Cartoons aimed at girls

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Thad
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 15, 2014 3:54 pm

Comics aren't movies, though. Is there any evidence that Chris Hemsworth's arms have women flocking to Thor: The Comic Book in droves?

Anyway, we all know it'll be just as permanent a change as the death of Wolverine.

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Classic
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Classic » Tue Jul 15, 2014 3:59 pm

Also, you can get the same thing going by adding male hangers-on. Possibly ones that create tension between the character's heroic and alter-ego personas?


EDIT:
The original Sailor Moon opening sequence is kind of perfectly bonkers.
I dunno how much it changed the show in the US to redub it as a superhero anthem instead of an (I can't find the adjective I want... angsty?) love song.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby zaratustra » Tue Jul 15, 2014 4:29 pm

Disposable Ninja wrote:I trust you're all aware that Marvel is replacing Thor with a girl-Thor with the specific intent of drawing in more female fans, correct?

Can anyone tell me why this will have the opposite effect? I'll give you a big, beefy hint why.


For longer than Spiderman was Dr. Octopus, or shorter?

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jul 15, 2014 6:23 pm

This seems so convoluted. There's a new Thor who's a lady and because she had the hammer that makes her Thor except the old Thor is still around but he's not Thor any more except obviously he's going to get the hammer back and be Thor again and the new Thor won't be Thor no more.

Snore.

Wasn't the original hook that Thor was just an alternate ego that pops out when whatever mortal jobber is holding the hammer invokes him? Would it not be perfectly natural to go back to that setup, and oh hey the person who inherited the hammer happens to be a woman now, and I guess she transforms into a noticeably more feminine thunder god? Do we really need OG Thor hovering around just impatiently tapping his foot to get his hammer back?

The answer is yes of course, it's unthinkable that we'd actually let Thor stay a woman, even though why the fuck not.

I don't read this crap so I'm just going to pretend that Thor was permanently replaced with Raijin from Muramasa and that Cap regularly defeats Nazis by ricocheting his shield off of her butt.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:02 pm

that article wrote:she will not be a temporary replacement

Ahahahahahahahahaha

...

Hahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaahhhh. Good one, Marvel. Ya almost got me there.

Actually, wait, no. You didn't get me at all, because it would be harder for you to make a less credible statement.
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Büge » Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:13 pm

I guess we can add What If? #10 to the list of noncanon comics plundered for stories.
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:52 pm

Brentai wrote:Wasn't the original hook that Thor was just an alternate ego that pops out when whatever mortal jobber is holding the hammer invokes him?


More or less, yeah.

Brentai wrote:Would it not be perfectly natural to go back to that setup, and oh hey the person who inherited the hammer happens to be a woman now, and I guess she transforms into a noticeably more feminine thunder god? Do we really need OG Thor hovering around just impatiently tapping his foot to get his hammer back?


I'd be totally down with that but it probably contradicts the last 45 years worth of retcons.

Maybe Thor will turn back into Don Blake? Even though I'm pretty sure they've been separate people for years now.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 15, 2014 9:09 pm

Thad wrote:
Brentai wrote:Wasn't the original hook that Thor was just an alternate ego that pops out when whatever mortal jobber is holding the hammer invokes him?


More or less, yeah.


This era of Thor is actually the only Thor I ever read. Anytime I hear about any new Thor stuff, the concept sounds so much clunkier and inelegant compared to that original idea.
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby ocksi » Tue Jul 15, 2014 9:10 pm

I think this story would have made more sense in the ten years or so when Thor was Odin as well and that could have been a fairly interesting dynamic, but as I understand it Odin is back?

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby TedBelmont » Tue Jul 15, 2014 10:04 pm

Two things I love about this:

1. They unironically used the phrase, "strong female characters" in their press release

2. Any time one of the big two does one of these MAJOR RADICAL CHANGE TO THE STATUS QUO things and the creative team is like they just walked down to the bullpen and grabbed the first two people they found standing around in the break room.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:40 am

Mongrel wrote:This era of Thor is actually the only Thor I ever read. Anytime I hear about any new Thor stuff, the concept sounds so much clunkier and inelegant compared to that original idea.


Well, the thing is, even in the Lee/Kirby era there are two distinct periods of Thor stories.

"Don Blake gets a hammer and gets Thor's powers" was how it started out.

But it wasn't long before Kirby started doing an entirely different kind of story, less superhero and more mythology, set in Asgard before the Don Blake stuff. That's where he introduced a bunch of the supporting cast (including the Warriors Three) and it's pretty fucking great -- for my money, better than the Don Blake/Thor-on-Earth superhero stuff.

Eventually they bridged the gap between the two sets of stories by way of a retcon that Don Blake was never a separate person at all, that Odin sent Thor to Earth and made him lose his power and memories and think he was a human. That was status quo for a good long while -- up until the last 10 years or so if I'm not mistaken -- but they eventually brought Don Blake back and decided that no, he and Thor were separate people after all.

I prefer Don Blake as a separate person instead of Thor with his memory erased, because amnesiac heroes suck. But I really can't praise Kirby's Asgard-set stories enough, either; they're so, so Kirby, and I definitely think that's what Kirby really wanted to do when he suggested adapting Thor in the first place.



(Lots of folks consider Simonson's run to be the definitive Thor run, and it's honestly a tough call between him and Kirby. Incidentally, Simonson is doing a new creator-owned Thor series with Public Domain Thor instead of Marvel Superhero Thor, and I am looking forward to it immensely more than anything Marvel could possibly have up its sleeve.

It was solicited for May but is apparently just coming out next week.)

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby MarsDragon » Wed Jul 16, 2014 10:39 am

Brentai wrote:Wasn't the original hook that Thor was just an alternate ego that pops out when whatever mortal jobber is holding the hammer invokes him? Would it not be perfectly natural to go back to that setup, and oh hey the person who inherited the hammer happens to be a woman now, and I guess she transforms into a noticeably more feminine thunder god? Do we really need OG Thor hovering around just impatiently tapping his foot to get his hammer back?

The answer is yes of course, it's unthinkable that we'd actually let Thor stay a woman, even though why the fuck not.


As Buge pointed out later, yeah, a woman just picking up the hammer happened in a What If. I don't know if you were around for the Sober Assholes where I talked about it (it's the very first test stream, Episode 0), but the basic idea is that Jane Foster grabs the stick instead of Don Blake, becomes Thor (calls herself Thordis because I guess that's the feminine?), and does a better job being Thor than actual Thor until Odin's all "well uh...I guess my son learned his lesson so you gotta give the hammer back now...but I've been watching you! You got guts! Also my wife is dead and I'm lonely wanna bang"

Gotta admit, I will laugh my ass off if they rip off the plot of it that thoroughly.

Back to the subject at hand, I don't think this is going to bring in that many new female readers for a lot of reasons. One of which is yeah, women already like movie version Thor and that isn't making them pick up comics in droves. It's unlikely they've just been waiting for a female Thor instead. It might be more prudent to try and figure out why the movies aren't bringing in more readers in the first place instead of just gender-switching an old character and hoping that will magically bring in new readers. But that really requires analyzing why in a good month comics can't even get five titles that sell more than 100K, let alone a normal month. Compare those numbers to the video game industry, to say nothing of Hollywood. Attracting female readers? Comics can't even attract straight white men.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 16, 2014 11:38 am

MarsDragon wrote:It might be more prudent to try and figure out why the movies aren't bringing in more readers in the first place instead of just gender-switching an old character and hoping that will magically bring in new readers.


Well, it would be pretty simplistic to say that all they did with Captain Marvel was to gender-switch an old character and hope that would magically bring in new readers.

(I mean, for a variety of reasons, including (1) they've been trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Captain Marvel for 30 years now, (2) they've had a revolving door of characters taking on the name, (3) Carol Danvers isn't even the first woman on that list, and (4) Ms. Marvel was already the female version of Captain Marvel anyway.)

Point being, by all accounts Captain Marvel is a pretty great book (and Ms. Marvel is too -- again, "by all accounts"; I haven't been picking them up myself). I'm sure "make Thor a woman" is just step 1 and they're planning on actually trying to make the comics GOOD, too. Whether that'll succeed remains to be seen, but Marvel's had a lot of critically-acclaimed books recently that break their standard formula and appeal to a wider audience.

Which brings me to:

MarsDragon wrote:But that really requires analyzing why in a good month comics can't even get five titles that sell more than 100K, let alone a normal month. Compare those numbers to the video game industry, to say nothing of Hollywood. Attracting female readers? Comics can't even attract straight white men.


That's definitely a related issue but it's not the SAME issue. I think it's reasonable to assume that "appeal to more female readers" is a part of a larger strategy to appeal to more readers in general.

And it's been successful -- if your rubric is "compared to video games and movies", it's been a pretty tiny success, but if your rubric is "sell more books to women than in recent years", it's been a noticeable one. Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel are both selling well, especially digitally, and getting great reviews, and they're not books that have been historically successful.

I've got my own set of issues with "Take a successful superhero and make him female and/or a minority" as a tool to make a lineup more diverse (I pretty much always think creating an original character is better), but it's a lot easier to get attention with a familiar brand than a new one and I understand why they do it.

We'll see how well the Thor stunt works out. They've already got people talking about it, so that's a start; getting people to actually buy it (either in a comic shop or, likelier for new readers, digitally) is another thing, and getting them to KEEP buying it is another thing still.

I'm guessing we WILL see a sales boost on Thor. Whether it's a long-term one, or whether any of the new buyers are new comics fans or just people who usually buy comics that aren't Thor, are much harder to predict.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Jul 16, 2014 1:12 pm

So should we start an argument about the fact that this is fucking around with an actual religious icon, or just skip that one?

Like... okay, I'm going on about this a bit, but the more I look at it the less I can stop thinking "Now why the heck didn't they do this with Captain America?" That would be perfectly natural - Steve Rogers hangs up his costume because he's tired or pissed off about Civil War or whatever, I don't know what's going on with that now, but anyway he dies or decides to pass on the star-spangled gimp suit to another superpowered-somehow military Captain who, by the way, is a woman. It works fine, Captain America is more about being Captain America than being Steve Rogers or Bucky or whatever dickslinger it is right now, and you get to have a character who's an actual high-ranking military lady. It even transfers naturally to the Movie universe! You're going to have a hard time making Iron Man not Robert Downey Jr. or Thor not Chris Hemsworth's Abs or Hawkeye not That Guy Who Plays Hawkeye in the Marvel Universe, but you can have Chris Evans' character ditch the title of Captain America after sorta-kinda becoming a terrorist in The Winter Soldier and have, I dunno, the fake nurse character show up in the gimp suit and have arguments with Iron Man. Whatever. Tell me why this doesn't work.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 16, 2014 1:35 pm

Because Captain America's already being replaced by the Falcon.

Allegedly. Quesada's announcing an "all-new era for one of Marvel’s most classic Super Heroes" on Colbert tonight and I think Cap's a safe bet.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby MarsDragon » Wed Jul 16, 2014 2:04 pm

I can attest that from the view on the ground, Captain America is also very popular with the ladies. Sweet, all-American boy next door who becomes a national icon and stands up for the weak is popular, I guess. Then again Falcon also got a popularity boost from the latest movie, so I guess making him Cap isn't a terrible idea from that perspective.

Thad, you'll have to show me where you're getting the digital distribution numbers because I only know of the Diamond ones.

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 16, 2014 2:15 pm

Comixology and Marvel both keep a bestseller list, and are both currently showing the latest issue of Captain Marvel in slot #16.

I don't see an aggregate listing offhand (or actual sales figures), but Ms. Marvel debuted at #1 back in February.



...Christ. People sure are buying a lot of Jim Lee-era X-Men comics. What's up with that?

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Büge » Wed Jul 16, 2014 3:51 pm

Brentai wrote:So should we start an argument about the fact that this is fucking around with an actual religious icon, or just skip that one?


Pretty sure Ásatrú practitioners are indifferent to the depiction of their beloved pantheon in comics and movies. And most modern Ásatrú practices emerged in the '70s anyway.
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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby TedBelmont » Wed Jul 16, 2014 4:43 pm

Brentai wrote:So should we start an argument about the fact that this is fucking around with an actual religious icon, or just skip that one?

Like... okay, I'm going on about this a bit, but the more I look at it the less I can stop thinking "Now why the heck didn't they do this with Captain America?" That would be perfectly natural - Steve Rogers hangs up his costume because he's tired or pissed off about Civil War or whatever, I don't know what's going on with that now, but anyway he dies or decides to pass on the star-spangled gimp suit to another superpowered-somehow military Captain who, by the way, is a woman. It works fine, Captain America is more about being Captain America than being Steve Rogers or Bucky or whatever dickslinger it is right now, and you get to have a character who's an actual high-ranking military lady. It even transfers naturally to the Movie universe! You're going to have a hard time making Iron Man not Robert Downey Jr. or Thor not Chris Hemsworth's Abs or Hawkeye not That Guy Who Plays Hawkeye in the Marvel Universe, but you can have Chris Evans' character ditch the title of Captain America after sorta-kinda becoming a terrorist in The Winter Soldier and have, I dunno, the fake nurse character show up in the gimp suit and have arguments with Iron Man. Whatever. Tell me why this doesn't work.


Isn't Kate Bishop currently using the name Hawkeye in the comics?

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Re: Cartoons aimed at girls

Postby Niku » Wed Jul 16, 2014 5:52 pm

yeah, but females getting to be bishops is a pretty recent thing
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