Mighty Marvel Monday: The End of March Madness

Hey, friends. It’s been a bad week for me, but it hasn’t been a completely awful week for Marvel, so I suppose that’s something.

Let’s start off with something interesting, shall we? Like these pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor during filming for Doctor Strange that were tweeted out.

I still have many reservations about this film, but the caliber of acting was never one of them. Cumberbatch looks the part fantastically well even if he is still younger than the Strange I tend to imagine. But those costumes do look awfully generically Asian-inspired, for two characters who aren’t Asian.

And that segues into the next section – which is this article from Arthur Chu at The Daily Beast. The entire article (which does contain spoilers for this season of Daredevil) is fantastic, addressing large-scale systemic problems and also microaggressions that illustrate just how deep Marvel’s problems are when it comes to representing Asian people and Asian cultures. These paragraphs, however, cuts to the heart of my concern:

Elektra is a hot chick who’s there as a love interest for a white guy main character to lust after, and for the audience to lust after by extension in various sex scenes and half-naked fight scenes. Danny Rand is a guy, and therefore of less interest to fetishists, thanks to the racial preference hierarchy that says Asian women get to be sex objects and Asian men get to be invisible.

The worst thing about this is that the producers of Daredevil actually knew this dynamic existed. […] The producers know that making Daredevil’s femme fatale a sexy ninja girl from the Orient would be playing directly into the preferences of a certain genus of skeevy nerd. They knew it would be, as the kids say these days, a bad look. They poked fun at themselves for doing it. But they did it anyway.

It’s this consciousness of the problem that is the most worrying. And with the recent casting news that Jessica Henwick will be playing Colleen Wing in Netflix’s Iron Fist, it’s unclear if Marvel is even aware that their description of Colleen as  “A martial arts expert running her own dojo, Colleen will serve as an invaluable ally to Iron Fist, aka Danny Rand (Finn Jones), as he returns to his life in New York” sets her up to be another victim of Trinity Syndrome – something they already did to Wasp in the first Ant-Man movie.

Making jokes about racist stereotypes doesn’t make your own racist stereotypes less racist. It just makes you look like more of an asshole. And, as Chu points out, the second season of Daredevil proves that Marvel knows how to thoughtfully integrate a stereotype-plagued culture into their narrative without resorting to stereotypes:

[…] even with the stereotypes on display, the Irish mobsters are normal human beings. They aren’t being manipulated by an evil cult of green-jacketed leprechauns on a mystical quest to find the Spear of Lugh. They fight with guns, as opposed to eschewing firearms in favor of the noble art of the shillelagh.

That was too good not to excerpt. And I hope it illustrates the point. Do better, Marvel.

Moving on to comics, this week is an important week for Marvel Comics. Black Panther #1 is finally hitting the shelves. In case you missed the preview pages posted a couple weeks ago on The Atlantic, here’s the link again.

But there’s been other interesting announcements coming from Team Comics of late. I’m still catching up on the C2E2 news, but if you recall the Vote Loki graphic from a few weeks ago, it turns out the idea was Tom King’s, who sadly now cannot see it through since having been signed to an exclusive DC contract, and I have to say that I have never been more irritated by exclusive contracts than right now.

Variant cover by Valerio Schiti, in which Sam Wilson is all of us.
Variant cover by Valerio Schiti, in which Sam Wilson is all of us.

And, then, of course, there’s more Civil War news. Marvel had a phone call press conference recently and revealed more information about the upcoming event, and you can read the liveblog of highlights here, and I don’t really have the time to process what’s happening right now, other than to say that the importance of Inhumans at the center of the conflict is a very interesting choice. At the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. roundtable at Wondercon, Clark Gregg and others were asked what relationship the tv show might have to the upcoming Captain America: Civil War, and Gregg’s response was to discuss the way Inhumans have divided the team, in some ways. It will be interesting to see how the storyline plays out in the comics differently than on TV.

But overall, I, for one, am feeling very rushed into a new event when I’m still trying to process Secret Wars and the fallout from that. More on that next week, provided nothing bad happens this coming week.

 

ICYMI

I have not one but TWO YouTube treats for you this week.

First, check out this very well done Hawkeye fan film, obviously inspired by the Fraction/Aja run, and starting not just Clint, but Kate, Lucky the Pizza Dog, and bonus Russians, bro!

There is so much this film gets right, but I have to mention that the actor who plays Clint is very whiny, when I feel like Clint’s not a whiner. The script itself is textually spot on, even if the actor is tonally wrong, and some of the shots are gorgeously Aja-inspired.

If that’s not enough happy to get you through your Monday, please also enjoy this clip of Tom Hiddleston-as-Loki giving a weather report on a local Chicago morning show.

 

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Kate Tanski

Kate Tanski

Recovering academic. Fangirl. Geek knitter.

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