Disney's Cloak and Dagger

Disney has purchased Marvel comics for roughly $4 Billion dollars.  At first glance, this seems like perhaps the most awful thing ever to happen to comic books and their characters.  Disney is anti-thetical, in so many ways, to the tradition and style of comic books.  Where comic books have had a long history of exploring the deviant, horrific, and politically uncomfortable; Disney has, since its very inception, striven to remain mainstream, inoffensive, and largely a-political (assuming you ignore Disney's Christianism and Christianism's recent graft with conservative politics).  For comic book fans, this is roughly equivalent to suddenly giving complete control of your social calendar to your grandmother--an unpleasant and certainly awkward situation.  

There is a silver lining.  Maybe.  Possibly.  The upshot is that Disney, despite it's $4 Billion dollar invoice, isn't going to get to touch the Marvel movie franchise's already in existence.  This includes the Spiderman trilogy, the X-Men trilogy and subsequent spinoffs, as well as the wildly popular Iron Man movie and its sequels.  They can't even get at the Avengers film.  In that light, the $4,000,000,000.00 that they paid seems a bit much, unless of course, Disney sees big profit in other Marvel characters and plots.  Here's where Marvel franchise fans may have a reason to thank Disney for buying the comic book factory of their boyhood dreams.  Disney may be eyeing the lesser known superheroes--and villains--for their own movies, aimed at drawing in larger swaths of the young male boys, tweens, and teens demographics.  Demographics that years of princess movies, Hannah Montanna, and the Jonas Brothers have left them struggling with.   It's inevitable that these movies would not necessarily remain true to their original art.  It's Disney, they're still Evil.  However, this purchase may bring some characters and stories to the big screen that otherwise may never have been picked up by a major studio simply because they'd be still too busy making Avengers 8 and Iron Man 14.  I, for one, am not welcoming our new Mousey overlords, but I'm praying to the Silver Surfer that some good may yet come of this.