Should We Be Proud or Mortified?

So, with The Avengers trailer released this week, it seems that the non-geeky folk, or "normals" as one might call them, are getting in on discussions that we've been having for decades, particularly concerning timelines, continuity, comparisons of storytellling quality between different creators handling the same property, and potential slugfests.

On one hand I look at this trend and get a little smile while "one of us, one of us . . ." chants in my head, and I feel glad that I can broach the topic of comics and have more people pick up on it and get interested.

On the other hand, the normals are getting their grubby hands all over the subject of superheroes and fumbling around with facts and feats that we have memorized, and they have more buying power than us.

So, should we be proud or mortified?

first, why do they have more buying power then us?
second, no we should not be worried, more exposure only increases the success of our beloved comics.

Considering I dropped comics because the people who control them were treating their customers like dirt last year, I don't see making the properties big money will do any good for the genre.

When Iron Man came out, I was on hand at my local (well, as local as these things get in the wooded neverland where I live, anyway) first-run theater for the Thursday-midnight show, 'cause I'd been waiting for an Iron Man movie since about 1980 at that point and it seemed like the decent thing to do.

What I hadn't been counting on was that the theater would make an occasion of it. They had a Local Television Personality emceeing a little floor show for about 15 minutes before the film started, and part of the proceeding was a little trivia contest giveaway featuring some tie-in toys donated by the local mall's K-B (remember them?). I sort of sat over in the corner observing, feeling a bit like a sociologist watching some bush tribe that's never seen television before.

The thing I remember most clearly about it, besides the fact that it was all kind of stilted and twee in the way that "gin up some enthusiasm in the stadium" exercises always are, was that one of the toy-giveaway trivia questions was "What is Russian for 'Iron Man'?" Now, as it happens, my "local" theater is also the nearest first-run theater to the University of Maine campus, so it gets a fairly international crowd for a movie theater in the middle of nowhere, and there was a Russian kid in the audience. So he blurted out the Russian for "Iron Man"...

... and the emcee, reading from a card and clearly having no familiarity with the material at all, told him he was wrong.

"I'm Russian," he quite reasonably objected. "I think I know what a simple phrase like that is in my own language."

But no, the emcee insisted, that was not right. According to his card, the Russian for "Iron Man" was supposed to be...

... have you guessed it yet?

... "Crimson Dynamo".

I have at no other time felt such a powerful cross-current of emotions - equal and opposite riptides of the terrible urge:

1) to be That Guy who explains that the Crimson Dynamo is another character, and while he might arguably have been intended as the Soviet answer to Iron Man, he sure as hell wasn't supposed to be Iron Man, and anyway "Crimson Dynamo" isn't even a Russian phrase so how in the hell is it supposed to be Russian "for" anything; and

2) to just go home and forget the whole thing because it was just too embarrassing to even sit there and witness this sideshow.

Fortunately, I stuck it out for another five minutes or so, the theater staff eventually gave up trying to be entertaining and just showed the frickin' movie, and all was forgiven, but...

That's the kind of thing that happens when regular people try to get down with the comics 'hood. It's the superhero fandom equivalent of the Segway scene from the "White & Nerdy" video. It's partly mortifying and partly just sad.

I'd have to say a little bit of both. Not for the 'normals' but what may happen because of it.

Proud that the things we love are slowly becoming 'mainstream' the cheaper and easier special effects are becoming. It's opening the arena for cool things we've wanted to see for years. Couple that with the fact that there's no 'real life enemy' to exploit like Hollywood did in the 80's and searched for in the 90's. Comic books allow us them to create familiar nemeses removed from reality (Hydra instead of Nazis, for example) or familiar tropes of emnity normally reserved for the most steadfast Sci-Fi elements- wraped in summer action blockbusters.

This exposure makes clear to mainstream what we've known all along. It's COOL!

However, the dark side, the 'mortify' factor, if you will, can come about from how it's packaged and sold to the mainstream, in my humble opinion. There's nothing wrong with folks wanting to learn, and learning about comic heroes and villains. More power to 'em, I say. However, their biggest influence is going to be popular media like TV and movies. If and when they screw around with it to make it more 'popular' against the grain of the characters or events they are portraying because some bean counters say this or that is the 'in' thing, well frankly we get movies like Superman Returns and Spider Man 3.

So basically, nothing wrong with the exposure of the culture, just more about how it's exposed. More importantly is the acceptance of that exposure or how it's changed, and working within that system to make it the best of both worlds.

For example. I have read the original Fantastic Four comics from number 1, up. The movie wasn't that bad based on the original source material it had to draw from about their origins. I guarantee if they made a movie following the book exactly, it would have been an epic failure to rise above all other failures from Ishtar to Battlefield Earth. Just sayin'.

But that's another thread... I think I'll start it...

Does anyone actually enjoy having our hobby seen as kids stuff?

The fact is most mediums are seen as a "Kids thing" or "Silly" at some point. Comic Books and Videogames are slowly joining Television and Films as acceptable adult entertainment and I'm pretty happy for it!

Why are they releasing trailers almost a year prior to the movie?

Well to be fair to that emcee, if you look through the additional material on the first Iron-man DVD the villain sketches of what became Ironmonger were labeled Crimson Dynamo.

Then in the second movie they sort of merged Crimson Dynamo with Whiplash, muddying the issue further.

As the "Marvel Oracle" of my office, I spend a lot of time helping normals distinguish between what they see in the movies and cartoons and the actual comic continuity. When they see how much more depth there is in the comic stories, it seems they want to go out and learn more. This can only be good for us, for it means we move further out of the "niche" category and more into the main-stream.

>.>

Is it wrong that I would say the correct answer is actually not whatever the russian for Iron man is... it is actually Iron Man... Proper nouns don't change when translated less there is a name for a place/thing in both languages such as Nihon/Nipon/Japan

Yeah...

Let's see...Iron Man was created in 1968 and is the epitome of the wealthy capitalist. In the middle of the Cold War.

Ya, I don't think Tony Stark was officially in print in Russia at that time. (Could very well be wrong though).