Guardian can’t handle the truth
They ran this story about the backlash against Marvel comics losing sales after replacing long standing white male superheroes with “diverse” black females.
The result was over 1,000 comments, mostly civil, explaining perspectives from long time comic book fans, and with the comments coming in at several a minute, the powers that be closed the commenting. This is a very familiar tactic (not just the Guardian) when the comments from readers indicate they don’t agree with the narrative laid out in a “news” story.
In some cases, not only are “comments closed” they are deleted entirely. Another recent tactic has been to require registration directly with the ‘news’ site to post a comment… i.e. no more posts via Facebook, G+, Disqus, or other 3rd party login. Soviet Liberals.
Also, people forget the real history of Marvel Comics. In the late 70´s and early 80´s Chris Claremont created boatloads of diverse and female characters that were placed into context, especially in the X-Men Comic books, which were ïntegral to the renewed success as the ´new´ X-men, when the series was close to being cancelled. This is the X-men we see in all the movies today, especially since Fox owns the X-men movie rights, and has kept recycling this theme.
He also created several female comic books outside of the X-men such as Spiderwoman and Ms. Marvel. They only were created, I think, because he was so popular and profitable with the X-men, he was allowed to do whatever side projects he wanted. I have a lot of these comic books in my basement. Haven´t bought any new books for 30 years.
http://collider.com/x-men-movies-comics-chris-claremont/
I would stipulate knowing very little about action comics. Donald duck and Mickey Mouse were about as far as I went. I remember some Classics Illustrated “comics” in the attic growing up.
The theme of the comments was not the introduction of new characters, but the transformation of existing characters. The story was linked to by Drudge, but many commenters were British