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Last weekend, I made it out to the comic book store for the first time in ages. Between the holidays and work hecticness, I estimate it's been 10 weeks. Steve had to give me a short-box to carry it all home in. Good thing I had managed to borrow the car!

The Outer Limits will be moving again soon, just a few doors down. They had been in their current location for many years, but I've been a customer for even longer. This will be the fourth storefront of theirs that I've shopped at.

Having been away so long, I had 3 catalogs to go through. I'm trying to cut back on my buying, but I still want to pan for new gold. It can take a lot of panning these days; a 500 page catalog often produces less than 5 new items I want.

And going through the catalog is depressing in other ways, too. Even though I avoid *buying* the worst excesses, I still become aware of them. And this latest catalog includes a series of items that makes me despair for the satirists of the world, if reality can offer up something like this.

First, some background. Sometime in the 1980s, the term 'Marvel Zombie' gained prominence in the fan community. It referred (in its purest usage) to people who not only bought exclusively Marvel comics, they would buy *all* Marvel comics, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed them. It was *not* meant as a compliment, though some far-gone cases took it as a badge of honor.

Sometime last year, someone at Marvel got the silly idea to do a mini-series that was actually named "Marvel Zombies". It took place in an alternate universe which was suffering from a typical zombie apocalypse, and in which many of the heroes had been turned into flesh-eating undead.

Apparently, this was something of a sleeper hit. Marvel has never been known to let something like that lie fallow until it has been milked completely to death, so now they're coming out with a bunch of spinoffs (by other creators naturally).

In one of these, Spider-Man, who had apparently avoided the zombie plague in the original story, gets infected. The first thing he does is eviscerate his wife, Mary Jane. The cover of the comic is a clever, if incredibly tasteless, homage to the cover of the issue where they got married. In this version, Spider-Man has a fanged, wide open, and bloody mouth, and Mary Jane's wedding dress has a huge bloodstain on it as she hangs dead on his arm.

I guess that the marketing arm really likes that image. Not only is it the cover of the book, they're also selling it as a poster. And a T-shirt. And even a statue which sells for $125!

I have often lamented over the past few years that the American comic book industry has been locked in a death spiral. That they have completely abandoned the *actual* mainstream, focusing instead on drawing ever-increasing amounts of cash from a fan base that gets smaller and more inbred every year. That they are, in fact, cannibalizing their own fan base.

This image encapsulates everything I see as wrong with the industry. It's hyper-violent and misogynistic. It's yet another version of continuity, to make things even more confusing to those not in the know. And Marvel seems to think that its fans will not only spend hundreds of dollars on different versions of this image -- they will even be willing to wear it in public.

This is not an isolated incident. Last month, in another out-of-continuity story, Mary Jane gets cancer because of years of exposure to Spider-Man's radioactive sperm. And then she turns into some sort of monster on her deathbed and attacks him before dying.

And it's not just Spider-Man, or just Marvel. DC has had an increasing incidence of high-profile rapes, mass murders, and mutilations in the last few years. Smaller 'exploitation' publishers, such as Avatar, seem to be having a boom year.

A modern-day Wertham might well find a link between reading superhero comics and antisocial behavior. Not because the comics *cause* that behavior, but because you have to be at least a little sociopathic to enjoy a steady diet of this stuff. Comics fans tend to be maladjusted nerds because the publishers have systematically driven away any sane readers. This has been going on since the advent of the Direct Market, but having continued down that path for 30 years, the conentration level is growing truly toxic.

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Alexx Kay

February 2025

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