Recently Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter was appointed as Veteran's Affairs Aid by President Donald Trump. I feel dirty just typing it. President Trump, Trump President, just nasty. People have began questioning if Ike should remain as CEO of Marvel. Well, I sat down and came up with a list of reasons that he sucks as a human. Disney should fire his ass today, but we all know they won't.
1. G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim woman and one of the creators for Kamala Khan recently expressed concern over Ike working for Donald Trump stating:
People understand that in today’s world, we vote as much with our dollars as we do with our ballots. We don’t want the things we buy and enjoy to support bigotry and injustice. The real possibility of a Trump presidency is terrifying to those who would prefer not to live in a dystopian autocracy, and for obvious reasons, the idea that the CEO of Marvel supports Trump makes a lot of readers seriously concerned.2. The guy has been feuding with his neighbor since 2013 going as far as to claim he secretly harvested Ike's DNA. Yeah, he thinks they're going Clone Conspiracy on him. What's the feud over? Ike doesn't like the neighbor's pool lights illuminating part of his tennis court.
3. Claims his DNA was illegally collected to prove that he was sending hate mail.
4. Ike is hit with a countersuit stating that he sent hate mail to his neighbor, sent other people in the areas claiming his neighbor was a rapist and pedophile, also sent threats to prison inmates signing his neighbors name.
5. Ike's lawsuit is thrown out because nobody ever collected his DNA.
6. The hate mail was sealed by Ike's wife Laura with DNA linking her to many of the envelopes. Ike still has not had his DNA tested. I'm just gonna go ahead and state he probably licked the rest of them. You'd think they'd be able to afford some $1.26 cent envelop moistener, that stuff lasts forever too.
7. In July of 2016 Ike sued in a New York court stating his DNA was illegally collected, this is after the original case was thrown out in Florida.
8. He's not denying that he intentionally lied to ruin his neighbor's image, sent him threats and sent threats to prison with his neighbor's name attached. He just doesn't think it's fair that he got caught. Hollywood Reporter has more.
9. You can view the archived story from Comics Bulletin here but Ike once told former Marvel Editor Bob Harras that if his kids turn out to be gay, he should murder them. For the record at the time Eric Ellebogen was an executive for Marvel and also happens to be openly gay. If you're wondering what happened, nothing happened to Ike. But, Bob Harras soon left Marvel for Wildstorm and eventually DC. Eric Ellebogen left and worked in several companies before settling in nicely for Dreamworks.
10. He will do anything to save money no matter how it effects employees or the company as a whole.
11. Archived reports from the Financial Times have stated that Ike has been known to go off on employees for things like leaving lights on when walking out of a room, leaving the coffee pot on for too long, wasting notepads, throwing away paper clips and wanting new pencils when they've still got an inch left on the old one.
12. In 2011 he fired dozens of people in a single week to cut cost. There is no logic behind who he chose to fire other than assuming that they are the ones who can be replaced for cheaper or weren't needed anymore.
13. Banned from the Marvel offices, rumor puts the reason as to "save people's marriages"14. Three black women sued him and Marvel in 2012 because in addition to being super homophobic, he's a fucking racist. The suit claimed that despite the three women all being long time Marvel executives he always referred to them as "The Help." Other claims listed were things such as telling one woman she had a bullet with her name on it. For the record, Ike is a strong supporter of open carry and often carries his gun to the office. Marvel quietly settled.
15. To cut cost on films Ike replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle because nobody would notice. Telling former Disney executive Andy Mooney, "all black people look alike."
16. Ike tried to personally negotiate with Fox to allow X-Men and Fantastic 4 characters to appear in Marvel films instead of letting Kevin Feige do it. He started with a low ball offer and he just kept lowering Fox's financial cut while adding more demands until they backed out and refused to speak with him.
17. His response was to cancel the Fantastic 4 comics and drastically cut X-Men exposure.
18. While Marvel was trying to pry Spider-Man from the hands of Sony Ike took the time to explain why female heroes are horrible, just plain horrible. Not just Marvel, but DC as well. All of this because Sony wanted to make movies with some of Marvel's female heroes if they gave up Spider-Man. But hey, you got Captain Marvel when you could have had Black Widow, The Night Witches, Scarlet Witch, She-Hulk, Spectrum and many others. Thanks Wikileaks. So homophobic, racist and misogynist. That's what I call a trifecta.
19. It's great that Kevin Feige basically has final say on movies now. Mainly because he was the only thing keeping Ike from firing Robert Downey Jr. because he was costing too much money in 2014. Yeah, I haven't been the biggest fan of every MCU movie, but c'mon RDJ makes some of those movies bearable. Because I assure Mark Ruffalo isn't. Feige basically had to threaten to quit until Disney took the power away from Ike. Then Kevin brought Spider-Man home in the exact opposite way Ike handled X-Men.
20. Jeff Dunetz who worked for Marvel from 2002-2003 recently told a story about Ike digging paperclips out of the trash:
Here’s a funny but true story about Ike Perlmutter. My second week at the new job (advertising director for Marvel comics) I received a letter of congratulations from an old colleague who also attached her new business card to the letter. I kept the card and tossed the letter and the still attached clip in the trashed. A few hours later Ike came into my office and noticed the contents of my trash. He took the paper clip of the letter, put it on my desk and said, “If you throw that out, I have to buy you another one.” That would bother some people, but not me. You see with Ike Perlmutter you always knew what you had to do to make him happy, profit!21. The most well circulated picture of Ike, isn't even Ike. He hired a model to stand in for him.
22. When Marvel's office moved to be closer to Disney's, Ike refused to let Disney buy them new furniture as an office warming gift because it would be too expensive, so they just moved the old furniture.
23. Ike once complained that Disney was spending too much money on catering for journalist. This meant during a media event for The Avengers they ran out of food and journalist had to steal food from Universal Studio's Five-Year Engagement.
24. Rumor has it that Ike got Andy Mooney fired as head of Disney's consumer products because he wasn't aggressive enough. When asked about it Mooney always replies "no comment."
25. Marvel has the rights to final say on script, story and costume on Fox films for X-Men and Fantastic Four. They just refuse to help because Ike says it would cost too much money. Let's hope Kevin lends a hand.
I mean, fuck this guy. It's what we expect from Trump's cabinet at this point. The problem is boycotting Marvel doesn't hurt him at all. It hurts the writers, artists, editors and so on. As an executive his salary is basically guaranteed. Going back to G. Willow Wilson on her personal blog she also stated:
Frustratingly–boycotting books you love will not take a single dime out of Perlmutter’s pocket, much less out of Trump’s. It will, however, kill the books. This is the great catch-22 of corporate art in any form. ( And it’s something I think about a lot.) It’s the flaw inherent in the system. There’s a lot I can’t say, so let me just say this: follow your conscience. I am going to continue to work on Ms Marvel, for the following reason: I have never, in my entire career, seen a character and a story light people up the way this has, and I need to see it through a little longer. (Unless of course I get fired for talking about this shit, in which case, it was nice meeting you all.)Sadly, she's right. There's a lot of people who just aren't going to be happy supporting Marvel now and you can't really blame them. It goes beyond just Ike and people have been unhappy with Marvel for while now due to things like removing digital codes from physical purchases, constant reboots, endless events and so on. The problem is there's no way to hurt the pockets of Ike and others making these decisions. Instead we'd only hurt the creators, the people actually responsible for giving us the content.
You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet. You can also check out his playthrough of Sleeping Dogs or Skyrim
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