RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books Smoking in Comics

http://worldcomicbookreview.com/index.ph...lgium/#more-742

I posted this over at WCBR. Quesada imposed his ban in 2001, and there are still some very cross readers 15 years later (see the comments on the site).

It seems to be more a protest against PC rather than some sort of surge in outraged smokers.

I didn't know until I researched it that Quesada imposed the ban because of smoking-related diseases in his family.

Still trying to work out where it was decided that Wolverine would start reading books instead.

Wolverine can kill people.

Wolverine can maim people.

But he can't smoke because he's supposed to be a role model for kids.

I started smoking and drinking so I could be more like John Constantine.

I became black so I could be more like Nick Fury.

But do you sound black enough?

He will have to change his name to Elroy or Tyrone.

I guess the lesson is, if you're going to create a character who smokes, create him for some other company than Marvel.

That just assures Marvel will lose the revenue for such new characters. In comics as well as in film, smoking can create a dramatic visual effect that is useful to the narrative, or just visually interesting.

I love what G-man pointed out, the irony that Wolverine can kill everyone in sight, but that smoking, not the taking of human life, is the unpardonable sin!

Marvel has started going PG with many of their content these past few years.

A good example is the Marvel Heroes 2016 game, where the devs have mentioned over a Twitch stream that Marvel has a very specific rule that nobody "dies" in the game.

Basically, they're not allowed to imply that the enemies in the game have died in the hands of your characters. So no words like Kill, Dead, Died, etc. All of the enemies are merely "defeated."

A weird rule in a game that has guys like the Green Goblin, Venom, Punisher, Deadpool, Wolverine, Magneto, Doctor Doom, and Elektra as playable characters that run around blasting/punching/stabbing street thugs and hydra grunts by the hundreds.

PC?


A hilarious story that highlights the dramatic visual effect of smoking is the "Wolveroach" story in CEREBUS 53-56 (1982), parodying the first Claremont/Miller/Rubenstein 1982 WOLVERINE miniseries, that took high-testosterone gritty first-person narrative storytelling to a whole new level.



http://www.multiversitycomics.com/wp-con...&w=593&zc=1&a=t

A story that nearly got Sim sued if I recall correctly, because the Wolveroach costume looked waaaay too much like the actual Wolverine getup of the time.

Yeah. Marvel chose to give Sim a legal warning not to use the character again. He was pretty ticked off about it.

But hey, how many billion OTHER characters were blatant parodies/swipes of other Marvel/DC characters used in CEREBUS? The Cockroach (Batman), Captain Cockroach (Captain America and Bucky), Neal Adams Deadman, Moon Roach (Moon Knight), Lord Julius (Groucho Marx), Elrod (Foghorn Leghorn), Bran Mac Muffin (Bran Mac Morn), Swoon (Sandman), Swamp Thing, Man Thing, Red Sonja, Ghita, Professor Charles X Claremont, Clint Eastwood's film The Beguiled, on and on. And that's not even a complete list of swipes from the first 50 issues or so!

The parodies didn't begin with Wolveroach, and they didn't end with him. As I recall, Marvel's beef was with the prominence that Wolveroach was given on CEREBUS covers (issues 53-56, parodying the first Claremont/Miller/ Rubinstein 4-issue 1982 miniseries), where they felt (or at least argued) that Sim's character was so much like Wolverine that a reader could mistakenly buy an issue of CEREBUS mistaking it for a Marvel WOLVERINE comic book.

I can see Marvel wanting to protect their characters, but even a prominent alternate-publisher like CEREBUS had such a small print run that even at its peak was no threat whatsoever to Marvel's sales. Perhaps it was to warn Sim, or perhaps it was to warn many other publishers not to follow Sim's lead.

But then a few years later, Jim Lee, McFarlane, Liefeld, etc., left Marvel and began publishing blatant swipes of Marvel characters, with no price paid, or any legal threat that I'm aware of. Despite that Image Comics was a far greater threat to Marvel's sales.

Yep. The issue with Wolveroach was that the costume was too similar to the original and, further, that the covers looked too much like actual Wolverine comics (and the fact he ran multiple ones on a row). In fact, Sim later conceded Marvel had a point.

I thought Cerebus was about parody? What's the complaint?

I read an interview of Chris Claremont years ago who was delighted that Professor Charles X Claremont was smothered to death between two copulating muck monsters.

I believe the complaint was that the covers (allegedly) crossed the line from parody to rip off.

If you look at the picture DWB posted above, the costume is virtually identical, unlike previous versions of the Roach, where the antennae were prominent.

The covers did not say, for example, "introducing Wolveroach," or anything else to indicate it was a different/parody character. There were no captions and only the title of the book. The character wasn't doing anything "funny," but rather, engaging in actions that would look completely normal on a "Wolverine" or "X-men" cover.

You basically had wordless covers with a character that was identical to Wolverine doing very Wolverinish things.

Now, perhaps, if it had gone to trial Sim would have won but that would have been prohibitively expensive for what was a throwaway character. Also, apparently, at some point, Sim and Shooter had a discussion about it at a convention and Shooter convinced Sim that it was those particular covers having crossed the line and Sim saw his point.

Aha. Yeah, fair enough.

Peril.
Escape!
The Wolveroach triumphant.

Sim really did a job of parodying Frank Miller's choppy melodramatic short sentence narrative style. (CEREBUS 53-56)

The four-issue storyline parodying the Claremont/Miller/Rubinstein WOLVERINE 1-4 miniseries (1982, the first solo Wolverine series).

Great stuff. During the course of the four-issue miniseries, one could assume Wolveroach must have had a 3-pack-a-day habit.

THEW DARK KNIGHT RETURNS 2 by Miller, vs. CEREBUS 93 by Sim.

A little more case-file lawsuit material for Marvel, and DC.

Super Secret Sacred Wars! Another Sim parody of Marvel.