An Open Letter to Marvel Comics, by Genevieve Kong

Marvel is like a bad boyfriend. The dating sucks, the break-up is messy, none of your friends understood what you had together, and it may have given you a UTI.

Genevieve Kong is an angry woman.  She’s written before.  She will write again.  She would like to be your friend, but she’d rather be your commander in chief.  She is not on this site for dating, romance, or networking.  Her turn-ons are irrelevant to this conversation.  And no, she will not ignore that dick thing you did that time.

You better fix it the fuck right now Joe Quesada or Axel Alonso or whoever the hell makes these sorts of decisions.

You know what I’m talking about.  I’ve given you years to undonkeyshit the Spider-Man world by putting Mary Jane and Peter back in wedded blitz.  Instead, you’ve continued trying to tell the stories you couldn’t tell with a married Peter Parker which, near as I can, could have been told just fine.  Load the script in MS Word then replace every instance of “Carlie’s upset because Peter put himself in danger” with “MJ’s upset that her husband could die”, then change “cop” to “model”.  See how easy it is?

Don’t even get me started on Carlie.  You may think it’s cutesy cool to Mary Sue your daughter, or at least name your cool new character after her, but you’re just setting yourself up for heartache in a couple of years when some writer decides to beat and kill her.  In a couple of years you’re going to have even more in common with Jim Shooter than you do now, so one day when you’re commiserating, ask him what it was like when baby Starbrand killed Debbie the Duck.

Don’t mistake what I’m saying.  I totally get that while you were watching the Mets wash out, your writers screwed up a whole bunch of things, like making Spider-Man a magic demon god or whatever the hell he was supposed to be. I understand that you needed some cheap thrills like unmasking Spider-Man to get USA Today to cover your events.  I’ll even forgive you for trying to shoe-horn character elements every time a filmmaker decides that Mystique should have scales, Xavier likes watching his beefcakes wear leather and Spider-Man should have organic webshooters because the thought of a slacker boy genius was too impossible for Hollywood.

Now you’re stuck with it.  It’s perfectly fine to shit all over the work previous administrations put into building the sandbox you’re watching over, but when you invite someone over to come play and they leave a turd you’re going to keep on playing and pretend it doesn’t stink.

But you’re damn adults in charge of one of the two companies  that somehow managed to alienate hundreds of thousands of readers so badly, a bestseller is going to have a readership half that of Sludge.  Do you remember Sludge?  He’s one of the army of properties suffocating in the Marvel vault. 

Between Marvel and DC, you guys have embarked on a campaign of institutional suicide so successful, an iPad app about birds in space is more of a cultural milestone than anything you’ve put out in the past 20 years.  Yeah I’m counting Origin. 

You want to know how irrelevant you are?  Disney picked you second in their game of IP dodgeball.  They thought a failed comic book company was a better bet than your flabby, uncoordinated, insecure and clumsy organization.  They looked at everything you had to offer and said “I’ll take the one that exploded in a huge public shitstorm.”  Yeah, Crossgen was cheaper than Marvel, but Disney’s the creepy rich guy that just wants you for your body.  He doesn’t care if it costs him a night of fine dining at McDonalds or a diamond necklace.  He just wants to gets his hands on what he wants.

And how do you respond to that?  What does Marvel do when they’ve spent the better part of two decades chasing away everyone that buys their books?  They keep pissing all over the handful of masochists and pain pigs that haven’t had enough of this S&M adventure.  No matter how many times you whip us with Ultimatum or Doomwar or World War Hulks or Deadpool Corps or Chaos War, you scare off a few of the thin-skinned readers.  It takes a hardcore person to come back for more after those beatings.

One More Day?  That was the beating that crossed the line.  That wasn’t a pain-before-pleasure thing like the whole Speedball/Penance storyline.  It was just you being an abusive dick.

You used to apologize.  And even when you didn’t apologize, you’d sometimes do something nice to make me forget.  Hey, let’s forget that we turned Runaways into such a trainwreck they’ve been shelved long-term, but here’s a guest appearance in Avengers Academy.

But OMD?  You won’t even admit you may have made a mistake. You just shrug your shoulders and say “hey, I don’t hear any of these other ladies bitching about it”.

100 percent of all experts, and 95 percent of all non-experts, agree that in every business, everywhere, throughout time, you should try to make your customers happy.  It costs more money to make a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Word of mouth is vital to success but you not only welcome negative feedback, you strive for it and act like pissing fans off was your whole goal.  Do you honestly not see how insulting it is every time you shoe-horn a knee-jerk change onto characters we know and love because you operate on some flawed logic that if you change the comic to match the movie, someone who doesn’t buy your books might be interested?  When you’re in a relationship with someone, they understand that you’re going to grow and change, but don’t expect them to be happy when you tell them you’ve decided to get a tattoo to impress the hot chick that works at Starbucks and don’t dismiss their complaints and concerns as whining or a “sense of entitlement.”

You want to still be friends, or at least not have me tell all my friends about the fucked up shit you’re into?  Then maybe you shouldn’t go on the internet when we break up and tell everyone how happy you are with the new girlfriends, or that we broke up because it’s my time of the month and we’ll be back together as soon as I’m done being hormonal.  I stopped buying your books, but since I’m a girl I doubt my purchases ever mattered to you.