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WARNING: A LOT OF FOUL LANGUAGE IS INVOLVED IN WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO READ. IT WAS CATHARTIC AS HECK, BUT BE WARNED. THE FOLLOWING ISN'T MEANT FOR PRE-ADULT EYES!

I said a long time ago that I have a rant chambered for a certain subject I brought up some time ago. One thing you should understand about me, I'm as mild and chill as you can get. But you've seen that when I really want to express myself, I hardly ever hold back.

At this moment, I don't feel like holding back when it comes to the subject of treating characters with respect, and more importantly treating the audience that loves them in the same way...and I thought I'd do it as I send a message to Marvel Comics.

Earlier this week, Joe Quesada stepped down (or was let go, we may never know what exactly is true) as Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Comics. He was basically the top dog there and presided over how the company guided the creation of stories and events in all of its books for over 20 years. Joe was the force who set the standard, made the rules, and was the one responsible for everything editors, writers, artists, and everyone else under his watch did...or, to use a slogan made famous by President of the United States Harry S. Truman, the buck stopped here with Joe.

If you are or were once a fan of Marvel, then there's an overwhelming mountain of evidence that shows Joe's reign was anything BUT positive when you really keep in mind that he was ultimately responsible for everything that happened under his watch. With a bit of examination, those who don't know what I mean will realize why Joe's time as CCO wasn't positive and why Marvel in general took the direction it did. Joe once said in an interview something really strange but quite telling...he compared characters to toys meant to be smashed together, broken and put back together. That sentiment (or I should say lack of any such thing) pretty much encapsulates what has been happening with both increasing frequency and greater intensity for just over two decades.

I need to qualify that personally, I pretty much stopped reading new comics a very long time ago around the start of Joe's reign because it was an indulgence I didn't exactly have a disposable income to afford anymore. I never stopped loving comics and the characters I grew up with, though. Nothing could do that. But if things had been different, if I had kept things up as a comic book fan, I might have lost that love thanks to the single-minded, often cynical, increasingly political and ultimately insulting direction Marvel went in thanks to the powers that be like Joe Quesada who steered the ship. Never mind that under his watch, we've seen people of questionable talent and creative ability like Sana Amanat, Vita Ayala and Leah Williams who are hired not so much for their storytelling ability than for the sake of pushing a certain message and furthering an agenda behind rhetoric saying they want to bring to readers 'the world outside your window'. How many times were readers told that, especially during the "All-New All-Different" and "Marvel NOW!" initiatives? You'd be inclined to think that with flowery descriptors like 'the world outside your window', that meant we'd see more grounded stories in the same sense as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did when they first created stories about a hero everyone could relate to, Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man?

That's not what we got, and it only got WORSE with every year that passed.

Long before things got "All-New All-Different", we were forced to deal with self indulgent, increasingly convoluted and idiotic things like not one but two "Civil Wars". Characters who weren't popular enough like Mattie Franklin, the newest Spider-Woman, were literally sacrificed for the sake of plot and just being dark from time to time. 'Diverse and inclusive' characters who appeared early on like the alternate universe Mariko Yashida, aka Sunfire of the Exiles, can arguably be called a tokenized character because unlike her deceased counterpart -- the mainstream Mariko Yashida, who was Wolverine's lover and nearly wife before she was ALSO killed for plot's sake -- Sunfire was a lesbian. Writer Judd Winick was accused of having a specific agenda, but of course, he denied it. (The most 'progressive' always do!) At least the poser knew how to write well and gave the impression he honestly cared...I did like this version of Mariko in some of the Exiles issues I got to look at. However, for the sake of plot and for a dramatic zinger, Judd unceremoniously killed Mariko and the last we saw, Morph held her body in his arms. I never heard of anyone having any compaints and trouble with the character outside of Judd's suspect motives. Did he honestly get tired of Mariko or something? Couldn't he care enough? All things considered, I really have to ask, and if you think that was a bad enough thing that Joe allowed to happen? That's honestly typical of a lot of 'creative' decisions that came to pass at Marvel, and what's happened to other characters has been worse...especially the company's flagship heroes.

Two of the most damned RIDICULOUS things to ever happen involved Spider-Man. It was lousy as hell for most every fan to see Peter got hit upside the head with the knowledge that Gwen Stacy had slept with eternal bastard Norman Osborn, the first Green Goblin, before she died...I'm sure he'd prefer suffering through another stupid clone saga any day of the week! Recently, almost blessedly, Marvel did retcon that idiocy by revealing that it was all a not-surprisingly-convoluted hoax perpetrated by Mysterio. An even bigger fuckup that has yet to be corrected was "One More Day", when Peter's Aunt May was dying, and Mephisto (the Marvel Comics version of the Devil, for those of you who don't know!) offered the hero the chance to give his mother figure a little more time in the mortal world...for a price. I don't have to tell you what that price was, what it did cost both Peter and Mary Jane Parker, and it basically unraveled literal years of marriage and growth for both of those characters. The uproar caused by that was massive, and I'm sure a lot of fans stopped reading Marvel books in pure protest.

That's what you get when someone in charge thinks of the creations he stewards like toys he can break and screw around with in any way he wants. Things only accelerated after "Secret Wars" literally rebooted all of Marvel continuity...not all the way back to square one, but again, it was as self indulgent as DC's "Crisis on Infinite Earths". The creatives let their heads go so far up their own asses -- a problem Hideo Kojima has had with his politics-infused video game versions of "War and Peace", they're so damn long in story! -- you'd think they'd never see daylight again. It all finally resulted in the "All-New All-Different" and "Marvel NOW!" stuff, and readers were promised a return to greatness for the House of Ideas.

What we got was very different. Emblematic of this Current Year Marvel were characters like Sana's self insert Kamala Khan, who took a name created long before Sana was even born -- Ms. Marvel. Another was Squirrel Girl, a joke character dusted off and given the chance to do beyond-ridiculous stuff like defeat heavy hitters from Thanos to Galactus. Really. You may be laughing at the idea, but Marvel tried to put it over SERIOUSLY! Then there's Brian Michael Bendis' purse puppy affirmative action creation Riri Williams, aka Ironheart. Really, that's basically all SHE was from the beginning. Brian created her to be a positive archetype for black girls, but Riri got her start to getting her Ironheart armor...uh, by stealing Tony Stark's suit. That's the most insulting message you can send, that one can only be a hero by stealing someone else's idea. Things only got stupider from one comic book to another...we were given Kate Bishop, who replaced Hawkeye because women are awesome (honestly!), Iceman was converted to the Church of the Gay by Jean Grey (Which is in a really weird way superhero 'conversion therapy', but don't gay people blast that sort of thing in real life when it's done to them?! Holy shit!), and the X-Men and their enemies AND lots of other mutants were replaced by plant clones and created their own 'separate but equal' utopian society run by committee on the alien living island Krakoa. Where are the real X-Men? As the Critical Drinker would say -- don't know!

And the 'hits' (being sarcastic here!) just kept on coming in the form of female versions of male characters or black versions of the same as a strange and uncreative forced diversity of Marvel's fictonal universe. Dumb as all of that and so much more is, there was a clear and present design to it. Marvel's mainline universe was being reset, slow but sure, into a more 'progressive and inclusive' version of itself that had nothing to do with true diversity...because you see, true diversity would involve the inclusion of everyone no matter their skin color and worldview. I'm speaking of a reasonable and just worldview, and the last I heard, conservatives have a pretty reasonable perspective on things. But that's not how the creatives at "All-New All-Different" Marvel feel, is it? It's not the message they're sending these days, is it?

Uh-uh. The message the Postmodern 'creatives' hired by Marvel under Joe's watch as CCO have a single point of view, a very narrow way of looking at things, and their politics show in everything they do. Most writers and artists at the company refuse to put their oh so diverse and inclusive characters through any real pain and struggle, they won't ever make stories with any drama or stakes out of the worry that they might offend the equally self indulgent and 'socially just' audience they constantly try to cater to. (Well, that's how they are most of the time when it suits them, and I'll soon go into when they don't care about characters, which is OFTEN!) And they have some of the strangest ideas of what makes someone a hero.

I already mentioned selfish purse puppy Riri Williams, who was created by a writer who USED to be good but now clearly is in it for the likes and retweets from 'progressives' online. Look at Nature Girl, one of the X-Men, who went postal and killed a whole bunch of ordinary humans over a turtle...and she got a power up right before she was kicked off of Separatist Plant Clone Island and see how many more people she can kill. No, I'm not fucking kidding. At least we're just talking about the CLONE of Nature Girl, though.

A very different story are characters who are retconned in the blink of an eye, transformed without explanation or justification into someone completely different...take the distinctly neo-feminist and authoritarian 'hero' who started calling herself Captain Marvel. She was no relation to the true Carol Danvers I grew up reading for years in her own book, the X-Men, and the Avengers. SHE was a hero who wouldn't impose her will upon anyone else. But Current Year Captain Marvel has...hell, she murdered Tony Stark at the conclusion of "Civil War 2"! And what consequences did the 'hero' face? ZERO. Because god forbid a female character faces conseqences for their actions...and creating examples of 'heroism' like that leads others down such a stupid path. Just ask anyone in the Batwoman Writer's Room what they thought Kate Kane and Ryan Wilder were entitled to since they were a woman, or black, or lesbian, or checked any of those other progressive boxes. Another example of a character transformed in spite of canon was Moira McTaggert. For the longest time it was firmly established she was an ordinary human who supported her former lover Charles Xavier and his X-Men. Then, naturally for the sake of plot, she was killed by a permutation of the Legacy Virus that infected normal humans. (Hey, Gail Simone? Nothing to say about that? Yoo-hoo!) But Jonathan Hickman brought Moira back to life, and it turned out she was a mutant after all with the power to reincarnate herself(?!?). Yes, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, and regrettably it led to the Not X-Men we're living with in Current Year! Yet another was America Chavez, who I've talked about before...there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with her until Gabby Rivera came along, and she's been a massive insult to Latinas and the very concept of what it means to be a hero!

Oh, have you heard the one where Danny Rand was too white to be Iron Fist, so they 'had' to replace him with an Asian character? I WISH I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THIS, BUT IT'S TRUE. For the sake of being 'correct', Danny had to lose his powers and they were given to an Asian dude...because there were supposedly complaints from weirdos that a white guy can't know martial arts, and I think some even said it was 'appropriating' Asian culture somehow. What. The. Fuck. I don't know what's more racist, an outlook like that or the fact Marvel hired an Asian-American writer to helm the new Iron Fist's stories because only someone Asian can write an Asian character's experiences!

Is that a fucking fact? Does that mean this Asian writer can't write about characters from certain other ethnic groups? You do see the problem here, right? You can see once and for all how hellishly insulting being so 'inclusive' is, right?

But now let me REALLY start in on my rant as I talk about another character who was changed arbitrarily under Joe Quesada's watch...Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.

You want to talk about contrivances? Writer Nick Spencer started the ball rolling with a Cosmic Cube actually becoming a living being, a little girl, some damn how. Then villains got ahold of the godlike girl named Kobik and filled her fairly newborn yet intelligent and impressionable head with THEIR ideas of what was right and wrong. That's enough of a recipe for disaster, right? What resulted was even worse than disaster...it was character assassination.

Nick Spencer wrote that with the prompting of the Red Skull, and I'm going by what was described in the story, Kobik went back in time to change Steve Rogers' past enough so he'd be indoctrinated into and become a loyal agent of the evil organization Hydra before he even became Captain America.

You can see how damned petty and arbitrary and self indulgent THAT is, right? To retroactively go back in fictional time to the roots of a hero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1940 and brought back to life and glory in 1964 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...a character beloved by many, many readers including me for decades...and made him into a villain. I'm sure this must resonate for a lot of you Whovians, and in the worst ways. Wasn't Doctor Who retroactively changed in his -- oh wait, I mean her! -- very essence and rendered the fact the character's first incarnation was played by actor William Hartnell completely irrelevant? What was done to the character many critics deservedly call Doctor Karen was pure pandering to a very specific audience by the BBC and Chris Chibnall, an oh so progressive and Postmodern hack who wants to put himself on a pedestal at the expense of men, especially if they're white. Make no mistake, that's all that motivated Chibby, to look stunning and brave and maybe he did it out of spite toward the creator of Doctor Who and every writer who came before him because the bastard knew he simply wasn't in their league and hated them for it.

This was just as ugly. Nick Spencer, with either the approval or the pure apathy of Joe Quesada, decimated the living legend of World War II himself. I'm pretty damn sure 'social justice' had everything to do with it. It doesn't matter to the 'inclusive' creators at Marvel that Captain America was so much like many other great characters he can be compared to like Superman and Spider-Man: he didn't see color and always strove to fight for what was right for EVERYONE. It doesn't matter you can find characters similar to Steve in some of the most iconic of performances by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne: they played heroes who had a fairly simple view of the world, and because of that had a clearcut understanding of virtue...they knew what was right and wrong and stuck to their guns no matter what. Jimmy's heroes often had to face an increasingly complex world and were usually only armed by their ironclad ethics in films like "Mister Smith Goes to Washington", while The Duke contended with much more dangerous physical threats more often than not in Westerns like "Rio Bravo".

"Wait," some of you might be saying, "Today's a more complicated age and maybe more complicated heroes are called for, right?" If you're inclined to think someone like Captain America was too simple, then as a writer, I've got to say that it's a big mistake to think that a hero with a relatively simple and old fashioned outlook CAN'T be compelling! Just look at Steve's origins alone. He really wanted to do what was right like a lot of guys in the Greatest Generation did by joining the military in preparation for the rising menace of the Axis Powers, but his big problem was that he was too frail and weak to even be considered for Basic Training. Do you think the super soldier serum would have just made him set aside the negative self image he must have had? What about everything he went through during WWII leading up to him and Bucky trying to stop a rocket on a fateful day? War is literal Hell, and even after he was reawakened from suspended animation, don't you think he would have had a few PTSD issues to work out for a while, and maybe even after he became a superhero in the present? I don't think enough was ever done for his being a man shunted from the 1940's to decades later, either...some writers have tried, but for one reason or another, they could get a little too political. (Not like Current Year, though. Back then, such stories were honestly mild in comparison!) Heck, some of the best writers have even reduced Steve into an archetype fighting other archetypes. Have any of you read that issue where Cap found himself fighting the revolutionary (and really goofily dressed!) Everyman, a guy who was woke LONG before 'woke' was even a thing? And how about the first male version of Flag-Smasher? I'd say in a more complicated world, there would be an even greater need for a hero with clearly defined morals and virtues, an outlook that gazed upon the much more complicated present day, and he'd have to adjust in many ways...but in just as many, I imagine he absolutely wouldn't. Some of his best stories involved Cap's unflagging conviction and patriotism, his pure dedication to serving and protecting every American -- let me emphasize for you woke idiots, EVERY AMERICAN REGARDLESS OF WHO THEY ARE, WHERE THEY'RE FROM, OR WHAT THEIR POLITICS ARE! -- and upholding the elemental virtues and principles of his country, virtues some of its greatest citizens embodied and principles his fellow soldiers fought and died for in World War II. Of course as years have gone by, people have gotten softer and more self entitled, the 'creatives' at Marvel had to get more and more political...

...but I could never have imagined in a billion years that a character could be retroactively changed in such a way. Until it happened. But you know what? Looking back such a short time to see how things have gone to SHIT at Marvel so badly, I shouldn't be surprised. Captain America, a hero idolized by fans for generations, the Sentinel of Liberty itself, represented ideals too many in the Current Year hate. And you know who those people are. They look for anything wrong and potentially offensive under the smallest rocks and criticize everything. They're the Postmodern, enlightened, and progressive folk...I call them soft serve humans because they don't know the meaning of struggle or having to really WORK. They've been raised on every luxury a great country like the United States of America could offer just as long as they can work to earn those luxuries. But they were raised soft to grow and become so incredibly self entitled, they honestly believe things should be simply handed to them. Their idea of 'social justice' is what is known as equity -- to tear the 'privileged and oppressive' down in order to lift the 'marginalized and oppressed' up. These people who have grown to believe in very little except for what they think is fashionable and would most benefit them, therefore, can't believe in things like The American Dream and all of its guiding principles. These selfish assholes who have absolutely no direction follow the Pied Piper's call of the Postmoderns, the neo-feminists, and of course organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and they listen when they're told that the United States is 'systemically oppressive', and all of their bullshit solutions only foster more and more division and both celebrate the 'virtue' of being a victim and the value in destroying what's considered traditional. These are the frontline social justice warriors of the Reset Era, and you may remember them best when they went out and burned down businesses and murdered people during the summer of 2020.

People like them, of course, would disdain if not outright hate Captain America. And naturally, the entitled and mostly liberal powers that be at Marvel would for the sake of garnering this audience -- an audience who would never buy their books because they can barely fucking afford to pay their smart phone bills and would rather get their daily fix of soy lattes from Starbuck's -- there would have to be a need to deconstruct the living legend of World War II. No matter how much good he's done, no matter how positive of an example he is, he's still a white male who loves America. And he had to be 'made better'...or at least in a certain way, 'reset'.

Then all of that "Secret Empire" shit came to pass. The man who became the Hydra Supreme betrayed his friends and fellow heroes and led Hydra to taking over America...the world was undoubtedly next. There was a lot of fighting and Steve murdered Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow, along the way. Remember what I said about Marvel finally not giving a rip about ANY of its characters? Natasha was a woman, to be protected and believed 150-percent of the time (just ask Amber Heard, ahem!), but in their minds I suppose it was okay to kill her since she was white. And a redhead.

When all seemed lost, we were in for one last contrivance. Kobik, it turned out, carried with her 'the living memory' of the Steve Rogers who used to be...and the legend was brought back as a mystic clone. This was the ludicrous 'out' that Nick Spencer created and the stage was set for a battle between the corrupted Steve and the 'real' Steve, and of course, good had to win out and America was saved. And what was the big take-away from this? What was the 'moral' of this story?

The 'real' Cap himself said that this will teach people they shouldn't put too much trust in their heroes.

That's such goddamn cynical HORSESHIT, and Spencer rendered his own message totally irrelevant almost from the start by being so self indulgent and petty! He used Kobik as a gigantic deus ex machina to manufacture the contrivance of transforming Steve Rogers into a villain in the first place! Captain America wouldn't have become someone who couldn't be trusted if it wasn't for Spencer basically manufacturing a stupid god-level time travel reason! And while I can only suspect what Spencer's politics are...after everything I said earlier, you probably don't have to guess!...I'm confident he did it purely because he knew he'd get a reaction by being so subversive...he took a shot like many writers have trying to be like Alan Moore, the creator of "Watchmen" and "V For Vendetta". Moore started the whole creative trend of giving us 'heroes' we couldn't just take at face value with characters from Rorshach to the Comedian to Doctor Manhattan. Or maybe Spencer just wanted to be a contrarian shithead, like a lot of liberal arts major social justice warriors are, by vandalizing a character beloved for decades...bottom line because again, he's male, straight, and wears the red, white and blue, and therefore the 'enemy'? Considering how damn toxic things have been for anyone BUT 'protected' groups, I really wouldn't be surprised if that was true!

No matter what's true, FUCK YOU, NICK SPENCER. I'd say fuck you straight to Creative Hell, but you're already THERE sitting alongside every other asshole writer so driven by ego -- I specifically mean veterans who went woke like Bendis, Waid, Simone, Conway and Hickman who are just as bad with their signalling as relatively new and talentless hacks like Ayala, Williams and Vissagio -- because you were all enabled by a prick named Joe Quesada to follow his goddamn 'philosophy', to consider characters you should be treating with respect and consistency and respect to their lore as toys to warp and twist beyond what their creators and previous superior writers made them. You 'creatives' can't fool me with your bullshit. We fans can hardly recognize some beloved heroes these days or they've been replaced by 'correct' versions of them in order to suit YOU, to be a reflection of YOU and your asinine worldview and judgmental politics. It's no wonder you're so thin-skinned and grow to hate your fans and do things to spite us: we rightfully question why you made these characters the way they are and we have totally reasonable justification for criticizing it, but it's not so strange that Postmodern lemmings like you who endlessly examine and criticize yourselves hate that, right?

I'd love to curse the rest of Joe's fellow executives at Marvel for allowing and I'm sure some of them were in full support of creating this now-toxic Current Year way of things in their industry, but I have no idea what their motivations are. Also, I really have to wonder why they keep these activist artists on their payroll. Maybe you hired a lot of them because you wanted to be 'diverse and inclusive' yourselves, but I think you figured out a long time ago you should have been more careful and less partisan. I say that because of a simple truism, 'get woke, go broke', and your sales have been declining at a faster and faster rate, right? Sure, Disney owns you and you've got their deep pockets to rely on, but they haven't been doing well financially and Mickey has been getting a serious black eye ever since they began trying to 'reimagine tomorrow'. Maybe it was a bad idea a long time ago to start this sanctimonious, propaganda filled, and low quality 'world outside your window' bullshit. Just saying!

I do know this about Marvel's highest corporate officers, they KNEW "Secret Empire" was one helluva mistake. I can only guess how many fans disavowed and stopped reading Marvel's books in droves...maybe as many or more than the number of readers who left after Spidey's "One More Day"? (Those are the kind of numbers that are never made public, of course!) How many fans must have sent the ugliest of letters expressing their disgust at what was done to Cap? I'm sure they got LOTS because Marvel has tried very quietly to make like "Secret Empire" never happened...in fact, on their official site they describe Hydra Supreme coming from another Earth entirely, but unless I missed something, THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE because we're not talking about a man being replaced by another version! The story outright said that Kobik went back in time and changed Steve's history! Oh, and official Marvel says that Kobik also rectified whatever damage was done during "Secret Empire". Really? Why did Steve have to earn the public's trust again? Why is Black Widow still dead, which made it 'necessary' for a clone of her to take her place!?! By the way, Natasha's clone has the memory of the original's death transferred into her mind along with the rest of the original Widow's life experiences, and the last I saw in this recent minseries (I read it for free, by the way -- I wasn't being a pirate, don't worry!), it took her a while to get over that! If you're going to 'rectify' things, Marvel, don't be half-ass and GO ALL THE WAY! And I don't give a shit if Evil Cap was killed off by Selene, all that means is the poor son of a bitch was put out of his misery! I'm not feeling good about Mystic Clone Cap because he's still in the hands of fucking Current Year writers...the last I checked, 'Steve' has started losing faith in The American Dream, which is something the true Captain America would NEVER do because he's said so time and again.

Marvel can try to act like the little kid who did something wrong and deny it ever happened, they can deny any responsibility for their own self-inflicted downard spiral into a giant dumpster fire, but they really can't. In this way and so many others, they ceased to please the fans -- people like me who gave them their money in the first fucking place -- and they only care about pleasing themselves and satisfying their own political agenda, a one sided agenda where they SAY they're so inclusive...but at the same time, they don't mind excluding anyone else who might dare to think a little differently or criticize the direction they've taken their heroes. In fact, they often go out of their way to insult and curse certain 'oppressive' people they don't like, and yes, I mean Republicans and men AND women who don't vote for the 'correct' political party. Want the latest sign too many of these 'creatives' are too partisan, selfish, and even outright dumb? Look at Leah Williams recently blasting Chris Claremont for having some 'incorrect' imagery in one of his X-Men stories! (Never mind the imagery she's referring to -- an 1800's slave plantation, along with some of the negative things you can probably imagine in an environment like that -- was on the part of a villain named Mastermind and wasn't meant to be taken in a positive context, but Leah's that desperate for attention. Donnie Iris would no doubt sing, "Ugh! Leah!")

Really, is it any goddamn wonder why Marvel has been losing regular readers and tanking financially as a result!? They refuse to do anything without serving their own politics and narrow-minded agendas...they've said time and again there's a big group of people out there they hate and want to badmouth every chance they get for being ists and phobes. It's stupid enough to alienate and insult approximately half of your fanbase, but these asshole 'creatives' send the message that if readers don't like what they do, then don't buy their books! It hasn't helped that too many of their artists hardly have the talent to draw...have you seen how it seems Captain Marvel is getting uglier and uglier, and it's all the fault of those who draw her and idiots like Joe who approve of it being published? At one infamous point, 'Carol' looked like Kevin 'Lying Bob' Smith's buddy Jay! DC has tried to go in the same woke direction to be competitive -- they've done really stupid shit like Batgirl taking part in a 'peaceful protest' to Superman Junior being given a rainbow Gay Pride cape, which is insulting as FUCK not only to Superman's family but patronizing in the worst way to gays! I don't know if the high income people in Marvel's executive suites are that damn tone deaf or they're just so stubborn refusing to do anything about the situation, but I know exactly how I'd feel if I was part of the boardroom. I'd be MAD AS HELL. You know how the company used to call their staff of editors, writers, artists and more the Marvel Bullpen? Well, if I was the manager of a baseball team and I was looking at a bullpen of players who were nothing but self entitled children who do sub-par work, constantly alienating and even bullying fans at times (I'm looking at the coward and complete scumbag Dan Slott and a certain piece of shit named Mark Waid)...if I looked around at a stadium where it was once standing room only -- referring to X-Men #1 by Claremont and Lee, which had to be reprinted so many times, it was insane! -- but now it was over 80-percent empty...

...if I was the manager, I'D FIRE THOSE CHILDISH ASSHOLES AND HIRE PLAYERS WHO GAVE A DAMN ABOUT MAKING STORIES WITH SUPERHEROES AND HIGH ADVENTURE THAT EVERYONE CAN READ!

As many of you heard, going woke has been described like a virus, and it's so much worse than [UNSPECIFIED VIRUS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN...you know which one!]. Marvel Comics was one of the earliest and HARDEST hit, but it's only spread further from there. This Postmodern plague has been found at Disney and their wholly owned companies Lucasfilm (they're already calling fans who'd dare to criticize "Obi-Wan Kenobi" bigots!) and the MCU, Microsoft (do some digging to see how curiously interested Bill Gates is in international health), and other corporations ranging from Coca-Cola to Best Buy. One way or the other, they're extolling the bullshit of Critical Race Theory or in some other way expressing that a lot of their employees and even many of their customers (cough!-white and Republican-cough!) should hate themselves for being the bad guys. And you've all seen the results still in progress, right? The CW, home of the ultra-woke and recently cancelled "Batwoman", is up for sale. Viewers have been tuning out and turning off the big networks and especially the completely partisan CNN, MSNBC, and BBC. DC Comics, which went woke just to outdo their greatest competition, has been sliding downhill fast along with Warner Bros., Netflix and many other media empires. Paramount should rightfully be next after what they perpetrated with that moronic "Halo" televison series...yeah, it's non-canon, but it was like a middle finger to fans of the Halo games AND to people who like good science fiction!

We don't ask for much as fans. We really don't. We just want good stories that might get our pulses going and stir our hearts, remind us that heroes represent the very best of us. We don't mind morals, but don't turn most all of your viewers completely off with unnecessary signalling and self indulgent politics. Don't hire artists who are like overgrown kids -- most of them bullies -- who care more about themselves and their agendas than for their paying customers. And for the love of all that's holy, just pay some respect to your characters, whether they're legendary or not...they're not toys, they're not disposable for the sake of plot or because they're too cis or white or don't sell very well, and don't change them or twist them into something completely out of character, or replace them with supposedly 'better' versions who fill the right diversity boxes! Just look at the difference between comics before and after Joe Quesada reached the top of Marvel's mountain. Take a look at the difference in the stories written by people who cared of Carol Danvers' Ms. Marvel and the empty dreck created for a token character like Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel. Dammit, if you got a good writer and artists who made Kamala into a hero truly relatable who anyone would want to root for, that alone would make a world of difference!

'Get woke, go broke' is a truism because reasonable, normal people like me can see right through the bullshit. We hear all of the self-serving propaganda and see all of the bullying of the 'diverse and inclusive and tolerant' elites and slacktivists who want the world handed to them because they're part of the right group or they're a victim in some way, we look at one person after another no matter their station being cancelled or threatened with such for the simple crime of disgreeing with the worldview of these professional victims and posers, we hear them reee and scream all of the time that America and white people and straight people are so oppressive...but we know what reality is. THIS is the reality, people:

It's the 'diverse and inclusive and tolerant' who constantly signal, want to reset our culture and shown they only care about imposing their will on everyone else, THEY'RE the oppressors. Normal, reasonable people have no patience for liars and bullies like that. That's why when they hijack one damn thing or another, we refuse to spend another damn cent on it. That's why Disney's stocks have been falling, Marvel has been burning hotter and hotter, and companies everywhere that placed their bets on a nag (which identifies as asexual according to the totally imaginary 'gender spectrum' -- does it include unicorns yet?) are visibly losing. Like I said, get woke...go broke.

The House of No Ideas is in really bad shape as Joe Quesada is departing, descending from a towering inferno to the earth with a golden parachute. What he SHOULD rightfully be doing is taking a long walk of shame, as I'm showing in the art above, away from the heroes he's allowed total hacks and self indulgent assholes to vandalize. Whether you're a fan of Steve or Natasha or Peter and Mary Jane or even pre-Gabby America, you must also be saying "Good riddance!"

Will this hopefully be the beginning of a positive turn for Marvel? Could they clean out the House of No Ideas of the unworthy people who aren't even fit to shine the shoes of Stan the Man and Jack Kirby and the legends who came before them? Will they hire much better writers and artists who would pay respect to all of the years and lore and development, and be true to the legendary characters in all of the ways that longtime fans know so well? Might they fix so much of the damage that's been done and finally take some of the biggest fuckups they've done like "Secret Empire" and "One More Day" and LITERALLY make like they never happened by retconning them out of existence? I'm really hoping so...

...but maybe WE can help speed that process along. I don't usually suggest something like this, but if you want to see positive change at Marvel and the way they do things, write them by email or tweet or whatever and make very clear how disgusted you are with their agenda and the fact they don't care about what readers want...right before you loudly declare you're going to boycott them. Seriously. Make your voices heard and tell Marvel what I'm saying right here: I will never, ever spend my hard earned money to buy another fucking book from you until you start serving us fans, which is what you should put first and foremost anyway. Start treating us with respect by simply giving us what we want. And most importantly, love your characters as much as we love them. It's not a complex recipe for success. It's been done for decades. Hell, for the longest time the Bullpen responded to their readers' letters and really respected their feedback. I have no idea how that got lost along the way, but I'm sure they can start doing that again if they really care enough...they'd better if they care about making money and not going straight to the poorhouse! Then hopefully under the guidance of truly creative people, we can really start to see that mighty Marvel magic happen again.

in the name of making that magic reality, in order to spur that positive change, let me echo the sentiments of Dicktor Van Doomcock, a YouTuber who's also had more than enough of Lucasfilm's total lack of respect for its characters, the lore and legacy of Star Wars, and more importantly for the fans who pay their damn bills...

***Without respect, we reject!***

I'll close with a quote from a great hero I will never, ever accept 'had' to be changed for any damn reason...dammit, in my heart and soul, he hasn't changed at all from the last time I saw him in comics, which was years before either "Civil War" and "Secret Empire". This will resonate for a lot of you, especially in this troubled Current Year, especially when he makes mention of mobs. (As in woke mobs.) It's a piece of advice on how to stand your ground and to let your convictions give you courage. THIS is how to be stunning and brave, and if we fans can do that, Marvel will serve us again...

"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians and mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world:

"No, you move." -- Captain America

Trust me on this, Marvel: until you make those changes, I won't budge a damn inch.

Giving credit where it's due!
XNALara created by Dusan Pavlicek; XPS by Dusan and XNAaraL

Models:
First, in the foreground...
Captain America, Sentinel of Liberty, by !
Next, two of the best redheads ever...the Black Widow, who in my heart could ONLY be Natasha Romanova, and Mary Jane Parker (yes, I'm with a lot of fans, I will NEVER accept "One More Day"!) by ! x 100!
Mary Jane's hubby Spider-Man by !
Last and way least, the unfortunate Joe who is finally shuffling into the sunset is thanks to !
Scenery by ! x 100!

Description
WARNING: A LOT OF FOUL LANGUAGE IS INVOLVED IN WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO READ. IT WAS CATHARTIC AS HECK, BUT BE WARNED. THE FOLLOWING ISN'T MEANT FOR PRE-ADULT EYES!

I said a long time ago that I have a rant chambered for a certain subject I brought up some time ago. One thing you should understand about me, I'm as mild and chill as you can get. But you've seen that when I really want to express myself, I hardly ever hold back.

At this moment, I don't feel like holding back when it comes to the subject of treating characters with respect, and more importantly treating the audience that loves them in the same way...and I thought I'd do it as I send a message to Marvel Comics.

Earlier this week, Joe Quesada stepped down (or was let go, we may never know what exactly is true) as Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Comics. He was basically the top dog there and presided over how the company guided the creation of stories and events in all of its books for over 20 years. Joe was the force who set the standard, made the rules, and was the one responsible for everything editors, writers, artists, and everyone else under his watch did...or, to use a slogan made famous by President of the United States Harry S. Truman, the buck stopped here with Joe.

If you are or were once a fan of Marvel, then there's an overwhelming mountain of evidence that shows Joe's reign was anything BUT positive when you really keep in mind that he was ultimately responsible for everything that happened under his watch. With a bit of examination, those who don't know what I mean will realize why Joe's time as CCO wasn't positive and why Marvel in general took the direction it did. Joe once said in an interview something really strange but quite telling...he compared characters to toys meant to be smashed together, broken and put back together. That sentiment (or I should say lack of any such thing) pretty much encapsulates what has been happening with both increasing frequency and greater intensity for just over two decades.

I need to qualify that personally, I pretty much stopped reading new comics a very long time ago around the start of Joe's reign because it was an indulgence I didn't exactly have a disposable income to afford anymore. I never stopped loving comics and the characters I grew up with, though. Nothing could do that. But if things had been different, if I had kept things up as a comic book fan, I might have lost that love thanks to the single-minded, often cynical, increasingly political and ultimately insulting direction Marvel went in thanks to the powers that be like Joe Quesada who steered the ship. Never mind that under his watch, we've seen people of questionable talent and creative ability like Sana Amanat, Vita Ayala and Leah Williams who are hired not so much for their storytelling ability than for the sake of pushing a certain message and furthering an agenda behind rhetoric saying they want to bring to readers 'the world outside your window'. How many times were readers told that, especially during the "All-New All-Different" and "Marvel NOW!" initiatives? You'd be inclined to think that with flowery descriptors like 'the world outside your window', that meant we'd see more grounded stories in the same sense as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did when they first created stories about a hero everyone could relate to, Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man?

That's not what we got, and it only got WORSE with every year that passed.

Long before things got "All-New All-Different", we were forced to deal with self indulgent, increasingly convoluted and idiotic things like not one but two "Civil Wars". Characters who weren't popular enough like Mattie Franklin, the newest Spider-Woman, were literally sacrificed for the sake of plot and just being dark from time to time. 'Diverse and inclusive' characters who appeared early on like the alternate universe Mariko Yashida, aka Sunfire of the Exiles, can arguably be called a tokenized character because unlike her deceased counterpart -- the mainstream Mariko Yashida, who was Wolverine's lover and nearly wife before she was ALSO killed for plot's sake -- Sunfire was a lesbian. Writer Judd Winick was accused of having a specific agenda, but of course, he denied it. (The most 'progressive' always do!) At least the poser knew how to write well and gave the impression he honestly cared...I did like this version of Mariko in some of the Exiles issues I got to look at. However, for the sake of plot and for a dramatic zinger, Judd unceremoniously killed Mariko and the last we saw, Morph held her body in his arms. I never heard of anyone having any compaints and trouble with the character outside of Judd's suspect motives. Did he honestly get tired of Mariko or something? Couldn't he care enough? All things considered, I really have to ask, and if you think that was a bad enough thing that Joe allowed to happen? That's honestly typical of a lot of 'creative' decisions that came to pass at Marvel, and what's happened to other characters has been worse...especially the company's flagship heroes.

Two of the most damned RIDICULOUS things to ever happen involved Spider-Man. It was lousy as hell for most every fan to see Peter got hit upside the head with the knowledge that Gwen Stacy had slept with eternal bastard Norman Osborn, the first Green Goblin, before she died...I'm sure he'd prefer suffering through another stupid clone saga any day of the week! Recently, almost blessedly, Marvel did retcon that idiocy by revealing that it was all a not-surprisingly-convoluted hoax perpetrated by Mysterio. An even bigger fuckup that has yet to be corrected was "One More Day", when Peter's Aunt May was dying, and Mephisto (the Marvel Comics version of the Devil, for those of you who don't know!) offered the hero the chance to give his mother figure a little more time in the mortal world...for a price. I don't have to tell you what that price was, what it did cost both Peter and Mary Jane Parker, and it basically unraveled literal years of marriage and growth for both of those characters. The uproar caused by that was massive, and I'm sure a lot of fans stopped reading Marvel books in pure protest.

That's what you get when someone in charge thinks of the creations he stewards like toys he can break and screw around with in any way he wants. Things only accelerated after "Secret Wars" literally rebooted all of Marvel continuity...not all the way back to square one, but again, it was as self indulgent as DC's "Crisis on Infinite Earths". The creatives let their heads go so far up their own asses -- a problem Hideo Kojima has had with his politics-infused video game versions of "War and Peace", they're so damn long in story! -- you'd think they'd never see daylight again. It all finally resulted in the "All-New All-Different" and "Marvel NOW!" stuff, and readers were promised a return to greatness for the House of Ideas.

What we got was very different. Emblematic of this Current Year Marvel were characters like Sana's self insert Kamala Khan, who took a name created long before Sana was even born -- Ms. Marvel. Another was Squirrel Girl, a joke character dusted off and given the chance to do beyond-ridiculous stuff like defeat heavy hitters from Thanos to Galactus. Really. You may be laughing at the idea, but Marvel tried to put it over SERIOUSLY! Then there's Brian Michael Bendis' purse puppy affirmative action creation Riri Williams, aka Ironheart. Really, that's basically all SHE was from the beginning. Brian created her to be a positive archetype for black girls, but Riri got her start to getting her Ironheart armor...uh, by stealing Tony Stark's suit. That's the most insulting message you can send, that one can only be a hero by stealing someone else's idea. Things only got stupider from one comic book to another...we were given Kate Bishop, who replaced Hawkeye because women are awesome (honestly!), Iceman was converted to the Church of the Gay by Jean Grey (Which is in a really weird way superhero 'conversion therapy', but don't gay people blast that sort of thing in real life when it's done to them?! Holy shit!), and the X-Men and their enemies AND lots of other mutants were replaced by plant clones and created their own 'separate but equal' utopian society run by committee on the alien living island Krakoa. Where are the real X-Men? As the Critical Drinker would say -- don't know!

And the 'hits' (being sarcastic here!) just kept on coming in the form of female versions of male characters or black versions of the same as a strange and uncreative forced diversity of Marvel's fictonal universe. Dumb as all of that and so much more is, there was a clear and present design to it. Marvel's mainline universe was being reset, slow but sure, into a more 'progressive and inclusive' version of itself that had nothing to do with true diversity...because you see, true diversity would involve the inclusion of everyone no matter their skin color and worldview. I'm speaking of a reasonable and just worldview, and the last I heard, conservatives have a pretty reasonable perspective on things. But that's not how the creatives at "All-New All-Different" Marvel feel, is it? It's not the message they're sending these days, is it?

Uh-uh. The message the Postmodern 'creatives' hired by Marvel under Joe's watch as CCO have a single point of view, a very narrow way of looking at things, and their politics show in everything they do. Most writers and artists at the company refuse to put their oh so diverse and inclusive characters through any real pain and struggle, they won't ever make stories with any drama or stakes out of the worry that they might offend the equally self indulgent and 'socially just' audience they constantly try to cater to. (Well, that's how they are most of the time when it suits them, and I'll soon go into when they don't care about characters, which is OFTEN!) And they have some of the strangest ideas of what makes someone a hero.

I already mentioned selfish purse puppy Riri Williams, who was created by a writer who USED to be good but now clearly is in it for the likes and retweets from 'progressives' online. Look at Nature Girl, one of the X-Men, who went postal and killed a whole bunch of ordinary humans over a turtle...and she got a power up right before she was kicked off of Separatist Plant Clone Island and see how many more people she can kill. No, I'm not fucking kidding. At least we're just talking about the CLONE of Nature Girl, though.

A very different story are characters who are retconned in the blink of an eye, transformed without explanation or justification into someone completely different...take the distinctly neo-feminist and authoritarian 'hero' who started calling herself Captain Marvel. She was no relation to the true Carol Danvers I grew up reading for years in her own book, the X-Men, and the Avengers. SHE was a hero who wouldn't impose her will upon anyone else. But Current Year Captain Marvel has...hell, she murdered Tony Stark at the conclusion of "Civil War 2"! And what consequences did the 'hero' face? ZERO. Because god forbid a female character faces conseqences for their actions...and creating examples of 'heroism' like that leads others down such a stupid path. Just ask anyone in the Batwoman Writer's Room what they thought Kate Kane and Ryan Wilder were entitled to since they were a woman, or black, or lesbian, or checked any of those other progressive boxes. Another example of a character transformed in spite of canon was Moira McTaggert. For the longest time it was firmly established she was an ordinary human who supported her former lover Charles Xavier and his X-Men. Then, naturally for the sake of plot, she was killed by a permutation of the Legacy Virus that infected normal humans. (Hey, Gail Simone? Nothing to say about that? Yoo-hoo!) But Jonathan Hickman brought Moira back to life, and it turned out she was a mutant after all with the power to reincarnate herself(?!?). Yes, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, and regrettably it led to the Not X-Men we're living with in Current Year! Yet another was America Chavez, who I've talked about before...there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with her until Gabby Rivera came along, and she's been a massive insult to Latinas and the very concept of what it means to be a hero!

Oh, have you heard the one where Danny Rand was too white to be Iron Fist, so they 'had' to replace him with an Asian character? I WISH I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THIS, BUT IT'S TRUE. For the sake of being 'correct', Danny had to lose his powers and they were given to an Asian dude...because there were supposedly complaints from weirdos that a white guy can't know martial arts, and I think some even said it was 'appropriating' Asian culture somehow. What. The. Fuck. I don't know what's more racist, an outlook like that or the fact Marvel hired an Asian-American writer to helm the new Iron Fist's stories because only someone Asian can write an Asian character's experiences!

Is that a fucking fact? Does that mean this Asian writer can't write about characters from certain other ethnic groups? You do see the problem here, right? You can see once and for all how hellishly insulting being so 'inclusive' is, right?

But now let me REALLY start in on my rant as I talk about another character who was changed arbitrarily under Joe Quesada's watch...Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.

You want to talk about contrivances? Writer Nick Spencer started the ball rolling with a Cosmic Cube actually becoming a living being, a little girl, some damn how. Then villains got ahold of the godlike girl named Kobik and filled her fairly newborn yet intelligent and impressionable head with THEIR ideas of what was right and wrong. That's enough of a recipe for disaster, right? What resulted was even worse than disaster...it was character assassination.

Nick Spencer wrote that with the prompting of the Red Skull, and I'm going by what was described in the story, Kobik went back in time to change Steve Rogers' past enough so he'd be indoctrinated into and become a loyal agent of the evil organization Hydra before he even became Captain America.

You can see how damned petty and arbitrary and self indulgent THAT is, right? To retroactively go back in fictional time to the roots of a hero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1940 and brought back to life and glory in 1964 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...a character beloved by many, many readers including me for decades...and made him into a villain. I'm sure this must resonate for a lot of you Whovians, and in the worst ways. Wasn't Doctor Who retroactively changed in his -- oh wait, I mean her! -- very essence and rendered the fact the character's first incarnation was played by actor William Hartnell completely irrelevant? What was done to the character many critics deservedly call Doctor Karen was pure pandering to a very specific audience by the BBC and Chris Chibnall, an oh so progressive and Postmodern hack who wants to put himself on a pedestal at the expense of men, especially if they're white. Make no mistake, that's all that motivated Chibby, to look stunning and brave and maybe he did it out of spite toward the creator of Doctor Who and every writer who came before him because the bastard knew he simply wasn't in their league and hated them for it.

This was just as ugly. Nick Spencer, with either the approval or the pure apathy of Joe Quesada, decimated the living legend of World War II himself. I'm pretty damn sure 'social justice' had everything to do with it. It doesn't matter to the 'inclusive' creators at Marvel that Captain America was so much like many other great characters he can be compared to like Superman and Spider-Man: he didn't see color and always strove to fight for what was right for EVERYONE. It doesn't matter you can find characters similar to Steve in some of the most iconic of performances by Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne: they played heroes who had a fairly simple view of the world, and because of that had a clearcut understanding of virtue...they knew what was right and wrong and stuck to their guns no matter what. Jimmy's heroes often had to face an increasingly complex world and were usually only armed by their ironclad ethics in films like "Mister Smith Goes to Washington", while The Duke contended with much more dangerous physical threats more often than not in Westerns like "Rio Bravo".

"Wait," some of you might be saying, "Today's a more complicated age and maybe more complicated heroes are called for, right?" If you're inclined to think someone like Captain America was too simple, then as a writer, I've got to say that it's a big mistake to think that a hero with a relatively simple and old fashioned outlook CAN'T be compelling! Just look at Steve's origins alone. He really wanted to do what was right like a lot of guys in the Greatest Generation did by joining the military in preparation for the rising menace of the Axis Powers, but his big problem was that he was too frail and weak to even be considered for Basic Training. Do you think the super soldier serum would have just made him set aside the negative self image he must have had? What about everything he went through during WWII leading up to him and Bucky trying to stop a rocket on a fateful day? War is literal Hell, and even after he was reawakened from suspended animation, don't you think he would have had a few PTSD issues to work out for a while, and maybe even after he became a superhero in the present? I don't think enough was ever done for his being a man shunted from the 1940's to decades later, either...some writers have tried, but for one reason or another, they could get a little too political. (Not like Current Year, though. Back then, such stories were honestly mild in comparison!) Heck, some of the best writers have even reduced Steve into an archetype fighting other archetypes. Have any of you read that issue where Cap found himself fighting the revolutionary (and really goofily dressed!) Everyman, a guy who was woke LONG before 'woke' was even a thing? And how about the first male version of Flag-Smasher? I'd say in a more complicated world, there would be an even greater need for a hero with clearly defined morals and virtues, an outlook that gazed upon the much more complicated present day, and he'd have to adjust in many ways...but in just as many, I imagine he absolutely wouldn't. Some of his best stories involved Cap's unflagging conviction and patriotism, his pure dedication to serving and protecting every American -- let me emphasize for you woke idiots, EVERY AMERICAN REGARDLESS OF WHO THEY ARE, WHERE THEY'RE FROM, OR WHAT THEIR POLITICS ARE! -- and upholding the elemental virtues and principles of his country, virtues some of its greatest citizens embodied and principles his fellow soldiers fought and died for in World War II. Of course as years have gone by, people have gotten softer and more self entitled, the 'creatives' at Marvel had to get more and more political...

...but I could never have imagined in a billion years that a character could be retroactively changed in such a way. Until it happened. But you know what? Looking back such a short time to see how things have gone to SHIT at Marvel so badly, I shouldn't be surprised. Captain America, a hero idolized by fans for generations, the Sentinel of Liberty itself, represented ideals too many in the Current Year hate. And you know who those people are. They look for anything wrong and potentially offensive under the smallest rocks and criticize everything. They're the Postmodern, enlightened, and progressive folk...I call them soft serve humans because they don't know the meaning of struggle or having to really WORK. They've been raised on every luxury a great country like the United States of America could offer just as long as they can work to earn those luxuries. But they were raised soft to grow and become so incredibly self entitled, they honestly believe things should be simply handed to them. Their idea of 'social justice' is what is known as equity -- to tear the 'privileged and oppressive' down in order to lift the 'marginalized and oppressed' up. These people who have grown to believe in very little except for what they think is fashionable and would most benefit them, therefore, can't believe in things like The American Dream and all of its guiding principles. These selfish assholes who have absolutely no direction follow the Pied Piper's call of the Postmoderns, the neo-feminists, and of course organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and they listen when they're told that the United States is 'systemically oppressive', and all of their bullshit solutions only foster more and more division and both celebrate the 'virtue' of being a victim and the value in destroying what's considered traditional. These are the frontline social justice warriors of the Reset Era, and you may remember them best when they went out and burned down businesses and murdered people during the summer of 2020.

People like them, of course, would disdain if not outright hate Captain America. And naturally, the entitled and mostly liberal powers that be at Marvel would for the sake of garnering this audience -- an audience who would never buy their books because they can barely fucking afford to pay their smart phone bills and would rather get their daily fix of soy lattes from Starbuck's -- there would have to be a need to deconstruct the living legend of World War II. No matter how much good he's done, no matter how positive of an example he is, he's still a white male who loves America. And he had to be 'made better'...or at least in a certain way, 'reset'.

Then all of that "Secret Empire" shit came to pass. The man who became the Hydra Supreme betrayed his friends and fellow heroes and led Hydra to taking over America...the world was undoubtedly next. There was a lot of fighting and Steve murdered Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow, along the way. Remember what I said about Marvel finally not giving a rip about ANY of its characters? Natasha was a woman, to be protected and believed 150-percent of the time (just ask Amber Heard, ahem!), but in their minds I suppose it was okay to kill her since she was white. And a redhead.

When all seemed lost, we were in for one last contrivance. Kobik, it turned out, carried with her 'the living memory' of the Steve Rogers who used to be...and the legend was brought back as a mystic clone. This was the ludicrous 'out' that Nick Spencer created and the stage was set for a battle between the corrupted Steve and the 'real' Steve, and of course, good had to win out and America was saved. And what was the big take-away from this? What was the 'moral' of this story?

The 'real' Cap himself said that this will teach people they shouldn't put too much trust in their heroes.

That's such goddamn cynical HORSESHIT, and Spencer rendered his own message totally irrelevant almost from the start by being so self indulgent and petty! He used Kobik as a gigantic deus ex machina to manufacture the contrivance of transforming Steve Rogers into a villain in the first place! Captain America wouldn't have become someone who couldn't be trusted if it wasn't for Spencer basically manufacturing a stupid god-level time travel reason! And while I can only suspect what Spencer's politics are...after everything I said earlier, you probably don't have to guess!...I'm confident he did it purely because he knew he'd get a reaction by being so subversive...he took a shot like many writers have trying to be like Alan Moore, the creator of "Watchmen" and "V For Vendetta". Moore started the whole creative trend of giving us 'heroes' we couldn't just take at face value with characters from Rorshach to the Comedian to Doctor Manhattan. Or maybe Spencer just wanted to be a contrarian shithead, like a lot of liberal arts major social justice warriors are, by vandalizing a character beloved for decades...bottom line because again, he's male, straight, and wears the red, white and blue, and therefore the 'enemy'? Considering how damn toxic things have been for anyone BUT 'protected' groups, I really wouldn't be surprised if that was true!

No matter what's true, FUCK YOU, NICK SPENCER. I'd say fuck you straight to Creative Hell, but you're already THERE sitting alongside every other asshole writer so driven by ego -- I specifically mean veterans who went woke like Bendis, Waid, Simone, Conway and Hickman who are just as bad with their signalling as relatively new and talentless hacks like Ayala, Williams and Vissagio -- because you were all enabled by a prick named Joe Quesada to follow his goddamn 'philosophy', to consider characters you should be treating with respect and consistency and respect to their lore as toys to warp and twist beyond what their creators and previous superior writers made them. You 'creatives' can't fool me with your bullshit. We fans can hardly recognize some beloved heroes these days or they've been replaced by 'correct' versions of them in order to suit YOU, to be a reflection of YOU and your asinine worldview and judgmental politics. It's no wonder you're so thin-skinned and grow to hate your fans and do things to spite us: we rightfully question why you made these characters the way they are and we have totally reasonable justification for criticizing it, but it's not so strange that Postmodern lemmings like you who endlessly examine and criticize yourselves hate that, right?

I'd love to curse the rest of Joe's fellow executives at Marvel for allowing and I'm sure some of them were in full support of creating this now-toxic Current Year way of things in their industry, but I have no idea what their motivations are. Also, I really have to wonder why they keep these activist artists on their payroll. Maybe you hired a lot of them because you wanted to be 'diverse and inclusive' yourselves, but I think you figured out a long time ago you should have been more careful and less partisan. I say that because of a simple truism, 'get woke, go broke', and your sales have been declining at a faster and faster rate, right? Sure, Disney owns you and you've got their deep pockets to rely on, but they haven't been doing well financially and Mickey has been getting a serious black eye ever since they began trying to 'reimagine tomorrow'. Maybe it was a bad idea a long time ago to start this sanctimonious, propaganda filled, and low quality 'world outside your window' bullshit. Just saying!

I do know this about Marvel's highest corporate officers, they KNEW "Secret Empire" was one helluva mistake. I can only guess how many fans disavowed and stopped reading Marvel's books in droves...maybe as many or more than the number of readers who left after Spidey's "One More Day"? (Those are the kind of numbers that are never made public, of course!) How many fans must have sent the ugliest of letters expressing their disgust at what was done to Cap? I'm sure they got LOTS because Marvel has tried very quietly to make like "Secret Empire" never happened...in fact, on their official site they describe Hydra Supreme coming from another Earth entirely, but unless I missed something, THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE because we're not talking about a man being replaced by another version! The story outright said that Kobik went back in time and changed Steve's history! Oh, and official Marvel says that Kobik also rectified whatever damage was done during "Secret Empire". Really? Why did Steve have to earn the public's trust again? Why is Black Widow still dead, which made it 'necessary' for a clone of her to take her place!?! By the way, Natasha's clone has the memory of the original's death transferred into her mind along with the rest of the original Widow's life experiences, and the last I saw in this recent minseries (I read it for free, by the way -- I wasn't being a pirate, don't worry!), it took her a while to get over that! If you're going to 'rectify' things, Marvel, don't be half-ass and GO ALL THE WAY! And I don't give a shit if Evil Cap was killed off by Selene, all that means is the poor son of a bitch was put out of his misery! I'm not feeling good about Mystic Clone Cap because he's still in the hands of fucking Current Year writers...the last I checked, 'Steve' has started losing faith in The American Dream, which is something the true Captain America would NEVER do because he's said so time and again.

Marvel can try to act like the little kid who did something wrong and deny it ever happened, they can deny any responsibility for their own self-inflicted downard spiral into a giant dumpster fire, but they really can't. In this way and so many others, they ceased to please the fans -- people like me who gave them their money in the first fucking place -- and they only care about pleasing themselves and satisfying their own political agenda, a one sided agenda where they SAY they're so inclusive...but at the same time, they don't mind excluding anyone else who might dare to think a little differently or criticize the direction they've taken their heroes. In fact, they often go out of their way to insult and curse certain 'oppressive' people they don't like, and yes, I mean Republicans and men AND women who don't vote for the 'correct' political party. Want the latest sign too many of these 'creatives' are too partisan, selfish, and even outright dumb? Look at Leah Williams recently blasting Chris Claremont for having some 'incorrect' imagery in one of his X-Men stories! (Never mind the imagery she's referring to -- an 1800's slave plantation, along with some of the negative things you can probably imagine in an environment like that -- was on the part of a villain named Mastermind and wasn't meant to be taken in a positive context, but Leah's that desperate for attention. Donnie Iris would no doubt sing, "Ugh! Leah!")

Really, is it any goddamn wonder why Marvel has been losing regular readers and tanking financially as a result!? They refuse to do anything without serving their own politics and narrow-minded agendas...they've said time and again there's a big group of people out there they hate and want to badmouth every chance they get for being ists and phobes. It's stupid enough to alienate and insult approximately half of your fanbase, but these asshole 'creatives' send the message that if readers don't like what they do, then don't buy their books! It hasn't helped that too many of their artists hardly have the talent to draw...have you seen how it seems Captain Marvel is getting uglier and uglier, and it's all the fault of those who draw her and idiots like Joe who approve of it being published? At one infamous point, 'Carol' looked like Kevin 'Lying Bob' Smith's buddy Jay! DC has tried to go in the same woke direction to be competitive -- they've done really stupid shit like Batgirl taking part in a 'peaceful protest' to Superman Junior being given a rainbow Gay Pride cape, which is insulting as FUCK not only to Superman's family but patronizing in the worst way to gays! I don't know if the high income people in Marvel's executive suites are that damn tone deaf or they're just so stubborn refusing to do anything about the situation, but I know exactly how I'd feel if I was part of the boardroom. I'd be MAD AS HELL. You know how the company used to call their staff of editors, writers, artists and more the Marvel Bullpen? Well, if I was the manager of a baseball team and I was looking at a bullpen of players who were nothing but self entitled children who do sub-par work, constantly alienating and even bullying fans at times (I'm looking at the coward and complete scumbag Dan Slott and a certain piece of shit named Mark Waid)...if I looked around at a stadium where it was once standing room only -- referring to X-Men #1 by Claremont and Lee, which had to be reprinted so many times, it was insane! -- but now it was over 80-percent empty...

...if I was the manager, I'D FIRE THOSE CHILDISH ASSHOLES AND HIRE PLAYERS WHO GAVE A DAMN ABOUT MAKING STORIES WITH SUPERHEROES AND HIGH ADVENTURE THAT EVERYONE CAN READ!

As many of you heard, going woke has been described like a virus, and it's so much worse than [UNSPECIFIED VIRUS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN...you know which one!]. Marvel Comics was one of the earliest and HARDEST hit, but it's only spread further from there. This Postmodern plague has been found at Disney and their wholly owned companies Lucasfilm (they're already calling fans who'd dare to criticize "Obi-Wan Kenobi" bigots!) and the MCU, Microsoft (do some digging to see how curiously interested Bill Gates is in international health), and other corporations ranging from Coca-Cola to Best Buy. One way or the other, they're extolling the bullshit of Critical Race Theory or in some other way expressing that a lot of their employees and even many of their customers (cough!-white and Republican-cough!) should hate themselves for being the bad guys. And you've all seen the results still in progress, right? The CW, home of the ultra-woke and recently cancelled "Batwoman", is up for sale. Viewers have been tuning out and turning off the big networks and especially the completely partisan CNN, MSNBC, and BBC. DC Comics, which went woke just to outdo their greatest competition, has been sliding downhill fast along with Warner Bros., Netflix and many other media empires. Paramount should rightfully be next after what they perpetrated with that moronic "Halo" televison series...yeah, it's non-canon, but it was like a middle finger to fans of the Halo games AND to people who like good science fiction!

We don't ask for much as fans. We really don't. We just want good stories that might get our pulses going and stir our hearts, remind us that heroes represent the very best of us. We don't mind morals, but don't turn most all of your viewers completely off with unnecessary signalling and self indulgent politics. Don't hire artists who are like overgrown kids -- most of them bullies -- who care more about themselves and their agendas than for their paying customers. And for the love of all that's holy, just pay some respect to your characters, whether they're legendary or not...they're not toys, they're not disposable for the sake of plot or because they're too cis or white or don't sell very well, and don't change them or twist them into something completely out of character, or replace them with supposedly 'better' versions who fill the right diversity boxes! Just look at the difference between comics before and after Joe Quesada reached the top of Marvel's mountain. Take a look at the difference in the stories written by people who cared of Carol Danvers' Ms. Marvel and the empty dreck created for a token character like Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel. Dammit, if you got a good writer and artists who made Kamala into a hero truly relatable who anyone would want to root for, that alone would make a world of difference!

'Get woke, go broke' is a truism because reasonable, normal people like me can see right through the bullshit. We hear all of the self-serving propaganda and see all of the bullying of the 'diverse and inclusive and tolerant' elites and slacktivists who want the world handed to them because they're part of the right group or they're a victim in some way, we look at one person after another no matter their station being cancelled or threatened with such for the simple crime of disgreeing with the worldview of these professional victims and posers, we hear them reee and scream all of the time that America and white people and straight people are so oppressive...but we know what reality is. THIS is the reality, people:

It's the 'diverse and inclusive and tolerant' who constantly signal, want to reset our culture and shown they only care about imposing their will on everyone else, THEY'RE the oppressors. Normal, reasonable people have no patience for liars and bullies like that. That's why when they hijack one damn thing or another, we refuse to spend another damn cent on it. That's why Disney's stocks have been falling, Marvel has been burning hotter and hotter, and companies everywhere that placed their bets on a nag (which identifies as asexual according to the totally imaginary 'gender spectrum' -- does it include unicorns yet?) are visibly losing. Like I said, get woke...go broke.

The House of No Ideas is in really bad shape as Joe Quesada is departing, descending from a towering inferno to the earth with a golden parachute. What he SHOULD rightfully be doing is taking a long walk of shame, as I'm showing in the art above, away from the heroes he's allowed total hacks and self indulgent assholes to vandalize. Whether you're a fan of Steve or Natasha or Peter and Mary Jane or even pre-Gabby America, you must also be saying "Good riddance!"

Will this hopefully be the beginning of a positive turn for Marvel? Could they clean out the House of No Ideas of the unworthy people who aren't even fit to shine the shoes of Stan the Man and Jack Kirby and the legends who came before them? Will they hire much better writers and artists who would pay respect to all of the years and lore and development, and be true to the legendary characters in all of the ways that longtime fans know so well? Might they fix so much of the damage that's been done and finally take some of the biggest fuckups they've done like "Secret Empire" and "One More Day" and LITERALLY make like they never happened by retconning them out of existence? I'm really hoping so...

...but maybe WE can help speed that process along. I don't usually suggest something like this, but if you want to see positive change at Marvel and the way they do things, write them by email or tweet or whatever and make very clear how disgusted you are with their agenda and the fact they don't care about what readers want...right before you loudly declare you're going to boycott them. Seriously. Make your voices heard and tell Marvel what I'm saying right here: I will never, ever spend my hard earned money to buy another fucking book from you until you start serving us fans, which is what you should put first and foremost anyway. Start treating us with respect by simply giving us what we want. And most importantly, love your characters as much as we love them. It's not a complex recipe for success. It's been done for decades. Hell, for the longest time the Bullpen responded to their readers' letters and really respected their feedback. I have no idea how that got lost along the way, but I'm sure they can start doing that again if they really care enough...they'd better if they care about making money and not going straight to the poorhouse! Then hopefully under the guidance of truly creative people, we can really start to see that mighty Marvel magic happen again.

in the name of making that magic reality, in order to spur that positive change, let me echo the sentiments of Dicktor Van Doomcock, a YouTuber who's also had more than enough of Lucasfilm's total lack of respect for its characters, the lore and legacy of Star Wars, and more importantly for the fans who pay their damn bills...

***Without respect, we reject!***

I'll close with a quote from a great hero I will never, ever accept 'had' to be changed for any damn reason...dammit, in my heart and soul, he hasn't changed at all from the last time I saw him in comics, which was years before either "Civil War" and "Secret Empire". This will resonate for a lot of you, especially in this troubled Current Year, especially when he makes mention of mobs. (As in woke mobs.) It's a piece of advice on how to stand your ground and to let your convictions give you courage. THIS is how to be stunning and brave, and if we fans can do that, Marvel will serve us again...

"Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians and mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world:

"No, you move." -- Captain America

Trust me on this, Marvel: until you make those changes, I won't budge a damn inch.

Giving credit where it's due!
XNALara created by Dusan Pavlicek; XPS by Dusan and XNAaraL

Models:
First, in the foreground...
Captain America, Sentinel of Liberty, by !
Next, two of the best redheads ever...the Black Widow, who in my heart could ONLY be Natasha Romanova, and Mary Jane Parker (yes, I'm with a lot of fans, I will NEVER accept "One More Day"!) by ! x 100!
Mary Jane's hubby Spider-Man by !
Last and way least, the unfortunate Joe who is finally shuffling into the sunset is thanks to !
Scenery by ! x 100!