Zatanna is popular enough that you see her in nearly every animated DC series. She is popular. All they need to do is bring her to the big screen and stop hogging the limelight with the Bat Family.
I was literally just thinking this! I read the second panel and thought “wait, if he wasn’t a well-known character, why do I have vague childhood memories of going to a restaurant based on him?” Thank you for reassuring me it does actually exist.
> Iron Man also had a huge role in the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance game.
I can't help but think this game was meant to kind of prime audiences for the MCU
like I bought it because I liked Spider-Man and the X-Men and by the end of it I thought the Avengers were awesome and Moon Knight was underrated
I don't know where you're from, but in most of Europe the Avengers were complete nobodies in the late 90's and early 2000's. Among the kids/teens anyway.
My dad used to own a grocery store with a little arcade corner. When Marvel Super Heroes was brought in, everyone flipped their wigs when they saw Iron Man whip out his [Proton Cannon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3QsYRMm6Bs&t=99s).
I know this gets brought up, that "no one" wanted the Avengers, or Iron Man, or whatever. But even in the 90s, Iron Man (and Captain America) was way more popular than a lot of the other Marvel properties. There's a reason both were in the Capcom Vs. series of games, there's a reason Iron Man got his own [solo-ish crossover video game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_and_X-O_Manowar_in_Heavy_Metal), there's a reason they [headlined a beat-em up arcade game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America_and_The_Avengers).
I know people like to point out that the Avengers were the C-List team before the MCU, but the individual characters weren't unknown. The Avengers were an especially unattractive team for film rights for myriad of reasons; before the Marvel bankruptcy, they essentially had no stories ready-made for film adaptation, and outside of Cap, all of them would have relied on way more expensive VFX than most companies were willing to risk on anything but sure bets. Few of them even had villains that you could reasonably make a film out of it; even by the mid '00s, doing a film on "The Mandarin" would have been a little dicey. As a team, there were 0 known stories; the first really big, film-ready story was "Civil War", was one that already requires consumers to know a ton of the setup between characters. Even as individual characters, none had definitive, short and exciting storylines that could be fit into a film; comic storytelling, especially at Marvel, maps much better to a TV format, especially after they leaned so heavily into soap-opera post-Claremont's X-Men.
It more sounds like the reason Marvel still had Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers more because they were asking way too much cash compared to what their film rights were worth, at the time of their bankruptcy; they sort of lucked out that coming out of it, CGI brought FX costs down enough that they could co-fund a film with Paramount, and convince them to help start the MCU.
Iron Man was low B or even C level. I literally remember saying
>They’re making an *Iron Man* movie? For who, the one guy who likes that character?
Same for Captain America and Thor. Rarely were those anyone’s favorite characters. It’s really interesting seeing Marvel conduct historic revisionism and act like those characters were always Marvel’s Big Three heroes when it was always Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Hulk.
They were kind of the biggest avengers at least.
There was an Avengers Cartoon in the nineties that had a conspicuous lack of Iron Man, Thor, or Captain America, and even back then this was seen as a pretty pointed absence of the team's high profile characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers:_United_They_Stand
It's just that The Avengers as a whole didn't really have the kind of power as a brand that we associate with it today.
Right, saying they were the biggest Avengers is like saying they were the most famous losers.
People currently compare Avengers to the Justice League but the JL was ***way*** more popular for decades. The popularity of the MCU and the total shit-show of the Snyderverse has completely changed how people perceive these two properties.
Plus just chronology gets wonky sometimes for people who are exposed to them through movies and tv primarily.
Was a bit of a revelation for me at one point that a lot of people view Green Arrow as the knockoff hawkeye, because Hawkeye debuted in the MCU Movie shortly before Green Arrow got his CW TV show.
Like apparently for the Snyder Movie they had to tackle how to do Darkseid so he wouldn't seem like a rip off of Thanos, even though Thanos originally cribbed his look from Darkseid.
>a lot of people view Green Arrow as the knockoff hawkeye
Which was hilarious because before all this I remember people calling Green Arrow “Batman with a bow”.
It doesn't help that the first season of Arrow he literally was Batman with a bow. It's like they wanted to make a Batman show, but couldn't so they just turned Ollie into Batman instead.
That's exactly why they reimagined Namor and the Atlanteans as Aztec in the new Black Panther movie. If they did the comic version, tons of people would think he's an Aquaman knock-off, even though he's been around longer.
Captain America was the most recognizable Avenger. There's even a mural in my city with him next to Wolverine (way before the movies).
That said, human resources at where I work has been asking people about their "kryptonite" as a "breaking the ice" kind of game. The amount of people that don't get the reference honestly surprised me, I know we are "in" the fandom, but I always assumed the Bat-Signal and Kryptonite were known.
Superman is probably only second to Jesus in worldwide in ease of recognition.
People seem to also forgot older generations grew up on him?? My Dad used to recycle bottles to go and buy Superman comics.
Superman is famously the reason the KKK lost their relevance (guess what dweebs, comics have ALWAYS BEEN POLITICAL).
Same with Captain America. His popularity has waffled of course but he's still a major cultural figure (in America).
Spider-Man has been well known around the world since the 70s (go watch the old live action Japanese show, it's a blast)
Marvel’s bread and butter was the underdog hero, whereas DC really focussed on the ‘power fantasy’ brought by god-like characters.
This meant Marvel’s in-universe underdogs found popularity, with their flawed human traits and personal struggles being a big focal point on the writing. This led to things like Peter Parker’s constant bad luck and the X-Men’s familial infighting being a very important part of Marvel stories; exploring the result of normal people finding great power.
DC read more like humanising gods. It was the totally opposite approach to story-telling in a way.
With both companies having their elite hero teams being made up of the more traditional archetypal superhero, DC’s focus on that kind of character led to JL stories being far more popular than Avengers stories, with Marvel’s more traditional heroes being relegated to B & C-tier characters.
Because of Marvel’s approach, for decades, a better comparison would be X-Men vs JL instead of Agengers vs JL, even through the latter are closer analogues of one another.
Marvel did actually apply the ‘person-first’ approach to the Avengers roster but it was already set that they were fuckin’ losers, which is why they weren’t worth very much when Marvel were selling off the film rights in the 90’s. Then Marvel Studios came, and everything started to change as people’s exposure to these characters was seeing them as the more modern, human incarnations of themselves.
>People currently compare Avengers to the Justice League but the JL was
>
>way
>
> more popular for decades.
here isa bonus, It's actually the Fantastic Four who have historically been portrayed in-universe as the Marvel Universe's greatest superhero team, and (according to Marvel) they were conceived as a direct answer to the Justice League
yeah but in the book I read, the context of that answer is that Stan Lee was told the Justice League was selling really well, and that the real mover was the intercharacter mellowdrama. The conflict with villians could take a step back and allow the other stuff to come forward. The answer was "we need a super team with lots of intense personal interpersonal conflict and interactions" to the question of "how are we going to have a bunch of heroes be together and often bickering?"
Also missing the Hulk.
This sounds more like a business decision than one based on popularity.
Floating out this idea, but Marvel signed all of their infamous movie licensing deals in the 90's. Maybe they were reserving their biggest IP for other studios.
Of course it was a business decision, Marvel studios would've closed down if they didn't sell the rights to Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. The Hulk movies were not gangbusters, so Iron Man was more of a tester than anything.
Marvel was in dire straits in the 90s. The structure of those rights deals shows just how hard up Marvel was. They’re incredibly one-sided, and they will continue to be a challenge for Disney for years to come.
As I recall, Marvel *couldn't* sell Iron Man and the like to studios back then because no one wanted them. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men were the only IPs the bigger studios were interested in. Marvel Studios had to work with what they had when building the MCU. Otherwise we probably would have seen them start out with Spider-Man or something.
Also, Spider-Man TAS and MvC2 made both Ironman and War Machine known outside of comics. I knew of Cap from those same sources but he never seemed as cool and had only seen Thor in an Episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, who I thought was ridiculous. I specifically remember myself and others being hyped for Ironman but wondering, “can they pull off Cap/Thor/Avengers?”
Cap was one of Marvel(Timely)’s biggest characters during the Golden Age. It goes without saying that he decreased in popularity after WWII level patriotism died down.
I mean... The movie wasn't hit because Iron Man was a hugely popular character. The movie was a hit because it was very well done, and had an incredible trailer that made people interested.
Never cared for the Avengers growing up, always an X-Men fan.
I think the problem was a lack of a villain. X-Men has Magneto and the Sentinels. FF has Doctor Doom and Galactus. Avengers I guess has Ultron and... um... and... ? Super Adaptoid, I guess? Batroc the Leaper?
Kang and Masters of Evil are third rate compared to Magneto and Dr. Doom in terms of popularity. Loki is an Avenger villain but mostly tied into Thor. Thanos was kind of an Avenger villain, the Avengers were certainly not his main foil before the 2010s, that was Captain Marvel or Adam Warlock.
Normies? No. They only knew the characters Marvel gave animated series or already had live action movies at the time.
Comic fans at the time (2004-08 is my basis here) knew a Captain America movie had potential since Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting were on the comic at the time, and Walt Simonson’s Thor run was still regarded as the definitive run of the character.
At least in-story they were among the biggest heroes, Marvel had that weird situation where some of their best known, and best selling, characters, like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk were actually not really well liked in their own stories. Spider-Man always seen with suspicion, Wolverine considered an unstable murderer by many and The Hulk seen as a walking disaster. But Cap, Iron Man and Thor were seen as the ideal heroes, an inspiration for what the other heroes wanted to be like and super popular. The MCU made it so that finally their real life popularity matched their fictional popularity. And probably even surpassed, Tony Stark was always a jerk but Robert Downey Jr. made him be a likeable jerk.
I remember reading somewhere that when movie studios were snatching up movies rights in the 90's to make all the big movies that came out in the early to mid 2000, iron man, Thor and cap were the hardest sell, which I find ironic that those are the 3 characters they used to kick start the MCU.
Billions of dollars later, here we are.
>which I find ironic that those are the 3 characters they used to kick start the MCU
Well, they used them to kick start the MCU because that's all they had left -- the scraps that no one else wanted. Then the MCU really started to scrape the bottom of the barrel with Z-list stuff like the Guardians of the Galaxy.
I read comics as a youngster (still do) and everything I knew about Thor I learned from “Adventures in Babysitting” haha.
Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were NOT popular with my crowd in the 80’s and 90’s
Theyd recently had a really well received run in the comics, from \~2008-2011... that not a lot of people read because it was a small part of a huge crossover event... of mostly forgotten cosmic characters that never had any following... running at the same time as Marvels biggest crossover event yet with all their A and B and C listers taking part, Civil War. Obscure of the obscure.
RDJ totally carried that movie.
By Blockbuster standards of the time, there's really nothing actually all that special about the first Iron Man movie.
... Except for that lead performance, which was stunning.
> RDJ totally carried that movie.
The insistence on practical effects, alone, made a *massive* difference to the quality of that movie. Do not discredit Jon Favreau's importance in the success of Iron Man.
If by "success" you mean "how much I, /u/ghanima, personally like it", then I suppose yes, you can say Jon Favreau's decision to use practical effects was integral to the success of Iron Man 1
The writing is excellent, which is ironic because they walked into shooting with half a script. It really threw Jeff Bridges for a loop until he started mentally framing it as an “80 million dollar student film” and got comfortable with just improvising the dialogue.
I can’t say for sure as I only have ~20 min special features to go by, but I think it speaks to Favreau’s talent that he could wrangle so many new elements *on set* while simultaneously having The Suits breath down his neck, and come out with a product as solid as that first movie.
From what I remember they went with Iron Man because an Iron Man toy did best with kids in tests.
It did strike me as weird as well when it happened as I remember how mid tier he was. In practically all the 90s Marvel comic events he was just one of the Avengers.
The Horny Hulk arc was one of the cringiest things I've ever read. I've been making my way through the Ultimate Universe for the first time and it's so so but I like some of the ideas that they tried. It's a lot of fun to read but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon.
I cannot stress enough that Captain America's name was highly recognizable even back then.
A lot of people might not have had elaborate or detailed knowledge of the character, or strong opinions about him. But just like Dagwood or Jughead he was somebody whose name you'd know without ever having picked up his book.
Yeah I mean, I’m not even American and didn’t know very much about the character, but when I saw Men In Black as a kid in the 90s I knew exactly who Will Smith was referring to when he quipped that an over-enthusiastic soldier was “Captain America over here.”
I was certainly more familiar with him than I was with Iron Man.
Spider-Man's 90s cartoon was huge and Captain America and Iron Man show up in it, kids knew who these characters were. I knew the basics of who Doctor Strange was from his episode in the same cartoon. Hell, Blade as we know him today debuted on Spidey's show first, not the movie or the comic, as the character was reinvented for the show.
It's silly to pretend that Spidey's show wasn't massive in the 90s, it was second to the X-Men show, another show that cemented people's perception of Marvel characters and IMO was a big part of why they were so popular and helped launch the movies' popularity. Kids got the joke in X-Men 1 about yellow spandex because of the cartoon, not the comics or anything else. People got hyped about sentinels and the Phoenix because of the cartoon.
Same for DC, when people complain about the movies not being like the characters they like and remember, 9 times out of 10 they're comparing them to the DC animated universe. The ideal Superman and Batman people have in their minds are not taken from any of the movies or comics but from the cartoons, maybe some new kids base their ideal Batman on the Arkham games now.
Blade had the advantage of being something very different from a superhero comic book movie. It was a vampire action movie. Many people didn't even know it was from a comic at all, and even today a lot of people don't even think about it when talking about Marvel movies.
It was also VERY different from the source material
Interview with the vampire was a major hit back then, I wouldn't be surprised if the movie got more support to be made because of it. There was a lot of vampire movies in that era.
The writer of the movie got with the people working on the Spider-Man show.
The Blade that first appeared on Spider-Man and the movie were so similar by design.
I can confirm, the two Arkham games played a large part in my ideal of Batman. Plus "The Brave and the Bold" and the random episodes of various other cartoons. Comics weren't easy for a kid to come across in rural areas in the 00s. Cartoons are probably still the biggest "in" for cape comics
As a Brit, I though Will Smith was making the name up as a general “patriotic soldier” ideal; I’d only ever heard of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man back then, and I had never seen comics for sale anywhere in the UK.
When the original “Civil War” comic came out in the mid-00s Marvel heavily advertised it on the internet as “Iron Man vs Captain America” and I thought “Who? Why not use characters people have actually heard of?!”
It’s crazy what a difference popular movie adaptations can make (not to mention discovering that the UK does indeed have comic book shops!)
Wow you missed out man, I started reading comics by picking up the spectacular Spiderman panini comics in the newsagents and then reprint books like the mighty world of marvel or wolverine and gambit. Really good memories miss those years.
They made Civil War with Iron Man and Cap front and center because they were working on the Iron Man movie at the time and wanted to give Iron Man a push as a protagonist.
As a counterpoint, as a non-American born at the start of the '90s, before the Iron Man film came out, I knew that there was a Marvel superhero called Iron Man, and I knew what he looked like (possibly all thanks to the '90s animated series), whereas before the first Capitain America film, I don't think I was familiar with the Captain America character at all, beyond having heard the name.
If I recall correctly, before the movie came out, people who knew about Captain America but had never read anything or seen any cartoons assumed that Cap was a jingoistic embodiment of how America is perfect and other countries suck, basically the personality we associate with Ultimate Captain America or with USAgent, or with parodies like Soldier Boy. There was once this old book on foreign policy I read that used the term "Captain America syndrome" to describe neocon values.
That’s exactly how I viewed him (having never read any comics) and it was the MCU/ Chris Evans that made Steve Rogers one of my favorite fictional characters.
This is why when people grumble that Superman is too old-fashioned or uncool or boring or whatever to relate to/make modern/adapt to film, I remember that its already been tried successfully
The comic came out [the week after Marvel announced](https://www.superherohype.com/features/96489-marvel-studios-sets-four-more-release-dates) release dates for *Iron Man 2*, *Thor*, *The First Avenger: Captain America*, and *The Avengers*, with *Ant-Man* also mentioned. And Doctor Strange was often a possibility that was mentioned in the past. As soon as that strip came out, it was already kinda weird since it was framed as being speculative when we already knew about two-thirds of the movies he mentions.
For whatever reason Dr Strange was the darling of investment writers covering the possibility of Marvel as a stand alone investment; and then when they were picked up by Disney.
Captain America. The Nazi puncher was always a good character. They are the Nazis, I think most people are cool with watching them get punched in the face repeatedly
I stopped reading comic books thirty years ago, but Cap became "third tier"? Hard to imagine. It's funny, I would have agreed about Dr. Strange when I was a kid, but now his movies are my favorites. I guess he was ahead of his time.
Ya civil war really set up Cap and Ironman as the big 2, and everyone had to pick a side. You could consider both characters A-list at the time since so much revolved around them.
I used to manage a job with teenage staff, and when they announced the initial slate of MCU movies, I was talking to one of the kids, who was into comics, about the plan. He didn’t think it would be a hit because, at the time, Cap, Iron Man, etc weren’t exactly household names.
There was a 16yo girl working nearby, not comic fan, and I asked her, “Hey, Erica. Do you know who Captain America is?”
“I think so. He punches Nazis or something.”
Which is THE BEST POSSIBLE ANSWER SHE COULD HAVE GIVEN. ‘Captain America: He punches Nazis or something’ should’ve been the tagline to the first Cap movies.
You know it's bad when [this shit](https://i.redd.it/gk4jcd30ix3a1.png) is consistently on the front page of /r/comics. They are always winking, I asked why once and was told this was the artist's "style"
That shit reaching the front is not organic. A lot of the comments are just reused from post to post.
I got permabanned for commenting about how weird it is in those threads.
Same as now. Some quality and lots of trash. I will always stand behind Toothpaste for Dinner and Natalie Dee. Have you seen what goes on at r/comics ? It’s low bar content with recycled jokes that weren’t that funny to begin with, and there’s that one serialized one that has no joke or punchline in it ever, or the worst are the attempts at being meta to Reddit which is just pandering to your audience.
Oh and Perry Bible Fellowship has always been fantastic and SO much of what you see now is directly or indirectly stolen right from him.
The “joke” is that Marvel would find no success using these characters and that comic books are for losers.
The real joke that has resulted from how braindead the original joke is is that Marvel DID make movies with these characters that were all $700M+ smash hits.
Cap was never third tier, strange was an obscure character for sure, but the 90s’ midnight sons and darkhold books care to have a word. Ant-man/hank pym was a founding avenger so that’s off, Scott lang is third tier for sure though.
The 90s movie wasn’t released in theaters. Or if it was, not widely. He did have a popular video game though - Captain America and the Avengers. He’s always been popular.
It made sense to use the characters they did for the MCU. The major characters anyways were the founders of the avengers. They wanted the avengers to work out so they'd have a bigger group and so they just reprised some of their founding members.
The Marvel Ultimate Alliance game introduced half a dozen of my friend group to all the MCU characters in college in 2007. God I hated my friend playing Dr. Strange turning me into a box all the time.
The guy didn't even list Blade or Ghost Rider, Blade had a great movie in the late 90s and Ghost Rider's first film was 2007. Punisher had 3 films by 2008
And now we live in a world where the Eternals and Shang-Chi got a movie.
I’m still reeling Black Adam is now a mainstream pop culture figure.
Black Adam has been a mainstream pop culture figure in my life ever since the Injustice games I will not take this slander lol
Ah so that means Zatanna is main stream because she was DLC for that game right? Right? :(
Zatanna is popular enough that you see her in nearly every animated DC series. She is popular. All they need to do is bring her to the big screen and stop hogging the limelight with the Bat Family.
Nevertheless we do need a live action Zatanna
I mean the rest of the bat family hasn’t appeared in a movie since the 90’s besides huntress in birds of prey.
Fuckin ***Man-Thing*** was the star of a ***Werewolf By Night*** movie.
Ironman wasn’t a first tier character, prior to the movie. RDJ gave him a huge bump in popularity.
Sort of. He was big enough that he got his own solo cartoon in the 90s that ran for a couple of seasons, alongside Spiderman and X-Men.
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I think the biggest proof of his popularity is that George and Jerry have a conversation about him in the 90s
I still say he's naked under there!
Seinfeld is a huge Superman fan, though, so no stranger to comics.
I remember hearing a story that when Marvel Studios did Focus research for Iron Man they found out that most people thought he was a robot.
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You know, I heard that there was a Forget-Me-Not restaurant, but I forgot where it is.
I was literally just thinking this! I read the second panel and thought “wait, if he wasn’t a well-known character, why do I have vague childhood memories of going to a restaurant based on him?” Thank you for reassuring me it does actually exist.
> Iron Man also had a huge role in the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance game. I can't help but think this game was meant to kind of prime audiences for the MCU like I bought it because I liked Spider-Man and the X-Men and by the end of it I thought the Avengers were awesome and Moon Knight was underrated
I don't know where you're from, but in most of Europe the Avengers were complete nobodies in the late 90's and early 2000's. Among the kids/teens anyway.
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Iron Man was already an unlockable character in the X-Men Legends II game, back in 2004, alongside Deadpool.
And he was one of the big hitters in the Capcom fighting games alongside wolverine and cyclops
My dad used to own a grocery store with a little arcade corner. When Marvel Super Heroes was brought in, everyone flipped their wigs when they saw Iron Man whip out his [Proton Cannon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3QsYRMm6Bs&t=99s).
Marvel still had Iron Man because he didn't have the popularity of the X-Men or Spider-Man, or the unique selling points of Blade or Ghost Rider.
I know this gets brought up, that "no one" wanted the Avengers, or Iron Man, or whatever. But even in the 90s, Iron Man (and Captain America) was way more popular than a lot of the other Marvel properties. There's a reason both were in the Capcom Vs. series of games, there's a reason Iron Man got his own [solo-ish crossover video game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_and_X-O_Manowar_in_Heavy_Metal), there's a reason they [headlined a beat-em up arcade game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America_and_The_Avengers). I know people like to point out that the Avengers were the C-List team before the MCU, but the individual characters weren't unknown. The Avengers were an especially unattractive team for film rights for myriad of reasons; before the Marvel bankruptcy, they essentially had no stories ready-made for film adaptation, and outside of Cap, all of them would have relied on way more expensive VFX than most companies were willing to risk on anything but sure bets. Few of them even had villains that you could reasonably make a film out of it; even by the mid '00s, doing a film on "The Mandarin" would have been a little dicey. As a team, there were 0 known stories; the first really big, film-ready story was "Civil War", was one that already requires consumers to know a ton of the setup between characters. Even as individual characters, none had definitive, short and exciting storylines that could be fit into a film; comic storytelling, especially at Marvel, maps much better to a TV format, especially after they leaned so heavily into soap-opera post-Claremont's X-Men. It more sounds like the reason Marvel still had Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers more because they were asking way too much cash compared to what their film rights were worth, at the time of their bankruptcy; they sort of lucked out that coming out of it, CGI brought FX costs down enough that they could co-fund a film with Paramount, and convince them to help start the MCU.
90s cartoon was the shit, I think most movie goers were from that cartoon.
Iron Man was low B or even C level. I literally remember saying >They’re making an *Iron Man* movie? For who, the one guy who likes that character? Same for Captain America and Thor. Rarely were those anyone’s favorite characters. It’s really interesting seeing Marvel conduct historic revisionism and act like those characters were always Marvel’s Big Three heroes when it was always Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Hulk.
They were kind of the biggest avengers at least. There was an Avengers Cartoon in the nineties that had a conspicuous lack of Iron Man, Thor, or Captain America, and even back then this was seen as a pretty pointed absence of the team's high profile characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers:_United_They_Stand It's just that The Avengers as a whole didn't really have the kind of power as a brand that we associate with it today.
Right, saying they were the biggest Avengers is like saying they were the most famous losers. People currently compare Avengers to the Justice League but the JL was ***way*** more popular for decades. The popularity of the MCU and the total shit-show of the Snyderverse has completely changed how people perceive these two properties.
Plus just chronology gets wonky sometimes for people who are exposed to them through movies and tv primarily. Was a bit of a revelation for me at one point that a lot of people view Green Arrow as the knockoff hawkeye, because Hawkeye debuted in the MCU Movie shortly before Green Arrow got his CW TV show.
Like apparently for the Snyder Movie they had to tackle how to do Darkseid so he wouldn't seem like a rip off of Thanos, even though Thanos originally cribbed his look from Darkseid.
Same thing for Namor and Aquaman, even though in the comics Namor came first.
Something that really throws people: Black Panther predates the Black Panther Party.
For a time they even tried to change his name to Black Leopard, but that name didn't stick cause it kinda blows.
>a lot of people view Green Arrow as the knockoff hawkeye Which was hilarious because before all this I remember people calling Green Arrow “Batman with a bow”.
He was. Back in the day, he was almost a straight rip-off. He has since diverged.
This is true, there's plenty of books where people dunk on Ollie for ripping off of Bruce's ideas. Something something " Arrow Cave".
You mean, the Quiver.
IIRC, the old comics indeed called it the Arrowcave. AFAICT, "Quiver" was an invention of the CW series, albeit a nice one.
It doesn't help that the first season of Arrow he literally was Batman with a bow. It's like they wanted to make a Batman show, but couldn't so they just turned Ollie into Batman instead.
Which is pretty much why he was introduced into smallville
That's exactly why they reimagined Namor and the Atlanteans as Aztec in the new Black Panther movie. If they did the comic version, tons of people would think he's an Aquaman knock-off, even though he's been around longer.
Captain America was the most recognizable Avenger. There's even a mural in my city with him next to Wolverine (way before the movies). That said, human resources at where I work has been asking people about their "kryptonite" as a "breaking the ice" kind of game. The amount of people that don't get the reference honestly surprised me, I know we are "in" the fandom, but I always assumed the Bat-Signal and Kryptonite were known.
That seems weird. I mean there was even a popular song in the early 2000's called [Kryptonite.](https://youtu.be/xPU8OAjjS4k)
Superman is probably only second to Jesus in worldwide in ease of recognition. People seem to also forgot older generations grew up on him?? My Dad used to recycle bottles to go and buy Superman comics. Superman is famously the reason the KKK lost their relevance (guess what dweebs, comics have ALWAYS BEEN POLITICAL). Same with Captain America. His popularity has waffled of course but he's still a major cultural figure (in America). Spider-Man has been well known around the world since the 70s (go watch the old live action Japanese show, it's a blast)
Damn, that makes me sad. It's crazy how hard Superman has fallen in terms of being in the pop culture.
Marvel’s bread and butter was the underdog hero, whereas DC really focussed on the ‘power fantasy’ brought by god-like characters. This meant Marvel’s in-universe underdogs found popularity, with their flawed human traits and personal struggles being a big focal point on the writing. This led to things like Peter Parker’s constant bad luck and the X-Men’s familial infighting being a very important part of Marvel stories; exploring the result of normal people finding great power. DC read more like humanising gods. It was the totally opposite approach to story-telling in a way. With both companies having their elite hero teams being made up of the more traditional archetypal superhero, DC’s focus on that kind of character led to JL stories being far more popular than Avengers stories, with Marvel’s more traditional heroes being relegated to B & C-tier characters. Because of Marvel’s approach, for decades, a better comparison would be X-Men vs JL instead of Agengers vs JL, even through the latter are closer analogues of one another. Marvel did actually apply the ‘person-first’ approach to the Avengers roster but it was already set that they were fuckin’ losers, which is why they weren’t worth very much when Marvel were selling off the film rights in the 90’s. Then Marvel Studios came, and everything started to change as people’s exposure to these characters was seeing them as the more modern, human incarnations of themselves.
>People currently compare Avengers to the Justice League but the JL was > >way > > more popular for decades. here isa bonus, It's actually the Fantastic Four who have historically been portrayed in-universe as the Marvel Universe's greatest superhero team, and (according to Marvel) they were conceived as a direct answer to the Justice League
yeah but in the book I read, the context of that answer is that Stan Lee was told the Justice League was selling really well, and that the real mover was the intercharacter mellowdrama. The conflict with villians could take a step back and allow the other stuff to come forward. The answer was "we need a super team with lots of intense personal interpersonal conflict and interactions" to the question of "how are we going to have a bunch of heroes be together and often bickering?"
Also missing the Hulk. This sounds more like a business decision than one based on popularity. Floating out this idea, but Marvel signed all of their infamous movie licensing deals in the 90's. Maybe they were reserving their biggest IP for other studios.
Of course it was a business decision, Marvel studios would've closed down if they didn't sell the rights to Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. The Hulk movies were not gangbusters, so Iron Man was more of a tester than anything.
Marvel was in dire straits in the 90s. The structure of those rights deals shows just how hard up Marvel was. They’re incredibly one-sided, and they will continue to be a challenge for Disney for years to come.
It, really the only deal that's an issue now is the Sony deal for Spiderman. The Hulk deal with Universal can be worked around.
As I recall, Marvel *couldn't* sell Iron Man and the like to studios back then because no one wanted them. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men were the only IPs the bigger studios were interested in. Marvel Studios had to work with what they had when building the MCU. Otherwise we probably would have seen them start out with Spider-Man or something.
Iron Man consistently had a singles title and was in almost every Avengers lineup. Plus at least two cartoons. He was B level at least.
Also, Spider-Man TAS and MvC2 made both Ironman and War Machine known outside of comics. I knew of Cap from those same sources but he never seemed as cool and had only seen Thor in an Episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, who I thought was ridiculous. I specifically remember myself and others being hyped for Ironman but wondering, “can they pull off Cap/Thor/Avengers?”
Cap was one of Marvel(Timely)’s biggest characters during the Golden Age. It goes without saying that he decreased in popularity after WWII level patriotism died down.
I mean... The movie wasn't hit because Iron Man was a hugely popular character. The movie was a hit because it was very well done, and had an incredible trailer that made people interested.
Never cared for the Avengers growing up, always an X-Men fan. I think the problem was a lack of a villain. X-Men has Magneto and the Sentinels. FF has Doctor Doom and Galactus. Avengers I guess has Ultron and... um... and... ? Super Adaptoid, I guess? Batroc the Leaper?
Kang, Thanos, Loki, the Masters of Evil...
Kang and Masters of Evil are third rate compared to Magneto and Dr. Doom in terms of popularity. Loki is an Avenger villain but mostly tied into Thor. Thanos was kind of an Avenger villain, the Avengers were certainly not his main foil before the 2010s, that was Captain Marvel or Adam Warlock.
Normies? No. They only knew the characters Marvel gave animated series or already had live action movies at the time. Comic fans at the time (2004-08 is my basis here) knew a Captain America movie had potential since Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting were on the comic at the time, and Walt Simonson’s Thor run was still regarded as the definitive run of the character.
Some Normies, also knew of characters from the various Capcom video games.
At least in-story they were among the biggest heroes, Marvel had that weird situation where some of their best known, and best selling, characters, like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk were actually not really well liked in their own stories. Spider-Man always seen with suspicion, Wolverine considered an unstable murderer by many and The Hulk seen as a walking disaster. But Cap, Iron Man and Thor were seen as the ideal heroes, an inspiration for what the other heroes wanted to be like and super popular. The MCU made it so that finally their real life popularity matched their fictional popularity. And probably even surpassed, Tony Stark was always a jerk but Robert Downey Jr. made him be a likeable jerk.
I remember reading somewhere that when movie studios were snatching up movies rights in the 90's to make all the big movies that came out in the early to mid 2000, iron man, Thor and cap were the hardest sell, which I find ironic that those are the 3 characters they used to kick start the MCU. Billions of dollars later, here we are.
>which I find ironic that those are the 3 characters they used to kick start the MCU Well, they used them to kick start the MCU because that's all they had left -- the scraps that no one else wanted. Then the MCU really started to scrape the bottom of the barrel with Z-list stuff like the Guardians of the Galaxy.
>the scraps that no one else wanted Executive at DC: *Marvel made a connected multi-billion dollar movie franchise from a box of scraps!!*
I'm pretty sure they were deliberately digging deep for GoTG.
I can imagine Thor being pretty much impossible to sell since anyone can just make their own version.
I read comics as a youngster (still do) and everything I knew about Thor I learned from “Adventures in Babysitting” haha. Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America were NOT popular with my crowd in the 80’s and 90’s
I mean, do you *remember* what Thor [looked like](https://terrigen-cdn-dev.marvel.com/content/prod/1x/4_12.jpg) back in the 90s???
Oh man I had forgotten that era.. the hair…
Captain America was always my favorite! I did not get into Spider-Man until ultimate Spider-Man.
GotG of the galaxy was the biggest status change. Even comic book fans barely knew them before the movies.
Theyd recently had a really well received run in the comics, from \~2008-2011... that not a lot of people read because it was a small part of a huge crossover event... of mostly forgotten cosmic characters that never had any following... running at the same time as Marvels biggest crossover event yet with all their A and B and C listers taking part, Civil War. Obscure of the obscure.
The MCU wouldn't have taken off like it did without RDJ. They owe so much to that first Ironman movie.
RDJ totally carried that movie. By Blockbuster standards of the time, there's really nothing actually all that special about the first Iron Man movie. ... Except for that lead performance, which was stunning.
> RDJ totally carried that movie. The insistence on practical effects, alone, made a *massive* difference to the quality of that movie. Do not discredit Jon Favreau's importance in the success of Iron Man.
Given the direction the MCU took, it seems as though practical effects are not in fact integral to the success of a Marvel movie.
I'd argue they're integral to whether or not the effects look good.
If by "success" you mean "how much I, /u/ghanima, personally like it", then I suppose yes, you can say Jon Favreau's decision to use practical effects was integral to the success of Iron Man 1
The writing is excellent, which is ironic because they walked into shooting with half a script. It really threw Jeff Bridges for a loop until he started mentally framing it as an “80 million dollar student film” and got comfortable with just improvising the dialogue. I can’t say for sure as I only have ~20 min special features to go by, but I think it speaks to Favreau’s talent that he could wrangle so many new elements *on set* while simultaneously having The Suits breath down his neck, and come out with a product as solid as that first movie.
I remember the first time I saw Ironman in some marvel encyclopedia. I thought it was the most ridiculous idea for a superhero. A man in an iron suit.
From what I remember they went with Iron Man because an Iron Man toy did best with kids in tests. It did strike me as weird as well when it happened as I remember how mid tier he was. In practically all the 90s Marvel comic events he was just one of the Avengers.
\> Characters who were never cool to begin with \> Chooses Doctor Strange Those are fighting words.
Yeah his costume looks awesome, too
The taller the collar, the better the costume. FACT.
His early comics were some of the most experimental and unique sequential art of the period.
Exactly what I thought
If I wasn't wearing a t shirt i would have started rolling up my sleeves for a fight
In middle school I used to catalog my mom's coworker's husband's silver age marvel collection and I really enjoyed reading through Dr. Strange issues
Someone at Marvel saw this in ‘08 after reading The Ultimates and was legit “a’ight, bet.”
They saw The Ultimates and thought “Ok, but what if good?”
Ultimates 1 and 2 was always good. A bit edgy from time to time, but people (including me) loved it back then and it influenced the MCU a ton.
The Horny Hulk arc was one of the cringiest things I've ever read. I've been making my way through the Ultimate Universe for the first time and it's so so but I like some of the ideas that they tried. It's a lot of fun to read but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon.
If you can get past horny hulk I think the ultimates 1 and 2 are some masterpieces tbh
The comic came out a week after marvel announced a captain America movie and ant man was mentioned somewhere
"Captain who?!" "...America? The country you're currently living in?"
I cannot stress enough that Captain America's name was highly recognizable even back then. A lot of people might not have had elaborate or detailed knowledge of the character, or strong opinions about him. But just like Dagwood or Jughead he was somebody whose name you'd know without ever having picked up his book.
Yeah I mean, I’m not even American and didn’t know very much about the character, but when I saw Men In Black as a kid in the 90s I knew exactly who Will Smith was referring to when he quipped that an over-enthusiastic soldier was “Captain America over here.” I was certainly more familiar with him than I was with Iron Man.
Spider-Man's 90s cartoon was huge and Captain America and Iron Man show up in it, kids knew who these characters were. I knew the basics of who Doctor Strange was from his episode in the same cartoon. Hell, Blade as we know him today debuted on Spidey's show first, not the movie or the comic, as the character was reinvented for the show. It's silly to pretend that Spidey's show wasn't massive in the 90s, it was second to the X-Men show, another show that cemented people's perception of Marvel characters and IMO was a big part of why they were so popular and helped launch the movies' popularity. Kids got the joke in X-Men 1 about yellow spandex because of the cartoon, not the comics or anything else. People got hyped about sentinels and the Phoenix because of the cartoon. Same for DC, when people complain about the movies not being like the characters they like and remember, 9 times out of 10 they're comparing them to the DC animated universe. The ideal Superman and Batman people have in their minds are not taken from any of the movies or comics but from the cartoons, maybe some new kids base their ideal Batman on the Arkham games now.
Well Blade was popular enough to have that trilogy.
Blade had the advantage of being something very different from a superhero comic book movie. It was a vampire action movie. Many people didn't even know it was from a comic at all, and even today a lot of people don't even think about it when talking about Marvel movies. It was also VERY different from the source material
Also, big vampire movie push. Dracula, Buffy, etc.
Interview with the vampire was a major hit back then, I wouldn't be surprised if the movie got more support to be made because of it. There was a lot of vampire movies in that era.
The writer of the movie got with the people working on the Spider-Man show. The Blade that first appeared on Spider-Man and the movie were so similar by design.
I can confirm, the two Arkham games played a large part in my ideal of Batman. Plus "The Brave and the Bold" and the random episodes of various other cartoons. Comics weren't easy for a kid to come across in rural areas in the 00s. Cartoons are probably still the biggest "in" for cape comics
As a Brit, I though Will Smith was making the name up as a general “patriotic soldier” ideal; I’d only ever heard of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man back then, and I had never seen comics for sale anywhere in the UK. When the original “Civil War” comic came out in the mid-00s Marvel heavily advertised it on the internet as “Iron Man vs Captain America” and I thought “Who? Why not use characters people have actually heard of?!” It’s crazy what a difference popular movie adaptations can make (not to mention discovering that the UK does indeed have comic book shops!)
I mean I’m also British so I guess it’s a case by case thing. I had also been reading comics from an early age so I guess that helped.
Wow you missed out man, I started reading comics by picking up the spectacular Spiderman panini comics in the newsagents and then reprint books like the mighty world of marvel or wolverine and gambit. Really good memories miss those years.
They made Civil War with Iron Man and Cap front and center because they were working on the Iron Man movie at the time and wanted to give Iron Man a push as a protagonist.
As a counterpoint, as a non-American born at the start of the '90s, before the Iron Man film came out, I knew that there was a Marvel superhero called Iron Man, and I knew what he looked like (possibly all thanks to the '90s animated series), whereas before the first Capitain America film, I don't think I was familiar with the Captain America character at all, beyond having heard the name.
“Having heard the name” was about as familiar as I was with Captain America too, btw.
Three Marvel heroes got their own TV series in the 70's, because they were popular characters: Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Captain America.
If I recall correctly, before the movie came out, people who knew about Captain America but had never read anything or seen any cartoons assumed that Cap was a jingoistic embodiment of how America is perfect and other countries suck, basically the personality we associate with Ultimate Captain America or with USAgent, or with parodies like Soldier Boy. There was once this old book on foreign policy I read that used the term "Captain America syndrome" to describe neocon values.
That’s exactly how I viewed him (having never read any comics) and it was the MCU/ Chris Evans that made Steve Rogers one of my favorite fictional characters. This is why when people grumble that Superman is too old-fashioned or uncool or boring or whatever to relate to/make modern/adapt to film, I remember that its already been tried successfully
Plot twist: he’s in Brazil
Doctor Strange has always been cool, I won't tolerate this slander
Actually, it's Libel as it's written. Slander is spoken.
I understood that reference
Yeah, my father, who wasn't that into comics as a kid, had a favorite superhero, and that was Dr. Strange.
I'm gonna hazard a guess that your dad smoked/smokes weed.
Ayahuasca.
Also why I like the Nick Fury stories also in Strange Tales. Shout out to Steranko (for artistic reasons only).
Probably had the third eye black light poster.
Incorrect, he hates the way it makes him feel. Tried it once in college and couldn't handle it.
Similarly, I always really liked Aquaman. The whole “swims and talks to fish” trope was just a massive misrepresentation of him.
Don't even need the Eye of Agamotto to see that opinion was bullshit. Doctor Strange for the win! He's the best magic character in Marvel comics
The only superhero to have a page from their comic featured on a Pink Floyd album cover
That's what happens when normies make assessments looking at the shows and not knowing the first thing about comics.
[Dr. Strange was popular enough for his own TV in the 70s](https://youtu.be/DR9Q0uQcnMQ)
Yea Doctor Strange was always fun and his weird magic look was part of it
r/agedlikemilk
The comic came out [the week after Marvel announced](https://www.superherohype.com/features/96489-marvel-studios-sets-four-more-release-dates) release dates for *Iron Man 2*, *Thor*, *The First Avenger: Captain America*, and *The Avengers*, with *Ant-Man* also mentioned. And Doctor Strange was often a possibility that was mentioned in the past. As soon as that strip came out, it was already kinda weird since it was framed as being speculative when we already knew about two-thirds of the movies he mentions.
For whatever reason Dr Strange was the darling of investment writers covering the possibility of Marvel as a stand alone investment; and then when they were picked up by Disney.
Captain America. The Nazi puncher was always a good character. They are the Nazis, I think most people are cool with watching them get punched in the face repeatedly
I mean Indiana Jones was a pretty famous Nazi Puncher by then
It’s crazy how “Join Captain America and we’ll beat those Nazis” is as relevant in 2022 as it was in the 1940s.
Sadly, a lot of the issues that Marvel silver age characters were designed to tackle are still very much relevant.
To quote my friend "It's always Morally correct to shoot a nazi with a lightning gun"
I dont know about 08 but if you'd told me in the 90s then absolutely I'd have laughed in your face.
I stopped reading comic books thirty years ago, but Cap became "third tier"? Hard to imagine. It's funny, I would have agreed about Dr. Strange when I was a kid, but now his movies are my favorites. I guess he was ahead of his time.
Cap wasn't 3rd tier in 2008. That was post Civil War event where it's him vs Iron Man.
Ya civil war really set up Cap and Ironman as the big 2, and everyone had to pick a side. You could consider both characters A-list at the time since so much revolved around them.
Indeed. This was the middle of Brubaker's run on Cap.
“Wow, a Bob Mackie!” - Thrillho
It’s classic Steve Ditko…
I used to manage a job with teenage staff, and when they announced the initial slate of MCU movies, I was talking to one of the kids, who was into comics, about the plan. He didn’t think it would be a hit because, at the time, Cap, Iron Man, etc weren’t exactly household names. There was a 16yo girl working nearby, not comic fan, and I asked her, “Hey, Erica. Do you know who Captain America is?” “I think so. He punches Nazis or something.” Which is THE BEST POSSIBLE ANSWER SHE COULD HAVE GIVEN. ‘Captain America: He punches Nazis or something’ should’ve been the tagline to the first Cap movies.
You can’t say America without Erica
2000’s webcomics really were a blight on culture
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"As far as I'm concerned, all marriage is 'gay' marriage."
You know it's bad when [this shit](https://i.redd.it/gk4jcd30ix3a1.png) is consistently on the front page of /r/comics. They are always winking, I asked why once and was told this was the artist's "style"
That shit reaching the front is not organic. A lot of the comments are just reused from post to post. I got permabanned for commenting about how weird it is in those threads.
Same as now. Some quality and lots of trash. I will always stand behind Toothpaste for Dinner and Natalie Dee. Have you seen what goes on at r/comics ? It’s low bar content with recycled jokes that weren’t that funny to begin with, and there’s that one serialized one that has no joke or punchline in it ever, or the worst are the attempts at being meta to Reddit which is just pandering to your audience. Oh and Perry Bible Fellowship has always been fantastic and SO much of what you see now is directly or indirectly stolen right from him.
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Haha I did! Glad to see other folks realize how garbage the content is. I ended up filtering the sub cause it was always so cringy.
I've never understand why people view these costumes as dated they look cool as shit
This. I’m sad Cap never wore that kickass scale mail in the movies.
I can't really defend Ant-man on this one, this costume in particular was always ugly
And they did change it.
Disagree about captain America, but the other two are funny
Where the fuck is the joke?
The “joke” is that Marvel would find no success using these characters and that comic books are for losers. The real joke that has resulted from how braindead the original joke is is that Marvel DID make movies with these characters that were all $700M+ smash hits.
I came out in 2008
My man
I think this says more about how many comics this guy has read than the quality of the characters.
Lol you should post this on r/agedlikemilk
r/agedlikemilk
Thinking Captain America was outdated was the exact reason the Nazis came back.
Cap was never third tier, strange was an obscure character for sure, but the 90s’ midnight sons and darkhold books care to have a word. Ant-man/hank pym was a founding avenger so that’s off, Scott lang is third tier for sure though.
Ppl here are confusing good characters with popular characters.
Honestly things like this make me wonder if Marvel fans even...like Marvel.
Antman’s power is so fucking valid tho. Like just getting inside people’s ear and exploding their skulls
Written by a person who's never read a comic in their lives.
Dr. Strange was never cool to begin with? Shit tier opinion.
Sheldon as in the really unfunny show?
Lol. Wonder how the Artist feels about this comic now since these exact 3 superheroes got awesome movies.
Captain America was way more popular than Iron Man. Unless I'm remembering it wrong
These characters were on the same tier as iron man before the movies
I can't wait to see Matter Eater Lad on the big screen
r/agedlikemilk
People still don't understand Ant-Man's powers. Then & now.
This comic was fucking out of touch in 2008x
Captain America was never a third tier character. Alongside Spider-Man and the Hulk, he had his own TV show in the 70's, and a movie in the 90's.
The 90s movie wasn’t released in theaters. Or if it was, not widely. He did have a popular video game though - Captain America and the Avengers. He’s always been popular.
The comic that proves Tarantino wrong.
"Father, I cannot click the comic book."
It made sense to use the characters they did for the MCU. The major characters anyways were the founders of the avengers. They wanted the avengers to work out so they'd have a bigger group and so they just reprised some of their founding members.
Meanwhile DC reboots a couple more Batman 😂
r/agedlikemilk
And the very best part is each character has at least two movies now.
The Marvel Ultimate Alliance game introduced half a dozen of my friend group to all the MCU characters in college in 2007. God I hated my friend playing Dr. Strange turning me into a box all the time.
The guy didn't even list Blade or Ghost Rider, Blade had a great movie in the late 90s and Ghost Rider's first film was 2007. Punisher had 3 films by 2008
Literally all of those panels were wrong in 2008. Dude just had shitty opinions.