ICEMAN - Ongoing Series - General Discussion

It was the trolling. Any you know what is funny? After Uncanny X-Men #600, I actually got a PM from one of the trolls at CBR apologizing, saying that they knew Iceman wasn't really gay, and they were just having fun, and how upset they would be if their favorite was changed because of someone else trolling.



I know Marvel counts people trolling on the internet as 'fans', I do not. If anything, they are the anti-fans.

Anyway, I read, like, three articles on this. I think all three were from Bleeding Cool. I went back and found links to two of them:

www.bleedingcool.com/2016/11/29/the-fans-made-iceman-gay-his-all-grown-up-series-by-sina-grace-and-alessandro-vitti/

www.bleedingcool.com/2016/12/02/ice-ice-baby-reaction-iceman-reveal/

Yeah, Ketchum is the editor.

In one article Ketchum basically blames the fans for making Iceman gay, the same way Bendis did from the beginning. In the other the guy writing the article goes on at length to praise the story as more truthful because the writer and cover artist are both openly gay, and that the interior artist also adds legitimacy(which suggest he is either gay and just got outed by the writer , or maybe is in some other way LGBTQ).

The third article, which I could not find again, was about the whole X-Men line relaunch and the new Iceman and Jean Grey books. In it Ketchum talks about how the focus of the Iceman series will be about self-discovery and the exploration of his sexuality, saying it was something Lemire didn't have room to fully explore in Extraordinary X-Men and do it justice.

He also basically blames teen-Iceman for the '05' not going back, saying part of the reason the '05' are not actively looking for a way to get back to their own time is because teen Iceman is enjoying being able to express his sexuality in our more modern era and doesn't want to go back to a more repressive period.

Don't like Iceman being retconned into being "a closet homosexual living his entire life in shame and denial"? Blame the fans! Don't like the '05' staying in the present? Blame teen-Iceman for not wanting to go back! Got to love how no one at Marvel takes any responsibility for storylines and directions the majority of fans do not like or outright hate.


Writer, cover artist and editor all confirmed as openly gay, interior artist also supposedly adds 'legitimacy'. That leaves what, just the inker and the colorist?

There was another article on Bleeding Cool by Rich where Marvel's top editor was defensive when criticized over all the straight, white male fan-favorite characters that have been retconned, sidelined or outright replaced by diversity replacements, saying Marvel hadn't forgot about its "meat-and"potatoes", and that Jane as Thor, Sam as Cap and Cho as Hulk all came from a natural, organic place in stories suggest by the writers.

Okay, then explain all the rest of it, because you could make a list as long as your arm that goes way beyond Jane, Sam and Cho. One person on another forum I am on said it felt like Marvel had turned adding more diversity to their books into a farce, something that had actually hurt the cause. Another pointed out that by forcing fans to chose between the characters they want to read about as they want to read about them and diversity, that Marvel was actually turning people off to diversity.

I agree with both of those statements.

Politicizing many, perhaps most of their characters and storylines has brought Marvel a lot of free press, but it has also damaged their characters and people's perception of them, and turned off a lot of fans or simply driven them away. Prime example, Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel. I've been a fan of Carol for decades, but how Marvel chose to handle her after changing her from Ms Marvel to Captain Marvel has turned off sooo many of her longtime fans.

After her last costume change I went into a thread on CBR discussing it. I thought the costume looked good but the headdress piece looked terrible. I expected to see other people expressing similar opinions. instead it was, like, just sixteen pages of:

"Did Marvel minimize her femininity and make her look more like a young boy to make her more appealing to young girls reading it who are not comfortable with adult female sexuality?"

"Is Marvel making Carol look more like a teenage boy sexist?"

"Is thinking Marvel made Carol look more like a teenage boy sexist?"

"Is liking or not liking Marvel making Carol look more like a teenage boy sexist?"

As long as Marvel keeps crafting things to that audience, keeps creating comics that feel like source material for a college sociology class, they are going to keep losing fans. They could have done much to add diversity in a way that brought fans together instead of polarizing them against each other.

But then that wouldn't keep people chattering on the message boards and social media...

CBR has been hijacked by the radical left. They shout-down, drown out or outright demonize anyone who doesn't agree with them.

While I'm certain getting an apology from one of the trolls who contributed to the change is a nice thing, the damage is done. And the fact they would be upset if it the change had happened to their favorite is quite shallow in general. Good for one, good for all. Lucky for them, there wasn't someone like them making all those threads for “fun” and changing their 60 plus year history. Sorry, I don't know what to say … I think it was nice of them to apologize but the damage had been done.

I remember someone on my forum … giving the Gambit fans some guff for G. Willow Wilson's portrayal of Gambit ...the logic was …. “you (the fans) shouldn't have tweeted her telling her to use chakra as a joke” … I read her twitter back then, while I don't know everyone's twitter handle and not everyone does have a twitter account. From what I could tell, there wasn't a Gambit fan who had suggested it. She asked and got trolled with some ideas that she went with thinking it was fans of his when it was a general call out to Xmen. Lets be honest …. Gambit gets trolled … hard some days. She fell for it, thinking it was some great idea. Then that issues comes out and no, it wasn't funny what so ever for the Gambit fan. While the general Xmen fan who doesn't care all that much didn't mind his appearance.

Marvel has got to realize that the fan base is not a whole pie, its broken up into slices and those slices put together make a whole pie – still once you've removed a slice the pie gets smaller. Alienating the smaller segments of fan bases does just that. They go away, leaving a much smaller portion to carry the line. Books are $4.99 now … very few or $3.99 and some are $5.99 – for 20 pages on content. Who ever is left as the devotees of Marvel are paying for all those segments leaving the market.

I will say, there some Gambit fans who told her how disappointed in her writing of him after the issue came out. Myself being one of them.

I know my comments or examples will feature Gambit … way I roll but its in relation to understanding on how you feel about Iceman and his changes … even when it comes to fans and things.

Blaming the fans is easy, better than taking responsibility for a story poorly received.



Diversity is great, but at the expense of other characters is where its going wrong. And I agree with these comments as well. There were places where they done it well, Morales Spider-Man I think is one such case but … it worked because Peter Parker didn't go anywhere. He was still Spider-Man, they just made another version of Spidey. Overall, I think he's well received. Some can chalk that up to the Spider-Man name but I still think its because …. Parker wasn't swapped out or changed for Morales.

I understand trying to reach more fans but I don't think they're making great choices.

I also feel like I can be more candid here.

Heard from someone at CBR that there were plans for a lot of LGBT characters to show up. Northstar, Hercules, etc... The more I hear, the less likely I am to try the book. I don't like this feeling. Iceman, who I never thought would ever be given an ongoing solo series, gets one. But it's all because of this new revelation that takes so much of why I grew to like him away.

Looks like I'll be sticking to Deadpool and Old Man Logan for now (until Gambit gets something). Maybe I'll pick up the new Punisher series. Idk.

I guess Bret White loves Iceman's change ... saw this on twitter. I am going to say ..... I doubt Iceman would be flaming ... I think he'd just be one of those who accepts who he is now and rolls with it or maybe its just how I see him.

twitter.com/brettwhite

I agree that flaming gay would be too extreme. "Gold star gay" doesn't fit his history. This is a messy story element, imo.

I feel for those involved in the Iceman solo as well as his fans because his sexuality is such a big deal due to how poorly handled by Marvel.

The creative team has to handle it right it. 

And like you said ... some of his fans will not bother.

In the 80's my three favorite X-Men were Nightcrawler, Shadowcat and Rachel Summers. For much of the 90's my three favorite X-Men were Iceman, Gambit and Wolverine, in that order. I bought everything Gambit(one-shots, minis and ongoings, even the three issue crossover with the Malibu/Ultraverse's Night Man) right up to before his last solo series. I stopped when I felt like Marvel had lost interest in the character and just wasn't doing right by him anymore(and I was already dealing with enough of that with Iceman). I HATED the way they resolved things with 'The Witness', even though they left it open-ended that it may have been a telepathic illusion created by Stryfe. Even though I don't slavishly follow the character anymore, I still like him(he was a big part of why I picked up the last run of X-Factor), and am looking forward to the new movie.

I think if more fans looked at things through the lens of 'what if that were happening to my favorite' they would be more sympathetic.

I made a post at CBR over a year ago echoing your comments about alienating segments of fans and driving up prices. I bought every issue of Fraction's long run on X-Men, even though I disliked much of it due to a myopic focus on a handful of characters I had little to no interest in, and sidelining characters or simply writing them out-of-character and poorly to facilitate those few character's storylines; because at the time it was the only book my favorite was appearing in, even though it was rare and usually poorly done. That's true of a lot of fans, and when you hear people say things like "I'm the only Beast fan I know of left" on a massive comic book forum, there's a problem.

On diversity, I expect if Marvel is going to tell a story set in the world I live in(with additional fantasy elements added), I expect it to look like the world I live in. Ordinary people and heroes of various races, genders and sexual orientations, and I expect them to be treated equally. I think if Marvel had been put in charge of desegregation, a different color of people would have just been moved to the back of the bus. The idea is/was people needed to be riding TOGETHER.

Marvel is too focused on generating controversy to get attention and set tongues wagging on message boards and social media. For me, I'm TIRED of the fighting and controversy. We just went though a rough political season in the U.S. and things are more divided and polarized than at anytime in decades. In the comics, we had almost ten years of the X-Men and mutants facing extinction, putting them at odds with everyone and each other. Then Marvel was going to reopen the school and bring things back together and fans cheered. Instead we got Schism and the X-Men even more divided, then the X-Men against the Avengers, and then S.H.I.E.L.D., and then the Inhumans...

When I was growing up(and I catch myself saying that a lot these days, lol), and for decades after, the heroes fought the villains and fans worried what the villains would do to the heroes; and fans, often disparate people, bonded over a shared love(it wasn't some idyllic paradise, there were always things fans didn't like and didn't agree on, but there was more right than wrong). Now, the villains are mostly redeemed or inconsequential, the heroes fight each other, and people worry what the writers and editors will do, with them becoming the new villains fans worry about).

One of the nice things about fiction is to have an escape from life's problems, to focus on those of a fictional character and share that with like-minded fans. Now, Marvel is catering to various factions of fans who want incompatible things, and attracting new fans who hate things existing fans love. People who view J. Scott Campbell's art as misogynist, and if you like it you are a misogynist. Who view Iron Fist's whole story as offensive and one of 'cultural appropriation' and if you like Iron Fist, you are for 'cultural appropriation' and are a racist. People who only like Captain America when he is depicted in a way they perceive as 'subversive'.

It's important to have a big tent, but it's a problem when instead of wanting to live in the tent, some of the people come in carrying torches wanting to burn the tent down.


I don't know how intuitive I am, it took me a year to see something that now seems obvious to me. Provided I am seeing what I think I am seeing...

I had many an argument like that there over the years at CBR, I think you comported yourself well, it's a tricky thing to do. I had an epiphany about some things actually while on a forum for fans of the Nick Turtles cartoon. There was, not surprising to me, a group of fans who think Mikey is gay, primarily because he has a jokester personality(like Iceman) and because he yells "Leatherhead" and runs to hug him every time he sees the big gator. After years of dealing with some people's misperception of Iceman, I actually expected that for Mikey.

What I didn't expect was the fans who were convinced Raphel was gay(primarily because of a scene where he was holding his pet turtle Slash, back before he mutated, apparently the dialogue was loaded with 'subtext'), and were mad as hell he had been given a girlfriend. As one fan put it "Raphel is a bitch-godess who has all the qualities of a woman while being completely disdainful of women". And much to my surprise, others were agreeing.

I think it's not so much a matter of perception, and that they are seeing Raph wrong, as it is they are looking for a character like("a bitch-godess who has all the qualities of a woman while being completely disdainful of women") that, and not finding it, are finding a character they can pretend is that, until something happens that contradicts their fantasy. At that point they can either accept that their perception was a fantasy, or they can pretend their fantasy is real and that Raph is secretly gay and go on enjoying him as they always have.

Understandably, they chose the path of continued enjoyment. Except they then hound the shows creators to out him, and hound other fans insisting their view of Raph is the right one. As Majorie Liu once said, sometimes fans would be better off just enjoying their fantasies as fantasies.

I'm also not surprised at the change to CBR. A lot of the trolling and bullying was always left-leaning. Brett White is now the Assistant Editor at CBR and a quick perusal of his Twitter shows he is a far-left activist, so I expect things will only get worse there in that regard.

I honestly and sadly don't think much of Marvel gives a shit about diversity unless they can get a press release out of it or a sales spike, or ideally, both. In the nineties we had a lot of what is happening now. Things that work for one character become a trend and get copy-pasted on to as many characters as they can. In the nineties it was making most of the male characters 'grim-and-gritty', and most of the female characters 'bad girls', whether it fit the character or not. Now it is diversity replacements. There was cheap stunts, and gimmicks and variant covers galore, just like now. It almost killed the industry.

People blame the 'speculator boom' and eventual implosion, but the reality is the speculators kept the industry afloat even as the quality diminished, until things hit a breaking point. Sales have massively declined since then and are no where near good enough to survive the next implosion.



I made the comment when Marvel was getting praise just a year or two ago for it's all-female team books and minority team books that Marvel had finally caught to where TV was in the 1970's.

Marvel was organically adding diversity for years, with Rhodes as first Iron Man and then War Machine, with women and minorities not only being members but leading the Avengers and the X-Men. Even though the comics code wouldn't allow openly gay characters, characters like Mystique and Northstar and Pyro were created and their status was acknowledged in interviews or non-code books.

Then the code was changed to allow what was prohibited...and Marvel took Mystique from gay to bi to basically straight aside from Irene. Pyro was never acknowledged, and Northstar became a token and a flagship minority. The Wasp was largely retired, Storm became written as a shadow of the character she once was, even her history-making fight where she beat Cyclops to lead the X-Men was retconned to say Madelyn Pryor had used telepathy on Cyclops to cause him to lose to Storm.

Now they are going from one extreme to the other, to manage what was becoming a negative perception of them as a company, and predictably, being Marvel, are doing it with gimmicks, cheap stunts, pandering and sowing controversy and division and then blaming fans for not embracing it.



It's the version most of the people pushing for this have been wanting, so I expect that is what they will get.

Ah, Brett White. I don't know if he is still working for Marvel while now being 'Assistant Editor' at CBR as his Twitter now says, but back when his two columns on CBR described him as a comedian and he was playing 'objective' journalist for Marvel's books, several posters at CBR pointed out he was also writing promotional copy for Marvel.com.

Holy conflict of interest Batman!

I take anything he says with a grain of salt.

Typical BW column for a Marvel book.

First - establish bona fides in regards to subject - aka I am a fan of what you are a fan of.
Second - acknowledge criticisms exist(but only minimally) and say you share some of them.
Third - dismiss criticisms as small or irrelevant and encourage people to buy it anyway!



I think they are more focused on telling the story the people who wanted and pushed for this wanted told, otherwise there isn't much point in them doing this to appease them. I'm just hoping my theory is right...