The MCG in the NYT

I find the current crop of Marvel Comics series to be tragically unreadable. I do purchase Namor because the Ariel Olivetti artwork is so entrancing, but there are many other books drawn by artists I admire that I will not lay down the dime (and by that I mean FORTY dimes) for because the writing and/or the status of the characters is in such a quagmire. I certainly out of principal refuse to buy Ultimate Spider-Man and its ilk because I don't want to reward the creative bankruptcy of recycling safe names rather than going to the trouble of creating new characters. The last time I was proud to buy a Marvel Comic was throughout the spectacular run on Fantastic Four by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo (and that run that ended way back in 2005). I am always hopeful for the future, though, and look forward to trying out Daredevil when Mr. Waid puts his mark on that character.

Last week's Sunday New York Times featured a leviathan of an article about the current state of Marvel Comics (from a business-oriented perspective). The online version of the article has a rollicking fun photo of four of the Marvel bosses (and is different from the more subdued version of the photo of the same four that appeared in the print edition of the newspaper). You can read the article here.

I was interested to read in there that Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso has a son named Tito. That intrigued me because I have never met anyone named Tito and the only time I've ever even heard the name was the fun Tito and His Burrito series that backed up The Fox and the Crow in Real Screen Comics. (But I've never met anyone named Axel either. If I had been the interviewer, the unavoidable follow-up would have been to ask Axel what his wife's name is.)

Please don't think that I'm making fun of anybody's name. I would never! It's just that by now I've had (quite literally) thousands of students in my classes and any time I come across a name that is new to me I take notice. So it is with a tip of my hat that I send greetings to my current and former students with the names Boruch and Princess and Rogelio and ...