What is Marvel's new Heroes Reborn and why can't we shake this feeling of impending doom?
Aux Features Comics
Today, Marvel Entertainment—that’s the whole company, covering the movies, the comics, and the games—posted a curious teaser that simply had the name Heroes Reborn and “whatever happened to Earth’s mightiest heroes?” underneath. We don’t know specifically what that means, but there is one obvious implication, and based on the… oh, let’s say mixed reaction that the post is getting on Twitter, a lot of Marvel fans are coming to the same conclusion.
Heroes Reborn was previously the name of a comic book event that Marvel published in the ‘90s, and even given the divisive nature of big comic book events, it’s not remembered especially fondly. Basically, Marvel handed its most high-profile teams (The Avengers and The Fantastic Four) to two high-profile creators who had since left Marvel (Cable and Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld and future DC Comics boss Jim Lee), and gave them free rein to modernize the characters’ backstories and separate them from the convoluted histories and connections that come from the main Marvel universe. Essentially, it was an opportunity to reboot characters like Captain America, Iron Man, and The Thing for the edgy, skateboard-riding teens of 1996.
The premise was sound, in that Marvel eventually found a more successful way to do this with Brian Michael Bendis’ beloved Ultimate Spider-Man comics, but fans weren’t thrilled with the way characters were changed and even edgy ‘90s teens had started to turn on Liefeld’s very particular art style by then, so Marvel eventually brought the FF and the Avengers back to the regular universe after revealing that Mr. Fantastic’s omnipotent son Franklin had hidden them all, including bad guys like Doctor Doom, in a secret pocket universe for safekeeping (comic books!).
Marvel’s teaser, then, seems like some kind of revival of Heroes Reborn, since it has the same name and the tagline seems to imply the same premise, but it is worth pointing out that the name Heroes Reborn can also mean a few different things now. For starters, Marvel Heroes was the name of a very good (yet under-appreciated) online action RPG that Marvel shut down in 2017, so Heroes Reborn could be the name of a reboot of the game. Also, Heroes Reborn was the name of NBC’s Heroes reboot from 2015, and while it wouldn’t make any sense for Marvel to be teasing something about that, we did want to check in and see if anyone else remembered NBC’s Heroes reboot.
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Considering comic sales are in the toilet these days, maybe a hard reset on everything might help to bring in MCU fans and people intimidated by 30+ years of continuing stories.
Problem is it’ll wind up the same way the Ultimate Universe did and become equally convoluted. At this point both Disney and WB are treating Marvel and DC as a trove for IP’s rather than for the comics.
“Problem is it’ll wind up the same way the Ultimate Universe did and become equally convoluted.”Yeah, but that’s somebody else’s problem several years down the line. Kick the can!
Yeah, the Ultimate line was pretty much a best case scenario. Good buzz, positive (professional) critical reception for most of the core books, some useful tweaks to the characters that eventually got incorporated into successful movies.
It took about three years for it to fall apart outside the Spider-Man book.
Not only become equally convoluted, but end up folded into the main universe. And then maybe split back out, or whatever the fuck happened there.
Really Miles Morales was the only thing of value to ever come out of the Ultimate Universe so they did all that weird multiverse hand wavey whatever to get him into standard 616 continuity then everything else went straight into the garbage can where it belonged. Weirdly they also wanted to port Ultimate Fury into 616 but instead of just doing it explicitly like they did with Miles they came up with this truly bizarre story where 616 Fury apparently had a long lost black son who looks exactly like Samuel L Jackson and was also named Nick that shows up out of nowhere and takes his place for no logical reason.Anyway I was a big fan of the Ultimate U when it came out but it became a parody of itself by the end, thanks largely to Jeph Loeb being a total hack.
I don’t really see how you can say nothing of value came out of it but you were also a big fan of it. The Bendis/Bagley run on Ultimate Spider-Man is one of the best ever. What does it mean for something of value to come out of it (other than say, being an entertaining and enjoyable story)?
I just meant by the time the ultimate line was discontinued every character and franchise other than Miles had been so thoroughly ruined that none of it was worth saving.
Convoluted and incomprehensible backstories are kind of the inevitable result when you A) have characters who can never age or die (I don’t just me getting killed in battle, but more like succumbing to Alzheimer’s) and B) create soap operatic plots which are constantly calling back to earlier stories. It’s like having continuity without change, dynamism without development. The only other solution is to go back to the tone and attitude of the Golden and Silver Age when nothing that happened from one issue to the next really ever mattered because these are just cheaply printed funny books for 8-year-olds so what kind of weirdo would give a crap about continuity? 8-year-olds don’t buy comics anymore (they haven’t for decades, really) so the market is now for grown men who treat stories about living gods in skin-tight costumes like Tolstoy. So they want continuity and for everything to have meaning because if not then they need to face the deep abyss which are their lives in late-capitalism, but that’s pretty alienating to anyone who is just curious to indulge in a little kitsch after absorbing 90 hours of their favorite film franchise. So the only solution is to reboot, until the reboot becomes bloated and sclerotic, inevitably needing another reboot, until this civilization dies out.
Arguably The Simpsons suffers from the same problem. Homer was originally a Boomer, then GenX, and now a millennial because he has remained in his thirties for thirty years (sort of, I think they finally made him turn 40). But other than flashback episodes to his childhood or how he met Marge, it doesn’t really matter. The show doesn’t really take continuity all that seriously. The problem with comic books is that they take it incredibly seriously.
Well yeah, think about the budget on a comic series for a year and how much one decent movie can make, or TV shows…. Why would you fund all these books that you know are going to fail if you weren’t getting secondary uses out of their material? Also, fans like stories they already know, despite the twists. Those Dark Knight Nolan films funded a decade of their comic division. And if you ignore hollywood’s accounting nonsense where promotion costs 300 million, almost all of their movies make some money. Marvel, not even sure any of theirs came close to breaking even.
Honestly it’s not that hard to jump in to new series, at least the ones that I do from time to time. As long as you know the basics comics are designed to be easy to jump into, and if there is something I dont get a quick wiki search easily explains it. The decades of continuity rarely applies unless a specific author wants it to, and even then they’ll typically explain it in the book from my experience. And as for the ultimate line, it lasted for more than a decade before it turned to shit which is an incredible achievement by any metric (Robert Kirkman’s run on Ult. X-men was bad, and Ult FF really goes off the rails at the end, but they come back during Hickman’s run on the Ultimates as some of the best comics I’ve ever read. So if Marvel was to do something as bold as Ultimates again I would totally be on board
I only read Invincible, does Kirkman have a schtick besides ultraviolence and stupid betrayals?
I actually am a big fan of Invincible, so I do think Kirkman is capable of doing great things but his work is all over the place. For X-men, I think he just never fit in at the big two and that was a big reason he decided to only do creator owned. He was a big deal at the time and they put him on a popular book that was not at all a good fit for him. I’ve always thought of him as a better “idea”person than a great writer.
I remember a few years into Ultimate Marvel, where I got the distinct feeling that in that brief time they’d actually managed to cram in a couple of decades of the sort of convolution that Ultimate was supposed to let you skip.
I mean, that was the Ultimate Universe, and it worked great. The problem with a hard reset, though, is that new readers probably expect certain beats to be there, especially post-MCU introductions. So you have to balance new continuity with reader expectations for, say, the origins of Iron Man or Ant-Man or the Hulk.
Great is a stretch. Spider-Man was a lot of fun and it got us Miles Morales. Early ultimate X-men was not bad but it and the other spin offs went hard into edge lord crap really quick. Every cross over event had millions of civilians killed. A large number of villains and at least one “hero” were cannibals. Captain America was jingoistic asshole. Iron Man was apparently born a blue baby who’s ever cell was a brain cell which meant he was really smart but always in pain, which is why he drinks, but eventually he started wearing makeup to not look blue and no one ever mentions the whole “I’m all brain” thing again.
Holy shit, is that Ultimate Iron Man for real?? That is some wild nonsense.
What? When did blue brain baby Stark come up? I think I read the first 2 Ultimates (so, the first 12 issues or so), and I don’t remember that at all. Maybe I just blocked it out. I do remember “DO YOU THINK THIS ‘A’ STANDS FOR FRANCE??????,” so I haven’t just completely blocked the series out.
That was the Orson Scott Card “Ultimate Iron Man” mini-series, which came after the initial “Ultimates” series run (and maybe “Ultimates 2?”). I don’t think blue brain baby Tony was ever acknowledged in the rest of the Ultimate Universe.
It came later when they did a couple Ultimate Ironman mini series that were his origin story. I misremembered a little. He was blue to start. His skin was super sensitive to light that caused severe burns so his dad coated him in a special blue paint that protected him.
That’s the ultimate problem with these things. They start with “It’s gonna be a hard reset! Of EVERYTHING!” and then they say, “But a lot of you complained about the longterm story arc in the Green Lantern books not coming to a conclusion, so not that. But other than that, EVERYTHING!” and then the say, “Well, it turns out a lot of you really like Batgirl…” and on and on and on. Even when most of your titles are in a creative rut, some are still popular, and it takes guts to scrap the popular stuff in favor of a new start for the weaker titles.The Ultimate Universe worked, for a while, because they were willing to publish it alongside the main Marvel universe, so no one had to give anything up (at least, not directly). But that’s also a real inefficient way to do things.
It would also be an opportunity to tell us how spider man originally got those powers.Did a platypus fall on him, or something ?
…are you joking or something? He was bit by a radioactive spi…ce rack.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Like, since coming out of my cave when Civil War came out and being introduced to this plucky kid from Queens I’ve been dying to find out how he got his powers?Also, is his hot aunt single or did they just not have time to cast her husband?
The platypus was the alien child of a scientist from a red sun solar system. Oh, and his platypus parents were really rich and got murdered in an alley.
A radioactive platypus!
With great platypus etc etc.
Monotreme man! Monotreme Man! Does everything a monotreme can. Has poisonous barbs and has a combined urinary/fecal/reproductive tract. Mary Jane and/or Gwen Stacy will love the last bit.
Yes they would. A clear upgrade from the Scientifically Accurate™ Spider-Man.
The reason comic sales are in the toilet has very little to do with the decades of continuity. It has everything to do with the combination of the death of print media and the speculator boom/bust of the nineties severing the new reader pipeline. No hard reset is going to fix that. DC has been trying it to no success every couple of years for decades now.
What they need to do is not have expensive comics that constantly have to tie into some company-wide crossover event and concentrate on telling fun stories instead of coming up with PR stunts to grab mainstream news headlines.
The old model of spreading stories across multiple publications, whether cross-title events or simply an individual character’s story being spread among multiple publications, has become a liability for the industry in multiple ways. I was wondering recently if a shift to treating every title as its own stand-alone “event” series is the way to go.
Pare down every character’s origins and backstory to the things they’re most well-known for, and define those at an editorial level across the entire company. Then, whenever a new creative team takes over a title, let readers go in expecting a blank slate and have the story itself inform us of where we are in that character’s life and career. When that team leaves the title, it’s a fresh start for the character, and the next team is under no obligation to carry forward any plot threads or major character changes. Don’t let any team’s work impact another’s (e.g., you could have a Detective Comics series going about old Bruce Wayne suiting up for one last case and an Action Comics arc about Superman dealing with Batman’s death in the prime of his life running concurrently.) If somebody has a good pitch for an epic-scope story that brings in characters from across the brand, you can absolutely let them tell that story, only now you don’t have to force whatever cosmic-scale hokum that entails into every single ongoing title.
I couldn’t agree more. DC has had such a slump in sales, they’re paring down to a mere 34 titles. Batman, and his surrounding characters, has always been my favourite comic character, but now he’s become so overused that it’s becoming hard to enjoy those titles. I like a lot of the crossovers that Marvel did in the past. Some great X-Men stories came out of those in particular. I love how they will announce a new big crossover that’s an “eight issue mini-series”, but if you want the full story, you’ll end up needing to buy another sixty comics to get the full story.Why do we buy comics? The stories. If I know there’s more to the story, then I want to read it. What I don’t want is to need to buy an armload of other titles, especially ones I don’t normally buy or enjoy. My fear? This will be a full-on reboot of the characters that a small minority of people want changed. All of a sudden, we’re going to see characters change race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Social Justice Warriors win. Characters I’ve loved for most of my 44 years will be taken away, to be replaced by shitty inferior versions that 95% of readers don’t want to see. Who wins? Nobody. Marvel sales will plummet, and we all lose. Welcome to the New World Order.
This might have been an issue before TPBs became the most convenient way to read comics. But not anymore when almost every comic is available in a trade or digitally.
Ugh, that’s a terrible idea.One of the things that makes comics so difficult to get into now is the refusal of creative teams to maintain continuity. Between retcons and reboots, they keep retreading the same ground over and over again instead of just coming up with something original that moves things forward.Personally, the way I see it, if you arent going to keep the plot and characters from the previous run, why even keep the same name. Come up with a brand new story with a brand new IP and let the old one end gracefully.
Seriously, and they kept cancelling series I was buying. I don’t want to have to “buy” (aka pirate) books of series I don’t care about or try to figure out what’s happening from a wiki because the plot got interrupted and suddenly everything is different bc blah blah blah happened in that other book. Can we just like have more books where the plot is resolved in one issue or in two issues? It’s so refreshing reading old comics. Also they should definitely consider making more books that are PG-13 at best and making those accessible for pre-teens to get. Superheroes are incredibly popular, but the one thing that’s hard for kids to buy is comics about those superheroes. I know one reason I got into comics was those big sets of random comics that you could get at borders plus those Archie comics that they’d sell in the grocery store checkout. If you go into a children’s library, they won’t have the “comics for kids” that Marvel and DC do publish- they’re going to have some silver age trades maybe, some modern trades that have often have stuff parents won’t want their kids to read, and Marvel or DC branded books that aren’t really comics. If people have to go to a specialty shop or download an app and pay a subscription before they can read what you have, you’re going to at best only ever have your previous audience and you’re never going to get new readers.
That, and they very badly need to redesign their comic format to the vertical webtoon format so it’s easier to read on phones.I tried comixology and it’s just painful trying to read regular comics on my phone.
i really don’t think there’s as much of an MCU-to-comics pipeline as you’d logically think there would be, regardless of how impenetrable comics have always been.
Yeah, even getting comics in your hands is not easy these days- even the apps don’t really bother to advertise. I can google tons of Marvel stuff and I also get quite a few kid-related ads since I look up videos for work and there’s *nothing* to convince you to bother with the app. These days kids are only going to get to read comics if their teacher happens to buy them from Amazon and stock them in a personal library or if their parents are already comic fans. I haven’t seen something like an Archie comic in a checkout line in years and that was my jumping on point as a kid. And Marvel’s hocking their branded regular books to children’s sections, not their comic books
As DC found out, every line-wide jumping on point is also a pretty convenient jumping off point.
The problem with that is that also serves as a jumping-off point for readers who like the continuity and have invested the time and energy learning the past stories.
And new continuity is established very, very quickly. And, really, the issue has never been continuity. A good writer can tell you the important information quickly through blurbs and captions. Comic sales are in the toilet for very different reasons.
Or rather… DC and Marvel’s comic sales are in the toilet. Some other publishers are more successful than ever.
Nah, print is a lost cause. If we’re lucky, they’ll keep them around as idea incubators for the MCU, but resets and plot heel turns are likely going to be the new normal.
“but resets and plot heel turns are likely going to be the new normal.”That’s arguably been the “new” normal since the late 80s.
This is pretty much what I enjoy about the MCU. Yeah it’s gotten huge, but there’s a clear start point and the characters have grown and changed since, without the reboots within reboots and status quo resets that have plagued the comics.
I think that’s probably the best guess. Right now, old fans hate the comics, New fans brought in by the MCU don’t understand them and the few fans left are frustrated by constant events, retcons, reboots and titles dying after six issues. Last gasp attempt to wipe the slate clean and mirror the movies makes sense, at least.
Or, they could just write stories that are new-reader friendly and don’t rely on an intricate knowledge of continuity.For example, Ben Grimm and Reed Richards originally served together in WW II. By the late 70s/early 80s, this would’ve made them older than the characters were supposed to be. Then, Marvel didn’t decide they had to blow up the whole universe to address this -THE CHARACTERS SIMPLY STOPPED TALKING ABOUT IT.
Not to mention it would be a better sell if that impulse Spiderman buy led to a comic you could read and fully enjoy without buying 15 other comics. Manga has done better than comics likely because they provide more content in one go so you’re less likely to regret buying it
Fans: That’s such a simple solution that it just might work!Marvel/DC: Yeah, maybe. We’ll get around to it right after our cosmos-shaking/this-changes-everything major crossover event that will encompass 75 titles and go on for the next five years.Then we’ll zero out our universes, reboot everything and start all over again with new Number 1 issues. Excelsior!
Don’t Marvel or DC try that every 5 years? It never sticks or works.
A hard reset can lose you your existing reader base, which are guaranteed sales, in exchange for new readers, who are a question mark. In comics, you have to write stories that are based in ongoing continuity, but accessible to people who haven’t read it all. It takes skill!
I read comics until I was in my mid 40s. I can’t even tell you why I stopped. The crass commercialism? The professional wrestling level writing? Multi-part series that ended badly? My inability to suspend my disbelief? lol. I just don’t know.
Maybe it was being in your mid 40s? I know comics aren’t just for kids anymore but it is still possible to outgrow them.
I think it’s the disappointing cancellations of series I was enjoying along with some really dumb plotting. Like I was beginning to enjoy the new Nightwing until they did that weird jump in their relationship in 1 issue. Plus I’m still sore that they haven’t brought back the character of Verity yet from Agent of Asgard for Marvel
For me it was the execrable Age of Ultron. A total wank-fest of Brian Michael Bendis at his worst. Then he went to DC and made me a liar.
Lol. Until they change it back to status quo in two years
Honesty the way they are fixing that, from the look of things, is pivoting to a on demand service model. Netflix for comics. Marvel Unlimited is very popular and it looks like DC is looking to replicate that. I worry about the comic shops. Although most of those have pivoted to being a small area of new comics and mostly collectibles, games and trade paper backs these days. I’d hate to see the monthly physical issue go away.
I can’t remember the last time I was in a comic store that actually prominently featured comics. These days they’re just all-around geek-culture shops.
The one store near my house still has a big foot print with one entire wall of weekly releases. But the owner will freely admit that if he crunched the numbers and did the “proper sales” approach that he is dedicated far to much real estate for something he ends up selling at a loss at the end of the day. He stays in business selling toys, games and clothes. The clothes, especially, are big money.
Not really. The distribution system for comic books is singularly designed to prevent an influx of new customers. When I was 5-9 years old, a kid could find comics in convenience stores, supermarkets, etc… in other words, places where the foot traffic of their parents would naturally lead them. Today comic books are primarily found in specialty shops… where the foot traffic of someone who is not already into comic books would never lead them, let alone their children.Comic books are dying because of the way they’ve primarily been sold for the last 20 years, something the people in charge of the comic book industry have never seemed to be that interested in addressing.
If the studios had never come along, Diamond would have completely killed the medium of monthly floppies. Now it just gets a slow death on life support.
Seriously, even in the 90s you could get comics in the grocery store or in Borders. And kids are still attracted to comics- when I’ve brought them in or when teachers have them in personal libraries they’re always very popular. But you have to actually make it visible so they can beg their parents for it. Marvel obviously knows how to sell Captain America toys and shirts and stickers to kids- why not sell them a comic or your comic app? Give them unlockable comics they can read if they download the app and scan a code. Actually ask Target if they want to stock your comics somewhere
Exactly. That was one of the side-effects of the speculator boom of the nineties; comics started being printed on higher-quality paper, which ramped up the price dramatically in the space of just a couple of years, and when newsstand sales dropped (along with new readership) they just sort of shrugged it off and focused on the comic shops sales driven by their existing adult customer base. Once the convenience store and grocery store market disappeared, it was over. It’s not coming back.
It’s like jazz. Jazz in its heyday was pop music. But then it started catering to the serious fans in the 1950s and has been becoming more and more niche ever since.
Yes they are in trouble, but, I dove nosedeep into the comics after Endgame and I’m following several titles now. It’s not impossible to like something intimidating.
I would immediately cancel all my Marvel books if they did that, DC does it a lot, and it fails every time.
DC has been rebooting every few years for like the past few decades and it’s never worked for them
Kids don’t read comics not because they’re intimidated by continuity, but because they have smartphones and playstations and other equally engaging ways to spend their time, and aren’t interested in picture books.
I mostly gave up reading mainstream comics in the late 90s, it’s just too convoluted to keep up with. Give me a single month to month series, mini series, one shot, graphic novel or collection, I’m good. Once you start doing crossovers and needing to go through six different titles a month to know the full plot, I’m out.If they simlified things I could see people buying more because it can be kept casual.
To this day whenever ‘Heroes Reborn’ is mentioned it immediately brings to mind Rob Liefeld’s catastrophic drawing of Captain America.
Either Rob changed perspective on that drawing mid-way through and didn’t go back and change what he’d already done, or the tumors on Cap’s left side have grown much larger than the ones on his right.
he’s got a mild case of cubism.
“Catastrophic” is a really good descriptor. I’m just endlessly fascinated with that drawing, how many people must’ve seen it before it went to press, and yet none of them was able to stop it from being seen by the public.
If you start looking through Liefeld’s catalogue, you’ll realize they ALL look like that
I think the issue was that Leifield was insanely popular at the time. People loved it and it made him and probably many at marvel millionaires. People probably stopped saying anything pretty quickly
A window on the Zack Snyder MCU we could have had.
Ha, I came here to post a related image:
Cap just had his chest pouches extra full that day.
The one good thing that came of Heroes Reborn was that Baron Zemo took a bunch of supervillains, gave them new codenames, and masqueraded as superheroes as a superhero team called Thunderbolts.
“Screaming mimi” ? Is that really a new codename ? Sounds like it was given at birth.
Her name is Melissa Gold and her codename she used for Thunderbolts was Songbird. Screaming Mimi was the codename she used prior to joining the Masters of Evil and she would keep her new codename going forward.
Oh dear. When your name is songbird and someone renames you screaming mimi, they’re tying to tell you something.
Let me clarify: She was first called Screaming Mimi and than changed it to Songbird.
Oh ok, sorry. The Marvel universe is less ruthless and gruesome than I thought for a moment.
It’s hard to overstate how shocking this was at the time. There were rumors of it being the case out there, but relatively few, and comic fans were not Very Online like they are now, so this knocked nearly everyone on their ass when they got to the last page.
Great run by Busiek on this book.
I think that was probably the last time I was shocked by a comic book twist.
Agreed. This is definitely one of the most shocking endings in comics history. With the FF going to the Heroes Reborn universe, Marvel was hyping this new team as the one to replace them in the 616 universe (I think they actually moved into the Baxter building). This definitely fooled everyone.
I recently read the run, and while I love Busiek (Astro City for life and Secret Identity is one of the best Superman stories I’ve read), the dialogue and narration is very cheesy. It was enjoyable though.
Busiek is better at ideas than characterization.
But this was also not a book that was going to lend itself to naturalistic storytelling. Superheroes got removed from the universe by the god-like powers of a superhero kid and now supervillains are dressing up as superheroes to replace them.
You don’t call Harvey Pekar to tell that story.
Take your fucking star
Man, I still remember how shocking that reveal was from back in the day!!
It’s the X-Men’s fault, if we’re being honest. The X-books were far and away Marvel’s biggest moneymaker, and the rest of the Marvel stable were basically in danger of either becoming second-class citizens in their own universe or just simply irrevelant.So they tried to contain them in their own universe in order to make them relevant without stepping on whatever massive earth-shaking events were routinely happening in the X-Men universe.
but wasn’t heroes reborn a direct result of the massive marvel crossover onslaught? i think the pocket universe was just a way for them to sell a shiny #1 issue with rob liefeld or jim lee’s name on them.
They used that as a jumping off point, but they were very specifically Heroes Reborn Into a World Without the X-Men.
And worse, using it as the launch point turned The Most X-Men Event Ever (the villain is an Xavier-Magneto hybrid) into The Event Where the X-Men Get Sidelined (the villain can literally only be defeated by non-mutants, thus the stars of the event sit back and watch the climax happen).
Honestly, bullshit turns like this are a big part of the reason I stopped reading open-ended ongoing monthly comics in the early 90s… and it happened through the X-Men franchise titles I was reading, though the problem was endemic to a lot of titles from many houses.
The combination of meandering plotlines punctuated by major events mean to drum up interest that were later undone (often also to drum up interest) rather than straightforwardly telling good stories was too much.
Superheroes and related characters and their stories CAN be fun, exciting, even sometimes meaningful, but I’d rather invest in the occasional high-quality limited series or one-off.
Yeah, it’s hard to get into comics because of the continuity. That’s a big reason why I’ve stuck to the MCU movies rather than the actual comics.
For me, it wasn’t even the continuity so much as the fact that a lot of that continuity was dumb and pointless. :/
That’s when I quit. Everything I’ve read about Marvel comics since has made me more confident it was a wise decision.
When I was in middle school in the 90s and still buying weekly comics, everything that was Marvel but not X or Spider-Man seemed like some weird holdover from a bygone era. I might as well read DC if I’m going to read Captain America or Iron Man! I know that much was going on in comics during the 90s, but if you were a 6th grade boy, all that mattered to you were superheroes, and the X-Men and Spider-Man were the only relevant superheroes around.
One would wish it’s Marvel’s Avengers: Heroes Reborn, a FF14: A Realm Reborn-style total reboot of a shit game, but yeah it won’t happen.
i think the best was just before when rob liefeld tried to create his own cap and the best name he could come up with was ‘agent america’ and then ALSO rebooted the fighting american.like…it’s so weird! who likes captain america that much?
wasn’t heroes reborn the result of the onslaught crossover, as well?
Indeed it was. To elaborate on what’s in the article, Franklin whisked the Avengers, FF, Doom, et al, into the Heroes Reborn pocket universe a split second before Onslaught killed them, leaving the 616 Universe to believe those characters had perished at Onslaught’s hands.
but fans weren’t thrilled with the way characters were changed and even edgy ‘90s teens had started to turn on Liefeld’s very particular art style by then, so Marvel eventually brought the FF and the Avengers back to the regular universe after revealing that Mr. Fantastic’s omnipotent son Franklin had hidden them all, including bad guys like Doctor Doom, in a secret pocket universe for safekeeping (comic books!). This was planned from the start. The series were conceived as being a limited series.Throughout his stay in the X-Men books during that year, Franklin Richards was possessive of a blue ball that he carried with him everywhere and picked-up after the Onslaught event. Which was revealed to be the physical manifestation of the pocket universe. Many comic readers guessed this plot point well ahead of the finale.
Ditto Thunderbolts, which was also written with the intent of climaxing its first arc in issue #12 with the return of the regular heroes. For starters, Marvel Heroes was the name of a very good (yet under-appreciated) online action RPG that Marvel shut down in 2017, so Heroes Reborn could be the name of a reboot of the game. That would be keen. I had just gotten into the game near the end and was rather enjoying beating up bad guys Diablo-style as various superheroes and was pleased with having Ghost Rider.It was a nice spiritual sequel to the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games.
To be fair, the original Secret Wars was a silly mash’em-up literally given that title by a marketing form to sell more toys and the reboot a few years ago was deep and complex and a lot of fun and not related at all to the original storyline. They could just be recycling a well-known name but doing something completely new with it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Whatever happened to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?” I can tell you: they gave the book to Jason Aaron, who decided to fill it with a bunch of mediocre storylines which I realized I just didn’t care about and weren’t going anywhere (including a Namor storyline which paled in comparison to Zdarsky’s Invaders series, even though they were essentially the same material), so I dropped the book at the end of 2019.So far as I can tell, it’s a book about the 1,000,000 B.C. Avengers (who aren’t a thing; stop trying to make them a thing), Moon Knight, and yet another Phoenix storyline. I’d say it’s the worst thing we’re supposed to care about in Marvel Comics right now…but King In Black is also happening.
I’m no big King in Black fan, but comparing it to Aaron’s Avengers is an insult to KiB. When he used like his second major arc to do vampire stuff? UGH.
Why does Marvel keep trying to make vampires happen? I remember when they put vampire stuff with Dracula in one of the X-Men relaunches with Jubilee and it sucked hard. Hell, even Knull in KiB looks so similar to that Dracula that I thought they were bringing him back again.
The 70s vampire titles were some of the best books of their time, so I’m guessing nostalgia?
Also Cosmic Ghost Rider showed up for a hot minute after being more or less ripped from Guardians of the Galaxy, which he was only really a part of for two issues and than left to join a team led by Gladiator to kill Gamora. I like Cosmic Ghost Rider and would like more of him. And at the very least King in Black is an event where the heroes are fighting a villain and not each other.
I don’t get how Aaron could write an Avengers X Phoenix story that’s somehow worse than AvX, which provided some very fun fights.The Age of Konshu was good compared to his other arcs, but it still feels half-baked.
I have yet to find anyone that reads Marvel comics, but not Venom, that has any interest in King in Black. Do these people exist?
Jason Aaron? Never trust someone with two first names.
“ but fans weren’t thrilled with the way characters were changed and even edgy ‘90s teens had started to turn on Liefeld’s very particular art style by then, so Marvel eventually brought the FF and the Avengers back to the regular universe”
That wasn’t the cause/effect at all. Marvel were over the moon with sales and even asked Jim Lee to continue doing it indefinitely, but he declined.
Or, you know, whatever you decided to make up.
Heroes Reborn was ill-advised in many, many ways, but the Fantastic Four reinterpretation was the only one that felt remotely fresh and enjoyable.
I enjoyed that one much more than the others.
Same here. It was the only HR title where the changes didn’t seem arbitrary or solely for spectacle.All the changes they made made sense both narratively and for modern sensibilities.For example, they made Sue the CEO of the company financing the space launch. So it gave her a vested involvement that is no longer just hand-wringing over Reed.Don’t get me wrong. It was Jim Lee, so it was still over-the-top in (many) ways. But it was OTT in ways that I could at least enjoy.
The FF reboot was great, and did a great job of reimagining early FF stories, leading up to (what I remember at least) being a pretty good Galactus crossover event, that wouldn’t be a terrible template for Phase 4 or 5 MCU.
Was the Ultimate FF version of the Galactus storyarc similar to the original? Unfortunately, I didn’t get an opportunity to read it.I would’ve continued buying the comic after Jim Lee’s departure. But the follow-up artist (Brandon Petersen) seemed dead-set on mimicking Lee’s penciling style – but was nowhere near successful in doing so in a flattering way.
D.C. did it best with the first Crisis–the problem was that they then walked back from it. Crisis on Infinite Earths was a masterpiece.
I’ve been reading comics for 30 years and I learned a long time ago that “being worried” about what a new event will do to characters is silly. Every single story line, no matter how final, will always revert to the status quo. No one who’s popular ever stays dead. No good guys stay bad. No bad guys stay good. It’s alway goes back. And then it changes in a different way. Then it goes back again. It’s just the nature of this medium. Indy and small press companies can give a group of writers free reign to create a universe that is dynamic and is in constant flux without back tracking but that won’t ever happen in DC or Marvel and that is okay. About the best we can hope for is a character to stay dead a good deal of fine after a climatic story line or maybe a new character actually sticking around. As for this one, my bet is this is the start of events that will reset the X books status quo. Right now the Krakoa mutant nation arc is amazing and different but it’s so far from baseline X-Men at this point and Marvel is going to want them back to being persecuted team of hated and feared mutants by the time they show up in the MCU
You are 100% right on this point. If you dont like a book then dont read it, and when the creative team changes maybe you will. As for the X-Books, I hope this status quo lasts for a long time, but I know it’s probably that it will last as long as Jonathan Hickman keeps writing good storylines that sell well. Based on what has happened to other books after he leaves is that other writers can’t do what he does so things tend to crumble pretty quickly
Just read thru Hickman’s omnibus’s and I think a hard reboot has to happen with Krakoa and Moira X. We know she dies and this world resets because of Destiny. So it was always a question of how long do they keep this reality going.Looks like we have an answer.
I think this is a great theory for the end game that I hope doesn’t happen. I hope Hickman gives his run a proper send off with some big ideas and a worthy successor to replace him. As of now I have no clue who that would be, but a man can dream.
Every decade or so there will be a soft or hard reboot/massive retcon because of the drift. This is almost 40 years since Crisis and that’s just how it is. You start great, in theory, and as writers change, you end up with 7 people voicing the same character and it doesn’t work. The creative freedom given to big writers allows them to ignore the past works to a degree. Yawn. Let’s not clutch the pearls.The real result of this ends up being codifying what worked, and ditching what did not. They used Morrison and then Whedon and Ellis to clean the post Chuck Austin phase of the X-men. Do we truly want every single arc and issue to be cemented forever? The good and the bad writers, stuff that didn’t work? Also, I mean, Captain America was unfrozen in 1961? After 16 years on ice? It’s been 60 years. We’d age out and have killed everyone from the first generation of the modern era of comics. They’ve always done this. Stop with the outrage, please.
Please no.
Eat shit and fuck off back to Splinter, BernieBra.
Never go full Heroes Reborn
Mr. Fantastic’s omnipotent son Franklin had hidden them all, including bad guys like Doctor Doom, in a secret pocket universe for safekeeping (comic books!).
Marvel stole that idea from ‘80s tv medical drama St. Elsewhere, whose snowglobe ending scene suggested that the entire run of the series was the product of an autistic child’s imagination (one wonders if the show runners were commenting on themselves). No genre or medium tops night time soaps for weird plot twists.
Marvel Heroes was actually pretty awesome for the worst type of skinner box iPhone game. The dialogue was hilarious. And one of Killmonger’s activities was “watch anime.”
The headline for this article scared the crap out of me because I was concerned that Tim Kring somehow finagled his way into a crossover with Marvel. It was bad enough that he was able to do a second show in the first place…
One of my favorite things about the post-Onslaught/Heroes Reborn time, beyond Thunderbolts which someone already mentioned, was at the end right before they moved everyone back into the main line where everything was just randomly merged with WildStorm content. I could say that due to not reading any of this since it originally came out is causing me to forget an excuse for any of that happening, but I feel like it legitimately was just “here’s the new status quo material, now here’s a crossover where the Marvel stuff is combined with WildStorm for a single issue per series tacked on to the end of each of them, now here’s everyone moving back to the main universe with no explanation of what the hell just happened THE END.”
WildStorm is DC, though?
Wildstorm wasn’t part of DC in 1996, it was still being published through Image. Jim Lee sold Wildstorm to DC to close out 1998.
Yes, but I don’t recall Wildstorm ever having anything to do with Marvel, and a cursory Google search also didn’t bring up anything.
Didn’t stop them from doing stuff like this for their thirteenth issues:
(It does keep them from being reprinted, though)
Thanks, that helped in knowing what I have to Google for.So the only reason some Wildstorm stuff was in there was just because Marvel outsourced the production to Lee’s Wildstorm Studios back then? Which I guess makes that something of a collaboration, which is why looking up when Marvel had any Wildstorm stuff returned no results.
Yup, and the thirteenth issues are the only ones where the Wildstorm/Heroes Reborn crossover stuff took place, so it was likely done to fill a one month gap in the schedule between the twelfth issues and Heroes Return.
Superhero comics need to start weaning themselves off the monthly publication schedule where everything’s in a shared interconnected universe. It’s dying a slow-death and the pretense that everything happens in the same cohesive and coherent universe is increasingly tenuous. (Hey, remember when Doomsday Clock and Three Jokers were going to be fundamental to the ongoing DC Universe? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Remember when they then pretty much got shunted into “not-quite-Elseworlds-but-let’s-face-it-we’re-never-going-to-mention-these-again” territory? Pepperidge Farm definitely remembers.)Embrace the multiverse. Not everything needs to be set in the same “official” reality. Embrace graphic novels and self-contained storytelling. Not everything needs to be split into monthly installments that take half a year to tell one story arc. But if you are gonna stick with the interconnected monthly schedule where everything is supposedly in the same universe, for the love of all that is holy, keep things simple stupid.