It’s a sentiment shared by many fans – or perhaps, more accurately, former fans – of the once-beloved entertainment studios: In the opinion of Alphacore co-creator Chuck Dixon, Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm have been completely mismanaged ever since their respective purchases by Disney, with their subsequent outputs being nothing short of absolutely abysmal.
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The Marvel-Comics-and-DC-writer-turned-Rippaverse-scribe offered his appraisal of the House of Mouse’s mishandling of the two studios while speaking to My Hero MAGAdemia and Superman Vol. 3 colorist Brett R. Smith on the current state of the entertainment industry during the latter’s Bounding Into Comics-exclusive live show Escape the Future.
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Amidst a resulting discussion on how mainstream comic book publishers suffered under their own self-aggrandizing attempts to appeal to female readers by injecting “third-wave feminism” into every aspect of their books, Smith raised his frustrations with the fact that, as a result of said pandering, the industry’s key demographic – young males – had been completely abandoned.
“It’s like this, ‘One size fits all’ now, you know, ‘we’re just going to make comics for everybody, we’re not going to cater to girls, we’re not going to cater to boys with certain titles or ideas – and I think that’s a failure on that part as well,” said the show’s host. “They’ve kind of just given up on the things that get young boys excited, or interested, in these characters. I just don’t see it anymore.”
Agreeing with Smith, the former Batman Vol. 1 author opined, “Well, no, no, because they’re going to reject what they see, like they’ve rejected so much.”
“I mean, comics aren’t the only things suffering,” Dixon proceeded to elaborate of his take. “Look at the population of people going on to college and university it’s 70% female yeah because guys get to university – this happened to me in 1972! I went to orientation to Temple University and thought ‘They don’t want me here.’ You know? ‘A white guy from the suburbs. I’m not welcome here. They don’t want me’, so I didn’t go. And that has to happen over and over and over and over again that either at orientation, or by the end of the freshman year, the guy says ‘I don’t know, I’m a persona non-grata here and my parents are paying a fortune for me to be here, so, I’m out.'”
“And we’re seeing that across the board,” he continued. “I mean, the streaming services, movie attendance, television series, everything else is falling apart because they’re not aiming it at an audience that actually wants to see it.”
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To this end, Dixon then focused his criticism directly on the House of Mouse, exclaiming to Smith, “Look what Disney
did! Spent eight billion dollar to get two male oriented franchise and immediately turned them into girly stories.”
“Yeah, you know, Chris Gore talked about that,” Smith replied. “Disney’s already got their princess line. Why do you need to take characters that are typically male-centric, or things that boys like, and turn them into princesses? I don’t understand this at all.”
In turn, the veteran comic book creator declared, “It’s like it was the only thing they knew how to do.”
Drawing his thoughts on Disney to a close, Dixon concluded, “But their stated intent, I remember reading about this extensively when they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm, was that they needed they needed material for boys. They didn’t have anything for boys in their library and and then they you know screwed both of them up in the worst possible ways you can imagine. It’s amazing how bad they’ve been at this.”
Featuring a story by Dixon and art by Immortal Hulk Vol. 1 artist Joe Bennett, Rippaverse’s Alphacore Vol. 1 #1 is now on sale.
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