“In a chat afterwards, Joe [Quesada, Chief Creative Officer at Marvel Entertainment] told me that he’d love to make a tentpole [sic] movie with a female lead, but that he really doesn’t think there is an actress right now who could carry it, or a character that would work either.”
Are you fucking kidding me?!?
Read the whole article, it is a much more thorough and coherent rant about this quote than I could come up with right now. Since I am pretty much just sitting here, spluttering with rage.
But, see, Black Widow’s not an A-list hero like Cap or Iron Man! Sure, everyone in the US if not the world knows who she is right now because of the movie, which is more than you can say for higher-profile female Avengers like Scarlet Witch, but if they make movies based on the characters that worked in other movies… why, that’s madness! They’d be forced to admit that the movies are more popular, more culturally relevant, and can do superheroes better than their tired, hidebound, self-referential echo chamber can! Everyone KNOWS the comics are the important part of all this, and the Black Widow comic (um… she has a solo comic title, right? I don’t actually know) isn’t high-profile like Thor or Spider-Man, therefore Black Widow is not a character who would work for an action blockbuster.
I can’t actually get too mad about this - they’re so far gone it’s almost funny instead, to me. For God’s sake, they learned the lesson about “women have money and pay for entertainment” back in the 50s, when romance comics outsold superheroes, and deliberately forgot it. Forgot it so thoroughly that in the mid-2000s I remember reading comics blogs commenting on their obvious flailing as they tried to figure out how to get all these teenage girls who were buying Fruits Basket to buy superhero comics as well, or instead. They couldn’t diversify and also write things girls might read; how they hell would they find people to write that? Some kind of mysterious woman-creature who could understand the minds of girls? No, they had to find some way to turn Spider-man into a shoujo manga. I gather the result was actually readable, but the rationale behind it was ridiculous. Also? Written by men!
Yeah, this is why I consume all my superhero content through media other than comics anymore. Because fuck comic books.
Bolding is mine, because this explains a lot. Clearly I do not understand Joe Quesada, nor am I relevant to him, because I am a mere movie fan who has never read the comics.
UGH! Right? I keep hearing that Black Widow is a C-lister character but so is Thor. How many people knew there was a comic book character named Thor before the movie came out? How about Iron-Man? Was that a character that meant a lot to anyone before RDJ made him cool?
(not really)
These weren’t super popular characters. They were not Superman or even Wolverine.
Black Widow does not have her own book; it’s a short list of Marvel characters who have continuous solo runs. She had a limited (fantastic) solo run, and she has appeared occasionally in Daredevil (LOVE) and the Avengers book, like most second tier Marvel characters. And by second tier, I mean basically everyone who isn’t Spiderman.
Black Widow movie now pls. O.O
