Anghus Houvouras on the perils of corporate synergy…
I have an aversion to corporate synergy, and this week I find myself cringing at a lot of media streaming across my screen.
Disney-owned Marvel Comics made a announcement that Thor would swap genders later this year ditching his fifty year old penis for a shiny new vagina. They decided this announcement would be made on the ABC show The View (also owned by Disney) which offers a female perspective on the news of the day. Of course, this is a gimmick to get people talking about Thor who has lacked the newsworthiness of his peers. This isn’t the first time Thor has been something other than a swarthy Norwegian, but it’s the most cloying type of comic book sales gimmick being passed off as some kind of win for women… or something.
I have zero issue with a female Thor, but the way it was announced feels so horribly disingenuous. You can almost hear the PING of the light bulb popping over the executive’s head as they came up with this idea.
“Thor’s going to be a woman? We need to announce it on that show we have that all the ladies watch!”
Doesn’t that just make you cringe? This painful attempt at making a sales gimmick like this some kind of cultural event? This blissful lack of awareness would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. By this logic, the announcement of a black Captain America might be just as awful. Are they going to make the announcement that the new Captain America is going to be black on BET? Are they going to have Samuel Jackson make the announcement at Comic-Con? How about wheel out Tyler Perry as Madea to let everyone know?
In their attempts to find synergistic venues to make these announcements, they’re actually showing how little they understand their audience. The real story will be the day and age when Thor being female and Captain America being black doesn’t warrant some silly publicity stunt announcement. It will simply be another chapter of a well told story.
It also just another example of how far comic books have descended into cheap events to lure in readers. By year’s end, Marvel will have killed Wolverine, turned Thor into a lady, and introduced a new black Captain America. These are the cheap stunts that I thought the industry had turned away from in favor of good storytelling, but Marvel is churning out gimmick stories and event comics like their publishing future depends on it. This is Marvel regressing back into the clone saga and ‘Capwolf’.
It’s unfortunate that this kind of press whoring potentially detracts from the potential strength of the stories being told. And as all comic readers are aware, these changes will last until interest is piqued before the reset button is hit and the status quo is restored.
I wish these kind of developments could be seen as something other than a quick cash grab for titles in need of a sales bump. But the sheer volume of gimmicky stories Marvel is churning out combined with the cringe-worthy announcements on The View seem to indicate otherwise.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
Originally published July 17, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
