NY Post Opinion Piece on DC and Marvel

General Discussion
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https://nypost.com/2022/12/27/woke-comic-books-are-laughable-money-losers-but-dc-marvel-push-them/

saw this article / opinion piece today, and was like, wow.

Figured I would see what the community thinks.

I agree with parts of it, I understand all of it, If I had the chance to reply to John Stossel who wrote at least the title, and this mystery " July " would be; no one is forcing you or anyone to read these storylines, that would be #1. B , would be, DC has a Multiverse/ Infinite Multiverse, so each character that was mentioned in the article, they have their own planet, if anything the debate should be, which planet are they on, and is it the only one that matters.

There are tons of Batman stories/ series, where it is just Batman, same for everyone.

I don’t like when stories tend to pander to politics , i stay away from those, I use to be turned off to the idea of LGBTQ characters, and was of the same mindset,
I do not like the label of " Woke " , for me what I saw happening, was a private society not liking change.

The comic book , was a closed society for " nerds and geeks " and what happened was now, the door was open to include a new community. One which mind you, if you are a Doom Patrol Fan, the lgbtq community is more than welcome and accepted into along with heterosexuals, it isn’t a kumbaya society they live in, it is just people who accept each other for who they are in this doom patrol group.

In the end, stossels opinion piece with commentary by " July " a waste of space.
It offered nothing constructive, or substantial, and it just came off in the end as trolling. Even if they are right to an extent, publishing this was pointless.

Also, just an FYI to everyone, I just wrote an opinion piece to an opinion piece, anyone can write an opinion piece, because, drum roll, wait for it… It is just someone stating an Opinion.

An we all know what Opinions are like, because everyone has one.

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First of all, let me just say the Post is trash. But I may be biased because I work for another NYC news outlet.

More importantly, comics have always been political. Superman was the original social Justice warrior when he debuted. Captain America punched out Hitler. Green Lantern and Green Arrow addressed race and inequality. And that’s just a small sampling from the DC side of things. The outrage culture warriors hitting at comics are going after what they see as an easy target because they don5 understand the history or the context.

Stossel is either an uninformed idiot or, most likely, he’s taking advantage of an uninformed readership.

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I agree with this. The Post makes some good points but the problems aren’t the issues being addressed it’s how. I don’t have a problem with pushing politics but not at the cost of plot.

I’ve mentioned before on here that I don’t like characters that only have one thing going for them that isn’t actually a character trait. Love interests, goober powers/knowledge, person who the hero can talk to for the sake of dialogue, and yes, social issues all being common examples. To be clear, those things aren’t necessarily bad, but if that’s all a character has, there’s no actual substance for a story. Friend put it as, “I’d rather not be represented at all than be represented as something incorrect or boring.”

As for changing existing characters, again, it isn’t a bad thing or a good thing in and of itself. It’s a bad thing if it doesn’t make sense or changes them into the above.

DC and Marvel have always been political and some of that was great. They’ve also had series that flopped before. These past few years are nothing new, it’s just comics are more mainstream now and casuals don’t realize that Val-Zod (a great character before you misunderstand me but this was something I actually had to explain once) isn’t actually main earth Superman but spontaneously black for no reason. Which, I think we could all admit that if Superman spontaneously became black it would be as weird as The Hulk spontaneously turning Grey (again, casuals won’t understand but this is meant ironically).

Bottom line, problem where it exists isn’t political issues, it is thinking issues can replace plot. Problem where it doesn’t exist is people who don’t know what they are talking about or people who don’t like change.

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So I think this article is trash and the opinions are very misguided, but it isn’t as though the author just made up some guy and called him July. It says right in the article that he spoke with “comic creator Eric July.” I’d admittedly never heard of him, but he at a minimum appears to be a real person.

But yes, greater representation has nothing to do with why comics don’t sell like they used to, or why American superhero comics are outsold by manga. It is a question of value. One twenty-two page comic today costs between $3 and $5. Those twenty-two page issues generally take maybe five to seven minutes to read, cover-to-cover. That comes out to about twenty-two cents per page, give or take.

Compare that with manga. Just by way of example, the first volume of Naruto costs $9.99. It is 192 pages. It is nearly nine times the size of a single floppy. The value per page of the first volume of Naruto is approximately five cents per page–that’s four times less than an American comic book.

Is it any wonder that kids are drawn to material that provides more value for their money? This isn’t anything like when a lot of us were first reading comics; our options on activities were pretty limited. Now, the entire world is at a kid’s fingertips pretty much 24/7. Why would they waste money on a comic that they can read in less than ten minutes that doesn’t tell anything remotely close to a complete story?

The decline in comic sales is related to quality and price, not “wokeness.” Sales numbers have been in pretty steady decline for what, decades now? Certainly well before DC and Marvel began to care more about representation.

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Additionally, while recognizing this is wholly anecdotal, every kid I’ve met who is really into manga are also kids who are politically aware and socially progressive. So saying “kids buy manga because the superhero books are woke” isn’t even logical–that wouldn’t be a turnoff for a lot of them.

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I, did not see the first name in the article, so bonus points to you for noticing that, all I kept reading as a name was July,

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sooooo

I did a bit more work than the article author did on establishing who Eric July is.

ole wikipedia took me like 2 seconds, why it wasn’t included in the online NY Post article, I have no clue.

It should have been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_July

I’ll let everyone figure out the rest, but I checked it all out, and he is basically throwing a big middle finger to the comic book industry as a whole.

I find it interesting A.F

will I stop being a DC Fan? pft, no, never. I know what I want to read, I am a die hard Green Lantern Corps Fan, and in general DC Comics Fan, so even if DC Comics plays political games, what ever, Ha , how about being " Woke " to political games. So if DC wants to have Jon- Kent not use his powers and simply wants to protest political issues, knock yourself out, create a world based on a political idiology or how ever ya spell it, i dunt carrre.

Mess with the cannon characters, not talking sons and side kicks, talking bout the League members, then I am going to disconnect till things get back to common sense.

But this guy is now on my radar and my curiosity is peaked. I think his views are a bit off in regards to at least DC , and not seeing how, there is a multiverse, and different versions of characters, and that there is a continuum that is pretty solid.

His vision seems to be no time travel and only one universe and one continuum with minimal reboots.

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No surprise a piece from the NY Post is absolute garbage. They don’t even try to hide their disgusting conservative bias. Even just reading them complaining about “woke” in the headline lets you know right away that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, as it essentially remains right-wing code for “I’m upset I can’t discriminate like people used to be able to!” I really hope nobody here puts too much stock in what this writer is saying

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As a conservative I have to agree with you. The word “woke” makes it sound like whining your political opponents go to bed too early or something.

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Will John Stossel get literally smacked down for going after comics like he did pro wrestling?

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you do realize that conservatives claim the NY Post to be a far-left propaganda machine.

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this is why i am done with political parities, because all they do is divide and label people, when all they care about is maintaining their own power and agendas.

and why I love DC Comics, and comics in general, is because 99% of the time they do not go out of their way to divide people, no matter which comic book company ya like, one likes them because they are entertaining, and some of us like them because they are inspirational and give hope, in a very bleak world, where there is constant injustice, rampant corruption in political parties that do not care about how corrupt they are as long as they destroy the other party at any cost. ; the comic book industry does more to bring people together than a lot of other industries in other categories.

Also,

If this thread goes bonkers into politics, I am going to request a moderator lock or delete this thread.

I only posted this because it was/ is relevant to DC Comics, granted there is a political aspect to the article at hand, but if this continues to spiral off into politics with out acknowledging the comic book and DC aspect of the topic from the article, then there is no need to continue the dialogue; thus requiring things to stop.

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excellent point, I would actually prefer a complete story, like a trade paper back of equal value to the entire single issues, and read the entire story at once, than being milked with suspense, though, i do like the suspense and collecting, seems like the industry in America can afford to do both, release singles and complete stories at the same time, and let people buy them how they want.

or I could always stay a year behind and just read and collect trade paperbacks,

but that would suck.

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The article has some points, but it is one sided and omits some facts. For instance, yes, there is a black Batman, but the normal Batman is still there. So you can still buy the Bruce Wayne comics and not the other Batman comics. It just gives you more options is all.
I have no idea what the sales figures are on the “woke” characters. I will say though that the ones I have read on DCUI are generally not very good. Superman son of Kal-El is just silly and so is the Tim Drake Robin book. I will admit though that these titles are not aimed at me, so others might enjoy them.

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I take it you don’t look fondly in 50% of the country

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Eric July is doing a little bit of what Malcolm X preached of building your own economy that you control

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Think that you could argue that building up Superhero familys like the Green Arrow Family and the Superman Family but having the bulk of them having the same power set is hurting the diveristy of the line. Look at the Green Arrow family, besides Black Canary the rest of the fam are just people with bows and arrows. Diversity means adding varity to the comics in some form and the Dinah is the only real varity in the main Green Arrow family.

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Our Founding Fathers Did Not Support Political Parties. "So did Alexander Hamilton, a major player in the adoption of our Constitution. He called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. They Just divide the nation in two

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Just came across this response article from Bleeding Cool that debunks a lot of the arguments Stossel made in his piece. Definitely recommend checking it out

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I cannot say this is a good article. It is very unprofessionally written, debunks an article that never had to be debunked like the writer wanted some really low hanging fruit, has that pointless jab at Damian’s recent series, constantly calls comics “graphic novels” since he does not know the difference, and just gives the basic stuff you can find in any comment section.