Q: With the eight month leap ahead of time announced across the board for Marvel, something has me curious. Just how much time has elapsed in the Marvel Universe since the Fantastic Four were formed, Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and all that? Normally I don't wonder about these things, but with a specific timestamp in the stories, its left me a bit curious as to how many years things have been going on in the comics. ..?

- Anonymous

brevoortformspring:

It’s been approximately 13 years since the Fantastic Four first debuted, in Marvel Time.

Marvel Time makes no sense.

dresdencodak:

ami-angelwings:

summer-of-supervillainy:

Once upon a time, Stan Lee, a rabid misogynist, invented the Fantastic Four. I’m gonna be honest, the writing was pretty shitty, but the premise was awesome - a team full of superheroes with different powers and opinions about superheroism. A variety of relationships - siblings, friends, lovers. A pretty damn good rogues’ gallery and some decent adventures.

Overall, the team was pretty good, and defeated a ton of baddies in their early issues. Except for Sue Storm. Sue was undeniably the weakest link of the team. She spent her time crying, saying her powers were useless, and getting kidnapped by villain after villain.

This is not an exaggeration in any way.

Stan Lee wouldn’t give her any chance to shine. He kept writing her as an insecure, self-hating, ineffectual crybaby, and wouldn’t let her take credit for even her few victories. He couldn’t even think of any good uses for invisibility, for crying out loud.

Pictured: Sue not even getting any credit for beating up Doctor Doom.

She was a really lousy superhero, and a drag to read about. She didn’t get any good lines or get to do anything cool. So naturally, fans hated her guts. And they wrote in and told Stan Lee so.

What did he do in response?

Did he decide to take Sue off the team and stick to writing male characters because he couldn’t write women who weren’t offensive stereotypes? Nope.

Did he decide to put some effort into writing Sue as something besides an offensive stereotype? Hahaha no.

He did this:

That’s right, a fourth-wall-breaking mailbag issue where the readers learned that their mean, mean letters made Sue Storm cry, and they should just learn to appreciate her the way Stan Lee’s sockpuppets the rest of her team does!

So, why exactly should we continue to read the adventures of Sue Sadsack Storm?

You wanna see women kicking ass? Go watch women wrestling! Superhero comics aren’t about that sort of shit! I hope you picked up this action-packed superhero comic for something besides people doing cool shit with their superpowers, because Sue won’t be doing any of that! The guys will, though. 

Why is she even on the team if she’s not going to participate at all?

That’s right. We should read the adventures of Sue Storm because even though she doesn’t get to do any of the adventuring, her teammates value their relationships with her and she totally adds a lot to the team offscreen!

And also this one time she got to go invisible and toggle a switch in the middle of an exciting action sequence!

This reminds me of the arguments I’ve seen that fans just have to try harder to appreciate female characters as much as they appreciate male characters. It’s bullshit. Sue Storm was a shitty, shitty character throughout Stan Lee’s run. Because he wrote her that way. He gave her all of those character traits, he put her in situations where her powers were useless, he gave her that dialogue, he made her lose fights, he kept her from any chance of heroism and being an enjoyable character fans could identify with. 

The writer was the one who needed to change. Not the fandom.

The writing was sexist. It was bullshit to create an unlikeable character and then blame fans for not liking her. We’re not obliged to happily accept any slop thrown our way, even if female characters are rare.

I really do like subsequent incarnations of Sue, but it really, really depends on the writer, and how much they’re willing to develop her character, give her good lines, and let her shine. 

Sue Storm isn’t inherently a bad character. She isn’t inherently an interesting character either. It all depends on how she’s written. Characters aren’t real people. They aren’t naturally who they are. They are written deliberately. That writing can be critiqued. And making your characters cry into their mail is just cheap emotional manipulation to avoid engaging actual critiques.

I bolded part of this for emphasis.  This isn’t specifically about Sue Storm but an example of what Summer’s been saying about how people treat characters like they’re real people in order to dismiss criticism of how they’re written/portrayed and put the blame on the reader for not trying hard enough to like them.

Also, I’m amused that Stan Lee’s response wasn’t even to really address his critics as much as be like “you’re being MEAN to her, don’t you feel bad now?“  And look the character I’m writing is crying!  And the characters I’m writing like her!  It’s almost like this weird fictional peer pressure thing. -_o  Plus, I’m not even sure how that’s an argument.  All the villagers in Beauty and the Beast liked Gaston.  Did we have to like him too?  And he’s not even supposed to be a hero we’re supposed to associate with and enjoy reading about.

His “behind every great man is a great woman” argument is hilarious too.  Not just because that argument is often used to dismiss arguments about lack of representation of women in the workplace or in power (“oh but my wife, she’s the REAL boss of the house!”) but also, they’re not real, so Sue isn’t actually doing anything for them behind the scenes.  Nor is Stan Lee interested in writing the amazingly useful things she apparently is doing for them, he’s just using it as a handwave and attempting to put the onus on the readers for his own writing limitations and sexism.

(It’s also not a particularly great response to make her helpless in the comic that’s about how she’s not useless and helpless.  She’s just crying and saying she should quit and it’s the guys making the arguments to defend her.)

This example may seem antiquated, but we still see this exact same argument brought up today when people are critical of how a female character is written. It’s also a good example why the “separate but equal" excuse for weak female characters is still comically lame.

“Feminine” attributes and “masculine" attributes are mostly arbitrarily assigned by whatever culture they’re in, and are a poor means of constructing believable, compelling characters of any gender.