whispered something in Thor’s ear, and he lost the right to wield his hammer, Mjolnir. Now we have a situation in which the terminally ill, Jane Foster is a new Thor and she welds the original hammer. And the original Thor is in a miniseries called Unworthy Thor, and he found a hammer from a dead alternate reality, the ultimate universe. Are you sufficiently confused?

This is all part of a diversity trend at Marvel. After 30 years of stereotyping Asians, neglecting minority heroes, marginalizing gays (Thanks Jim Shooter), and punishing and depowering all the strongest female characters like Phoenix, Moondragon, and Ms. Marvel in the 80s (Thanks again Jim Shooter), Marvel decided to suddenly become super inclusive. Therefore now we have a black Captain America (Sam Wilson who I liked better as the Falcon), an African American female teen Iron Man, a Middle Eastern Ms. Marvel, a female Wolverine and a Hispanic lesbian America. Not all of the comics that this inspired were bad. I quite like the recent run of Captain America Sam Wilson in which Rage is framed and railroaded by the judicial system for a crime he did not commit. But I would have liked the series even better if Wilson were still the Falcon. It’s degrading to have a long established African American superhero drop his whole identity to pinch hit for a more popular white hero.

Now sales have gone down on recent Marvel releases, and the company is supposed to go back to the original incarnations of some of the heroes they replaced with minority and/or female counterparts. Also some of the more prominent female characters Spiderwoman and Hellcat are losing their books (but America and the former She Hulk turned Hulk got new mags.) I don’t think that Marvel’s impulse towards diversity is wrong, but that they went about it in a terrible way.

Marvel has become quite stagnant in the last decade or more and many people are sick of seeing Spiderman or other versions of him appearing in 17,000 comics a month or seeing three Avengers related books each week taking up shelf space (ok so I am exaggerating a bit). And no one is going to create new characters if Marvel continues their policy of treating their writers and artists like horse manure. More and more of their best talents are now doing most of their work for Image and other smaller companies. Who can blame them? They all afford more opportunities for creativity than the house of ideas from 1963.

Everybody has read the horror stories about how Jack “King” Kirby, Gary Friedrich, Marv Wolfman, and Steve Gerber were humiliated by Marvel, and their lawyers for having the audacity to try to profit from their own creations.

What Marvel needs to do is actually start giving out a commensurate level of royalties for the new creations by their writers and artists. They need to encourage them to create new minority characters that are not just temporary fill ins or rip offs of more popular male white counterparts. So the next time someone at Marvel comes up with an albino transgendered Intuit character they should make him or her an original character not this year’s temp Daredevil, Deadpool, Impossible Man, or the Gibbon (ok so the last two are unlikely). This is the best way Marvel can prove they are diverse and keeping up with societal changes.

But I did rather enjoy the impassioned argument I recently witnessed in a comic store between a male and female employee about whether Jennifer Walters or Bruce Banner is the true hulk. No one defended Cho, the Korean hulk.