Marvel Comics blabbery

Starting in June, every new issue of a Marvel comic will be branded as #1 in perpetuity.

The least they could do is some kinda '90s Superman numbering shit to keep things straight. I'm way on top of this stuff and it's confusing even for me. I cannot even imagine how casual fans make heads or tails of anything (like trying to keep track of the three volumes of Captain Marvel that have been released in the last couple of years, featuring Carol Danvers, who was previously named Ms. Marvel but who is not the Ms. Marvel who has had two separate volumes of her own comic within the same span of time).

the sad thing is that i could easily keep all this shit straight in my head when i was 15, when i'd have to travel for a couple of hours in each direction to buy my comics. now that i'm 35 and have access to 50 years of marvel to read anytime and anywhere, most of the time it's too much effort to work out which captain america or whatever i should be reading next and i just end up doing something else instead.

Well, twenty years ago, Marvel would actually continue issuing a single volume of a title for decades at a time rather than rebooting every six months. It was a much more streamlined thing. And they also put out about a third or a quarter of today's volume of titles.

does continually bringing out new #1s really have a positive effect on sales? i'd have guessed diminishing returns would have set in long ago but they keep doing it!

it doesn't help that marvel unlimited will frequently throw an additional spanner in the works by filing All-New Forbush Man as under 'A' rather than with all the other Forbush Man comics under 'F'. it took me like a year to realise that the new squirrel girl series was on there because it wasn't where i expected it to be under 'S'.

I honestly can't keep track of the verbiage for the line-wide rebranding. I don't know what's Marvel Now! and what's All-New Marvel Now! and what's Even Newer Marvel Tomorrow! and Super-Seriously Way-New Marvel Future!

also this hawkeye comic sucks

the thought of an all-new hawkguy without fraction/aja is deeply unappealing tbh

I wouldn't say the new Hawkeye sucks but it's definitely not as good as the Fraction/Aja/Wu iteration

in the first five the present day bits just felt like the same thing done less well (why are kate and clint being idiots?) and the kid stuff was just ...

We (me and my friends in middle school/high school times) used to think it was awesome that Thor was on issue 348 and capt America on issue 275 etc etc. it made us want to read those series more. I mean new titles were exciting too but those triple digit issue numbers were IMPOSING like the way hulk lifting 50 tons was imposing.

Yeah, that's pretty OTM. But everything is Tweets and Vines now, who has time for long shit, man.

The first issue of Uncanny X-Men I picked up was #273. This was immediately on the heels of a crossover (X-Tinction Agenda, I believe), and all of the X-teams were hanging out at Xavier's. I had no idea who 90% of these people were, and there was a ton of them. Totally baffling, but also totally intriguing because I'd jumped into the middle of this story that had clearly been going on for a looooong time, and the fascination with digging into that backstory has kept me going for a couple of decades since in a way that I don't know I would've been as inclined to do had I first picked up, say Uncanny X-Men v.3 #4.

One of my first X-Men issues was during the X-Cutioner's Song crossover. I still don't understand what happened in that crossover.

there's just too much now. I would be more inclined to dip my toe in if series naming/numbering wasn't so bafflingly complicated.

One hopes that shit will settle down in the wake of Secret Wars but we shall see.

damn, and I thought I was kind of a latecomer to Uncanny X-Men at #210

I wasn't going any deeper into comics than G.I. Joe at that point.

huh, #272 was my first issue of uncanny!

Weird! And that was still most of a year away from Claremont leaving and all of the other big changes and new series, and a number of months before Infinity Gauntlet (the thing that cemented my own Zombification), so I don't even know what that's about. Synergy!

first one i remember was #176; i remember i thought it was wild that cyclops was destroying the name of the book

90% of my Marvel Universe collection at that point was culled from whatever random stuff I found in grab bags and on drugstore racks. Like one issue each of Alpha Flight, Micronauts: The New Voyages, New Warriors, etc.

Renumbering Ms Marvel - an actually popular IRL life comic book that sells to audiences beyond the usual nerds - is bananas. But renumbering other books, when a new creative team starts, doesn't strike me as an intrinsically terrible idea. Cutting off bullshit comics like Howard and Uncanny Avengers - I mean, those comics are bad anyway so it's hard to get worked up about.

The new Daredevil comic is also pretty awful compared to the last run, and it seems like they've continuity-fridged Waid's great female lawyer character (unless she's turned up now - I quit after the second issue.)

Also, I hate to mention Waid with DJP just five or six posts up, but the new Black Widow #1 was super fun, and read even better on the iPad guided view thingy.

I was just reading Waid's Fantastic Four. I gave up quicker than I was expecting to.

Seem to remember it peters out after the face scar story.

i gave up just after reed got it, you mean it was going to go downhill from there? terrifying

i remember reading a couple old issues -- human galactus, jack kirby god -- and quite liking them both. but the rest of the ideas seem less interesting and on a sentence by sentence level waid just can't write at all and they set up this whole 'they're explorers, adventurers!' thing in the first issue and then never do any exploring or adventuring and literally every single issue someone literally says 'we're not just a group of superheroes -- we're a family/'

oh, and mike wieringo's sue storm is just embarrassingly cheesecake all the time

For those keeping track of these things, a War of Kings/Rise & Fall of the Shi'ar Empire omnibus has just been solicited. So it looks like there will be omnibi of, well, at least most of the Abnett & Lanning cosmic saga.

i kind of appreciated the thread of the "time runs out" arc where sue storm was undercover with shield. in a different uniform and situation, i just kept thinking "damn, what a badass" which is, unfortunately, the opposite of what most FF writers do

yeah that was great

never really thought of it this way but if you think of Val's motivations being a result of her being Sue's daughter, not as some "dad vs. uncle doom / compromise" angle, she's an even stronger character

was there a comic where sue was doing that or do you just mean the like six total pages of new/avengers where she features

hey, I think it was seven

Hickman's great with her in his FF run. The fact that she's basically secondary to Reed in Secret Wars was disappointing (although not surprising).

So is anything good from All New, All Different?

Ultimates. Dr. Strange. Karnak.

The other decent stuff is continuing from before: Ant-Man, Thor, Ms. Marvel, etc.

Sadly, as with each reboot, almost all of it is hot garbage. The glut of Avengers/X-Men/Inhumans books area combo platter of suck now, which is a bummer.

Overall it's weaker than their last relaunch - ball totally dropped on XMen and some of the Avengers books - but still miles ahead of DC. I like Al E's New Avengers a lot, moreso than Ultimates - although it's just been dropped into crossover hell. The Black Widow relaunch with Waid & Samnee was a great debut; at the same time Waid's Avengers book is some of his worst work in a while.

And I'm enjoying Bendis's two Iron Man titles before the plot one inevitably collapses into stasis as is Bendis's way.

Enjoying the heck out of:
The Ultimates
Spider-Woman
Vision
Thor
Spider-Man (Miles)
Karnak
Captain Marvel
Dr. Strange

2nd tier/s'OK:
Red Wolf
A.N.A.D. Avengers
All-New X-Men
Ms. Marvel
Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur
A-Force
All-New Wolverine

Too soon to tell:
Black Widow
International Iron Man

Not really feelin' it:
Uncanny Inhumans
Old Man Logan
New Avengers

NO:
Uncanny X-Men

Add Daredevil to "not really feelin' it"

Oh yeah, Spider-Woman and Vision are both great and destined to end soon.

what did they do to the x men this time

Jesus william, do you own a comic shop or torrent or...?

In a world that’s never hated or feared mutants more, there is only one constant: BIGGER THREATS REQUIRE MORE THREATENING X-MEN

oh goody

I think what's so confusing about this relaunch is that there seems to be no 'main books' now. In the last decade or so it has been the main Avengers writer who said the tone, no matter how bad Bendis became - and boy was he a self parody towards the end of his launch - if anything weird happened in a good book you were reading, you could go to the Avengers books to figure it out. But it seems the playing field is a lot more level now, and I'm confused as to what is going on.

That said, I checked out both New Avengers and Ultimates, and really, the trick is to read anything by Al Ewing, right? Those books begin pretty good, and picks up a lot of pieces from Hickmans run.

The idea that there should be a main book leading the entire Marvel line hasn't existed since the Bendis rehaul of the 00s, has it? In previous decades (like in the 80s, when I first started reading this stuff), there were some people who read all comics across the line, but a lot of people just focused on their favourite corner of the Marvel universe, like the X-books or Spidey books or Avengers or whatever. Starting from Secret Wars here were some line-wide crossovers, but mostly these different sub-franchises still kept to themselves. Which was great for someone like me, who loved the X-Men but didn't much care for Spider-Man.

So if Marvel comics would actually return to this previous model, where one writer/comic/storyline doesn't dominate the entire franchise, that'd be great for casual readers like me. I don't have the time, the money, nor the interest to follow most Marvel books, but in last the 10+ years I have been been reading a handful of niche titles... And one of the worst things about the whole franchise being directed by Bendis was that books which could've/should've been mostly self-standing were constantly interrupted by various mega-crossovers. This undermined their own storylines and made them hard to follow for people like me, who weren't interested in what was going on in the Bendis Avengers books. Thankfully the Abnett/Lanning cosmic comics mostly took place outside Earth, which helped them stay out of these crossovers (though there still was a pointless Civil War tie-in in Nova), but books like Avengers Academy weren't as lucky.

While this sort of "everything is connected" approach maybe makes sense from a marketing point of view (to understand what's going on in your favourite comic book, you have to read 5 other books every month), it's also effective in driving away casual readers like me, who might be interested in one or two montly book, but can't be arsed to read 15 different titles. IMO this "for superfans only" attitude is one of the main reasons why Marvel comics haven't been able to get more new readers despite the popularity of the Marvel movies.

It's a balance, really. I like reading New Avengers and seeing plot-threads from Young Avengers being picked up and developed. I loved it then, I like it now. I like seeing Pod and Sunspot further developed from what Hickman did with them. But then of course they'll mention something that happened in a book that I don't care about, such as Inhumanity or Sam Wilson: Captain America and I'll go 'ugh, enough with the continuity noodling!'

The good thing about late Bendis was how his changes were so stupid and superficial that you could get almost everything of it through reading an interview. 'Oh, so Norman Osborn is in charge of the Marvel Universe. And it's because he shot the queen skrull? Ok, I do not need to know anything else about this, please don't tell me more.' And then you could read on.

It's not just that you in order to read Book A you needed to know what was going on in Book B, C, and D, it's that the crossover plots of Books B, C, and D kept interrupting the plot of Book A. I mention Avengers Academy again, because it's such a good example of this. The writer, Christos Cage, was clearly interested in building long arcs and mythos of its own for the book, but because it had the word "Avengers" in the title, at least once a year it had to include a multi-issue tie-in to various linewide crossovers, which diminished Cage's ability to give the book it's own, unique feel and arc.

I too like the idea that character backstories and old plot arcs are referenced, that's what gives the whole Marvel universe a lived-in feel: everything and everyone has a history. But these references should be integrated of the dialogue, or at most there could be a one or two page flashback to previous events. But there shouldn't be multi-issue detours into crossovers plots you don't care about, which you have to wade through to continue reading the plot that got you interested in the book to begin with.

I think there are currently more niche titles, and a more diverse range of niches, than I can remember in a long time. Maybe not niche title groups, per se, but the niches are there.

I was just thinking the other day that Milligan's []X-Force[] was such a weird outlier at the time it was coming out but now it seems to fit right in with a lot of the stuff Marvel has been publishing lately.