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Marvel Comics... finally letting me down


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Been here long enough, you know I'm a die hard Marvel fan... (and pretty much hate DC). I've been happy recently what with Bendis writing my beloved X-Men... but I haven't been thrilled with the product for a few years mainly due to event saturation.

 

I always preferred Marvel because their heroes were more real, and they were allowed to evolve and change. A few years ago, Marvel decided every year would have an event-- like TV seasons. It's a fun idea-- but with no break, event saturation started to effect continuity everywhere and it's hard to just follow the characters you like with all the tie ins.

 

Lately, there has been time travel and multiverse jumping galore in every book, and they've been saying the space time continuum isn't doing well as a result.

 

This leads to the next big event-- Secret War and it would seem... even though they deny it.. they are pulling a DC, which makes me really unhappy.

 

I HATE alternate reality stories, I always have. I despise DCs New 52 and the fact everything seems to revolve around alternate worlds when I thought the point of it was to simplify their eons of different eras and continuities.

 

Marvel has a multiverse as well, and certain books have always played it up-- but as far as pure continuity, they've been running two primary universes. The core Marvel universe, and the Ultimate universe which was started around the turn of the century to reimagine everything as if everything started then instead of the 60s.

 

In Secret War, it seems that the two Marvel universes are being merged/fighting each other. They are being coy as to what the end result will be, but based on EICs talking about this being a chance to resurrect, retcon and reestablish certain things, it would seem as if one of a two possibilities is likely:

 

One, they are pulling a DC and rebooting everything by merging the universes and creating a two new ones. Why do they need to do this? I don't know-- their continuity is fine. Most fan guesses surmise Marvel is out to re-establish their prime continuity sans the properties that they do not own the film rights to in order to make brand synergy more intact. They've already subtly retconned most of the Avengers to match their movie counterparts where needed.

 

This would basically spin the Fantastic Four and X-Men into their own universe. FF has already been cancelled. The X-Men are too popular to cancel and the x-books are an easy 3rd of Marvel's total print product... but with them set into a new continuity they could pretty much do whatever they like with them... and the plan currently seems to be to make the product as far from the X-Movies as possible. Also, and this would likely be the most controversial aspect, joining the FF and X-Men in this new continuity would be Peter Parker, Spider-Man. Why? Because Sony owns him and the Spider-Man of the Ultimate universe is Miles Morales... who Sony does not have the rights to. There's no way Marvel would shuffle off their mascot to an alternate continuity... but if Miles changed up his costume to the classic Spidey-digs, problem solved. Spider man, in prime continuity, just not Peter Parker.

 

The second possibility is that they are just winding us all up to sell comics and none of this is going to happen... but solicitations of books after the event are slim, with most al the Ultimate books being cancelled. But this isn;t without precedent. In the 90s, the Age of Apocalypse event saw the faux cancellation of every Marvel book replacing them with alternate universe titles. So they could be playing us...

 

But it's hard to deny that with FF being cancelled, Wolverine being killed, and Miles Morales being the star of the Spider-verse event over Peter Parker that Marvel hasn't made it a priority to stop helping market share of competing studios.

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Miles is cool, but I have a hard time believing fans that like him would be okay with no Peter in the "real" Marvel U. I mean call it Prime or 616 or whatever but we all know it's actually the Real Marvel Universe and then the Alternates. If Peter is now an Alternate then that spells as much permanency as Heroes Reborn.

 

As for reboots, retools, alternate realities... those that pay attention know I love Elseworlds and What Ifs. So multiverses have never really bothered me. I also think there should be less arcs (and arcs never being more than three issues), way more pick up and drop stories and crossovers should only be every few years. I think annuals need to make a come back and in those do any tweaks or soft resets needed to push forward to the next year and next set of creatives... so yeah I also think creative staff should change every year or so. Mix it up, there has to be more than 7 artists and 12 writers. ;-)

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I'd be totally behind the idea of the X Universe being seperate from other Marvel heroes. Never made sense to me that the public hated people who were genetically powered yet loved the other heroes.

Besides that I have no love for this, most of the New 52 I have picked up have sucked (except Batman and especially Superman).

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But it's hard to deny that with FF being cancelled, Wolverine being killed, and Miles Morales being the star of the Spider-verse event over Peter Parker that Marvel hasn't made it a priority to stop helping market share of competing studios.

 

One small note, but I haven't seen Miles as the star of Spide-Verse. In ASM, where the key plot points mostly progress, Peter has been the clear focus of the event, even taking on a leadership role amongst the spiders. Even in most of the tie-in books, Miles either doesn't appear or is just one of many spiders showing up.

 

Other than that, though, I agree with pretty much everythign else you said. The New 52 has been, for the most part, a mess and my regular DCU reading list has dwindled to mainly Batman books and some other series like Swamp Thing, which has stayed mostly out of te way of everything else other than the neat Rotworld crossover from awhile back. I really hope that isn't what Marvel is doing here.

 

Even if it is, though, I at least have a bit more faith in Marvel in pulling it off, at least in terms of editorial oversight. If nothing else, it has been clear that they have been building to something huge for awhile, with the most obvious evidence being seen in Hickman's Avengers books. Because of that, it definitely seems like they have a plan in place. Even if the result is something lackluster, it definitely at least seems like it won't be due to a lack of planning the whole thing out.

 

With the way that Marvel is now dominating the superhero aspect of my comic reading now, I'm definitely apprehensive about it, too.

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Are they considering that as part of Spiderverse? I've been reading that, too, and it is completely unrelated to that event from what I can tell. In Spiderverse, Miles has been palling around with a bunch of other Spidermen, running various errands in some sort of car. I have completely forgotten what their purpose is supposed to be there. As opposed to in All-New X-Men, where the entire purpose seems to just be stalling for time and keeping the original X-men away from everything else.

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"Spider-Verse" looks funky enough from the outside that I was considering picking it up in trades someday, but Secret War looks like every aspect of the DC marketing model that I can't stand anymore.

 

The main reason I stopped collecting all of Marvel's team books is because crossovers and events seem to be all they do, and they all do them sooner or later. All the Marvel series I still follow are solo books (Daredevil, She-Hulk, etc.) whose crossover exposure risk is pretty minimal...and when it does happen, the damage is slight and over with quickly. (In fact, Mark Waid and Chris Samnee turned Daredevil's Original Sin tie-in two-parter into one of the best stories of their run, using it as a springboard to dive more deeply into his estranged mom's backstory. Great stuff.)

 

I'm hoping Secret War won't affect my books too much, but if Marvel really does toss everything out and start over, I reserve the right to bail out without notice, same as I did with DC. I'm not at a point in my life where I feel like I have to collect a minimum number of corporate super-hero books even if they all suck. But it would be nice to want to keep collecting at least a few of them.

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Are they considering that as part of Spiderverse? I've been reading that, too, and it is completely unrelated to that event from what I can tell. In Spiderverse, Miles has been palling around with a bunch of other Spidermen, running various errands in some sort of car. I have completely forgotten what their purpose is supposed to be there. As opposed to in All-New X-Men, where the entire purpose seems to just be stalling for time and keeping the original X-men away from everything else.

I thought whatever event caused the Spiderverse to happen was the same that caused the X-men from the past to jump to the ultimate u-- assuming that this new mutant was involved somehow. Maybe I'm just assuming that and really it's just Miles because Bendis writes his book too?

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It wouldn't surprise me if the cause for much of it is all tied up with what Hickman has been doing along with Age of Ultron and Hunger/Cataclysm, but I don't think that has been explicitly stated (yet). Spiderverse has been all tied up with Morlun and his family and the Spider-Man tie in to Original Sin. I've enjoyed it far more than most of Marvel's recent crossovers/events. That comparison might not be saying much, but I have enjoyed most of the issues I've read.

 

Even though I'm pretty skeptical of the fallout of Secret Wars, I do have to give them credit, so far at least, with how they've pulled together many different lines of books with similar ideas while still having them do their own thing. Other than Axis and its related nonsense (aside from a few of the tie-ins, like Loki, which I think worked quite well).

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I don't know. Marvel puts out a LOT of fun books (rememnder avengers, ewing avengers, squirrel girl, spider-verse has been great so far, spider-man 2099, slott spider-man, deathlok, the peggy carter book, angela asgard's assasin, the art is pretty on the bucky barnes book, thor (love the logo for the new thor), captain america has wings now, iron man is an awful person now, bendis is a better fit for x-men right from the start than he ever managed to be on avengers, there's a guardians book with the movie guardians but also a guardians book with the REAL guardians from future times, samnee and waid daredevil, fantastic four is boring because accidentally being boring is james robinson's biggest weakness, elektra, hulk, loki, black widow, allred silver surfer, ultimate spider-man, magneto) and those are just the books I personally like, a different person with different tastes could have an almost entirely different list of well crafted unique books that they enjoyed and I would understand why they enjoy them.

 

I don't think DC puts out any fun books and certainly nothing that feels unique and maybe what they do put out is well crafted but whatever kind of craft it is it really feels like it is the exact same craft for each and every one of their books so I don't really understand anyone who enjoys more than one or two of the non-fun books they have to offer right now. The solicitations for this Convergence thing makes it look like someone sat down there and said to themselves "oh if only our books could be fun so let us get out our Checklist Of Fun and get basically the exact same set of people to do the exact same books but now operating under this lifeless near-fun rubric".

 

anyway, even if whatever marvel is doing next breaks the rules of their fictional universe or separates their franchises (uggh) into their own little fiefdoms or they just stop calling the Fantastic Four book by its title out of spite that is okay by me because everybody there seems to more or less understand what their jobs are so whatever crazy constraints they decide to put on themselves for whatever reasons they've concocted I still have a little faith that things will turn out okay (or at least suitably ignorable) in the end. They decided once that Spider-Man had to sell his marriage to the Devil and things now seem pretty a-okay for Spider-Man as a character.

 

but seriously what if Grant Morrison is coming back to Marvel what if he's doing Avengers oh man what if he and J.G. Jones are doing Marvel Boy II

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Magneto had a pretty interesting arc going, but as soon as I heard the first crossover was coming, I bailed out immediately.

 

Meanwhile on the "fun" tip, on the basis of #1 alone I can already tell Unbeatable Squirrel Girl will be one of my top 10 series of 2015. Most of the other Marvel books I follow have their own kinds of fun: Daredevil's free-wheeling action-adventure fun, Hulk's musclebound lunkheaded fun, Silver Surfer's Doctor Who homage fun, Ms. Marvel's optimistic-teenage-hero fun, and on and on.

 

It's not that I'm opposed to Serious Super-Heroes unilaterally, but the Big Two can't seem to do a truly serious book that's also crossover-free. Curious, that.

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I haven't read any of Ms. Marvel's book yet because I've been trying to trim my titles down over the past few months and didn't necessarily want to pick it up at that time, but I've seen the character pop up in some other books recently and liked what I saw. At some point, I'll have to go back and read the title.

 

You guys are definitely right about Marvel having fun books, especially compared to DC. The only book I've seen by them that completely qualifies to me is Harley Quinn. Occasionally, some of the other books have arcs that I would consider falling under the "fun" banner, like the recent Robin Rises arc of Batman & Robin. Of course, that fun factor lacking is only one of DC's many problems that has gotten me to drop most of their titles. I think I'm just down to a number of Bat books, Multiversity, and Swamp Thing at the moment. I barely even have any idea of what their upcoming event is, other than that it is bringing back the multiverse to the main DCU.

 

Granted, Axis, which could have been pretty fun, was mostly a disaster, so I don't even know what the point I'm trying to make is.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Dunno, since "Allihilation" kicked my ass I think Marvel has made quite a comeback in general. Right now it´s all a mess - and I kinda like it with all the side lines and mysteries stacking on top of each other. Especially if you add the Thanos: Infinity Revelation oneshotto the equation where basically Thanos and Adam Warlock from alternate universes swap places... and each have a horrible turn at omnipotence. I love just about everything Jim Starlin does, but now it´s getting seriously weird in a good way.

 

Since Infinity and the incursion/Black Swan storylines still hold my interest, I´ll stick around for the cosmic stories while waiting for Michael Moorcock to call his lawyers for mistreating his Multiverse like this. How many "major" ones are we up to? 616, Ultimate, Cancerverse which apparantly wasn´t destroyed after all, the new one(s) introduced in Revelation, at least three destroyed so far in the Everything Dies mega-storyline... plus of course 666 alternate futures from the X-Men.

 

Been giving the "normal" stories a miss since Punisher Max ended. Tried Death of Wolverine. That really, really, really sucked. Especially since

 

 

Wolverine´s actions in "Age of Ultron" have been confirmed as what broke the multiverse and make Earth the focal point of total annihilation. So Logan oughtta be around a LOT to handle the fallout.

 

 

New 52 even managed to make a kid friendly John Constantine. Bleurgh.

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