Direction of Marvel stories (rant)

Okay I am so far caught up in this current story line of Fear Itself and it has left me more questions than answers, mainly as to where the heck are they going with this current formula. I could forgive previous stories like Secret Invasion through Siege and see where they were going, but this current one has me asking what are they doing? I get they want realistic books but are they trying go back and to recreate a "Days of future's past"? Example( SPOILERS)) The chosen one Attuma attacks Canada killing by estimations thousands, Chosen Grey Gargoyle fighting Iron Man, Tony thinks that the population of Paris has been decimated. This kind of thing if your indeed going for realism will ultimately end like in the Watchmen where the president will outlaw vigilantes and start clamping down on organizations that are threats to National Security like AIM, Doctor Doom's country, Hydra, vampires, all of them.


What is going on Marvel? Can they stop with the killing of civilians for one second? By my estimation they killed more people than Ultimate's Magneto. I mean the mutant population is staying to themselves these days and not doing anything and not doing half of what the regular books are doing and still the Earth fears mutants more than the Hammer possessed people? Something is awfully screwie around here. Mutants fight for survival or reaction to humans hunting them, while others who think their gods want to massacre the planet.
Magneto doesn't seem like a bad guy nowadays. I just feel they need to pick a direction story that will not involve killing a whole city.

geez

Thank you, I feel better now

The mutant hating in the Marvel Universe has never made all that much sense, when people like the Fantastic Four are seen as great role-models there's no reason for all Mutants to be as hated as they are, even if Magneto does keep trying to kill people.

I've just never heard a good reason for it, people seem to hate mutants purely because they're mutants and .... that's it, it's a bit rediculous. Maybe it could work if they were in their own universe, but not alongside a whole host of other superheroes who people have no problem with!

The reason someone told me is that mutants are hated for two reasons, one: Because of evolution. Like Neanderthals, humans fear being replaced by someone better( will not get to the religion theme Marvel likes to use here on these forums) and two: Jealousy, nuff said.

Except no one hates Captain America and he's a Superhuman, or Wasp or Iron Man.

I mean I know the X-Men 'Mutant hate' is often used as a stand in for other prejudices in the real world, but ... we've got comics now that deal with those directly! We don't need the one degree of separation to get it past the censors any more.

The X-Men just work a lot better if there's only Mutants. In fact usually the books tend to assume this as they generally see little interaction with the other Superhuman community. Which is strange, you'd think Captain America would get on TV and say "Mutants are Americans too, lay off people"

One would think. But if you noticed The Avengers, Fantastic 4, and other major players in the Marvel U. are often more dangerous than mutants and their stories show it yet they are loved and respected. But to my original rant is that Marvel just seems not to have a clear direction with it's stories. It comes down to "how can we mess with their lives this week"?

The whole we fear mutants thing doesn't work at all because they have no way of telling what origin a super powered thug who is attacking the city is on a given day. I mean there's plenty of times beings who weren't mutants did far worse things. If anything with all alien and beings from other dimensions invading they'd be ok with having freaks on their own side too.

It being a analogy for race fails long as there's supers of all types running around. True bigeots wouldn't care or know the difference between the origins and would hate all supers. Fear and ignorance is rarely so selective. Civil war is the closet instance to marvel getting this train of thought right because that's where it would go. If nothing else you'd think tehre'd be more nut jobs beign anti-whatever other origins too. (get these magic users out of here. Dang witches. Stop there from being the next hulk. Stop the mad science!)

They really want to idea to stand then the X books really should been their on universe as they re written like half the time anyways.(Which the movies and Cartoons always do.) If it's like on show Heroes...Super = Mutants, so everyone with powers is the problem. As is it falls flat on it's face.

I'm mainly just tired of these "epic" event mini-series, that go on way too long, and spread too far out in various crossovers for books. I don't need the Civil War/Secret Invasion/Siege/Fear Itself logo stamped onto every damn Avengers book, and half the damn X-Books every month for seven months. Its getting ridiculous.

What I find really annoying is this constant need to manufacture these event comics. Let's decide on a huge event, then figure out how to shoehorn all of our comics into it! Yeah, thats a brilliant idea. I remember when the real event comics just grew naturally out of the stories that were being told. They weren't EVENTS for any other reason than that the story being told was that damn good. The Kree/Skrull War in the Avengers, The Hellfire Club/Dark Phoenix saga in Uncanny X-Men, Byrne's Fantastic Four run, Simonson's Thor run, Wolfman/Perez on New Teen Titans, I could go on and on.

All of those were epic stories that were done solely within the bounds of the single monthly book that they were working on. They didn't need to cross over into nineteen other series, didn't require a separate special mini-series so you'd know this was supposed to be huge. They became events because they were just that good. You didn't want to miss an issue. THAT is what irks me most about comics right now. Stop with these giant, pre-planned, bloated, endless, momentum crushing events and just turn your best creators loose on things and let them tell good stories. Those are what will be remembered in the end.

One interesting thing about pretty much all of the ‘science’ based heroes (and by that I mean the scientific accidents, experiments and whatnot), be they Marvel or DC, is that we can pretty much lump them into a single category – they survived whatever happened to them that gave them powers because of their unique genetic make-up. Which means that they survived and got powers because they are not ‘normal’ humans. In other words, these super powered people are the way they are because they are mutants who hadn’t manifested powers until their accidents. Marvel has said this a few times over the years and DC pretty much embraced it with the Invasion! crossover and the introduction of the metagene into their universe.

So, the thing about Marvel supers and mutants, if they wanted to be more realistic about mutants and the whole ‘it could be anybody’ part of the fear, is that it’s not just your neighbor’s kids that could manifest powers and kill people at any time, it’s your neighbors themselves, hell even your own family could be an unmanifested mutant! Maybe even you yourself!

I do grow tired of the "Big" events, which shakes up the entire marvel universe, and later is changed again. Just write a good group book or solo series. I don't mind a big event every 5 or 10 years, but now there is one big event (for example Fear) and another smaller run alongside (Schism). It does look too much a marketing ploy to me (which it probably is).

I can imagine seeing the executive sitting in a room and saying things like: "Hmm, what could we do for a big event next year?"

Same goes with the constant deaths of characters. First Johnny Storm dies (conveniently without seeing a body) and now I do see advertisments with the fantastic four (with a human torch). For longtime readers it isn't exciting at all, in fact it makes me feel cheapened as well.

Just write a good story.... They were able to do that before....

As some of you may remember, I'm a bit of a Marvel fanboy. However, I'm working to detach myself more and more. It got bad, to where I was reading any book with any sort of tie to any book I regularly read. Then I got behind, because I expected myself to read like 20 books a week, and it just wasn't working.

So I'm currently going through and "cutting the fat." For instance, I don't give a damn about Black Panther, so I'm not going to read his series, even if it's tying into Spider-Island, which I am reading. I'm not interested in the New Mutants, so who cares what their reaction to Schism is?

I think I finally came to this realization after reading Fear Itself: Fearsome Four with Howard the freakin' Duck. Biggest waste of time there ever was. And then I saw that "Worthy" Hulk was going to fight Dracula, that was it. "DONE!" I shouted, then read Fear Itself: The Deep, Fear Itself: Homefront, and Fear Itself: Youth in Revolt.



(The difference: Those books at least have characters or storylines that interest me.)

As for the OP's main point about casualties... Why not? Action movies do it. I don't think Marvel is going to have to keep the per capita income of France in mind for any future storylines (besides, I'm sure Grey Gargoyles' "spell" will fade when he goes back to being a chump). It's just a way make the tragedy more impactful.

Me and a friend are laying odds that the next Marvel "epic" event is "Everyone becomes a Herald of Galactus."

Yes, the direction of all encompassing events, sorta like:

1. Alien invasion!
2. Alternate dimensional invaders!
3. Mystical takeovers of parts of the city!
4. Heroes gathering together to defeat an enemy with god-like powers!

Now, why do those seem familiar?

But, yes, the extraordinary death tolls in recent comics seems excessive. How many civilians do you kill before there's backlash? Civil War started with the deaths of 600 people in Stamford, CT, but really didn't have many after that. Yet, with Secret Invasion and Fear Itself, we've seen much more death and destruction, to the claiming of tens of thousands. Where is the line drawn on going too far?