Whoom! comic book traditions have gone blooey. The Mighty Thor is in for a sex change, and that's not even the big news.
Archie Andrews is demised, shot to death with a "BLAM!" in jagged letters. R.I.P: red-headed Archie, whose worst problem used to be deciding whether to date Betty or Veronica.
The next Captain America will be a black man, stepping into longtime white guy Steve Rogers' big red boots. Wonder Woman tries on more new outfits than a bargain shopper at a Labor Day sale.
And the man best able to leap tall odds turns out to be North Little Rock native Nate Powell.
Cartoonist Powell's nonfiction graphic novel, March: Book One, topped the New York Times best-seller list. March is a collaboration with Georgia Cong, John Lewis and writer
Andrew Aydin, the story of Lewis' role in the civil rights movement.
"The reaction to March has been beyond everything we could have hoped," publisher Top Shelf Productions spokesman Leigh Walton says. She rates the work "a significant step forward not just for Top Shelf, but for the whole comics industry."
A comic book about a real-life hero -- a comic book version of Andy Hardy gunned down as if it really happened -- a Norse god with grrrl power. Astounding?
Maybe so, and probably more to come with comics in a blur of transition as unpredictable as Superman's Bizarro World.
MERCIFUL MINERVA!
Kara Dyer tracks comics readership as youth services librarian at the Faulkner County Library in Conway.
"I've seen an explosion over the past two years," she says. She and husband Jimmy Dyer organize the library's ComicCon-way convention, Nov. 14-16 this year. Nearly 4,000 comics fans whooshed to last year's three-day convention.
Still upset with Wonder Woman for changing outfits (star spangles gone in favor of black), Dyer is super-skeptical about the switch coming Thor's way.
Marvel Comics announced the gender swap to come in October as "an all new era for the God of Thunder." Old Thor, it seems, fumbles his mighty hammer, Moljinir. A "brand new female hero" picks up the majestic conker. In this way, the publisher aims to pick up a neglected audience, "women and girls."
"Thor wasn't a woman in Greek mythology," Dyer says. "You see Thor as a blond, muscular man, and now you see Thor as a woman -- it doesn't even make sense."
This could bring Loki-like trouble to the Dyer household, where Thor comics collector Jimmy Dyer is ready to give the idea a chance.
After all, he reasons, comics survived a previous incarnation in which "Thor was actually a frog."
Magic changed the Asgardian hunk into a thunder frog in 1986. "Chugga-rrumph!" he went. Struggling to wield his hammer, the frustrated amphibian cried out to Father Odin, "Hear a warrior's plea!"
Forty-two-year-old oil consultant Dyer says he welcomes Marvel's attempt to bring more readers to the comics he has enjoyed since childhood.
"I can remember being 7 years old, reading Thor and Batman," he says. Today's kids, "they don't."
Time magazine called on comics writer Danny Fingeroth (Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four) to size up the situation. "Superhero comics are today largely consumed by middle-aged men," he wrote, "who have read every permutation."
Longtime comics readers look for something new. The vastly bigger audience looks for comic book characters at the movies, not in print.
Once featured in colorful spinner racks in practically every Woolworth's, grocery and drugstore, today's comic books call for a trip to the comics shop. The future of comics might be as e-books.
Where things are going is like when the Rocketeer takes off: Who knows?
ALL-AMERICAN HEROES
Marvel's second announcement is that Sam Wilson, "the intrepid Falcon," will take over from a weakened Steve Rogers this fall as Captain America. Stranger things have happened. In one version of Spider-Man, the fallen Peter Parker is replaced by Miles Morales, a black and Hispanic, radioactive spider-bitten understudy.
But what next? Some alien bruiser whupping Superman? Too late, it's been done: "The Death of Superman," a 1992 epic, one of the biggest events in comics publishing.
Batman, too, has been through the temporary inconvenience of dying. Author Neil Gaiman laid him to rest in "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader." Robin the Boy Wonder died. The Walking Dead died. Archie -- oh, no, not Archie.
Betty and Veronica hold each other, sobbing.
Archie has been a comic book and newspaper comic-strip character since 1941 -- the eternal teenager at Riverdale High School. Most of that time, his misadventures have been no more serious than the fizz on top of a double-scoop ice cream soda.
The premise "has never deviated from the positive outlook that won the hearts of teenagers and their parents in the 1940s," according to 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics (Random House).
But now? One change is that Archie cost 10 cents a comic in 1941. But it's $9.99 for the "commemorative issue" in which he expires with a few, faltering last words to the gang at the Chok'lit Shoppe: "I've always loved you ... "
But wait.
"I know at the end of the day, there's going to be another Archie comic book with Archie in it," River City Comics Expo organizer Brent Douglass says.
Archie's death happened in Life With Archie comics -- hardly the most accurate title the way things turned out, but there it is. At the same time, he remains freckle-faced and youthfully alive, up to high jinks as usual in Archie comics.
Life With Archie is a spin-off series where the characters are more grown up, the stories given to imagining what-ifs. What if Archie married Betty? In this variation, he did.
"What if Betty and Jughead got married," Douglass wonders, "and Archie stayed single?" Anything could happen in Life With Archie, so why not?
Once he figured out the Archie who died is "not the Archie that everybody knows," Douglass says, "I wasn't into it."
JUSTICE TEAM
River City Comics Expo is a biannual convention in Little Rock. The next will be in March. The event in August brought together a gathering of at least 1,500 comics fans and professionals. Among those aware and opinionated about comic books making big changes -- Thor, especially -- these were the comments:
• "I'm not really sure why Thor needs to be a woman. He's such a strong character." -- comics artist agent Renee Witterstaetter of New York, former editor of She-Hulk and Xena: Warrior Princess comics.
Witterstaetter predicts Old Thor will come back. New Thor, if she gains an audience, "probably will end up with her own book, and they will co-exist."
• "I never understood why change a character's gender. Why not come up with a new character?" -- Larry Hama, New York, comics artist and writer of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and others.
Female characters in G.I. Joe "are just as competent as the guys," Hama says. No need to change "F" to "M" on their driver's licenses, any more than to make Shaft the color of Wonder Bread -- or Wonder Woman a man.
• "If I was a female Thor, I would make her surly -- put in a little more Viking." -- actress Dawn DuVurger, Biloxi, Miss., whose movie appearances include Zombie Pirates and Cadaver Bay.
So how about Wonder Woman with XY chromosomes, a man.
"Well, she's an Amazon," DuVurger says, "so -- no."
THOR SHE'S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW
Could it be that dramatic change in the comics is all a bid for attention, a public relations ballyhoo?
"Of course, it's PR," says Little Rock comic book artist John Lucas on a break from drawing the masked crime-fighter, Deadpool.
"It's New Coke," he says, likening comics to when Coca-Cola changed the soft drink's formula in 1985. New Coke caused a big stir. Once the commotion bubbled down, Old Coke came back.
Old Thor is bound to return. Mighty-thewed actor Chris Hemsworth is coming back as movie Thor in Avengers: Age of Ultron next year.
Meantime, Lucas suggests how things might go for Thor as a woman, but probably won't: What if the distaff Thor received a visit, not from Iron Man and the Avengers, but from the stork?
"Change him back into a man while he's still carrying a child," Lucas dares.
Then might the troubled defender of earth and Asgard cry anew to Father Odin, "Hear a warrior's plea!"
Style on 09/07/2014