Marvel drops Northrop Grumman tie-in after Comic Con fan rebellion

[D B Davis]

Marvel drops Northrop Grumman tie-in after Comic Con fan rebellion
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/oct/07/marvel-northrop-grumman-comic-con-fan-rebellion

The Marvel comic company dropped a partnership with the defense
industry giant Northrop Grumman and canceled a launch event scheduled
for New York Comic Con on Saturday, after plans for a special series
featuring branded superheroes alongside the legendary Avengers
characters met with fierce opposition. ...

Uproar on social media was swift, with fans variously calling the
tie-in disgusting, tone deaf, amoral and "propaganda for the
military-industrial complex". Marvel soon announced that the project
had been cancelled. ...

Thank you,

--
Don

[Kevrob]

This from the company built on "Captain America."

Reminds me of Mike Friedrich and the other INVINCIBLE IRON MAN scripters
changing Tony Stark's mind about building weapons systems, back in the
1970s. That came straight from the comics, before it was made a plot point
in the IM movies.

Stark Industries was, originally, sited on Long Island, where Republic
and Grumman were HQed before they were merged into other companies.
Besides jets for the US military, Grumman built the LEM, the lunar lander
for the Apollo missions.

Kevin R

[Carl Fink]

Nobody tell them I used to work for Lockheed Martin! Actually, tell them, I
don't need self-righteous would-be-hippies as friends.

If you want to annoy them, tell them about Dr. Seuss' wartime propaganda.
--
Carl Fink nitpi...@nitpicking.com

Read my blog at blog.nitpicking.com. Reviews! Observations!
Stupid mistakes you can correct!

[Quadibloc]

I am saddened at this deplorable outpouring of unpatriotic sentiment.

Of course, Donald Trump has only himself to blame.

John Savard

[Kevrob]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 2:56:03 PM UTC-4, Kevrob wrote:

> In the comics, in the early 1970s, Tony Stark...

Apologies for the double post. I didn't see my initial one propagate.

Kevin R

[Robert Carnegie]

On Tuesday, 10 October 2017 17:33:50 UTC+1, Kevrob wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 9:45:33 AM UTC-4, D B Davis wrote:
> > Marvel drops Northrop Grumman tie-in after Comic Con fan rebellion
> > https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/oct/07/marvel-northrop-grumman-comic-con-fan-rebellion
> >
> > The Marvel comic company dropped a partnership with the defense
> > industry giant Northrop Grumman and canceled a launch event scheduled
> > for New York Comic Con on Saturday, after plans for a special series
> > featuring branded superheroes alongside the legendary Avengers
> > characters met with fierce opposition. ...
> >
> > Uproar on social media was swift, with fans variously calling the
> > tie-in disgusting, tone deaf, amoral and "propaganda for the
> > military-industrial complex". Marvel soon announced that the project
> > had been cancelled. ...
>
>
> This from the company built on "Captain America."

Up to a point. And Cap (and Stan Lee) were fighting
Hitler at the time. Later, Cap took on Socialism and
fought organised labour - stories later ignored,
then recast as a fake Cap devised by the government
since the real on was (retroactively) accidentally
frozen until the 1960s.

Then, as was remembered with the passing of Joan Lee,
as Stan considered quitting, she encouraged him to take
a get-fired chance instead, and the result was
Fantastic Four - three bourgeois and a poor Jewish
kid with an athletic scholarship, who got cosmically
irradiated and proceed to squabble into sequential art
history. Until then, superheroes never squabbled.

Spider-Man was another wild shot since Spidey's first
magazine was already cancelled so they might as well
put something experimental on those pages.

> Reminds me of Mike Friedrich and the other INVINCIBLE IRON MAN scripters
> changing Tony Stark's mind about building weapons systems, back in the
> 1970s. That came straight from the comics, before it was made a plot point
> in the IM movies.

Iron Man spent most of the Vietnam years fighting
"Communists" who wanted to steal his military secrets,
mainly how a metal suit does all that using "transistors".
The "Communists" tended to be a lot like Doctor Doom
and less like Krushchev or Brezhnev political-doctrine-wise
but I suppose readers didn't mind.

> Stark Industries was, originally, sited on Long Island, where Republic
> and Grumman were HQed before they were merged into other companies.
> Besides jets for the US military, Grumman built the LEM, the lunar lander
> for the Apollo missions.

The Fantastic Four got to the moon before Apollo did,
but that's probably impossible in modern continuity.
And at the time they were patriotically discreet
about it.

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 4:11:58 PM UTC-6, Robert Carnegie wrote:

> Iron Man spent most of the Vietnam years fighting
> "Communists" who wanted to steal his military secrets,
> mainly how a metal suit does all that using "transistors".

A number of Marvel comics in the early 'sixties showed the Communists as the bad
guys. Iron Man was indeed one of them, with the Black Widow, the Crimson Dynamo,
and the Titanium Man. But there was also Ant-Man, whose first wife was murdered
by an Eastern European Communist regime; as well, the Hulk had the Leader as one
of his foes.

John Savard

[Kevrob]

...and Reed Richards rushing their rocket "to the stars" without
improving protection against cosmic rays, as Ben Grimm suggested?


"Ben, we've got to take that chance...unless we want the commies
to beat us to it!" - Sue Storm (later the Invisible Girl/Woman,
in FF #!)

The Fantastic Four also battled menaces such as the Red Ghost
(Ivan Kragoff) and his Super-Apes, as late as issue #13. Hulk
v Gargoyle. Even Thor had commie villains!

<a href="https://www.avclub.com/how-the-cold-war-saved-marvel-and-birthed-a-generation-1798246215">Tegan O'Neill of the AV Club on early 60s Marvel anti-communism</a>

Kevin R

[Kevrob]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 7:01:40 PM UTC-4, Kevrob wrote:

> The Fantastic Four also battled menaces such as the Red Ghost
> (Ivan Kragoff) and his Super-Apes, as late as issue #13. Hulk
> v Gargoyle. Even Thor had commie villains!

https://www.avclub.com/how-the-cold-war-saved-marvel-and-birthed-a-generation-1798246215

Tegan O'Neill in the AV Club on Marvel Commie villains.

I posted the wrong sort of link. Apologies.

Kevin R

[Robert Carnegie]

Interesting. Thank you.

"Presumably, if Iron Man is rebooted again in 20 years,
Tony Stark will need to have been involved in whatever
America’s next conflict will be."

But will his arch-enemy be The Mandarin or The Tangerine?

[J. Clarke]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 16:37:31 +0000 (UTC), Carl Fink <ca...@panix.com>
wrote:

>On 2017-10-10, D B Davis <g...@crcomp.net> wrote:
>>
>> Marvel drops Northrop Grumman tie-in after Comic Con fan rebellion
>> https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/oct/07/marvel-northrop-grumman-comic-con-fan-rebellion
>>
>> The Marvel comic company dropped a partnership with the defense
>> industry giant Northrop Grumman and canceled a launch event scheduled
>> for New York Comic Con on Saturday, after plans for a special series
>> featuring branded superheroes alongside the legendary Avengers
>> characters met with fierce opposition. ...
>>
>> Uproar on social media was swift, with fans variously calling the
>> tie-in disgusting, tone deaf, amoral and "propaganda for the
>> military-industrial complex". Marvel soon announced that the project
>> had been cancelled. ...
>
>Nobody tell them I used to work for Lockheed Martin! Actually, tell them, I
>don't need self-righteous would-be-hippies as friends.
>
>If you want to annoy them, tell them about Dr. Seuss' wartime propaganda.

Of course the whole war was really a collection action brought by
Disney against Adolph Galland for painting the Mouse on his plane with
out paying licensing fees.

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 5:03:27 PM UTC-6, Kevrob wrote:

> https://www.avclub.com/how-the-cold-war-saved-marvel-and-birthed-a-generation-1798246215
>
> Tegan O'Neill in the AV Club on Marvel Commie villains.

The article states:

"Although every Marvel story still “counts” in canon—the company has never
committed to a wholesale reboot of their continuity in the manner of DC—many
older stories are rarely mentioned."

Perhaps by a wholesale reboot, they're thinking of Crisis on Infinite Earths,
and not the previous reboot of continuity at DC that retroactively became
finalized with "Flash of Two Worlds", where the Golden Age versions of the
various DC superheroes turned out to have been on Earth-2.

In any case, what DC did _twice_, Marvel did do _once_ - and since the article
was dated March 31, 2016, the author should have been aware of this.

It is "Heroes Reborn" of which I speak. For one year, Marvel's comics featured
completely re-imagined versions of their heroes - but at the end of the year,
things did not return to what they were before; instead, while Marvel's
superheroes were all _similar_ to their former natures, they were much younger,
and had more recent origins.

So Marvel did reboot - the current Marvel superheroes are the ones introduced at
the end of Heroes Reborn, in 1997.

John Savard

[David Johnston]

That's...wrong. While the specific characters involved in Heroes Reborn were somewhat rejuvenated by the experience, it didn't change their origins and didn't do anything to people who weren't part of the stunt.

[Kevrob]

There was a retcon/reboot of a sorts, much earlier. Atlas, the name
Martin Goodman used for his comics line in the 1959s, between 40s
Timely and 60s Marvel, had a revival of Cap, Namor and the Torch
in 1953-1943. When Stan and Jack brought back the Timely Trio
in the 60s, the backstory was changed, most notably the "CA is
trapped in the ice from before V-E Day" suspended animation plot.

1970s stories had multiple replacement Caps in the post-war 40s
and 50s. Namor was supposed to have had amnesia before meeting
the second Torch (Johnny Storm,) and the original android Torch
was reactivated by the villainous Mad Thinker and set against the FF.

[Don't even get me started on how this affected the Android Avenger,
The Vision]

Marvel, especially in stories concocted by Roy Thomas, eventually
came up with some reason or another, however implausible, to
justify the various published stories that otherwise contradicted
each other.

Kevin R

[Kevrob]

On Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 7:02:38 AM UTC-4, Kevrob wrote:

> .....had a revival of Cap, Namor and the Torch
> in 1953-1943.

1953-1954. (No Marvel 20 cent time paradox, here. Just a typo,)


Kevin R

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 9:22:01 PM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 10, 2017 at 8:59:11 PM UTC-6, Quadibloc wrote:

> > So Marvel did reboot - the current Marvel superheroes are the ones introduced at
> > the end of Heroes Reborn, in 1997.

> That's...wrong. While the specific characters involved in Heroes Reborn were
> somewhat rejuvenated by the experience, it didn't change their origins and
> didn't do anything to people who weren't part of the stunt.

Ah. There _was_, some time after, a sort of "Thing of Two Worlds" story in
Fantastic Four where the Thing meets his earlier version while going down to
get food from the refrigerator...

and Spider-Girl is presumably the daughter of the Ed Sullivan Spider-Man, not
the ones appearing in comics now.

The fact the characters were not _changed_ a lot, to me, doesn't make them
*the same characters*, because being younger _does_ mean their origins have
changed, even if in *subtle* ways instead of big ones.

John Savard

[David Johnston]

Their origins are constantly changing. That's inherent in flex time. But on that particular occasion the event didn't change their origins. It gave them fake origins and younger bodies but in the "real world" they had still been around for the same time. Until, that is flex time moved their origin again. In any case, that's not a reboot because it only affected certain characters. The history of the actual Marvel Universe continued unchanged by anything except the usual limited retcons.

[Robert Carnegie]

Right... but /in/ the "Heroes Reborn" universe,
the characters had rewritten origins. Later they
discovered the curious fact that their universe
was only a year old.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_Reborn_%28comics%29>

Iron Man came back with a particular problem - before
Heroes Reborn started, he had been turned evil, then
died, and The Avengers recruited an alternate universe's
young "Iron Boy" instead. But the Heroes Reborn
Iron Man was made from both of them. Essentially
his problem was ours, the confusion.

"Ultinate Marvel" was another re-invent of the world
from scratch, published alongside the original Earth-616
(I think Alan Moore assigned it "The Number of the Beast"
in Captain Britain stories because... he is Alan Moore.)
It had its own Spider-Man, and its Avengers were called
The Ultimates. Eventually these became parallel universes,
then deleted, and 616 was recreated but is now called
"Earth Prime", but, I think, as a replay of Earth-616
history in full. But with some new characters, including
Ultimate ones. Other re-created universes exist, but
Ultimate Earth is gone.

There also have been several other Marvel stories where
the world was destroyed and then created again either
exactly the same or as good as. I think the wizard
Sise-Neg did it. The X-Men had an "Age of Apocalypse"
with history catastrophically altered while no one
else noticed. The Fantastic Four used the "Ultimate
Nullifier" to defeat Abraxas by destroying the universe.
"House of M" consisted of the mutant Scarlet Witch wishing
the universe was different, so it was. It got wished
back. Genis-Vell, son of Marvell, went mad and
destroyed the universe, again, then it got re-created
with a different history for /him/ but much the same
otherwise - in the new universe, his mother hadn't died,
/again/, and he has a sister. (Incidentally, they're
all from Saturn. I think.)

Meanwhile, Jewish Spider-Man cut a deal with the
Marvel Devil so that his marriage of many years never
happened, along with the exposure of his secret identity.
I am not making this up.