New Direction Same as the Old Direction

In an effort to further destroy the struggling market for anglophile comics it seems the new bigs over at Marvel Comics have decided that kid friendly is the way to go with their comic books, what with this return to good old-fashioned do as you are told morals that our country is apparently yearning to return to [what with frightful breasts being shown on the television and all].

The exceptions to this rule are looking to be the Marvel Knights and Max lines, which I would assume are going to be treated as something like teen and adult imprints respectively.

They've already dropped Igor Kordey from Excalibur because his style just isn't what they are looking for.

It seems that they want to return to the old fashioned super-hero costume look, and return to simple moral stories without any real emphasis on thought or content. The house of ideas has officially decided that they are to return to the old ideas.

There are also rumblings that they're wanting to return to the 90s style promotional covers with super-rare variant this and chromo-that, because, you know, the collector's are where the money really is, as the 90s showed. Here, they've let the so-called 'readers' dominate the market for a little while, and what do they get? Drops in sales, and critical acclaim. You can't build an audience with critical acclaim, now can you?

Not when you can't get that much critical acclaim with Chuck Austen writing half your books.

I have an idea for them. Here's what they can do to drive down the cost of all this hooptedoodle. What you do is, you hire artists to just draw big splash pages as covers. All the variant's you can imagine in all the different colors. Then you fire all the writers and editors and what-not, all the useless people. You take all those issues of Darkhawk and whatever else you have laying around over at vault-marvel and you print up new covers with all those drawings you had the guys do.

Then you just put the new covers over the old ones.

Now here's the really good part.

You seal this in one of those slab-plastic containers and grade the book really highly, but with the constraint that if the slab is opened [you could just as easily make it unopenable] all the value of the book is lost. Maybe it could burst into flames or turn immediately to ash or something.

Don't let anyone in on what is actually in the issues, because that would spoil everything.

Now sell those puppies and watch the dollar's fly in.

It's a win-win for everybody.

I think the comics world would have been better off if Marvel had just closed up shop and sold all of its holdings when they filed for bankruptcy. They obviously don't know what they want, and don't understand that the reason for flagging sales and general apathy towards mainstream comics is that they've lost hold of the market and most people just don't care anymore.

Why should they care, comics are just for kids anyway.