At a certain level, Disney seemed to think that it had a Captive Audience with the MCU and that it didn't really matter what they did with it. It turns out that it matters a lot! It matters a lot if the movies you make are good. With a pair of movies that brought in almost five billion dollars, they capped off and paid everyone for their ten year investment in a way that feels earned but also, you know… final, with real stakes. Once they lost that scaffold they lost the plot. There wasn't any attempt to earn audience anymore, they had them. When they stopped being captivated, they stopped being captive. Now Disney has flipped the script; they've decided to go with captive creators instead.
It isn't that I don't think there isn't some lore reason why it can't happen. This is fucking comics, shit like this happens all the time. I read comics at my friends' houses; I don't have the bonafides to make some kind of rhetorical case. I once mistook Earth-616 for Earth- some other number and received death threats. You know? I'm not the expert, but it's funny that they happened to make movie after movie based on the only comics I do know. It's been variant city for a minute now in Marvel and so there's an uncountable number of Starks and Victor Von Dooms and some of them must overlap. Here is my friend Bronze who is OG on this kind of stuff talking about a specific run where shit like this happened.
Honestly, I loved Bendis's run where Doctor Doom took up the mantle of Iron Man. This is an interesting direction to take and I hope they take a big swing with it. https://t.co/Tf82PXldGI pic.twitter.com/POMA0e6tVm
— ThatBronzeGirl (@ThatBronzeGirl) July 28, 2024
On the one hand, they do seem to be admitting that they lost the plot. Is it weird if their response is to go back and get the old plot? Maybe, yeah. Is it worse than what they were doing? It can't be.
Multiverse shit is like an acid. It's fun to play around with, provided you have the right equipment. At root, it can make anything possible. My friend Kris Straub used to make a comic called Starslip about a type of engine that could get you anywhere instantly by slipping you to a universe where you were already there. Eventually he came to absolutely loathe this multiversal hook, but it was right there as the heart of the work where it couldn't easily be extracted, like a sliver of glass inside an organ. What he hated about it was that it made anything possible, but in a bad way. Nothing had to connect. Nothing had to be coherent. It could, certainly. But because it didn't have to, he felt like the good writing he'd done felt unearned. So if the advantage of something is also its disadvantage, this makes it a questionable if not dangerous tool.
Speaking of "dangerous tools," my name is Jerry Holkins. In this context, on the website we have operated for the last quarter century or so, I go by Tycho Brahe. For a brief time, during Strip Search, I was one of "The Creators." I'm also Omin Dran, CEO of Acquisitions Incorporated. But let's go back to the start: I'm Jerry Holkins. And I just wrote my first two novellas based on Acquisitions Incorporated that I would love for you to check out in pdf format.
The first is an origin story of sorts, about how my character and my best friend Mike Krahulik's character (ahem) "Jim Darkmagic" first meet. It's called Acquisitions Incorporated: Initiation.
There is a ship of our characters, because of course there is, called Dranmagic. I told people that if I had a chance to write the first book, I would make a version of it that gave them some measure of what they craved, and I did so. "Dranmagic: The Incredibly Gay Version of The Acquisitions Incorporated Novel That Might Actually be The Real One," looks like this, it costs $8, and is available here.
You can also save some money if you'd like to grab both of them simultaneously!
If you are in a region our store does not support, you can find both books in our Patreon Shop. Did you know Patreon had a shop? Well now you do, and it doesn't require that you be a member to utilize it. If anybody grabs the books, let me know what you think!
If you're a publisher and this all sounds tantalizing to you, please contact Eric at biz@penny-arcade.com.
(CW)TB out.
