Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

The other day, everyone’s good Twitter friend Brian Novicki of EUCantina tweeted the following:

Seems to me nothing is served by a book being issue #745. Just makes new readers stay away, while a #1 shouldn't hurt longtime readers.

— Brian (@brian_nov) June 5, 2015

I tossed off a brief semi-joking response, as is my wont, but the more I thought about it the more serious thoughts I had on the subject. Allow me to back up.

In the spring of 1996, about a year before Star Wars entered my field of vision, I started buying comic books at a shop near my house. My aunt, a voracious collector herself in the eighties and early nineties, had for a time co-owned another shop in town, which I must have thought was the coolest thing in the world, and that led me to start poking around the place despite having very limited spending money. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the miniseries DC vs. Marvel; at this point everything I knew about these characters came from the Batman, Spider-Man, and X-Men animated series, so jumping straight into that big publisher crossover (which would be unthinkable now) was a great way to quickly familiarize myself with the print incarnations of Spidey and company. Read More

While the initial marketing push for The Force Awakens will come this September with Journey to‘s oft-misunderstood slate of twenty “books“, those of us who remember the prequels know that that’s only the first drops of the thunderstorm that will descend a couple months later when the film actually comes out. And even then, print material will only comprise a small portion of the flood—the graphic in that link is cumulative, not movie-by-movie, but it’s a safe bet that a plurality, maybe even the majority, of Disney’s profits from the sequel trilogy will come from capital-M Merchandising. There will be action figures, of course, but there will also be t-shirts, bed sheets, Hot Wheels, umbrellas, Sprite bottles, sneakers, and whatever the hell these are.

But that’s Star Wars. Ubiquitous branded nonsense, for better or for worse, is synonymous with our franchise of choice, and we’re used to it by now. So what’s different about it now that Disney is holding the reins?

It’s widely understood by now (because they’re happy to admit it) that Disney views Marvel, its last big acquisition, as specifically a boys’ property, and it’s pretty clear that same sentiment led to their purchase of Star Wars. As the thinking goes, Disney’s big in-house merch machine is their string of “princess” movies like Frozen—which, of course, are only for girls, because it’s not like I still remember all the words to “Under the Sea” or anything—so now they want to conquer the boys’ market via these big acquisitions, because something something Global Supremacy. Read More

In David Schwarz’s series Meet the Marvels, he’s been spotlighting the previous work of Marvel’s current slate of Star Wars writers, including Star Wars‘s Jason Aaron, Darth Vader‘s Kieron Gillen, and most recently, Princess Leia‘s Mark Waid (since he hadn’t written comics previously, Greg Weisman was skipped—but if you’d like to read more about his work pre-Kanan and Star Wars Rebels, Ben Wahrman has you covered). That brings us up to Charles Soule, who was announced around Celebration Anaheim as writing a Lando miniseries to follow Waid’s Leia. Though he’s certainly made a name for himself in recent years with prominent work like The Death of Wolverine, Soule’s bibliography isn’t quite as extensive as a Gillen or an Aaron, so David was gracious enough to hand this one off to me—so that I might extol the virtues of Soule’s awesome relaunch of She-Hulk last year.

She-Hulk is an interesting character; on the one hand, she’s the absolute embodiment of the ancient comics trope of taking a popular male hero and sloppily stapling on a uterus rather than creating a totally original female character (and not only was she unoriginal, but She-Hulk was also a staple of the sleazy “Swimsuit Special” era of comics). On the other hand, Jennifer Walters (as it says on her birth certificate) has proven remarkably adept at representing all sorts of progressive, empowering messages. She’s funny: even at their tackiest, She-Hulk comics have always had a wry just-this-side-of-Deadpool element of metahumor to them that gives the character a certain snarky agency lost to more “serious” characters. She’s also pretty much always in control of her abilities: She-Hulk is Jennifer Walters, there’s no Jekyll/Hyde melodrama in her life whatsoever, and Soule’s series in particular depicted her in Hulk form literally all the time. She’s not stunted by or ashamed of her powers, they’re simply who she is—which puts her miles ahead of Bruce Banner. And lastly, did I mention she’s a goddamn lawyer? Read More