"Marvel Enterprises will increasingly move into film and video games and away from comics, Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo told The Wall Street Journal." (via Rupture)

"'The simple paper medium of comic books just isn't cutting it in the age of video's flashy special effects, explosive audio and interactive action,' the Journal said."

This is bull on so many levels.

Yes, the comics industry's sales are flagging, but this isn't the time to give up on it. If publishers would focus on telling stories, pairing well-written plots with good artwork, instead of stretching characters and plot-lines too thin over several different titles trying to milk every dollar they can out of fans, they maybe comics could still be saved. The reason I and everyone else I know who used to read Marvel titles stopped reading them is because with all of the different titles you had to buy just to follow one story, or one character, it was too damn expensive and too difficult to keep up with. How could I just read Cable and know what was going on with my favorite character when he kept making appearances in just about every other X title, all of which were relevant enough to reference in those helpful little asterisked footnotes that told you exactly which issue to go buy so you could follow that plot thread and not be totally lost? They could wrap up a plot thread every now and then, too, and not be so soap operatic. Quit trying to be "Days of our Mutant Lives," and just tell a superhero story. Maybe then Marvel's titles would appeal to the youngsters.

Compare Marvel to it's biggest mainstream rival, DC. Granted, DC started the whole multi-title cross-over fad with "Crisis on Infinite Earths," and while their cross-overs aren't always perfect, they are usually handled deftly enough so that you don't have to buy and read every single related issue to keep up with the story; and while DC does often delve into the personal lives of its heroes, in the end, the stories they tell are about heroes doing what they do best. Their most popular titles are consistently well-written, the art is top-notch, and they're not afraid to experiment from time to time. Best yet, more often than not, the stories they tell begin and end in a single issue. DC does comparatively well without having to constantly resort to cheap gimmicks to sell comics.

Marvel also sure sounds confident about their future in feature films, considering the X-Men movie hasn't even come out yet, and they don't know whether it will achieve the box-office success of previous comic-based movies, or if it will fare about as well as Marvel's previous attempts at movie magic. Though, by now, even I, after having been so careful about keeping my expectations low, have to admit that the X-Men movie trailers have considerably raised my expectations, and it probably won't suck. Still, it looks like Marvel would wait to count the box-office receipts before declaring that from now on movies will be their thing.

While this move is disappointing, I can't say I'm too upset about it. Clearly Marvel is no longer helmed by people who care about the artform of comics. That such people will no longer have the opportunity to give the artform a bad name is probably just as well.