Tom Spurgeon hits the LA Times with an opinion piece of Marvel’s second tier heroes:
From the moment in 1998 that Wesley Snipes slipped into Kevlar and fake fangs to play vampire hunter Blade, Marvel has experienced its own startling transformation. A king of the comic book stores so flustered by Hollywood that its best movie deals once involved a talking duck (1986’s “Howard the Duck”) and Dolph Lundgren (1989’s “The Punisher”), Marvel turned around with a string of punching-and-pathos popcorn pictures (including the “X-Men” franchise and “Ghost Rider”) that have so far grossed more than $2.3 billion. But the company’s next move — a mopping-up operation run mainly by second-tier players — is the kind of no-guarantees cliffhanger that could make Stan Lee, Marvel chairman emeritus, exclaim, “Read on, MacDuff!”
Aside: only in LA could Marvel’s upcoming film slate make the OpEd page.
Freudian slip or spell-check error: “Marvel’s upcoming film stale” instead of “upcoming film slate?”
interesting….interesting…..
Holy crap! A newspaper article about comics that didn’t lead with “Bif! Pow!” — I’m frankly stunned.
The characters that appeal to comic fans don’t always appeal to the general public, and vice versa. You’d think the success of BLADE would have Marvel mining the so-called second-tier long ago.