Everyone Else Chipped In, So. . .

Disney bought Marvel. I really want to make a joke here about how Bendis will soon turn the Magic Kingdom into the Noir Neighborhood, 'cause why figure out how write magic well when you can just dump it in favor of gritty crime stuff, but I suppose that's assigning power to the wrong side.

Economics isn't an area I know particularly much about so I can't really assess what this means for Marvel Comics, and what it means for Disney doesn't matter terribly much to me. I've read that Disney may barely acknowledge Marvel even publishes comics, or that they'll acknolwedge them but not interfere, like how they leave Pixar alone, or that they'll only butt out if Marvel's really successful, or that they're going to be heavy-handed and we should expect to see the effects of their ownership right away. A full spectrum of speculation, really. Perhaps we could form up armies under each banner and do battle, with each faction assigned a different color. Then all the senior citizens will get cranky because we're distrubing their naps, and march out to attack us all.

I've lost the thread again.

I wonder if this would lead to greater creativity in terms of the comics Marvel releases. I'm guessing they'll have some sort of financial support from the Disney corporation, so they could afford to take more chances on comic projects, because even if it doesn't sell well, I don't think it would be such a huge financial loss as to hurt Disney. Not as long as they can pump out the Spidey merchandise. So it could be freeing, because there'd be a greater buffer if you failed than there was before. I know Marvel made most of its revenue from merchandise and movies and such, but I'd think they were still showing less profit than Disney, so they still might have stuck more frequently to things they felt had a good chance of succeeding. So maybe a bigger attempt to revive certain areas (for some reason I thought of western comics), or aiming more comics for younger audiences (though they've stripped down the Marvel Adventures line lately), or trying some other kinds of stories that I'm not even thinking of.

I suppose it's more likely Disney would add another level of people investigating what projects are being proposed, with possibly a different set of criteria, which might constrain things even further. And there's always the possibility there won't be any changes at all. I don't know how the probabilities of those three compare to one another.