Tuesday, August 09, 2022

Justice is served: the axe falls at DC Comics


Harley QuinnDoom Patrol, and Titans [and Batwoman] are all up next on the chopping block and cancellation is apparently imminent. They will join the never started Wonder Twins on the DCEU scrapheap.

That is not all. Another high profile show is also about to be made to walk the plank while it is still in development. Greg Berlanti's Green Lantern.

The show was in the process of casting with Jeremy Irvine locked as Alan Scott back in June. Alan Scott became one of the few DC superheroes to come out as gay in 2012, before it was fashionable.


The one-trick-pony has never been a crowd favorite, and now the dismal audience response to "yet another superhero is gay/trans/gay-trans-furry" is being seen as a real live problem, not a symptom of gay-o-phobia in America. Because they're going to go stony frigging broke, for sure.

Contrary to the article, coming out as gay became fashionable in the comics in 1992. Immediately crashing and burning with the audience also became the done thing immediately after. Northstar came out as gay in Alpha Flight #106. I remember that. I have a copy of Alpha Flight #106. The book lasted until #130 in 1994 when it was cancelled. I do not have a copy of that one. I had stopped buying comics by then. Because they were boring. So very boring. Oh, my ghod.

Fast forward to now, and the Woke has taken over Hollyweird completely, leaving guys like David Zaslav bailing water out of the sinking ship as hard and fast as they can. He's looking at projects like the Netflix series Teen Titans and he's seeing that nobody is watching it. Remember that Netflix just did the same thing, cut a ton of Woke projects. I can tell you why nobody is watching, because the writing is gawd-awful. Make you cringe awful.

They have really accurate audience numbers. They know how many people watch those shows, how old they are, male or female, what time of day, what parts people fast-forward past, how many episodes before they watch something else, they know -everything-. And they KNOW the audience, meaning us people out here, hate it. We hate it. We're quitting Netflix in our thousands because we're not fucking well going to pay for it.

The comic book companies know it too. They have very immediate feedback from their sales numbers. They know what moves and what doesn't. Spiderman by Stan Lee and Jim Shooter sells>300,000 copies per issue. Black Panther by Ta Nehisi Coates sells 3,000 copies per issue, and that was only because Marvel forced the distributors to take it if they wanted Spiderman.

But what are they selling? Black Panther. Mr. Coates has had not one but two (2) comic books cancelled out from under him. They hired him AGAIN to author another one which tanked like a Panzer on a frozen lake at spring breakup.

DC Comics: same shit different pile, and worse sales numbers. Even Superman has shit numbers. Because its stupid, and boring.
 
So long, sweetheart.


Comic book stores devote all their shelf space to POP figures and anime figurines, manga, and back-issues of formerly popular comics. The new comic books, the ones that used to be right at the front, are relegated to the back corner of the store. Two or three copies of popular titles, usually. The days of 200-copy stacks every Wednesday are over, baby.

It very much seems that David Zaslav as president of Warner is going to drop the axe and fire up the diesel logging machine for DC Comics division. Rumors are circulating that he's going to fire them all. Burn it down to the last snowflake and sell the IP.

Oh well. We did warn them. We've been warning them since 1992. Guess they'll have to learn to code.

6 comments:

Jason said...

My belief on why people lose interest / stop watching / stop buying media with such characters, is not so much that the character is gay / furry / trans / whatever, but that they proceed to RAM that down the readers' / watchers' throat every chance they get.

There was actual outcry about the fact that a bigger deal WASN'T made of the one gay gay in Capt Americas' "Thanos didn't snap us" support group in Endgame.

Entertain me, and I do not care what the character(s) do between the sheets. Preach to me? I'm outta there!

Jonathan H said...

Do you think this is a turning as companies realize that wokeness is bad for their bottom line, or do you think this will only happen at a few companies?
I've seen some people say we're at "Peak Woke" but I'm not so sure - I think this will get stretched, pulled, and tortured for quite a while longer, regardless of the financial consequences.

Jason said...

I think there's going to be quite a bit of pandering to the various and sundry woke causes for some time to come. The smart companies will dial it back (heck, I think even Starbucks has dialed back on the woke-signaling) but even then, it'll take them a long time to earn back the trust and dollars of the people they drove off.

Comics? Eeash, I think Marvel and DC haven't hit bottom yet with the print comics, DC TV seems to keep going hard-woke and then tanking, Marvel Studios hasn't (to me) gone full-woke.

Basically, no matter how low you think something can go, there's ALWAYS someone standing by to hand out shovels (regardless of the cause, woke or otherwise.)

The Phantom said...

Greetings gents.

Jason, gotta say I didn't care about the gay member of the support group in Endgame. Rolled my eyes at the INEVITABLE mandatory 20teens boilerplate pandering to the approved victim group. Just a little jab, no big deal.

But imagine watching a movie where they didn't do the stupid boilerplate horseshit. Wouldn't that be excellent? I think it would. Does -everything- have to be about politics? Always? Every single time? Am I not allowed to see that movie? Who says?

Jonathon H, I think there was a great upheaval in The Force, as millions upon millions of complacent Normies got bitch-slapped by Reality. We all watched as assholes in black hoodies BURNED DOWN Minneapolis and the cops let them do it. And they did it in the middle of a pandemic, at a time when people were being arrested and tossed in jail for not wearing their mask properly because they were going to kill us all with the Wuhan Flu.

Suddenly, millions of Normies, faces stinging from that contact with cold hard Reality, realized that everything on television was horrible, it made them feel depressed, and they needed that money to buy smokes and beer so they could feel better. So they all cancelled their Netflix accounts and their Disney+ accounts pretty much at the same time. They also cancelled their cable, newspapers, magazines and satellite TV. Its a bloodbath. The media is done like dinner.

I do not see that dynamic slowing down. Media companies thought they were winning with the Woke thing. More Woke was more better. But now? They have the data to -prove- it isn't selling. More Woke is more broke.

Business owners and stock pickers must go where the money is. They don't get a choice. It's math. 1-1=0 and now you're broke. Oops.

The money is not in Woke anymore. It was a fad, its over, and they don't want to get stuck with warehouses full of hula-hoops that no one will buy.

As soon as the businessmen drop it, the politicians will too. Like a hot rock. You will see the pronouns vanish from social media accounts like snowflakes in an Arizona summer.

Naturally the hard-core tools will be the last to let go. Guys like crapestros cameltron will continue to be Woke, nobody else will. The Normies have moved on. The herd waits for no one.

Jason said...

Phantom, as far as the Endgame bit, I didn't care either, it was arguably a throw-away line and they moved on. It was (if I'm recalling right) wokeists' that went bonkers that a bigger deal wasn't made of the fact in the movie.

The Phantom said...

Oh, I do seem to recall that now. They were all up in arms that the movie didn't spend 20 minutes chasing that all-important thread down.

I recall a bunch all upset that there was no "sparkle chemistry" between Cap and Bucky too.

None of them care that nobody would have gone to see that movie, the one in their heads. They think we should be forced to watch.

That movie won't get made now. Yay.