Commercial Suicide for Superheros
Why is DC comics committing financial suicide on their comic titles? Why is Marvel?
This puzzled me back when I was a hard-core Libertarian, and I honestly thought all human action could be understood in terms of self interest. Now that I am a hard-core Christian, I honestly think all human action can be understood in terms of the war between the Prince of Darkness and the Virgin Mary.
The answer is actually simple: man does not live by bread alone.
A Christian should happily sacrifice worldly goods if Christ asked. Likewise, a Secular will happily sacrifice worldly goods when Antichrist asks.
They have a religion (albeit they do not call it that) which forms their worldview and sates some of the spiritual needs of man. Man needs an account of his origin, of the purpose of life, of the moral order, and he needs a sense of self-worth especially if he has no sense of being loved, and he needs to escape from the sense of original sin that haunts him.
Their religion, being a secular one, is fake from crown to heel. The origin myth of the antichristian is to call himself “woke” that is, enlightened. He came into being once he created a special, inner knowledge unshared by the unwashed masses: this knowledge is the ability to see that everything is the opposite of what it appears. If a society appears democratic and just, it is actually a white patriarchy founded on oppression. If a man appears male but says he is a woman, he actually is female, in spite of his dangling male member. And so on.
Most of all, their religion preaches crusade. Their Great Commission in life is to spread utopia, which consists of a magical land where goods may be consumed before produced, ruled by an all-powerful but all-benevolent spirit called The State, and man is woman, man is beast, or child is man, merely if so said.
Crusade demands self-sacrifice. But, no matter the cost in money, they are rewarded by the applause of the Prince of This World, and all his servants, selfaware and unselfaware, who bow the knee to him, and adore whomever he directs they adore.
So they sacrifice the intellectual properties of their forebears, not on the altar of Mammon, god of money, which would please Antichrist, but on the altar of Asmodeus and Cybele and Ganymede, gods of anti-marriage, castration, and sodomy, which pleases Antichrist even more.
The comic publishers do not need the money. The comics are being kept afloat on the market for the legal purposes of retaining ownership and copyright of characters who make their money elsewhere: in toy sales, computer games, films and television.
But the men in charge of these companies need self-esteem. Man needs pride to live, if he is to live in a godless world. He needs the power of a Nietzsche to reshape reality as he will.
Sex is the most basic reality of the human condition, marriage is the basic social institution, masculinity and femininty inform every cell in brain and body. It is the most real of real things, and children the most beloved and innocent of things that reality produces. Therefore the devil hates children, hates virgins, hates mothers, and hates the family unit and seeks to destroy them at every turn, either by pederasty or abortion or divorce or by eliminating the prestige and the very idea of fatherhood, of man as master of his house and head of his family.
Sexual perversion unmakes all these things at one blow. Sodomy produces no babies, and sodomites cannot form family units. All they can do in mockery of reproduction is gain institutional access to children to groom them for pederasty, and make them into little homos. Hence the push for excluding parents from schools, for government run child care. Pulling kids away from single mothers is easier if no man is nigh to father and protect the boy, and no man teaches the boy manhood. Hence the push for contraception, for no fault divorce, and for moral relativism.
Perversion is their religion and abortion is their eucharist. Once they can, by uttering a word, change man into women, they think they have changed reality itself, and that theirs is the power of God Almighty, who spoke a word to bring forth the cosmos out of darkness.
It also serves their political ends by tearing down monuments: Washington and Jefferson, yes, but also Superman and Luke Skywalker. A people without heroes, without dreams, is easier to conquer.
Making Superman into Ganymede, that is, into the butt-monkey of another man, at one blow removes his heroic stature, ruins him as something one can show to children, and normalizes a disgusting sexual perversion. It tears down a monument, induces despair, desecrates a hero, and makes filth seem normal. It is gaslighting, where you force all the frightened and obedient mobs to wander in a daze, repeating lies to each other they would rather not tell, but they are afraid not to tell, lest the mob turn on them.
I realized that the comic book industry, as a whole had turned into a Woke Religion Movement, and was no longer interesting in selling comic books, when the movies first starting becoming very popular.
At about the same time, instead of making comic book versions of the characters seen on the screen, Marvel and DC turned Thor in to a girl — not Sif nor Valkyrie, mind you, but Thor’s name now put on a curvaceous battle-babe. Hawkeye was replaced by a girl. Not Archerette or Lady Robinhood or some such, but a woman with no origin story simply given his name and taking his place.
Spiderman was replaced by Miles Morales. Captain America by Falcon. Hulk was replaced in rapid succession by a teen Korean lad who wanted to be the Hulk, which undermines the whole point, and She-Hulk changed from sexy to monstrous and changed her name to Hulk. I
ron Man was replaced by a teenaged black girl, who did not change her name to Iron Girl or somesuch, but called herself Iron Man.
The only original character to come out of this period was Kamala Khan, who was given the name Ms Marvel, from the old female sidekick to Captain Marvel, who, as it happens, had his name usurped by his old sidekick, and this C-List character no one remembers was suddenly the center of the spotlight of publicity and a whirlwind of hype, trying to make this undramatic, unmemorable nobody into the most important and most popular character of the Marvel Universe.
The poison spread from the comics backward into the movies. The movies resisted for a year or two, but they also worship at their same altars, and so surrendered.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
