Marvel Plays Dumb Again

Check out this story.

http://news.sky.com/story/marvel-pulls-comic-over-hidden-koranic-messages-10831925

My take on it? From experience I know that editors know PRECISELY what is being printed in each and every issue. A few errors slip by their notice here and there, but nothing blatant. If the letters on that man’s chest were added by the colorist without permission it would have been caught by the letterer or the editor. While easter eggs are hidden in all kinds of art (and I see them all the time when flatting and coloring comics myself) and sometimes go unnoticed (and can be fun for readers to find) that is blatant. I never looked at the originals of the new issue in the controversy, but it appears to me that the letters are stylized (the style fits other Marvel comics I’ve worked on that has the same overall style) and correctly drawn and so it is hard to believe the colorist added them. The numbers on the signs appear to have skipping irregular and jagged lines and inking just as the rest of the page does which suggests they were there already, but they are a bit misplaced and forward facing so it’s hard to tell from the thumbnail what is true. Whoever has the pencils (who would be the penciler, the inker, the letter, and the colorist, and of course the editor for each stage of the process) knows the truth. But that’s not really the point for like in the issue of Captain America in which tax protester’s signs were and the script was written to disparage the Tea Party as racists Marvel again blames some patsy worker as they did in that former case with the letterer. If anybody is to be fired here it is not the colorist, but rather the editor. Either he failed to catch the change, which makes him incompetent, or he was in on it and just covering his own ass. Who wants to risk working on a project like that where you could be blamed as the sole person involved in doing something that actually passed through the approval process because the company gets caught pushing anti-christian political propaganda? Getting the sole blame for something like that could not only cost this man his job (or disciplinary action) but it can be a career ending move and worse it could even be defamation if it is not true. And if that’s the case then he needs a good lawyer. This is why I quit working on the Captain America story arc which handled the other situation that same way. If Marvel wants to produce anti-American and anti-Christian propaganda they are free to do so. But blaming the artists for what is clearly an approved project’s agenda evidenced by the scripts themselves is totally unacceptable. And in the earlier case involving Captain America leaving a few signs blank that were in the foreground and middle ground that clearly were going to be filled in later (yes they were blank, I worked on these pages and those large signs were blank when they came to me, but the surrounding ones which were smaller had letters) so the company can purposely blame the letterer if the shit hits the fan (which it did) if the public objects to the script (which they did) stinks to high heaven. It’s a cover-your-own-ass move. And it looks like they did it again.

http://www.publiusforum.com/2010/02/08/marvel-comics-captain-america-says-tea-parties-are-dangerous-and-racist/

Update: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/04/12/marvel-artist-fired-for-hiding-anti-semitic-messages-in-x-men-comic/

Update: http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/10/x-men-torture-head-heritage-think-tank-new-comic-book/#.WRWkcZ8VCOd.facebook

Update: http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/266712/marvel-cancels-anti-police-black-lives-matter-daniel-greenfield#.WRrOt0oiKLl

Update: http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/08/28/dumping-fascist-cap-character-marvel-comics-finally-makes-captain-america-hero/