DC/WB Films/Worlds (No Spoilers)

[Clark_Kent]

Well, yeah, but it's pretty impressive how many tickets Superman sold. Adjusted, it would have done much more than any DCEU film to date. That's why BO Mojo has another list for adjusted.

Adjusted for inflation numbers are fun to look at, but shouldn't be taken seriously because those films had less competition. Superman: The Movie came out during a time when fewer films were hitting theaters than today, there were no services like Netflix grabbing peoples' entertainment dollars, no video game consoles to eat into the pie, etc. There are dozens of factors to include when trying to use inflation numbers (though most will ignore those factors), and using inflation alone gives a false sense of how the film stacks up compared to todays films. Superman: The Movie sold a lot of tickets, but also had way less competition.

[kjn]

Aquaman and Wonder Woman need to be thrown on a higher pedestal now from the people at DC. What they both accomplished is crazy.

What is likely to happen is that more high-status writers vie for attention to write them, and that in turn mght help visibility and sales in the long run.

For Aquaman I imagine that that process can be rather straightforward. For Wonder Woman it is trickier, because even established and experienced writers have shown that they have a very poor understanding of the character, and DC has done a poor job at selecting writers who have that understanding.

[Krypto's Fleas]

What is likely to happen is that more high-status writers vie for attention to write them, and that in turn mght help visibility and sales in the long run.

For Aquaman I imagine that that process can be rather straightforward. For Wonder Woman it is trickier, because even established and experienced writers have shown that they have a very poor understanding of the character, and DC has done a poor job at selecting writers who have that understanding.

Actually, I think WW is a cautionary tale for AM. A renewed demand to write the character doesn't mean more characters understand him. Hopefully history doesn't repeat itself.

[HandofPrometheus]

Sadly I don't think this will change anything comic-wise.

comic wise I expect nothing but hopefully more animated precense and other media. Comics are a lost cause.

[byrd156]

comic wise I expect nothing but hopefully more animated precense and other media. Comics are a lost cause.

I said oof out loud reading this, I agree but damn it hurts.

[Raijin]

comic wise I expect nothing but hopefully more animated precense and other media. Comics are a lost cause.

That’s all fine. More comics for me. I usually prefer the books anyway.

[byrd156]

That’s all fine. More comics for me. I usually prefer the books anyway.

Well it's not really more comics for you if the industry dies off by way of focusing on the IPs as other media than the original medium they came from.

[Raijin]

Well it's not really more comics for you if the industry dies off by way of focusing on the IPs as other media than the original medium they came from.

If you say so? The comics industry isn’t dying no matter what. Readership could be low. But I can’t see the medium dying. It’s absurd to even think so.

[byrd156]

If you say so? The comics industry isn’t dying no matter what. Readership could be low. But I can’t see the medium dying. It’s absurd to even think so.

It's absurd to think that an entertainment medium can die or become something else entirely? We don't exactly sit around and listen to radio dramas anymore do we?

I could see comics going fully digital in 20 or 30 years, it's more absurd to think that things will stay the way they are forever.

[kjn]

Actually, I think WW is a cautionary tale for AM. A renewed demand to write the character doesn't mean more characters understand him. Hopefully history doesn't repeat itself.

I assume when you say "more characters" you mean more writers.

While Wonder Woman is a cautionary example in this regard, I believe the risks of that is much lower for Aquaman. If we take the movie version of the character (I'm not qualified to assess other versions) he was raised by his single father within human culture, while his mother from another culture departed while he was small. You can find similar people all over the world, later on trying to reconnect or reject or reconcile their double heritage. It does not imply a rejection of fundamental axioms of our society.

Wonder Woman is different. By the "default" version she was raised in an all-female utopic society. If you go by Marston's original stories, it was also sex-positive, and kink-positive; viewed from today Marston's vision included a lot of what now is called queer. Not only does such a culture not exist anywhere, it goes directly counter to the axioms that our patriarchal society is built on, and that everyone of us has integrated into our relation to society.

So Wonder Woman would, if written seriously, be considered a communist (Themyscira can be considered a state-less and class-less society, not that Marston thought in those terms) and a woman unfettered by patriarchy (a lot of feminist and gender theory would be bewildering to her, because she never experienced patriarchy, even at a remove, until her adulthood). Add in the things about sex, kink, and queerness, and you have an explosive combo.

Such a character can be hard to understand, and for some fundamentally unsettling. I think it's no surprise that there have been attempts to make her "safe" to use in various ways. By wreaking havoc on the Amazon society (Brian Azzarello, Grant Morrison); by introducing and prioritising men around her (Azzarello, James Robinson); by making Wonder Woman into a virginal Madonna figure (Pérez); or the meme that Wonder Woman is "unrelatable".

With Aquaman you run the risk of writers finding him boring, just as with any other character, but at least poor stories can be spotted rather easily by a decent editor. But any writer worth their salt would run a high risk of recoiling from some of the questions that Wonder Woman poses, and the same goes for the editors.

[Raijin]

It's absurd to think that an entertainment medium can die or become something else entirely? We don't exactly sit around and listen to radio dramas anymore do we?

I could see comics going fully digital in 20 or 30 years, it's more absurd to think that things will stay the way they are forever.

Here we go. A media evolving and dying are two separate things. You literally just made it seem like the comics medium will die out completely. Yeah they’ll go digital (as they should) but it will never die out, especially when comics are at their strongest right now.

[byrd156]

Here we go. A media evolving and dying are two separate things. You literally just made it seem like the comics medium will die out completely. Yeah they’ll go digital (as they should) but it will never die out, especially when comics are at their strongest right now.

"Well it's not really more comics for you if the industry dies off by way of focusing on the IPs as other media than the original medium they came from."

You can see in my reply I said IF. I literally just pointed out the fact that another person not reading damages the medium and is not somehow better or more for you, as a reader. You keep acting like I say some grand absolutes.

As for a form of media dying vs evolving, they are the same thing. They can't die off because they aren't alive. The term die or evolve is interchangeable because the other is implied. Radio dramas died off/evolved into podcasts. You can use either term and come to the same conclusion. I'll make sure I'm more clear and will explain myself for you.

[Jim Kelly]

The medium of the printed comic book doesn't live on if it's in the medium of an electronic digital platform. Those are different media. That's the whole point Marshall McLuhan was making when he said "The Medium is the Message" (apparently I'm the only one who took Canadian Intellectual History in university). He was saying that what kind of medium of communication you have (oral, stone, papyrus, telegraph, wireless radio, film) shapes what kind of message is transmitted. If you change the medium that can't help but change what you communicate.

Neverthess. I don't believe paper is dying out as a viable form of communication, so therefore printed comic books are not going to die out in my lifetime. The greatest threat is environmental catastrophe--but when that happens, we'll have more important things to worry about than comic books. Super-heroes are a different kettle of fish. They just happen to be the most popular thing that was created in the comic books. But just like Tarzan, Peter Pan or Santa Claus, they don't require one medium of expression to persist. In the aftertime, when the modern world has crumbled, our descendents will tell each other tales of the Superman over the campfire and draw his symbols in the dust.

[Bruce Wayne]

Aquaman and Wonder Woman need to be thrown on a higher pedestal now from the people at DC. What they both accomplished is crazy.

The direct market is completely divorced from the mainstream movie going audience. While Aquaman and Wonder Woman can make billions at the box office and in merchandising, their numbers are middling at best in the direct market. Any attempt at promoting these characters will fail because of the niche audience that services the direct market is more interested in Batman.

It also doesn't help in regards to Aquaman that DC is trying to run away from the movie take on the character because of bts editorial politics. But that is another story.

[Jim Kelly]

I've always thought the key to Wonder Woman's publishing success should be the children's and young adult's book market. If DC was putting out books for those readers, then a lot more of them (especially girls) would find them and the books would be geared toward their interests rather than those of forty year old men. Also there are a lot more women (writers and artists) working for that market than for comic books.