jenisboxed:

khajida:

Some people (thefwoosh.com) are apparently mad that in the 616 (Main) Marvel Universe, Nick Fury’s son, Marcus Johnson, now looks very similar to the Ultimate and Movie-verse Nick Fury.  

This was obviously done to catch the eye of new readers who are curious about the comics and are coming in fresh off the movie.

I don’t understand why bringing in new readers to comics is a bad thing.  

I don’t understand why having an African-American character featured prominently in a major comic book is a bad thing.  What, are there “enough” black characters in comics?  They taking away all the good superhero jobs?  

I don’t think I really need to elaborate on that anymore.  If either of these things bother you, there is something wrong with you. 

Comics are supposed to be fun and enjoyable.  

If this is the kind of thing that upsets you, stop reading comics.  Just stop.  Just get out.  Your negativity is putting a damper on it for the rest of us.        

I’m breaking my tumblr-hiatus again, because I came across this post and would like to respond to it.

While I don’t want to to belittle your feelings, it sounds like you haven’t actually paid attention to the specifics of complaintsabout Battle Scars.

As far as I’m aware, the trouble is certainly not at all having a black character play a major role - in fact, I’ve heard nothing but nice things said about the fact that a new black character exists and has potential to be part of big stories.

Having accessible ‘hooks’ for new readers is not a problem at all. Where I’ve been seeing Marvel fans have a problem is actually in regards to the amount of effort and care being put into making the Marvel canon understandable for new readers. Let’s look at Marcus Johnson/Fury Jr.: as a character, he has only existed for a few months and has so far had extremely lacking development in terms of personality or motivations, and yet readers are apparently supposed to automatically accept him as this big important deal, as if no continuity or character mythos existed whatsoever before 2006. It is on the second-last page of the last issue of the Battle Scars miniseries that it is suddenly decided, “oh hey, you’re Nick Fury now!” - it’s poorly-written and an incredibly awkward shove-in, even if Fury having random illegitimate children everywhere is plausible. The spirit of the complaints is that INSTEAD of allowing new readers to immerse themselves and explore the Marvel universe (both Ultimates and 616), the MU is being dumbed down with no guarantee of those new consumers being permanent or long-term. It takes all of 30 seconds to explain that Ultimates and 616 are different, separate, but equally-interesting strands of continuity, from which the Cinematic Universe cherry-picks various details to make concise plots for films. Ultimates and 616 Fury have many factors that make them extremely different characters, so the thing is, having a lookalike of Ult!Fury be inserted into 616 continuity comes across like incredibly arbitrary and lazy advertising for movie-verse. Advertising is fine. Arbitrary and lazy, not so much.

Now unfortunately, there are people out there saying shit like, “I’m mad because a random black character took over my precious whiteboy’s role!” In my opinion, if Fury (either version of him) were real, he would look down at those people for their prejudices. The criticisms that I’ve been aware of have been more to the exent of, “I’m mad because fusing 616 and Ultimates for plot is lazy storytelling, and it means that important plot points with characters I like might be ignored”. It’s important to remember that really, Ults and 616 are quite different, so in some cases, even if you’re seeing a lot of one version of the character, you still wanna know what’s going to happen on ‘the other side’.

Honestly, I’m a gigantic fan of Nick Fury in any iteration and I would really appreciate it if people would stop shoving these half-baked political debates all over the place.