Doctor Who Dead, XBox Layoffs Incoming, Marvel Artist Pans Conventions - Fandom Pulse Daily Briefing
Getting ready for the weekend! It’s been a busy one over here and wrapped up my reread of The Lord Of The Rings today, which I’ve combined with Christopher Tolkien’s "History of Lord of the Rings” a 4 volume set where he curated notes, drafts, and outlines of his father’s work. This made it a lot less enjoyable of a read to go through but on the flip side I feel like I have a better understanding of Tolkien than ever before. Hope you’re having a good read this weekend.
For now, you can read these articles from today and please know that Fandom Pulse needs your support! We do this full time and it’s a lot of work and only $5.99 for a subscription to help keep us going:
Russell T Davies Just Said He Won’t Film Anything Until 2027 Amid Doctor Who Christmas Special Cancelation Rumors
Russell T Davies appeared on James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure podcast this week. Toward the end of the interview, O’Brien asked what Davies was doing next.
Microsoft Put an AI Executive With No Gaming Experience in Charge of Xbox And She’s Already Warning of “Hard Choices”
Phil Spencer retired from Microsoft Gaming on February 23, 2026, after 38 years at the company. Sarah Bond, his President of Xbox and the person widely considered his heir apparent, resigned the same day. The person Microsoft chose to replace them both is Asha Sharma, who had spent her career at Meta, Instacart, and Microsoft’s CoreAI division working o…
A Marvel Cover Artist Says Stop Going to Comic Cons
Mike Mayhew spent the last week of May detonating a grenade inside the comics creator community.
IndieGoGo Is Still Refusing to Approve Indie Comic Creators: Joe Sonntag Is the Latest
Joe Sonntag, creator of Reaper Destroyer, raised over $75,000 on IndieGoGo for his first issue. The campaign fulfilled. Backers got their books. By every commercial and ethical measure, it was a success.
Black SFF Magazine FIYAH Magazine Is Going on Hiatus After The Modern Audience Didn't Show Up
DaVaun Sanders, publisher and executive editor of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, announced on Bluesky on May 21 that the magazine is going on indefinite hiatus after issue #40. His full statement:
What this kind of pop-culture briefing captures well is that franchises do not usually collapse all at once. They erode through a loss of trust: between studios and audiences, publishers and readers, executives and creators, symbols and the people who once recognized themselves in them. The interesting question is not only whether Doctor Who, Xbox, or Marvel are “in trouble.” It is why so many cultural institutions now seem unable to distinguish stewardship from extraction. A franchise is not just content. It is an inherited imaginative world. Once that world is treated mainly as an asset to be managed, the audience eventually feels the difference.