While taking a break working on yet another secret doomsday weapon for a certain supervillain who will remain nameless, I’ve had some time to watch videos on YouTube. Turns out people are pissed at SJWs, also known as Social Justice Warriors who’ve taken over Marvel comics.

Critics have made points claiming that these people are using Marvel to promote a political and social agenda using comics. They’re taking all the original characters and replacing them with anything but white males.

I have to say, what I’ve seen is pretty disturbing. Whatever social agenda these people think they’re enacting, they’re having the opposite effect and killing off the publishing wing of Marvel and could wipe out the comics industry as a whole.

Having worked with my fair share of supervillains, I have to say, I hate bullies. By trying to ram through an agenda and browbeat and berate critics of said agenda, these writers and editors at Marvel are being the very thing they claim to oppose; bullies.

I could speculate what makes these people tick. I suspect they believe they’re fighting a good fight and working to create a better world. (If I had a dollar every time I’ve heard a supervillain say that…)

Here’s the core of the problem: They’re taking a beloved comics publishing company and using it as a tool to promote an agenda. That’s BAD BUSINESS!!

Marvel has been publishing comics for a long time. What made Marvel work is they created characters that were authentic. After defeating a villain, the heroes would go back to their lives and worry about things real people worried about; paying bills, who’d they’d date, family squabbles, debates about what the heck a wheat cake is, and so on.

This SJW batch of hacks has no clue about the history or backstory of characters in the Marvel canon. Marvel has been including diverse characters for some time. It’s a comic company that’s published a wide variety of characters. The need to diversify is a cover for something else.

Case in point: Storm. When I was first reading comics as a kid, I loved the X-Men. One of my favorite characters was Storm.  I loved her punk rock look, she was tough, but also human. She took on being leader of the X-Men for a period of time and we got into her character’s worries and concerns about being a leader. By getting into the head of the character, readers got to know her and sympathize with her.

That’s good writing. That’s authentic. Sure it’s fiction, but getting to what makes a character tick is what good writing is about. Getting readers to feel concern for characters is an aspect of a good writer. There’s a reason Chris Claremont was on the X-Men books for years.

What these SJWs are doing is pandering. They’re writing down to groups that have been put down upon one way or another historically in America. They’re creating these Mary Sue characters and trying to jam them down people’s throats. Fans be damned, you’re getting these new versions of your historically favorite characters like it or not.

Ideally, the point of social justice is to make sure nobody’s being put down, attacked, berated, or demeaned simply because they’re different or not in the mainstream. Sure, we all want a hero to reflect an idealized sense of who we are. However, writing to try to please target groups while ignoring the base of your fans (customers), is bad business and inauthentic. It’s terrible writing and character creation.

I’d wager most comic fans would be open to reading about characters not like themselves so long as those characters remain true to beliefs that comics fans have or at least to see the character’s vulnerabilities which make them human and believable.  There’s many things readers can learn from characters not like them, and in the process just might open their minds to a new way of seeing the world. Make the characters relatable and readers will come back and enjoy stories. It doesn’t matter if you create a transgender, transcendental, Transylvanian attacking a supervillain’s moon base, as long as you write a character you believe in who rings true to the reader.

Someday, I’d like to return to saying, “Make mine, Marvel.”