Tag Archive for: Marvel Comics

172,202 Murdered by Muslims Since Marvel’s Muslim Superhero Debuted

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Marvel Wants Us to Mourn Her Fictional Death.

After ten years of failing to make their Muslim superhero popular, during which they’ve tried everything except making her compelling, Disney/Marvel just killed off Ms. Marvel in the comic books, likely in an attempt to try to make her relevant through sympathy as she will appear in an all-female movie that no one asked for, The Marvels, this November. The Ms. Marvel live action streaming show on Disney Plus is their lowest-viewed show. And Disney/Marvel only allows Muslims to write her adventures (unlike with Captain America, where they only allow anti-American leftists to write the patriot’s exploits), and dishonest Muslims at that, who are as leftist as they are Muslim. I attempted to become a watchdog for the comic book when it debuted, but I tapped out after only four issues, as it was mind-numbingly boring, and underhandedly propagandistic: Islam is good, Muslims are good, and there’s no such thing as jihad. The only reason we began to talk about Islam was jihad, and so of course the leftists at Disney/Marvel kept jihad out of their comic book, streaming series, and upcoming movie.

Marvel often boasts that their fictional world is “the world outside your window.” Well, the world outside of Marvel’s New York windows saw the atrocity of 9/11 take place, and Marvel mainly responded with crying fireman and crying cops, as if that’s what was needed in the face of evil. And they had their superheroes helping do the clean-up after the attacks, but didn’t have any of them hunt down the jihadists. If you’re going to allow the reality of 9/11 into your comic books, then you better allow at least one of your superheroes, one of the ruthless ones, to do what needs to be done, even if only in fiction.

So back to Ms. Marvel and her death, which Marvel is trying its best to create a buzz over, but the problem is that most people don’t even know about her. Also, she’s not being killed off in her own comic book, because she currently doesn’t have her own comic book. She’s being killed off in the pages of Marvel’s most popular superhero, Spider-Man, in order to try to make her appear important by association. And in a cover for an upcoming unearned tribute to Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man is on his knees, with his hands over his face, hysterically crying over the death of someone he barely knows. It’s embarrassing, but Marvel’s entire attempt to try to make her appear as a worthwhile character has been embarrassing. Based on her words and actions, no one would ever assume that she’s a Muslim. She’s Muslim the way Biden is president.

And in the ten years of her appearances across comic books, video games, cartoons, streaming shows and movies, Marvel kept her clear from doing what they now routinely do with their characters, that is, making them lock lips with someone of the same sex. I guess they thought twice about doing that because Muslims aren’t as permissive as most are about such matters.

Also, there’s another factor that may be behind this unexpected killing of a Muslim character. The Muslim Marvel editor who’s to blame for this relentlessly unpopular character is named Sana Amanat. She wears an Arafat scarf at comic book conventions. Amanat saw the gutless leftists at Marvel and made her move by pitching a Muslim superhero that she knew would not be denied, and once in, they’d never dare cancel the comic book. And so “Marvel’s First Muslim Superhero!” was born, which isn’t even true, as a British comic book writer, Grant Morrison, who tellingly declared himself a pacifist right after 9/11, created a Muslim mutant character, Dust, for the X-Men. And there likely were others before that. But since no one remembers those characters, Marvel touted its first Muslim superhero, as if having one were somehow a badge of honor. As for Amanat, as is often the case these days, whenever a non-white, non-straight employee of major companies such as Disney/Marvel acts in ways that are either scandalous or criminal, these companies never outright fire them, but quietly remove them from their positions. And that appears to be the case with Sana Amanat, who was once a reliable media whore, but who hasn’t been seen for a long time. And despite Disney/Marvel’s silence on the matter, some who claim to be insiders have said that she  violated company policies in some damning way. So maybe getting rid of the character has something to do with getting rid of Amanat.

And while I mock Disney/Marvel and its Islamophilia, and it should be mocked, there really is something sinister about what it has done here. The comic book and streaming series is enemy propaganda produced by a domestic enemy for a foreign enemy. Even though innocent people continue to be murdered around the world by Islam’s true believers, a major American entertainment company has promoted a character who shares the same ideology as the Islamic enemy.

Superheroes were once a way for cartoonists during World War II to smash our enemies, to give themselves and their readers a much-needed taste of victory over them. Can you imagine Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, instead of creating Captain America in order to fight Nazis during World War II, creating a German superhero, while completely ignoring Nazis and the Holocaust? That’s what was going on with Disney/Marvel’s ten-year run of Islamic propaganda in wartime.

AUTHOR

BOSCH FAWSTIN

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Economics Can Help You Understand Why Warner Bros. Sunk $90 Million Batgirl Movie

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Many questioning the decision are victims of the sunk cost fallacy.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) recently made headlines when they canceled the release of their upcoming Batgirl movie, starring Michael Keaton, J.K. Simmons, and Leslie Grace in the title role.

Movies get canceled all the time, but what shocked many was the fact that Batgirl was already finished filming. In a statement, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) explained that shelving the project was part of a “strategic shift.”

“The decision to not release Batgirl reflects our leadership’s strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe and HBO Max,” the statement read. “Leslie Grace is an incredibly talented actor, and this decision is not a reflection of her performance.”

The decision led to confusion and criticism from many. One of the actors in the movie went as far as to call WBD CEO David Zaslav an imbecile.

The response from fans was one of bewilderment. Why cancel a movie that you’ve already spent $90 million on? After spending so much, why not try to make back that money?

Without realizing it, many who argued the movie should be released did so by invoking one of the most common economic fallacies.

People, whether in business or just daily activities, make their decisions based on whether they think the benefits will outweigh the costs.

When a studio greenlights the creation of a movie, the studio heads must believe the benefit they get is more than what it will cost to make the film. If a CEO expects only 100 people are willing to spend $10 for a particular movie, and hiring the actors costs them $20,000, the movie won’t get made.

It’s possible studios may even receive some intangible benefits from making a beautiful artistic movie, but those intangible benefits still wouldn’t warrant extremely high costs.

In a similar way, when people buy stocks, they’ll only do so if the benefit outweighs the cost. If a stock costs you $75, and you’re absolutely certain the stock will be worth $100 tomorrow, you’d almost certainly buy that stock.

So people will do something if the benefits exceed the costs. But it’s important to note that we’re talking about future benefits and future costs. Past costs have no place in future decision-making.

To understand why, let’s return to our stock example.

Say after buying your stock the price actually fell the next day from $75 to $50. Even worse, you now have a strong reason to believe the price will fall to $25 tomorrow. What should you do? Well, assuming your intuition is right you should certainly sell.

While there may be a temptation to hold on to the stock to “make back what you lost,” it’s important to note that if you do hold the stock when it drops from $50 to $25, the final result is that you’ve lost $25 more dollars. The fact that you already lost money does not change the fact that selling at $50 leaves you richer than “riding it out” and letting it fall to $25.

The initial loss when the stock falls in value from $75 to $50 is what economists call a “sunk cost.” It isn’t recoverable and shouldn’t change the decision to sell the stock before it falls to $25. While people may dislike the idea of “selling at a loss,” it’s superior to an even bigger loss.

When people believe they should act on sunk costs rather than future costs, economists call this the “sunk cost fallacy.”

And the sunk cost fallacy applies to movies too.

The question on whether releasing Batgirl is a good idea has nothing to do with the $90 million already spent on production. That money is a sunk cost.

What matters for the studio is whether the release of Batgirl will bring in more money than the release would cost in the future.

So what would be the relevant costs of releasing Batgirl?

First, as IGN points out, WBD might lose out on tax write-offs if the movie is released. But this isn’t the only cost.

Whether company resources are used to put Batgirl in theaters or on a streaming service, those resources could be used to promote and place other projects instead. Each dollar spent making Batgirl available to viewers is a dollar not spent on a different project.

Finally, and maybe more importantly, WBD could have an enormous cost imposed on their brand if Batgirl turned out to be a bad movie.

The “DC Extended Universe” has already experienced its fair share of troubles. Critics and audiences have been disappointed by several portrayals of DC heroes.

From personal experience, I haven’t paid to watch a DC movie in theaters since the total dud portrayal of Superman that was Man of Steel.

I’m not interested in watching a DC Universe that can’t get its flagship hero right. And many fans may decide a bad Batgirl movie is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

So even if DC already spent $90 million producing the movie, what good would it do to release the movie if it alienated more fans than it satisfied?

Although I’m not privy to any insider information, my suspicions are strongly towards this last explanation. The Marvel Cinematic Universe stands as an example of how valuable the comic book movie brand can be, and it’d be no surprise if WBD executives were trying to raise the bar on DC movies to reach that level.

So WBD’s decision to cut the already-finished Batgirl isn’t some crazy mistake where a corporation is abandoning a valuable movie.

The company likely believes the cost is greater than the benefit. And given the recent track record of DC movies, I don’t doubt they’re right.

AUTHOR

Peter Jacobsen

Peter Jacobsen teaches economics and holds the position of Gwartney Professor of Economics. He received his graduate education George Mason University. His research interest is at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and population economics.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

What the Death of Hollywood Means for America

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The new entertainment industry will be even more woke.

Peak TV, a stunning era during which Big Tech and traditional studios entered into a furious competition to make a bewildering amount of content, is dead. The 559 scripted shows from last year represent a historic hubris that everyone, especially investors, is recovering from.

That was the year that Netflix announced that it was spending $18 billion on content.

In the aftermath, Netflix lost subscribers for the first time and expects to lose millions more as its stock fell 35%. The dot com giant lost, but so did its rivals. Disney+ lost billions, HBO Max is cutting back programming, and so are most others, including the ‘N’ in the FAANG oligarchy.

Netflix has been humbled, and is shedding woke programming and exploring an ad-supported tier, but the push by Hollywood studios to build rival streaming platforms to those of Netflix and Amazon by investing heavily in original content gated by subscriptions has set a lot of money on fire without achieving platform independence. Everyone lost, but Big Tech still runs the show.

Streaming subscriptions are replacing movie theaters and television networks. And that also means that Silicon Valley is replacing Hollywood. Netflix, Amazon, and Apple demonstrated that they had the capital to dominate the entertainment industry. This isn’t good news for the culture.

While old Hollywood had a reputation for being liberal, many studio bosses and producers were actually fairly conservative and movies were the products of a tug-of-war with more liberal writers, actors and directors. Movies had to be able to play in theaters across the country and serve as broad an audience as possible. Movies of that era might be homogenized, but they were less likely to openly offend or antagonize audiences. Movie stars were expected to at least pretend to lead moral lives and keep industry decadence locked away behind closed doors.

The partnership between Eastern European Jewish immigrant studio bosses who had started out, like Samuel Goldwyn, as a glove salesman, William Fox, a garment industry foreman, the Warner brothers, the children of a shoe repairman, and the much more urbane British and American talent turned the film industry into a cultural touchstone and made its products part of our national identity. Critics rightly pointed to the cultural impoverishment of making movie theaters into the hub of our culture, but they could not have imagined what was to come.

The fall of the studio system overturned the industry’s innate conservatism and while it ended many abuses and unleashed the talent, the end result was that movies became increasingly at odds with the values and morals of the American public. The decline of the networks likewise unleashed cable and then streaming programming that was oriented culturally leftward..

Rather than open up a range of programming targeting untapped segments of the public, Peak TV aimed for the same upscale urban multicultural audiences that the entire industry is aimed at. If the ideal wisdom of the marketplace existed, a world in which untold billions were spent to produce 559 scripted shows, should have produced a wave of conservative programming.

It did not.

The entertainment industry’s programming has been most conservative when control was consolidated by studios and networks. It is least conservative when it is driven by “talent”. Consolidated entertainment has at least tried to make programming for a broader country while industry disintegration has made programming more woke, more radical, and more hateful.

The Netflix revolution, in which endless amounts of investor cash were burned to lure talent, made for some of the some ‘woke’ programming imaginable. At the peak of Peak TV, Netflix had not only successfully mainstreamed radical sexual and gender identity, but was actively pushing sexual content involving children from Cuties to Big Mouth. Freed from a business model other than the dream of endless growth, Netflix burned billions of dollars and our culture.

Wokeness precedes broke-ness. But the story of Peak TV is also one of cultural brokenness.

Netflix pursued original programming by trying to make it as edgy as possible. In response, Hollywood studios revived old intellectual properties and tried to make them edgier with racial recasting, gender-swapping, sexual politics, and general social justice themes. The giant dumpster fire of Netflix was met with a social justice Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, and DC. Anything with a known brand or IP was brushed off and given a social justice makeover.

Ghostbusters was rebooted as all-female, Doogie Howser, M.D. was reborn as an Asian girl, The Wonder Years was reimagined with a black family, Magnum P.I. with a Latino star, Party of Five with illegal aliens, and these and countless other examples showed that underneath all the fake wokeness, the industry had run out of original ideas. All Hollywood could do was try to make the old tired ones seem fresh and new with identity politics remakes.

And as Hollywood’s popular culture has become American culture, and for some the quasi-faith of fandom, the decay of the entertainment industry into wokeness has devastated society.

Hollywood has come to consist of the culture championed and consumed by boomers. Succeeding generations have reworked those “intellectual properties” to make them edgier and more political, but have produced few of their own franchises. Of the top ten media franchises dominant in America, only one, Harry Potter, was created by anyone born after 1964. And J.K. Rowling is not American and was predictably canceled for insufficient wokeness.

Hollywood is Joe Biden making TikTok videos. It’s an industry that was once creatively revolutionary, but now only puts on an appearance of aspiring to a political revolution. As long as the revolution doesn’t interfere with its tax credits and Chinese box office. Behind the wokeness is a brutal war between agents, producers, writers, directors, and the new dot com masters of the universe, over fortunes that are both astronomical and on the verge of vanishing.

The entertainment industry was slow to adapt to the internet because it is not inventive and is incapable of innovation. Even its response to Netflix consisted of old studios trying to build their own Netflix. Political radicalism makes dinosaurs seem like they are on the cutting edge. That’s why corporate broke-ness so often follows corporate wokeness. It’s not just that wokeness is bad for business, but it often disguises a much more broken business model underneath.

Hollywood is as tied down by guilds and painstaking rules as any medieval kingdom. All it really has anymore are the intellectual properties mined by greatest generation creators marketing to baby boomers (and in some cases, boomers reworking the pop culture of past generations) that have been passed down to newer generations and laboriously reworked to be more woke.

The internet killed Hollywood, as it did so many other industries, and streaming has become its slow death, accelerated by the boom and bust economics of an unstable country and world.

Cinema made a national propaganda machine possible. The Nazis and Communists both seized on it for that very reason and regime figures like Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein were brilliant, revolutionary, and quite evil. But it was American movies that conquered the world because they fused creative talent with American values. Hollywood is still the only national industry with the production capacity and know-how for a true worldwide reach, but its cultural impact is swiftly becoming negligible as it churns out reworked versions of the same thing.

As Hollywood dies, America and the world will be poorer for it, not for the billion-dollar woke digital cartoon factory that it has become, but for a time when a centralized entertainment industry did not have to be a mass propaganda machine feigning popular support for a regime.

That is exactly what it is now.

Hollywood’s biggest production of the pandemic year was the 2020 Democratic convention which abandoned working-class and riot-scarred Milwaukee for an entertainment industry stream. Stars in a streaming convention propping up a senile reactionary who had outsourced his future to radicals while sidelining the party’s old working-class constituency proved to be the perfect metaphor and epitaph for both the Democrats and for Hollywood.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Muslims Enraged As Muslim Ms. Marvel Turns Out To Be Un-Islamic

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This is the kind of thing that happens when you’re so eager to pander that you don’t do adequate homework about the object of your pandering. Marvel has stepped into a minefield, and is likely to explode a few more mines before it gets out.

Muslim Ms. Marvel Fans Express Serious Concerns About Kamala’s Power Source

by Brad Lang, CBR, June 23, 2022 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

This article contains spoilers for Ms. Marvel Episode 3, “Destined.”

Some Muslim fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest series Ms. Marvel are expressing their displeasure with the recent revelation regarding the source of Kamala Khan’s powers.

As revealed in Ms. Marvel Episode 3, “Destined” the titular hero’s newfound abilities are apparently due to her heritage as a Djinn. As explained by Kamran’s mother Najma, Kamala’s ancestors are otherworldly beings from the Noor dimensions that were banished from their reality sometime before 1942. These people are quickly explained to be the Djinn, creatures from Islamic mythology which can be both good and evil. A number of fans have expressed frustration with the reveal, specifying that the Quran condemns the practice of worshipping Djinn.

Viewers have interpreted Kamala’s Djinn-based powers as an act of “shirk,” the sin of idolatry, which is problematic as practicing Muslims are forbidden from worshiping anything other than Allah. However, despite Ms. Marvel‘s latest plot twist, other fans are convinced the Djinn angle is merely a red-herring designed to obscure the real identity of Kamala’s ancestors. Some MCU enthusiasts suggested that the hero will be revealed to be related to the alien race known as the Kree due to the appearance of an unknown, dead character with blue skin in Episode 3….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Marvel’s Mightiest Muslim by Sarah Skwire

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Last year, the crew at Marvel Comics rebooted Ms. Marvel — formerly a scantily clad blonde superheroine — as a teenaged Desi Muslim high school girl living in Jersey City. Reboots of old, familiar characters are always complicated, and they are all the more so when the reboot seems suspiciously like politically correct pandering.

But Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel, is a huge hit. And she’s not a hit because she’s some kind of mouthpiece for popular pieties. She’s a hit because she’s a great character, a believable teenager, and — in the style of the best superheroes — a symbol that lets us rethink our own identities while we watch her learn to balance hers.

When Kamala’s story begins, she is the mildly rebellious 16-year-old daughter of parents who have immigrated to America from Pakistan. While she chafes at some of their restrictions, she is a “good kid” — a girl who may sneak out to a party, but who spits out alcoholic punch when someone tricks her into trying it. On her way home from the forbidden party, Kamala is caught in a strange chemical mist that gives her visions of her favorite superheroes — Ironman, Captain America, and her idol, Captain Marvel, the superheroine formerly known as Ms. Marvel. (If you’re picturing the guy who says, “SHAZAM!” and turns into the Earth’s Mightiest Mortal, that’s a hero from another comic book company. Marvel Comics has a different history using the same name.)

The dream avatar of Captain Marvel asks her, “Who do you want to be?”

Kamala replies, “I want to be you.”

Captain Marvel promises her “the kind of total reboot most people only dream about.”

When Kamala wakes, she has transformed into the 1970s-style Ms. Marvel — blond hair, skimpy costume, thigh-high boots, and all. As she morphs uncontrollably back and forth between this new self and her old self, she wonders, “This is what I asked for, right? So why don’t I feel strong and confident and beautiful? Why do I just feel freaked out and underdressed?”

In this moment, as in many others throughout the comic, Kamala’s reactions to her new self are not just reactions to new superpowers. They are the reactions of a young Muslim woman wrangling with the idea that the modesty with which she has been raised, and against which she has chafed, may well have a point to it. But they are also the reactions of all young people to an unpredictably changing body that is suddenly sexy and scary in ways that it never was before.

For me, this triple layer of reactions is the strength of the Ms. Marvel reboot. Kamala is never just a superhero. And she’s never just a Muslim-American superhero. She’s a kid — smart, brave, loyal, and moral — trying to protect the people and places she loves, to learn a new identity, and to be true to herself at the same time.

As Kamala’s story develops, we discover that she is an “Inhuman” — part of a superhuman race that attains its powers when exposed to that chemical mist that Kamala wandered into after the party. Sometimes heroic and sometimes villainous, the Inhumans occupy a complicated place on the edge of the superhero world and even farther on the edge of the human world.

When a young man whom Kamala’s parents introduce her to as a potentially acceptable suitor turns out to be an Inhuman, all Kamala’s identities come into play again. The rebellious Muslim teenager wants to reject her parents’ suggested suitor out of hand. The 16-year-old girl thinks he’s completely dreamy. The superhero finds herself faced with a group of Inhumans who consider humans to be an inferior subspecies.

And you can’t quite tell if it’s the geeky teen, the post-9/11 Muslim, or the superhero who tells the Inhumans, “It’s always the same. There’s always one group of people who think they have special permission to terrorize anybody who disagrees with them. And then everybody else who looks like them suffers.”

It could be a horribly preachy moment, but somehow, it’s not. Somehow, Kamala’s three identities, and writer G. Willow Wilson’s ability to convey the naïveté and insight that come along with young adulthood, make the moment feel honest.

When Kamala follows up her comment with a massive comic book punch, we cheer for her. And when she follows up her punch with the sickening awareness that she almost killed her adversary, we panic with her.

The careful balance that Kamala must maintain as a character, and that Wilson must maintain as she writes Kamala’s story, means that each of the elements that make Kamala special is always in play.

I’m particularly fond of the cover images for the graphic novel collections of Ms. Marvel. On the first, Kamala wears a Ms. Marvel fan T-shirt and carries a US history textbook and a collection of hadith. On the second, she slugs a bank robber while checking her cellphone, wearing a new costume she has fashioned out of the burqini she refused to wear. And on the third, she punches through glass with one hand and flashes a peace sign with her other mehndi– decorated hand while a stack of vintage Ms. Marvel comics flutters away in the background.

Always, she is equally a teenager, a Muslim, and a superhero. I find the combination makes for compelling reading. Even more so, I suspect it will make for compelling reading for my daughters. I want them to think about Kamala’s multiple identities and the challenges of balancing them. And I want them to hear the surprising lecture she gets from the youth leader at her mosque when Kamala comes close to telling him about her secret identity. “If you insist on pursuing this thing you will not tell me about, do it with the qualities befitting an upright young woman: courage, strength, honesty, compassion, and self-respect.”

And if she can do all that while still writing fan fiction about the X-Men? I’ll keep reading with interest.

The fourth volume of the Ms. Marvel graphic novel collections comes out on December 1.

Sarah SkwireSarah Skwire

Sarah Skwire is the poetry editor of the Freeman and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis.

EDITORS NOTE: Kamala breaks the Islamic doctrine that women are inferior, second class citizens, to Muslim men. Kamala violates shariah law by not wearing traditional Muslim clothing, going out to parties and flashing the peace sign. She is the anti-Muslim Muslim girl. She wants to fit in and do good rather than perpetrate evil as we see daily in the news. Perhaps Kamala will become a figure for young Muslim girls to break away from being a devout Muslim to being a human being?