You can’t date two Actresses at a time. Doesn’t work. They will find out and ruin your life. It may not be immediate but they will find you and haunt your existence until you feel immeasurable pain, suffering and you develop an incurable case of paranoia. You will start seeing them appear in random places. Did whatshername just pick up somebody in an Uber across the street? Is whatshername peeking around the corner of the hummus refrigerator at Whole Foods at me? I could’ve sworn I just saw whatshername looking at me from underneath a desk at the DMV office. You will come to find out that all of those appearances were real and while you find her slicing your tires in a parking garage the first thing you’ll ask is ‘Who do you know at the DMV and can you waive my late fees?’.
So knowing that, what you definitely can’t do is date two Famous Actresses at the same time. Duh. So if you’re dating Aubrey Plaza you sure as hell better not be seeing Chloe Grace Moretitz at the same time, either on the down low or half-assedly. One or both will end your career and it will feel like every time you go out or walk around LA people will look at you like you’re Harvey Weinstein walking around in a speedo while squeezing imaginary asses. This is what Chip Zdarsky has been doing for the past year or so. He’s dating two Titans of the comic industry and it clearly has backfired on him. Batman was a shit show from day one and now Daredevil, good ol’ reliable Daredevil, can’t fail Daredevil, the one constant yee haw that emitted from the Marvisney bunghole of death has turned into its own crime scene of plot, story and character arcs. I can hear most of you disagreeing with me. You’re wrong. You’re being blinded by Marco Checchetto’s staggeringly beautiful art. But just like a 10 who you might be dating, you can’t condone behavior that rips your heart out and makes your pee miss the toilet due to the shakes and anxiety you feel because of her.
The fact that Double D is so popular now feels the same way that an Actress who you’re dating all of a sudden becomes popular. Now she’s at all the fancy parties and premieres. She’s not playing darts with you at a dive bar on a Tuesday night. She’s not snuggling up with you on a Saturday afternoon asking you to explain why the Knicks choke during the playoffs. She’s hobknobbing with the HootsieTootsies of La La Land. She doesn’t have time to taste your Matcha Olive Oil Coffee Cake. She’s getting hotter and sexier with all the ooh la la Beverly Hills treatments and Energy Work that’s being done on her by the Ayahuasca Hippies and Shamans in Topanga Canyon…but she’s losing her soul. She can’t even introduce you as who you are anymore. She says ‘This is my boyfriend, he’s a – Creative’ She can’t say that you’re in an Improv Group or that you’re still working your material out in open mics, ewww, gross. You don't recognize her anymore. I don't recognize DD anymore. He looks like a bearded hipster grump from Silverlake who sits on a toilet for hours while scrolling through survival meal kit websites.
There’s just no way around it anymore. It’s time to break up Daredevil. We’ve been together for, gosh, how many years now? 15 straight? Maybe more? On and off for 25? Aww, remember those Marvel Knights days, sigh, you were such a brilliant beast. Ooh, remember when Kevvy Smithy (when he hadn’t lost all sense of reality like his recent Dark Horse Poop Fest) was writing the hot pants off of you along with the Mack of all Macks, David Mackaroonski back in the late 90s? Oh Double D, I’m not really a Double D kinda guy, more like a C kinda guy, we’ve been through a lot. It’s ironic that as Satan has turned the Marvel brand into a bonfire of balderdash the one hero who wasn’t tarnished by his brimstone breath was Daredevil. Perhaps that was by design. It began with such a flourish of genius. Chip, the new Comic Scribe Darling, was clicking on all cylinders but something happened along the way. Did DC pilfer half of his brain with their Bats offer to sabotage his work at Beelzebub’s Workshop? Did he just get too big for his britches?
I feel like Daredevil was always a secondary character who minded his own business and his own neighborhood and stayed the hell away from all the drama that the high profile tights crowd got themselves into. That all changed with the ridiculously unbelievably amazing Netflix Daredevil TV Show which I would say piggybacked on the jaw dropping wow run that Mark Waid began back in the early 2010s. Now DD is prime time and a supposed tent pole of Marvisney and it’s no bueno. I kinda feel like it all went downhill after the Devil’s Reign mega event of last year. Clearly I had zero interest in reading it since all mega events are just mega cash grabs intended to pump up sagging sales of weaker titles that you’d never read in a million years. But after Chip came back after the story schmooze fest DD started to tank. Look, the ‘Island of the Hand in the Fist of your Evil Anus’ storyline was a great idea but something has been way off from the get with this book since the first issue after the mega event. Maybe Chip rebelled against Satan and resisted the Mega Event? Maybe they took Chip out, cloned him and it’s the Chip Clone who’s been writing DD the past 6 months? I’m trying to figure out how it’s possible to ruin an infallible title other than the fact that the stink that began in Bats has seeped over into Double D and it’s just not possible to write two ENORMOUS HERO stories at the same time.
Come to think of it, I’m wondering how Chip became the go-to for the Tights Crowd anyway? Like, when you were taking in his art in Sex Criminals (one of the greatest comics of all time hands down) and there was an oversized cum shot that looked like an Anime Chick on a mushroom cloud did you think ‘Dude, this Anime Cum Shot artist should write the main Batman Title and Daredevil!’
Yes, that white thing above is a Jizz creation. Maybe Matt Fraction, wherever the hell he is right now, needs to tell the dominatrix that’s got a heel in his nostril to take five as he texts his ‘Chum’
Hey man, we need to get back to Brimping (banging a clump of hair) and Time Shattering Orgasms again.
I wanted to stick with Double D but this book, despite Marco’s eye popping art, has just continually descended into an unreadable mess. I let Issue #7 sit there for a long time so I could cool off and dive back into what I hoped would be a serious ramp up to the long awaited ‘Battle Issue’ but issue 7 was putrid on so many levels. Why? Two bit crooks stealing the spotlight? The entire DD crew leaves the biggest battle island of the comic book universe to deal with a bunch of people being evicted from an apartment building??? Stilt man, STILT MAN, saves a litle girl? Some purple carnage looking ghost rider chick being trained by Elektra to channel her anger? And then finally, the Punisher and his evil clan kidnap the two-bit crook’s kid which ends up being the ultimate trigger to finally begin the battle that we’ve been waiting for since last summer. This is the trigger???? They kidnap a kid? It’s not that they’re the most evil death cult on the planet? It’s not that they taken out all the world leaders and replaced them with puppets that turn to sand when you hit them? It’s not that Elektra’s on the run because of her supposedly murdering a President? It’s not because of a Book of Prophecy that Stick carries around with him like he’s about to go on a crusade with Dr Strange in a wormhole to Medieval Europe where he plans to blindly bang the text into thousands of ancient coochies? Nooooo, the last straw was ‘Aww how could you take this cute lil’ blonde kid Frank?’ REALLY?
If this really is the most influential Death Clan on the planet and Double D is Satan’s tentpole don’t you think that the Avengers would actually get involved instead of a bunch of criminal misfits? Don’t you think they’d be a little more proactive than sitting around a surveillance monitor saying (for what feels like the third time) we need to take Daredevil out? Fisk wants to be major of New York?? Well that needs to be covered in 75 comic books. An evil legendary death cult has a Dragon and has pulled the levers on all the power brokers on the world’s political stage, that’s a job for Hank Dastardly from Queens and Geno Muttley from Yonkers??? That’s allz I can standz and I can’t standz no more!
Issue 8 was just a big waste of Marco’s class on how to draw the shit out of a dragon and a battle between good and evil. I honestly could not follow Chip, or clone Chip’s, text. I reread the issue a couple of times and the entire thing is a huge letdown to me. It just felt so, I dunno, canned? It felt like AI wrote it. Like if you went to ChatDOUBLED and asked it to write the penultimate battle issue in this run this is what it would spit out. Maybe that’s it, maybe they uploaded Chip’s consciousness to an AI mainframe and AI has been writing this series. Ya know, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI was writing all of Marvisney’s titles at this point. If Stegron is making an appearance in your long awaited issues I think it’s time you tweak the programming guys. Honestly, I can’t put my finger on it. I can’t tell you in a succinct clearly defined line of reasoning why Marvel has descended into such a dung heap of drivel; but it has. Everything just feels off. And believe me, I look at all their solicits and new series and go under the hood with all of them; something is wrong with the Kingdom of Comic Books.
Can we honestly blame Disney? What is Disney? A corporate international entertainment conglomerate who wants to sell sell sell sell, nothing wrong with that. However it can’t be denied that since the Marvel takeover it’s been a steady decline on my pull list of marvel titles. What used to be a consistent drop of genius from the Marvel brand has dried up. Is it the talent? The editorial staff? The corporate overlords? I can’t say. The last brilliant offerings that I can think of offhand from Marvel was Ta Nehisi Coates ‘Black Panther Run’, Fraction’s ‘Hawkeye Run’, Kaare Andrews ‘Iron Fist Run’, all the ‘Moon Knight’ runs with Bendis, Maleev, Ellis, Wood and Lemire and of course, everrrrything Daredevil since the Knicks were last in the Championship back in 1999. As also stated in my Best Comic Books of 2022 I was into their initial Defenders run and their six issues of King Conan was the best Conan story in years...which of course they cancelled...dumb asses.
Now? Nuthin’ and it’s not okay. Just like in sports we need teams like the Yankees and the Lakers to be good; it’s good for the league. So we need Marvel and DC to not only be good but great. It’s not enough for Image to carry the torch and be a creative power publishing house; throwing spaghetti ideas at the market every month. We need the Big 2 to be the King 2. DC has been holding up its end with last year’s Black Label titles but other than that it be slim pickins.
There was a great article written several months ago by Brandon Schatz and Danica LeBlanc about the state of the comic book industry. Definitely worth a read:
The Indirect Market is Gonna Suck but it Doesn't Have To
A lot of great points and insights. I'll respectfully disagree with the notion that raising all comics to $4.99 a pop is going to send readers away. I obviously can't speak for everyone, but Yo! If a comic is worth it I'll drop the funds. You think I had any problem dropping 8 bones a pop for CatWoman Lonely City or WonderWoman: Historia? Nope and Nope. I've said this before, I think Marvisney needs their own Black Labelish thang. If they came out with a Bendis Maleev Daredevil Reunion in Prestige format for $10 a pop I'd be all over it! I'm not gonna trip over 5 measly ducats if it means something special.
I think we’re at the point that when comic books just become a cog in the machine that is an entertainment factory we have a problem. They can’t just be a slave class to your over arching multimedia empire, they must exist on their own and interact in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with the empire; that’s not happening now. If what the article above says is true then perhaps the expiration of a bunch of licenses for many Marvel Characters could force Satan to renegotiate or relinquish these properties. It’s probably a long shot at best. The fact that Disney is selling off a bunch of its streaming titles is probably a good thing.
If you ask me, we need an Elon Musk moment. Not Elon but someone
who truly loves and believes in comic books as an art form and vows to support
and sustain the industry in and of itself. I think we’re at the point where we
have to hope that Disney and AT&T (or whomever owns DC) somehow sells the
rights. We need a billionaire comic book collector, is that even a thing, to
come in and make them an offer they can’t refuse. Maybe even do some Mafioso strong
arming, maybe even get a Fed or two involved, I dunno. Otherwise we may be
looking at the slow burn of a dying direct to Local Comic Shop industry. We may
be looking at, God forbid, an all digital or Trade market. Independent publishers
will probably continue comics in some physical form but those will be the
exception, a novelty, not the norm. We need the Big 2 to demand the
sustainability and creative freedom that the world of comic books should be. I feel like suits fear that kids and eventual new consumers of content will only want stuff that is convenient and easily consumable. If it's not on a phone nobody will want it. I reject that notion. There is something about holding a book in your hands that will never be replaced. There is something about turning a page that can't be replicated. You can either celebrate that with the new generation or give into the fear that they wouldn't want that. Books will always be special. Comic Book issues will always be special. Digital will neverrrr replace both.
As for Daredevil, buh bye. I’m sure I’ll hop back on when you christen a new team with a new number one in September or whenever. But, and this extremely important my fellow comic geeks and daters out there, know this: “YOU CAN’T DATE POTENTIAL”. Capische? You can’t buy a title because you hope that it will get better based solely on the brand. You can’t date a babe based on your hope that she lives up to her inner Zen delightful Yoga Hottie while she continually steals your debit card so she can take all her besties out for sushi at Katsuya. Ya gotta cut the cord. I’m cutting it.
Disney stock is at 94 today. Whaddya think it needs to tank
to? 50? 40? When do they sell Marvel off? Because one day they will, they’ll
grow weary of destroying these characters and stories, a new shiny toy will
come along. Maybe Satan just needs to own the licenses for all these properties and they can leave the creative stuff to other actual Humans who are willing to pony up to have at them.
Maybe Matt Fraction is somewhere negotiating with a Billionaire to take over the comic books industry right now. I guess we’re just gonna have to wait for him to tire from being paddled by an Amazon in a full body rubber suit for our comic geek dreams to fully come true. Until then? I'm gonna pray that MiracleMan gets better and that the wonderfully fun retro series 'Avengers War Across Time' written by an industry relic they rolled out of Katz's Deli inspires more retro series. Maybe Chip giving up Double D means new comics with exciting new magical cum shots and a Batman title that will mercifully be handed off to a real Batman writer.
Anime Cum Wonder Babe - A new Maxi Pad 12 issue series by Chip Zdarsky
We can only hope.
Rating: 5.0 (Marco Rocks)
Verdict: Block
Disney Stock: 94.22
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