I’ve long suggested that a Doctor Strange movie would be a great way to introduce a new tone to the Marvel universe, a kind of movie that could rely less on big fights and more on magic and atmospherics. Now, it seems gossip suggests that Thor 2 might be planning to introduce Strange somewhere along the way, though as Topless Robot points out, it’s not entirely clear what he’d be doing hanging out in Asgard.

And while I love Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who is reportedly in contention to play Doctor Strange, I’m coming towards the end of my patience with Marvel announcing spinoffs and new characters, who don’t feel all that new given that they’re all white dudes. If a man shows up, even in a peripheral way, in a Marvel movie, it feels like he has a chance of sticking around. Hawkeye backs up S.H.I.E.L.D. in Thor and gets to be sexy and brainwashed and tragic in The Avengers. Bucky hangs out with Steve Rogers in Captain America, and gets to be a focus of Captain America 2, which will follow the Winter Soldier arc, which involves Bucky’s resurrection, though Gabe Jones (Derek Luke), Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) will stay safely in the past.

Women and people of color who aren’t Samuel L. Jackson haven’t been as lucky. Terrence Howard got replaced in the Iron Man franchise by Don Cheadle, a move that Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter reportedly said he thought wouldn’t matter because people of color are indistinguishable. Pepper Potts, despite running Stark Industries while Tony goes off and does his superhero thing, will forever remain primarily Iron Man’s girlfriend. The same fate seems likely for Jane Foster, whose only appearance in The Avengers was as an image flickering on a computer screen. This may be more contractual than intentional, given that Cobie Smulders, who played Maria Hill in The Avengers, may end up having to do another season of How I Met Your Mother beyond this year, but Joss Whedon says that his S.H.I.E.L.D. show, rather than focusing on Maria, who could have been a hugely promising hook, will feature all new characters. If Guardians of the Galaxy is, in fact, going to be a Carol Danvers movie, it would be awfully nice for Marvel to let us know, and soon.

Ever since the news came down that Joss Whedon would direct The Avengers 2, work with Marvel on the overall direction of its franchise, and make a television show that would be part of the franchise, the last part of the equation has been the biggest question. Whedon began his career in movies, but he truly excelled on television, and a show from him would be a major event, even if it wasn’t the connective tissue in a multi-billion-dollar franchise, and even if, given his track record, his involvement could be a significant way to get more women involved in that franchise, which is currently dominated by men.

Now, it appears we know at least the basic subject of the show:

From ABC Studios, the project is based on the long-running comic created by Jack Kirby and revolves around the secret military law enforcement agency dubbed S.H.I.E.L.D., which stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistic Directorate. Whedon is on board to co-pen the pilot alongside his brother Jed Whedon, and his wife, Maurissa Tancharoen, who all previously teamed on the three-part web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (The CW will air the Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day starrer in October.) Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Whedon will direct the pilot, should his schedule permit.

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions: Cobie Smulders, who played S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill and would be an obvious main character for this show, is committed to How I Met Your Mother, and I have no idea if her Marvel contract could compel her to do both, or if that would be logistically possible. The same uncertainty is the case for both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner (who was once under contract to ABC), who as S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives Black Widow and Hawkeye would also be logical significant characters.

But whatever the ultimate lineup, I think this is a logical choice. I wrote yesterday before the announcement came down that a S.H.I.E.L.D. show would make sense because “it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.” It’s also a somewhat safe one that brings elements of the films that are most like procedural cop dramas to television, preserving a familiar tone and structure.

I just hope that that safeness doesn’t mean that Whedon and company will pass up a chance with this safe concept to make the Avengers universe a little less monochromatic, and a little braver and more thoughtful about the use and abuse of power. In the current comics continuity, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s director is a woman, Daisy Johnson. Having a whole squad of agents would open up space for characters like Jimmy Woo. And if Samuel L. Jackson isn’t available to play Nick Fury, why not have his son, Nick Fury Jr. feature in whatever lineup gets pulled together? It’s excellent that the Whedonverse means that a woman, Tancharoen, is going to be working on this project at a high level. But it would be even better if that translated into a more diverse, more interesting character slate as well. I can forgive white dudes arguing with each other making up much of a one-off movie. But not a television show, and not for much longer in the franchise as a whole.

I also really dearly hope that Whedon builds on both the tensions between Nick Fury and the S.H.I.E.L.D. council, and on Maria Hill’s apparent doubts about Fury’s leadership, even if those characters can’t be in the show, in some form. As much as The Avengers are an awesome teamup, it’s relatively terrifying that Fury has essentially pulled them together as his personal army, their functionality dependent on his ability to manipulate them correctly. And it’s even scarier that a quasi-governmental body with nuclear weapons is out there calling shots beyond the scope of the U.S. government. We have a very romantic relationship with both vigilantism and decisive military action in our pop culture that The Avengers relied on to cast a warm glow over a lot of what went down in the movie, and as Whedon did with his exploration of the abuses of the Watchers’ Council in Buffy, or the bureaucrats in Cabin in the Woods, I hope he can be more nuanced about that concentration of power going forward. This is a fantastic opportunity. I hope Whedon makes it mean something.

Yahoo’s got an alternate look at what could have been the beginning of The Avengers, and what would have been a striking, and fascinatingly, different movie:

One of the most underdeveloped elements of The Avengers—or one of the most interesting pieces of setup for a future film, depending on how it’s played—was Nick Fury’s relationship with the S.H.I.E.L.D. Council, a shadowy, multi-national organization that apparently has access to nuclear weapons, and has some power to oversee his work. It wasn’t clear who they were or what authority they had, or what ability they have now to call The Avengers to account. Those tensions are all fascinating story engines that Fury essentially blew off or ignored simply by acting as he wished in the face of great danger. It’s one of the reasons that an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show would be so interesting—it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.

And it would be a nice way to reckon with the actual costs of superhero throwdowns. The Avengers skips straight from the fear and devastation and the near-nuking of New York to a world where the city is restored and there’s a vigorous debate underway about what it means that superheroes exist. But so much of superheroism is about destroying the world to save it. That’s a terrible tension, and accepting it, and not just the prospect of people with abilities, is part of what living in a world with superheroes would relaly mean.

I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.

Via Deadline, it looks like the rights to Daredevil are going to revert back to Marvel and to Disney after Fox killed an effort to reboot the franchise. The fact that the rights to certain key properties, including the blind Hell’s Kitchen lawyer, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men are held outside the company has always been one of the challenges to Marvel’s consolidation of its empire, and one of the reasons we saw a Spider-Man reboot this summer. Continuing to make use of the characters is the way outside companies keep their claim on Marvel characters live so the rights and the profits don’t revert back to Marvel and Disney.

I’ll be curious to see what, if anything, Marvel does with Daredevil. I’ve always thought the planned Marvel-ABC television show would be best off in a procedural format, both to lure in audiences who aren’t sold on superhero stories but are willing to test another lawyer, detective, or cop show, and to save money—if you can keep your hero in the office, courtroom, and street, you don’t have to invest quite as much in special effects and major action sequences. Daredevil, like She-Hulk, would be a fine contender for that kind of show, though I’d hope given the current Avengers lineup and Joss Whedon’s involvement with the television show, that they’ll choose a female character instead.

And I continue to think it would be smart of Marvel to develop a lower-budget, grittier run of hero movies, or a cable show that intersects them, a part of the market that’s open now that the adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers appears in limbo at FX. With Daredevil back in the fold, you could have an overlapping New York universe that includes him, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones in Harlem, and Doctor Strange down in Greenwich Village. Marvel has always been woven deeply into the fabric of New York. The Avengers are disconnected by virtue of Tony Stark’s globetrotting, Bruce Banner’s time on the run, Black Widow’s missions, and the fact that Hawkeye and Captain America are buried in institutions. A lower-budget franchise, whether on the silver screen or the television, could root a separate set of characters deeply in a place, making their approaches and personalities facets of the city. That kind of storytelling always served the Law & Order franchise well, and with those shows cancelled or in their twilight years, there’s a place for a great new New York crime-solver, as well as for a different sort of superhero story.

Per the good folks at ComicBookMovie.com, who base their reporting on a Disney investors’ call, Joss Whedon, who co-wrote and directed The Avengers, will return for the movie’s sequel for Marvel, and also will be developing the planned ABC Marvel superhero show. It’s about as perfect a fit as I can imagine, giving the artistic and commercial success of The Avengers. And if the ABC show centers on a woman, it would fit beautifully with Whedon’s brand, given his success with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, arguably the best successful superhero show of the last two decades, and his terrific expansion of Black Widow in The Avengers. Such a move would also help expand make Marvel’s on-screen universe more balanced, making this continued pairing an especially good fit.

As reported late yesterday, Christopher Eccleston will play Malekith The Accursed, the big bad in Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor’s first forary into the Marvel universe, Thor: The Dark World. Though he’s been eclipsed by David Tennant and Matt Smith, Eccleston’s melancholy turn as the Doctor was terrific, with a sense of brooding, cosmic scale that should fit supervillainy nicely. Both the character, a shape-shifting dark elf, and one of the most important arcs he’s associated with, an attempted coup by secrecy of the throne of Asgard, seem like an excellent fit for the world Marvel’s building, and to leverage Taylor’s Game of Thrones experience.

In that arc that sounds most promising, Malekith has Loki switch places with him in prison, something that might be easy to accomplish if Loki’s going to get thrown in Asgard Jail after Thor brings him home after the events of The Avengers. He then disguises himself as Balder, an ally of the Warriors Three (Thor’s main men), who wasn’t a character in Thor, who is apparently about to be crowned king of Asgard. It’s the kind of thing that could make for terrific nasty court politics and dramatic and unexpected showdowns in those settings. Taylor’s proved himself a nice hand in those sorts of emotional situations—he directed “Baelor,” the tremendous first-season episode of Game of Thrones in which King Joffrey orders the former hand of the King Ned Stark executed in front of his daughters, and “Fire and Blood,” in which Dany reveals herself with her dragons. The man knows how to stage an announcement of a new and dramatically different identity or worldview.

And a disguise story could also be a setup for a larger Avengers arc. One of the best-executed parts of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers was Hawkeye’s brianwashing by Loki, and the sense of betrayal his teammates experienced, the loss Black Widow felt, and his shame when he came back to himself. Similarly, if the Skrulls are going to play a role in future Avengers storylines, it would be a shame not to make use of their shape-shifting abilities in addition to those nifty ridged chins, a plot device that could gel nicely with that sense of uncertainty, loss, and hollowing-out that was present in Hawkeye’s storyline. And a Malekith conflict that also involved swapping and surrendering identities would be in keeping with those themes.

Much of the conflict in The Avengers—and the reason the finale was so satisfying—was driven by the characters attempts to come to truly know each other. Captain America wants to know if Tony Stark is sincere or a callow playboy. Tony wants to know if Cap’s a relic, and if Bruce Banner has gotten comfortable with his inner rage. Nick Fury has a role and an agenda he successfully conceals for the entire film while his men and women are busy figuring Loki out. When they all trusted each other, knew each other’s capabilities, and could work together instinctively, only then could they stop the invasion, working together at the top of their capabilities.

It’s not exactly news that ABC, which is part of the same corporate family as Disney, wants to get in on the massive success of The Avengers (and give the franchise a cross-promotional boost in between major movie events) and develop a television series based in the Marvel universe but not overly dependent on the ongoing set of superheroes who are getting major motion pictures. But apparently discussions are heating up again. And given ABC’s brand is closely associated with serialized storytelling and female characters, this is a great opportunity to get a superheroine in the mix. ABC’s already tried and failed to develop an AKA Jessica Jones show, so assuming that character is out, and excluding characters whose rights are held outside of Marvel or who have already appeared in the movies, here are five Marvel women who might be perfect for television:

1. She-Hulk: I know. Broken record. But the story of Jennifer Walters, attorney and Avenger, is begging to be turned into a smart procedural. The show could have a case of the week—Jennifer sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel on behalf of Spider-Man and files wrongful death suits against a corporation whose carelessness creates new superheroes at the cost of human lives—as well as to longer, Damages-like investigations across the course of entire seasons. And while Hulk effects are expensive, the show could keep Jennifer in human mode most of the time to save money in a first season, and have her spend more time as She-Hulk if the series progresses and is successful.

2. Sif: The Marvel movies have Thor, a god with ties to Earth. So why not bring Sif, his fellow female brawler, who’s occasionally gotten herself stuck outside of Asgard, to the human realms and see what happens? It would be a fascinating thought experiment in what it would be like for ordinary people to deal with Strong Female Characters who step off the screen, expecting equality. As much as I’d love to see a Wonder Woman movie or show again, it seems we’re ages away from that. So why not experiment with another goddess? Jaimie Alexander didn’t have nearly enough to do in Thor, so Marvel should let her shine on the small screen, and out from the shadow of Thor’s hammer.

3. Ms. Marvel: Air Force pilot. C.I.A. operative. Feminist magazine editor. And now, in the comics, she’s taken on the mantel of Captain Marvel. A TV series would have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in picking a setting to tell a story about Carol Danvers. If Marvel is going to do a Secret Invasion storyline, which would feature the Skrulls who showed up in The Avengers shapeshifting and disguising themselves as humans, a TV series could also be a great way to introduce Ms. Marvel, who played a major role in beating back the Skrulls in that comics storyline, to the franchise.

4. Dazzler: Want to do something soapy and fun? Originally invented as a way to do cross promotions for Casablanca Records, Dazzler is a performer when she isn’t a reluctant superheroine, and she could be a way to tell a story about struggling to make it in the entertainment industry, even with a little something extra on offer. And a Dazzler show could also be a way to do an anti-hero story. All the super-powered people we’ve seen in the current era of movie superhero storytelling have taken up the call. Dazzler is more than unusually reluctant, and could be a way to explore what happens when significant power comes unmoored from a sense of responsibility.

5. Spitfire: If ABC wants to hop on the Downton Abbey bandwagon, the network could revisit Spitfire, a World War II-era British superheroine from a noble family. The story’s got vampires, Nazi sympathizers, the Blitz, and efforts to hunt down war criminals. Captain America could swing by in an occasional flashback. And ABC could co-market lipstick and forties styles.

The news that makes me excited to start buying books issue by issue just keeps coming. First came the news that Jeff Parker, starting in October, will start writing Red She-Hulk as the main character of the Hulk books. Now comes word that Jonathan Hickman, known for writing long superhero arcs, is going to write The Avengers, and he tells Comic Book Resources that among his first concerns are making the team more diverse than the one we see on the big screen:

“The idea is that the Avengers have to get bigger,” Hickman told CBR. “That means bigger in every sense. That means the roster has to be bigger, and the missions have to be bigger, and the adversaries and scenarios they find themselves in have to be larger. I’ve played with this stuff a little bit over in the Ultimate Universe. Obviously, it’s a completely different weight class here, but in a lot of ways that’s the kind of velocity that the book should have. We (Tom Brevoort and I) also felt like that if the book was going to be about an Avengers world, it should look more like the world. Of course there are complications starting out when the necessary movie characters are five white dudes and a white lady, but, you know, bigger roster. Frankly, I’m really, really excited at how we address that. The lineup is killer.”

That’s not just good news for people who are dying to see some of their favorite superheroes get some more attention, or who feel frustrated by the whiteness of the big-screen Avengers lineup. It’s a way of mixing up Marvel’s franchise storytelling. It would have been supremely easy, given the vast success of the movies, for Marvel to concentrate the Avengers comic storytelling very tightly on the same set of characters. But Hickman said in the same interview that he intends to let the movie characters’ storylines play out in the books devoted to them and use The Avengers to tell individual stories about the heroes he’ll add to the team and about how those heroes interact in small groups. That means less homogenized storytelling. It means that if fans of the movies who come to the comics for the first time, they may have a chance to get invested in an entirely new set of characters. And Marvel may have a chance to build a constituency for an excitement for about characters they weren’t brave enough to make Avengers the first time around.

Because it’s The Dark Knight Rises week, I wanted to flag this post by Jim Emerson on the facileness of “Good v. Evil” as a superhero movie theme. He writes:

What I really want to talk about here are how some superhero movies develop their themes. “The Amazing Spider-Man” touches on the issue of vigilantism, but only superficially — certainly not as seriously as in either Tim Burton’s or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. The psychology of the (anti-)hero is usually interesting — and Peter finds himself repeating patterns of denial and abandonment he’s suffered at the hands of his own father and Dr. Connors. What drives someone to put on a unitard and try to catch criminals? That’s always an underlying question. Tony Stark puts on a whole metal suit in an effort to atone for his military-industrial sins.

What’s not a theme is a simplistic formulation of “good vs. evil,” although I see critics, fans, pundits and filmmakers announcing it as if it were supposed to mean something all the time. It might be a simple math problem, or a wrestling match (ask Rev. Harry Powell about Love vs. Hate), but it’s not a theme. Good and evil exist only in the human heart and mind and cannot be artificially separated — one always contains the seeds of the other. I’d argue that the idea that the world can be broken into such categories is, perhaps, essential to the very definition of evil itself, which is at least more provocative than pretending that it’s so easy to tell one from the other. It’s not always so clear-cut. And it makes for lame drama, because if the choice is clear, nothing is at stake. The Big Lie about the Holocaust, to use the most extreme popular example of the 20th century, is that it was perpetrated by people whose only motivation was to “do evil.” I see that as a form of Holocaust denial, an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to deal with the realities of human nature.

I think this is exactly right and deeply important, and it gets at one of the things that frustrates me so much about so many superhero movies. Cheering for someone who we are told is a hero, even if we have no idea what they stand for and what they stand against, feels good, but it’s ultimately a distraction, an experience that produces the feeling that we stand together with the people cheering alongside us in the theater even if we understand ourselves to be championing totally different things. What does Spider-Man, in his latest iteration, stand for? The idea that the police are an institution limited by both resources and perspective whose work should by the work of vigilantes, even if their agendas compete? What do The Avengers stand for? The idea that the world should not be blown up by fanatics and also that Nick Fury is better-equipped to make decisions than the council that oversees him, which has total screen-time amounting to less than the shortest fight scene in the movie? Good v. evil is a convenient distraction from having to talk about actual issues, like civilian control of superpowers as a stand-in for the military, or the impact of corporate influence on the scientific process, on which people in the audience might actually disagree. If the thing on which we can reach consensus is that it would be better not to be involuntarily turned into giant lizard-beasts and/or devoured and conquered by them, that is a pretty low baseline from which to start.