2019 was a rocky year for superheroes — until 'Watchmen' raised the bar for the genre

[Ironhold]

Shazam!, Brightburn, Hellboy, Dark Phoenix, Glass, all movies that didn't do well. Other like Joker and Captain Marvel made a lot of money, one was not as widely critically acclaimed, the other inspired an incel hate campaign (although they both made over $1 billion). You also have to factor in cancelled series like Cloak & Dagger, The Gifted, and Krypton (to name a few). It's been a rocky year with more misses than hits; you also have the recent controversy with some actors and directors attacking superhero films saying they are not cinema.

Watchmen managed to come on the scene and prevent something fresh, particularly capturing the serious and deconstructionist tone of the original graphic novel in the 1980s.

Did you really...?



The opposition to "Captain Marvel" was *not* an "incel hate campaign".

The truth of the matter is this:

Carol Danvers, as a character, has always been B-list at best and in fact hasn't been able to carry a solo book in over a decade. This perhaps made her even *more* of a risky call to get a solo movie than even the Guardians of the Galaxy despite all of the media attention she's been getting, and so people were already on guard.

When word came out that Danvers was going to be pushed as some godlike being and that her origin story would somehow set up how she could essentially come out of nowhere and defeat Thanos, people balked.

If this had been it, there wouldn't have been much controversy. Instead, actress Brie Larson kept shooting her mouth off in public and generally making herself appear to be hateful. Her remark about "old white men" was the final straw, as it was widely taken as meaning that she only wanted an echo chamber around her and held no regard for anyone else.

Making matters worse is that some of the same people going to length to defend the film in the days before it opened were among the same people literally making things up to demonize "Alita", leading to many people hypothesizing that the film was deliberately being targeted so that it wouldn't seem like a challenger to "Captain Marvel". In fact, if you'll note, there's minimal overlap in the fandom for the two films; people either like one or the other, but not both. And yes, *to this day* folks who express support for "Alita" risk being labelled as "alt-right" by various "progressive" and "woke" types if they don't immediately sing the praises of Brie Larson as well.

When "Captain Marvel" finally dropped, people found plenty in the film to criticize. One big thing people called out was the poor effects work compared to other Marvel films, such that you could actually tell when certain scenes were green-screened because of the poor matting that was done; the worst offender is the scene where she's riding her bike through the desert, as the cut to Brie on the bike is obviously her on a stationary bike inside of a studio.

The flashback montage of all the men who were "evil" to her in her life? This fell flat when people realized that her dad was getting after her for causing a dangerous situation for multiple people and her drill instructor was simply being a drill instructor by berating her for showing weakness during a training session.

By the time we got to "Just a Girl" as her big fight number music, people had checked out. That of all things made it clear that Danvers was being pushed because of her gender, not her strength as a character.

Things got worse when the home video versions of "Alita" and "Captain Marvel" were released, as the deleted scenes from the latter showed her being absolutely sadistic to people while the former rapidly selling out led to yet another skirmish between fans of the two movies.

So no, it wasn't just a handful of cranky "incel" types opposing the film. It was a large cross-section of the internet - women, racial minorities, and so on - who called Marvel out on it. And the cross-section was vindicated when it became clear that several of Larson's MCU co-stars were similarly sick of her nonsense, something that culminated in the infamous pre-"Endgame" interviews in which she tore after her co-stars over minor things while missing the times they dissed her.

Leaks coming out of production say that Larson is so unlikable a person that the only way they could think of to sell her after this was to have a Spider-Man / Captain Marvel team-up movie, which we had a hint of at the end of the last Spider-Man film... and even then, this was thrown into confusion when Sony nearly clawed the movie rights back.

 

[Ironhold]

Shazam!, Brightburn, Hellboy, Dark Phoenix, Glass, all movies that didn't do well. Other like Joker and Captain Marvel made a lot of money, one was not as widely critically acclaimed, the other inspired an incel hate campaign (although they both made over $1 billion). You also have to factor in cancelled series like Cloak & Dagger, The Gifted, and Krypton (to name a few). It's been a rocky year with more misses than hits; you also have the recent controversy with some actors and directors attacking superhero films saying they are not cinema.

Watchmen managed to come on the scene and prevent something fresh, particularly capturing the serious and deconstructionist tone of the original graphic novel in the 1980s.

Furthermore:

1. Dark Phoenix was just an awful movie. It was clearly churned out just to finish off the Fox X-Men films so that the merger could allow the characters to be included in the MCU, and even people like The Film Theorists noted evidence that it had perhaps been Nerfed so that it wouldn't seem like a rival to "Captain Marvel". There's no universe in which it could have succeeded without a *lot* of fraudulent activity.

2. As noted above, Shazam did good despite Warner Brothers bungling the early marketing for the film. It at least broke even by all but the most pessimistic of mental algorithms, and you can't ignore toy sales as well.

3. If you read the critics who harshed "Joker", you'll see that a lot of them did so because of personal politics. There was a consistent narrative being pushed that the film would lead to an "incel" uprising, such that Gizmodo actually falsely reported that the United States military was being put on high alert ahead of opening weekend; in reality, one single base was given a general "watch your six" notice because Texas state law enforcement saw something on the dark web. Yes, I was the fact-checker on this one. Weaponized Nerd Rage (et al) got their information from me. If you check audience reviews and scores, you'll see that the film had widespread popular approval. This is how it cleared $1 billion internationally without opening in China.

4. Krypton = SyFy Channel = What don't they cancel over there? The network's entire m/o is to cancel shows at or before the 5 year mark so that they don't have to go through salary re-negotiations, so anyone who gets attached to a show on that channel is just asking for heartache.

5. Let's face it: the Hellboy remake was an awful movie as well. I actually saw it, and it was so bad I swore off "modern" horror movies for several months afterwords. I actually noted in my newspaper bits that I found Kris Straub's "Local 58" YouTube channel to be a more worthy entry in the horror genre than much of what I'd seen in theaters over the last few years.

 

[iluvatar5150]

A good year for the genre is when there are none.

(he said curmudgeonly)

I agree.

 

[Ironhold]

The real truth of the matter - and this coming from a professional entertainment writer - is that over the last few years too many people within the entertainment industry have lost sight of who and what the classical superhero is supposed to be.

In contrast, older fans - and those younger ones who they have trained up - find themselves becoming more and more frustrated as they remember the days when classical superheroes were indeed heroic and are becoming increasingly alienated from what's going on.

Not helping matters any is the fact that an ever-increasing number of industry pros are refusing to behave in a professional fashion, such that they are *literally* telling people to either adore everything being churned out or buzz off. They think that their position *as* a creative gives them carte blanche, and far too many are using it to either hide their sins or shove their personal views about, if not both.

The end result is that people are voting with their feet and their wallets. They're picking and choosing who and what they support these days, meaning that they're going for indie projects, *select* brand-name projects, and even foreign-produced fare.

I'll tell you right now that because of this, five of the six biggest US comic book companies are on deathwatch. Odds are that IDW is going to be the first to go, both because they're millions in debt and because they learned *nothing* from the Aubrey Sitterson incident. But Marvel, DC, Image, and Archie are shadows of what they used to be, in large part because the people in charge now either don't know what they're doing or they've lost sight of their own heritage.

General consensus is that they'll all either be gone within the next decade, or be forced to reorganize in such a fashion as to leave them unrecognizable to modern audiences.

That'll leave Dark Horse, Dynamite, and a few of the stronger indie houses (odds are that the list will include Boom, Alterna, Wikid, and Splatto) to rebuild the US comic book industry.

We're watching a full-fledged apocalypse in the making all across the entertainment industry, from Disney to DC Comics.

I'd say "trying to prevent that from happening" is far more important than "ensuring every single movie has every single box of a checklist marked off".

 

[SummerMadness]

and this coming from a professional entertainment writer

You always mention this as if this should make your comments hold weight... I have seen none of your writing besides rants about Captain Marvel on this forum (you've managed yet again to write an indignant treatise on Brie Larson in this thread).

As for the "coming apocalypse" it's more than likely a change of times. People are collecting comic books the same way people are reading newspapers. There will likely be a transition to digital, which will have to evolve to the audience demands. Times change.

 

[Ironhold]

You always mention this as if this should make your comments hold weight... I have seen none of your writing besides rants about Captain Marvel on this forum (you've managed yet again to write an indignant treatise on Brie Larson in this thread).

As for the "coming apocalypse" it's more than likely a change of times. People are collecting comic books the same way people are reading newspapers. There will likely be a transition to digital, which will have to evolve to the audience demands. Times change.

I recall previously mentioning which newspapers had my pieces.

And yes, I've been in print saying these things as well: if the entertainment industry at large doesn't start dealing with the incompetent & corrupt executives and dire lack of professionalism among the broader mix of creative talent, a reckoning is going to happen as consumers take their money elsewhere and various regulatory bodies start getting involved.

 

[SummerMadness]

I recall previously mentioning which newspapers had my pieces.

And yes, I've been in print saying these things as well: if the entertainment industry at large doesn't start dealing with the incompetent & corrupt executives and dire lack of professionalism among the broader mix of creative talent, a reckoning is going to happen as consumers take their money elsewhere and various regulatory bodies start getting involved.

Your prediction reminds me of something JL Collins, keep talking about the coming reckoning periodically. Eventually superhero films will go the way of westerns and biblical films and your "prediction" will finally be correct.

 

[Ironhold]

Your prediction reminds me of something JL Collins, keep talking about the coming reckoning periodically. Eventually superhero films will go the way of westerns and biblical films and your "prediction" will finally be correct.

Let's look at the situation with IDW.

IDW's debt is the result of a one-two punch.

The first hit came when they spent far too much money attempting to self-finance production of a pilot episode of a TV series based on one of their in-house properties. The deal they *thought* they had wasn't as solid as they believed, and so they had to eat the cost.

The second hit came when the changes in the tax laws meant that they got hit with a massive tax bill they weren't expecting.

Now, IDW has a *lot* of popular licenses going. Transformers. Sonic The Hedgehog. My Little Pony. And so on. One would think that it would simply be a matter of allowing what by all rights should be strong book sales to allow them to finance their debt.

Except...

At one point, they had two G. I. Joe books.

One of them, a direct continuation of the classic 1980s title, is being written by Larry Hama himself, the guy who did most of the writing back in the day. Hama... has a bad habit of going off into the weeds when left to his own devices, and so his run's been met with a mixed reception.

The other book was a direct tie-in to their other licensed Hasbro properties, and so should have been receiving a major boost from all of the others since Transformers was still a hit. Problem was, in due time the writing duties were given over to a man named Aubrey Sitterson. Just as a new manager may be quick to modify or overturn outright policies put in place by previous managers so as to make their mark on a company, Sitterson promptly threw quite a bit out the window in order to redo things his way.

Two characters who had been consistently depicted as heterosexual were suddenly pushed off into a homosexual relationship.

The established leadership of the G. I. Joe team was all forced off to the side or even turned into villains so that a female character could take the helm.

Plot elements were hastily dropped so that his own plots could come to the fore.

Et cetra.

Sitterson even went so far as to rework the Hasbro-created character Salvo, a buff, bald, Caucasian anti-tank trooper dude with a fondness for edgy T-shirts (hey, it was 1990), into an obese Polynesian female.

Sitterson wasn't content to just force his changes onto everyone and everything. According to reports, when he wasn't busy working on the book he would troll some of the larger G. I. Joe fan websites and begin trolling anyone he saw who was critical of his work for any reason. In particular, he was quick to lash out at anyone who criticized the cover artwork for a particular issue; most people were calling out the abysmal quality of the artwork (such that a few characters depicted on it were almost unrecognizable), but because the cover was pushing a pro-homosexual angle he immediately declared all critics, regardless of reason for being critical, to be homophobes.

This came to a head on 9 / 11 / 17 when he *literally* took to social media to declare that as far as he was concerned only those people who were in New York City when 9/11 took place had any right to honor the occasion, and anyone else was just being selfish.

Cue the two biggest G. I. Joe fan sites declaring a 100% media blackout on all things IDW until such time as Sitterson was fired.

IDW hemmed and hawed on the matter, and so Papa Hasbro had to get out the switch. A behind-the-scenes deal was reached, and as part of it Sitterson was told to be on his best behavior.

That November he went on a 26-part Twitter rant in which he aired his personal political views for the masses, declared that there were times that writers had the moral duty to make major changes to existing works, and as part of it literally stated that the reason he so radically re-worked Salvo was because he felt that the Hasbro-original design had an "alt-right vibe" that needed to be "recontextualized".

If Hasbro had wanted to, this incident would have been grounds for them to revoke *all* of the licenses IDW held. In fact, rumors were circulating to the effect that Hasbro had laid that option on the table, and workers at the company had begged them not to. Either way, Sitterson was fired, his Joe book was immediately cancelled despite being in the middle of a story arc, and the controversy over the book caused sales for *all* Hasbro Shared Universe books to fall off a cliff; every single book, including Transformers, would be cancelled by the end of 2018 so that things could get a full reboot.

No, IDW did not learn a thing from the incident. Their rebooted Transformers book opened with the murder of a major fan-favorite character for the sake of shock value, while their rebooted second Joe book likewise shoved most of the fan favorite characters aside so that their in-house creation, a gay Vietnamese ex-delivery boy who signed up after Cobra kidnapped his lover, could have the starring role. Three guesses what sales are like on these two books.

Oh BTW, Sitterson's 9/11 remarks literally, immediately, and directly led to the formation of #comicsgate as we know it. When a D-list comic book reviewer on YouTube was erroneously credited by an industry publication as leading the effort against Sitterson when he merely broke the news, three comic industry professionals responded by plotting to have him arrested on false charges if the reviewer showed up at a specific comic book convention. Yeah...

 

[SummerMadness]

Let's look at the situation with IDW.

IDW's debt is the result of a one-two punch.

The first hit came when they spent far too much money attempting to self-finance production of a pilot episode of a TV series based on one of their in-house properties. The deal they *thought* they had wasn't as solid as they believed, and so they had to eat the cost.

The second hit came when the changes in the tax laws meant that they got hit with a massive tax bill they weren't expecting.

Now, IDW has a *lot* of popular licenses going. Transformers. Sonic The Hedgehog. My Little Pony. And so on. One would think that it would simply be a matter of allowing what by all rights should be strong book sales to allow them to finance their debt.

Except...

At one point, they had two G. I. Joe books.

One of them, a direct continuation of the classic 1980s title, is being written by Larry Hama himself, the guy who did most of the writing back in the day. Hama... has a bad habit of going off into the weeds when left to his own devices, and so his run's been met with a mixed reception.

The other book was a direct tie-in to their other licensed Hasbro properties, and so should have been receiving a major boost from all of the others since Transformers was still a hit. Problem was, in due time the writing duties were given over to a man named Aubrey Sitterson. Just as a new manager may be quick to modify or overturn outright policies put in place by previous managers so as to make their mark on a company, Sitterson promptly threw quite a bit out the window in order to redo things his way.

Two characters who had been consistently depicted as heterosexual were suddenly pushed off into a homosexual relationship.

The established leadership of the G. I. Joe team was all forced off to the side or even turned into villains so that a female character could take the helm.

Plot elements were hastily dropped so that his own plots could come to the fore.

Et cetra.

Sitterson even went so far as to rework the Hasbro-created character Salvo, a buff, bald, Caucasian anti-tank trooper dude with a fondness for edgy T-shirts (hey, it was 1990), into an obese Polynesian female.

Sitterson wasn't content to just force his changes onto everyone and everything. According to reports, when he wasn't busy working on the book he would troll some of the larger G. I. Joe fan websites and begin trolling anyone he saw who was critical of his work for any reason. In particular, he was quick to lash out at anyone who criticized the cover artwork for a particular issue; most people were calling out the abysmal quality of the artwork (such that a few characters depicted on it were almost unrecognizable), but because the cover was pushing a pro-homosexual angle he immediately declared all critics, regardless of reason for being critical, to be homophobes.

This came to a head on 9 / 11 / 17 when he *literally* took to social media to declare that as far as he was concerned only those people who were in New York City when 9/11 took place had any right to honor the occasion, and anyone else was just being selfish.

Cue the two biggest G. I. Joe fan sites declaring a 100% media blackout on all things IDW until such time as Sitterson was fired.

IDW hemmed and hawed on the matter, and so Papa Hasbro had to get out the switch. A behind-the-scenes deal was reached, and as part of it Sitterson was told to be on his best behavior.

That November he went on a 26-part Twitter rant in which he aired his personal political views for the masses, declared that there were times that writers had the moral duty to make major changes to existing works, and as part of it literally stated that the reason he so radically re-worked Salvo was because he felt that the Hasbro-original design had an "alt-right vibe" that needed to be "recontextualized".

If Hasbro had wanted to, this incident would have been grounds for them to revoke *all* of the licenses IDW held. In fact, rumors were circulating to the effect that Hasbro had laid that option on the table, and workers at the company had begged them not to. Either way, Sitterson was fired, his Joe book was immediately cancelled despite being in the middle of a story arc, and the controversy over the book caused sales for *all* Hasbro Shared Universe books to fall off a cliff; every single book, including Transformers, would be cancelled by the end of 2018 so that things could get a full reboot.

No, IDW did not learn a thing from the incident. Their rebooted Transformers book opened with the murder of a major fan-favorite character for the sake of shock value, while their rebooted second Joe book likewise shoved most of the fan favorite characters aside so that their in-house creation, a gay Vietnamese ex-delivery boy who signed up after Cobra kidnapped his lover, could have the starring role. Three guesses what sales are like on these two books.

Oh BTW, Sitterson's 9/11 remarks literally, immediately, and directly led to the formation of #comicsgate as we know it. When a D-list comic book reviewer on YouTube was erroneously credited by an industry publication as leading the effort against Sitterson when he merely broke the news, three comic industry professionals responded by plotting to have him arrested on false charges if the reviewer showed up at a specific comic book convention. Yeah...

This post doesn't even relate to what I posted, but okay.

It appears to be the usual anger about racial minorities, women, homosexuals, transgender people, etc. Their presence in comics is bad and the argument will be that as comic sales decrease, it is because of this as opposed to the real reason for the decline, technology.

 

[Ana the Ist]

It appears to be the usual anger about racial minorities, women, homosexuals, transgender people, etc..

That...or people needlessly injecting their political views into what was an otherwise entertaining property.

See the Ghostbusters reboot, the recent Terminator, and the last Star Wars film for other examples.

 

[Ironhold]

That...or people needlessly injecting their political views into what was an otherwise entertaining property.

See the Ghostbusters reboot, the recent Terminator, and the last Star Wars film for other examples.

This.

Sitterson decided that the best way to claim "ownership" of the book was to completely redo everything to his personal standards, and openly picked fights with anyone who didn't like it.

It didn't matter that he was violating continuity or that none of his changes made sense in context.

It didn't matter that his changes led to the book hemorrhaging sales.

It didn't even matter that the owner of the IP told him to knock it off because he was damaging the integrity of the brand.

He had to have it his way, and the company is pretty well dead now because of it.

It's this kind of arrogance that has infected so much of the entertainment industry: we have creative talents who would rather the world burn down around them than admit that their ideas and concepts aren't popular with the general public.

**

And for the record, #comicsgate as a movement is more "diverse" than some comic book publishers these days. You can readily find prominent members who are female, LGBT, racial minorities, and so on.

 

[Ironhold]

This post doesn't even relate to what I posted, but okay.

It appears to be the usual anger about racial minorities, women, homosexuals, transgender people, etc. Their presence in comics is bad and the argument will be that as comic sales decrease, it is because of this as opposed to the real reason for the decline, technology.

"How well can you describe your character without referring to their gender, race, LGBT status, religion, or any other such category membership, pronouns excluded?"

This is the standard I apply to my own characters in order to try and determine how well-rounded they are. The harder it is, the more critical the category membership is to explaining who they are and so the more work I need to do in developing them to compensate.

It's depressing how many comic book characters I've seen lately that don't pass muster under this metric.

 

[Ada Lovelace]

2019 was a rocky year for superheroes — until 'Watchmen' raised the bar for the genre


An amazing series.

My brother absolutely loves this show, and so I watched a bit of it with him over Thanksgiving break but not attentively enough to do it justice because I was editing a paper. Once this quarter is over and I can breathe again I'll watch it properly.

The opening scene was magnificent. Heartbreaking and horrifying because it was based on history, but from a cinematic perspective amazing. The show kept captivating my ears because of its soundtrack. It's actually what I'm listening to right now on Spotify. This is the song I'm currently obsessed with:

 

[SummerMadness]

"How well can you describe your character without referring to their gender, race, LGBT status, religion, or any other such category membership, pronouns excluded?"

This is the standard I apply to my own characters in order to try and determine how well-rounded they are. The harder it is, the more critical the category membership is to explaining who they are and so the more work I need to do in developing them to compensate.

It's depressing how many comic book characters I've seen lately that don't pass muster under this metric.

Since you do not experience systemic, institutional, and daily discrimination based on your gender, race, LGBT status, religion, etc., it's understandable that you don't understand the characters. However, for many of the people in those groups, they strongly identify and appreciate the portrayal of these characters. What you're calling for is ignoring history and also show a strong amount of hypocrisy. You sound mad that a film doesn't promote you and people that look like you anymore, ignoring the fact that film has promoted your gender, race, sexual orientation and religion for decades, but now dislike that when it occurs for other groups. How many films have been released with a male-female love story? How many movies ends with a man kissing a woman? If you're suddenly up in arms that a gay character emerges, that shows some fragility on your part.

 

[durangodawood]

"How well can you describe your character without referring to their gender, race, LGBT status, religion, or any other such category membership, pronouns excluded?"

This is the standard I apply to my own characters in order to try and determine how well-rounded they are. The harder it is, the more critical the category membership is to explaining who they are and so the more work I need to do in developing them to compensate.

It's depressing how many comic book characters I've seen lately that don't pass muster under this metric.

Ah the issues you can avoid when youre a norm among norms!

 

[Ironhold]

Since you do not experience systemic, institutional, and daily discrimination based on your gender, race, LGBT status, religion, etc.,

I've had death threats leveled against me because of my religion, and the area I live in has had some toxic ministers in the past who saw nothing wrong with circulating "hate" literature.

So you might want to try that again...

 

[Ironhold]

Ah the issues you can avoid when youre a norm among norms!

"As a kid, he lived in the bad part of town and so soon wound up involved in a gang. One day he realized this life was taking him nowhere, and so he joined the Army to get out of there. He became a Ranger, led his own special forces team in Vietnam, and is now aide to a general." -> Stalker

"As a child he wanted to be a chef, but his family didn't have the money to send him to cooking school. An Army recruiter convinced him that the Army could teach him to cook, but once he was there he discovered that military cooking methods were so crude he wanted no part of it; instead, he took the first transfer he could get - .50 machine gun operator training - and decided to use his G.I. Bill benefits to pay for proper training. Turns out that his great stature proved quite the advantage in handling such a large weapon, and now he's making the best of a wonky situation." -> Roadblock

"He was born and raised in a town in South Texas, where the heat was so burdensome that he spent his allowance on buying himself an air conditioner for his bedroom rather than a bike or other traditional kid wants. When he learned that the military maintained posts throughout the Arctic, he immediately signed up and specifically requested arctic combat training to increase the odds of his being sent there. Since then, he's become master of the terrain." -> Iceberg

All of the characters are African-American members of the G. I. Joe team. Their profiles were written by Larry Hama, who is mixed-race. As you can see, all three are well-rounded characters with solid motivations whose lives aren't defined solely by the color of their skin.

Note that Roadblock's early appearances in the cartoon were so incredibly popular that he became one of the "face" characters for the series, with one toy or another being available for a cumulative 9 years of the 1980s series' 13 year run.

 

[durangodawood]

"As a kid, he lived in the bad part of town and so soon wound up involved in a gang. One day he realized this life was taking him nowhere, and so he joined the Army to get out of there. He became a Ranger, led his own special forces team in Vietnam, and is now aide to a general." -> Stalker

"As a child he wanted to be a chef, but his family didn't have the money to send him to cooking school. An Army recruiter convinced him that the Army could teach him to cook, but once he was there he discovered that military cooking methods were so crude he wanted no part of it; instead, he took the first transfer he could get - .50 machine gun operator training - and decided to use his G.I. Bill benefits to pay for proper training. Turns out that his great stature proved quite the advantage in handling such a large weapon, and now he's making the best of a wonky situation." -> Roadblock

"He was born and raised in a town in South Texas, where the heat was so burdensome that he spent his allowance on buying himself an air conditioner for his bedroom rather than a bike or other traditional kid wants. When he learned that the military maintained posts throughout the Arctic, he immediately signed up and specifically requested arctic combat training to increase the odds of his being sent there. Since then, he's become master of the terrain." -> Iceberg

All of the characters are African-American members of the G. I. Joe team. Their profiles were written by Larry Hama, who is mixed-race. As you can see, all three are well-rounded characters with solid motivations whose lives aren't defined solely by the color of their skin.

Note that Roadblock's early appearances in the cartoon were so incredibly popular that he became one of the "face" characters for the series, with one toy or another being available for a cumulative 9 years of the 1980s series' 13 year run.

My goodness I would never be interested in a characters who are defined "solely by the color of their skin". But I find it hard to imagine that the black small town Texas character would not find being black in that situation very formative. It almost seems fake to imagine its not. Likewise it would be fake to have a character who only defined by identity matters, as you note.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Ah the issues you can avoid when youre a norm among norms!

Wow.

If the most interesting thing about a character is that they are fat, gay, non-white, gender-fluids, female, etc....then perhaps the character isn't interesting. If these things truly don't matter, then building an identity around them makes a character boring.

 

[Ana the Ist]

But I find it hard to imagine that the black small town Texas character would not find being black in that situation very formative. It almost seems fake to imagine its not.

Why?