Entertainment Weekly wrote about a new documentary anthology airing on Disney Plus, “Marvel’s 616”, covering past history of the publisher, and one of the directors, Gillian Jacobs, puts their lady contributors into focus, proving there were women working in comicdom decades ago, contrary to social justice distortions of the past several years making it seem as though there never were, although the downside is that it appears to cite many of the more recent, far less respectable women working for them too:
“I inadvertently made a piece about the history of comics, not just Marvel which I did not think I was doing going in!” she says with a laugh. “For a more casual fan of Marvel who doesn’t know a lot about the history of it and for me who didn’t know anything about the history of it, it was really exciting to discover not just the names that Marvel fans know of like Marie Severin who is a really important artist there but a whole host of other women who worked at Marvel over the decades and then also talking about the really exciting women who are currently working there.”
Some more of those past artists and writers include Louise Simonson, Florence Steinberg and Bobbie Chase, whom I expect will be getting some mention here in the docuseries. That’s the upside, and it all demonstrates why the propaganda fed by MSM sources over the past number of years that “more” are supposedly needed in every way, shape and form regardless of personal merit is just a lot of baloney. The downside, however, is if more recent women like Sana Amanat, Kelly Sue deConnick, Alanna Smith, G. Willow Wilson, and Heather Antos are given focus here, after all the social justice damage they did in the past decade. And of course, if it matters, there’s modern menfolk at Marvel who’ve lent themselves to this past decade’s whole catastrophe in artistic merit and sales, not the least being Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso, with C.B. Cebulski becoming the latest. If they get sugarcoated focus here, that’ll honestly be bad, ditto if their mistreatment of Mary Jane Watson is glossed over.
That said, as mentioned before, the citation of past contributors with more talent like Severin is certainly good in its own way, because it proves that contrary to recent SJW narratives, Marvel did have women contributing to their productions in the past, and attempts to make it look otherwise are shameful, and hurtful to Stan Lee’s legacy.
There’s also another segment of the docuseries that doesn’t make me feel very encouraged:
But Scheer then jokes that he might be the most obscure Marvel character of them all. “I am in the Marvel universe!” he says. “I am flirting with Scott Lang’s daughter in Astonishing Ant-Man #4 written by Nick Spencer, yes I memorized it. I show up to a basketball game and I get Scott Lang upset. So honestly that character must come back.”
Even if Spencer’s mended fences of recent with his writing on Spider-Man, which finally brought back Mary Jane Watson into a relation with Peter Parker after nearly a dozen years following One More Day and the faustian pact with Mephisto, all engineered by both Quesada and J. Michael Straczynski, Spencer’s work on Secret Empire and the embarrassingly awful spectacle of Capt. America/Steve Rogers becoming a Nazi/Hydra agent is still is a big stain on his resume, and still enough to make one shudder. If that’s glossed over as well – and it’s entirely possible it will be – one has to wonder what’s the whole use of the documentary apart from the better elements if it won’t be honest about modern mistakes?
Originally published here.
