Disney Eats Marvel: The most disturbing image of the day (so far)
Inspired by a twitter from Brian Reed, and drawn (or at least posted) by petroglyf.
Monthly Archive: August 2009
Disney buys Marvel: Reactions
As you can imagine, the reactions on twitter have been flying since today’s announcement. Here are some of our favorites so far:
- Brian Reed has the quote for the win: “Face it, Tigger, you just hit the jackpot!”
- patrickkeller: Brian Michael Bendis is currently having giant, round mouse ears surgically attached to his head.
- Pinguino: Hey does this mean Rogue and Storm can be disney princesses now and get frilly dresses?
- Dave Stokes: Tinkerbell to play The Wasp in Avengers movie?
- uberthegeek: Chip & Dale: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
- joshuwain: “Finding Namor”
- One person we won’t name: “maybe this means i’ll be able to go into the disney store again without looking like a pervert”. Uh, if you have to ask, then the answer is NO.
More to come…
Disney Eats Marvel: Hannah Montana becomes Dazzler
C’mon, it’s too easy:
Hannah Montana has to reveal her secret identity under the Superhuman Registration Act, refuses, and goes head to head against Tony Stark.
Hannah Mutana. I like it.
(Not to be confused with hakuna matata, which is also a wonderful phrase.)
Disney Eats Marvel: The Analysis
So the mouse is eating the spider. What does it all mean?
Poke around the Internets and you’ll see a lot of hysteria. Comics fans aren’t happy; they’re worried Disney will Disnify the whole thing. Movie fans are worried the Marvel flicks will have all the weight and depth of your average Disney movie. Theme park fans are concerned about Universal losing their franchise just so Ant-Man and the Wasp can fit into “It’s A Small World After All.”
Calm down. Assuming the deal gets approved by Marvel’s stockholders – which is likely – and the government – which is likely but not as certain – contracts are contracts and Disney would rather spend the next five years buying other things than paying for litigation. Paramount will still release those next five Marvel Films films, Universal will continue to maintain their current lifespan (however long that might be) with the Marvel rides and that fat lady who’s knocking the poo out of Captain America’s winged head in those commercials, and the comic books will continue to be published.
Well, most likely.
Marvel’s been trying to pattern itself after the Disney business model for at least the past four or five owners, so it’s no surprise that the House of Mouse took preemptive measures. Disney can’t mess with their theme parks right now – I mentioned the contractual obligations and, quite frankly, business ain’t what it used to be. The Disney characters and the Marvel characters are not a good theme park fit: the latter are not grandmother-friendly.
I doubt Disney will interfere with publishing very much, at least not in the short run. They have a very bad track record in the publishing fields, and the racks are littered with their cancelled product. They’re in the licensing business; that’s what they do and what they know. If the overall comic book publishing field continues to deteriorate they might do what they did with their other product and simply license it all out. It would be wonderfully ironic if Mark Waid’s Boom Studios gets the franchise, and I’ll bet you Mark feels the same way.
If there are any changes, they are likely to take the form of a reorientation of the Marvel characters towards the teen-age male market. Disney is weak in that demographic and can use some bolstering up. And bringing Marvel Comics back to the teen-ager friendly arena isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It worked for Lee and Kirby and Ditko and Thomas and Buscema; today there are more than enough really good writers and artists to address that market in a contemporary manner.
So I don’t think we’ll see Doctor Doom threatening The Little Mermaid. Don’t hold your breath for that Sinister Seven Dwarves movie. The Hulk probably will not stomp Goofy. Stan Lee will not be frozen and placed on the shelf next to Walt Disney and Jim Henson. All that’s a pity. Disney has no sense of humor. Just ask the Air Pirates.
The fact is, big business has never, ever been able to understand the American comic book industry. We defy the Harvard MBA mentality, and I’m proud of that. If DIsney does what Disney does best and the publishing business doesn’t implode, nobody will notice a thing. The Avengers 3 will make more money than publishing could lose.
Unless Dean Jones is cast as Nick Fury.
A 33 year veteran of the comic book industry, Mike Gold is ComicMix’s editor-in-chief. Portions of this blather appeared in today’s The Point podcast.
The Point Radio: What Does Marvel/Disney Really Mean?
Everybody’s talking about Disney buying Marvel, but what does it really mean? Beyond all the speculation is there a real story yet? Plus we continue our visit backstage at WAREHOUSE 13. Meet the guy behind that oh so familiar face – noted character actor Saul Rubinek who is at the center of the new SyFy series. And it was a frightening box office tally this weekend, but it’s a good week in the comic store with some real treats waiting for you!
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Disney Eats Marvel – Update 2
Walt Disney reached an agreement to purchase Marvel Comics for a combined cash and stock deal valued today at $4 billion. According to a report at Marketwatch, the acquisition was approved by both Boards of Directors over the weekend and is subject to SEC approval.
In a statement, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said “adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation.”
Those holding Marvel stock are expected to receive $30 per share in addition to approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.
A shareholders’ conference call was scheduled for later today and no doubt Marvel will have their own comments for the press. The deal is not expected to close for some time and how the integration will work, including the comics properties owned by Disney and Marvel will be announced in the future. In addition to Disney’s own characters, they purchased the assets of CrossGen some years ago and have done little with them, much I the same way as Marvel has yet to fully exploit the Malibu Comics characters they acquired in the 1990s.
Disney has been moving more into the graphic novel field through their publishing division, notably announcing works based on their forthcoming film The Prince of Persia, based on the video game. One can only expect Disney to entrust projects like this and others to Marvel.
Isaac Perlmutter, Marvel’s CEO, will continue to oversee the Marvel properties and is expected to be an architect of the integration along with Disney execs.
Disney Eats Marvel – Update 1
One minute after today’s Wall Street opening, Marvel Entertainment’s stocks jumped 25%, to over $48 a share.
Disney will be allowing Marvel to continue to operate under its own name.
Disney To Buy Marvel
Disney Entertainment, owner of damn near everything in the entertainment world, is planning on purchasing Marvel Entertainment. The purchase price is purportedly $4,000,000,000. That’s four billion, for the zero challenged.
No word on what will happen to the current crew of Marvel employees, but as of this writing the House of Idea is not expected to move to the west coast.
More as this story develops.
Review: ‘Syncopated’ edited by Brendan Burford
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95
For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.
That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[The
Big Skinny]]]) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.
If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.
Something Awful ‘improves’ Superman
And wackiness, of course, ensues:
For every good book like Red Son or The Superman/Madman Hullabaloo,
there are hundreds of stories where Lex Luthor comes across more of the
incredibly rare Kryptonite and uses it to make something stupid like
kryptoteeth for an army of bank-robbing robots.
