How to get complaints from Elektra fans, part one.
1. Can Reed Richards stretch his hair? Just wondering. See, I was looking at that run of Fantastic Four where everyone thought Reed was dead, but in fact he was off in some other dimension/on another planet/on Gilligan’s Island/some damn thing, where he grew himself a fantasti-beard. I was wondering if, on cold nights during his isolation, if he could stretch out his beard and wrap it around himself for warmth.
These are the things I think of while at work.
2. Okay, pal Dorian brought it up, so I guess I’ll mention it briefly here. I was just shooting the breeze with new employee Pope Nathan here at the shop, idly wondering what it would take for Marvel to consider Wolverine to be an expendable character, like, for example, how DC considered Blue Beetle.
Well, my guess is if a Wolverine solo movie (as is rumored to follow the third X-Men movie, assuming that film doesn’t die a dog’s death) comes out, and it’s the most terrible thing ever, that’s probably what it would take. It would have to be Doc Savage-movie level, which was so bad that (as I understand) it curtailed a then-burgeoning revival of interest in the character. It would have to be Howard the Duck-movie level, which so completely destroyed the reputation of the character (once a cult favorite) that even now I have to swear to people that, yes, the original comics are good.
It would almost have to be something outside of comics that would kill interest in Wolverine. Comics, in general, tend to be self-correcting…long-established characters can generally ride out bad patches. A few bad Howard the Duck comics after Steve Gerber left the book didn’t hurt the rep of the earlier issues. ‘Twas the movie that killed the character, not the crummy non-Gerber black and white magazines. The closest we had in comics was probably the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” story, which, while well received at first, dragged on so long, and shed so many readers from the comics, that Marvel had to resort to restarting the two main Spidey titles to give everyone a clean break from what had come before. (And even then, it took the stunt-casting of Straczynski to get people to really look at Spider-Man again.) And then there was the whole post-Crisis Hawkman brouhaha, but that got straightened out eventually, more or less.
Anyway, this was just some casual pondering Nathan and I were doing, not a well-supported thesis or anything. To be fair, the really lousy Catwoman and Elektra movies haven’t hurt the comics or characters, near as I can tell…though it’s not as if anyone’s been interested in Elektra since Frank Miller last worked on her comics, anyway.*
3. “Dolphins FB Barnes in comic-book game”
“[Darian] Barnes, 25, started Twilight Press Unlimited, a comic-book publishing company, this year with former Cowboys teammate Richie Anderson and friend Joshua Goldfond. […] Might we see a Dolphins comic book?
“‘I sincerely doubt it, because no one wants to read a comic book about football players,’ Barnes said. ‘We’re really not that interesting.'”
(Case in point….)
