Diversity In All-New Marvel NOW!

I’ve blogged about diversity in comics before. I’ve even talked about it extensively on Twitter and Facebook as well. As an Indian comics reader, comics diversity is something that I think about a lot, and being a reviewer has helped me to think about it in several different ways that I didn’t quite consider before. Diversity doesn’t just stop with gender, or race. It is much more. It is about religion, geography, physical attributes, mental state, health disorders, etc. One point I’ve iterated on again and again is that today, comics readers aren’t just white males in their teens and twenties and living in UK/US. They are much. Comics readership crosses all sorts of boundaries today. All sorts of people, from all walks of life and with all kinds of backgrounds read comics in this day and age.

Hell, comics aren’t just print anymore. They went digital and they have only been growing despite the ridiculous scaremongering from those who dislike the medium or are hopelessly wedded to their print collections to the exclusion of all else.

In a world like this, diversity is an important topic to discuss. And there are no better agents to discuss this topic than the Big 2, Marvel and DC. They are the giants of the industry who together make up about 67-75% (give or take a couple percentage points) of the market in terms of unit sells and market shares in any given month. They have the longest legacies, and thus the most material to contribute to such a discussion.

Justice League of America #8 by Matt Kindt (Comics Review)

Given the way that DC’s last big crossover event, Trinity War, ended and the way that the current event, Forever Evil, started, the big question on everybody’s mind has been just what the hell happened to the three Justice League teams. Forever Evil #1 jumped forward in time a bit and its opening act is disconnected with the ending of Justice League #23, which was the final Trinity War issue. It was only until the final page of this month’s Forever Evil #2 that we were able to get a glimpse of that in-between time, or rather, the result of it.

With Justice League of America #8, the first JL issue to hit stands since Justice League #23 in August, we finally begin to explore where the heroes are, what’s happened to them, and what the future has in store. Matt Kindt begins his 6-issue arc on this title with this new release, and it promises to be an interesting time, if he can get rid of all the kinks in his script.

How To Win by Matt Forbeck (Book Review)

I’ve talked before about Matt’s super-crazy plan to write a dozen novels last year, a project that he called 12-for-12 which specifically called for him to write one 50k novel a month for every month of 2012. He didn’t quite get to complete the project, since he also undertook comic gigs and wrote novels as work-for-hire, aside from other events, but it was still a superhuman feat. He’s been working on the novels this year as well and has already released nine of the novels, three separate trilogies with different themes and settings, to great fanfare and a hell of a reception. While I loved his Brave New World trilogy and his Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy was another good one, its really his Dangerous Games trilogy that I have really, really enjoyed.

Set at the premier gaming convention in the West, GenCon, this trilogy is a thriller/crime novel that makes full use of Matt’s experiences as a tabletop/board/card game designer and his attendance of the convention itself for the last several years. If ever you needed a window into a geek con through the lens of a contemporary novel, this is the trilogy you need to be reading.