i am excited for agents of SHIELD tv show but it bugs me how it's based on your comics yet not a single of the main characters are from comics. it's not like marvel doesn't have over a hundred SHIELD agents. and now you'll obviously do the painful insertion thing like you did with marcus johnson and phil coulson into the comics for all these new tv characters.
I don’t see this as a problem—and I’m not sure why any such insertion would be painful. There’s nothing wrong with originating characters for a project, and if the characters are good, there’s nothing wrong with introducing a Marvel Universe equivalent of them either. But most of those SHIELD Agents that you’re talking about are relatively faceless apart from a small handful, so all you’re talking about is baggage. Would Phil Coulson as played by Clark Gregg be a better character if his name happened to be Jasper Sitwell?
kurtbusiek
Yes. Yes, in fact, he would.
The rest of the point holds — Grant Ward, Melinda May and Leo Fitz wouldn’t be any better or worse if they were called Clay Quartermain, Helen Kim and Sidney Levine, fun though it’d be for a very small portion of the audience if they were.
But Phil Coulson would be a MUCH better character if his name was Jasper Sitwell. MUCH!
I agree that Clay Quartermain offers little advantage over Grant Ward, but if it was me I’d still take that. There’s nothing to lose in doing it, and you’d end up with a single stronger character rather than two middling ones.
To me the whole problem with SHIELD is that all the agents feel the same, except for Fury, Dum Dum, Sitwell, and Val. Sharon Carter and Jimmy Woo stand out by having more to do with other series. Marvel’s never convinced me that anybody else in the organization matters. I only started to care about Coulson when he died and, well, never mind.
So the decision to make up a whole new team of redshirts (bluetights?) reinforces that stigma. If they couldn’t find one rank-and-file SHIELD guy from the comics they cared about, then why am I supposed to think their all-new rank-and-file SHIELD guys are any better? It’s basically “Guys you never heard of, based on the comic whose cast we didn’t find all that interesting.”
