Not Quite The Avenging Angel I Was Hoping For

Today, for about three minutes, I was convinced that something amazing was going to happen. For that 180 seconds, I was so convinced of this thing that I've spent the rest of the day since I found out it wasn't going to happen trying to recover from the disappointment.

In order to explain fully, I have to back up a few days, to the release of Marvel's solicitations for June, which included this:

AGE OF ULTRON #10 (OF 10)BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS (W)BRANDON PETERSON, CARLOS PACHECO& JOE QUESADA (A/C)Cover by BRANDON PETERSONVariant cover by MARK BROOKSUltron Variant by ROCK-HE KIMSpoiler Variant also availableSpoiler Sketch Variant Also AvailableTHE FINALE!The biggest secret in comics will be revealed to you! An ending so confidential...even the artists of this book don’t know what lies on the final pages...! A surprise so big that comic book legend Joe Quesada himself returns to the pages of Marvel Comics to draw a sequence that people will be talking about for years.40 PGS./Rated T+ ...$3.99*All covers of Age Of Ultron #10 will be polybagged 

Which, you know, alright. Caleb Mozzocco has covered the more absurd aspects of this particular solicitation, and all I have to add is that I'm not particularly interested in Age of Ultron, whether its a universe changing event or not; I'm not enamored of Bryan Hitch's recent work and I'm suffering from a little bit of, and this is a clinical term, event burnout after having spent six months and way too much money on Avengers vs. X-Men.

Then, on Monday, Rich posted the following missive:

Age Of Ultron‘s surprising ending is meant to be top secret, only eight people are meant to know about it and Joe Quesada is drawing the last few pages to preserve the mystery. Nice bit of PR, certainly but it’s not true. 

Guarding the secret has been Marvel’s number one job, but it seems there more than one aspect to Age Of Ultron‘s ending that they are trying to keep confidential. Everyone seems to think I love to spoil stories but it’s just not true, when I discovered one aspect to the ending of Age Of Ultron after the Marvel Summit, they asked me not to run it, so I didn’t (even though it screams at me from this month’s solicitations- could only eight people really know this one?) 

Later, however, I was told a different aspect to the ending, which caused Marvel to properly panic when I shared with Marvel that I knew it – or at least a part of it – and I was told there were all sorts of legal implications if this story got spoiled by me. And so, again, I’m not running it, but I will give you a hint because you deserve at least that, “an unexpected guest star joining the Marvel Universe…”

Again, well, ok. I didn't see the hint, but I also didn't care enough to look particularly hard. All of that was followed up by this announcement this morning:

This summer, acclaimed writer Neil Gaiman makes his return to Marvel—and he won’t be alone!

Those of you with eyes will notice that the press release continues after that, but as soon as I saw that sentence, I put together the following things: Neil Gaiman is returning to Marvel. Age of Ultron ends with the arrival of a special guest. The special guest is a huge, shocking, presumably long awaited surprise, the acquisition of which involved some legal wrangling, and they appear in a part of the comic drawn not by Hitch but instead by Joe Quesada.

Well, that could only mean one thing, right?

Marvelman! It had to be! Gaiman was the last Marvelman writer before the series stopped publication. Quesada had even drawn the announcement poster when Marvel told the comics world it had bought the rights. I was euphoric! Here he is, three years later! Finally! After all this time!

And then I read the rest of that press release, which continues as follows:

June’s AGE OF ULTRON #10 will not only conclude the epic event, but include a special epilogue written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by the legendary Joe Quesada bringing Gaiman’s original creation Angela into the Marvel Universe. Sporting a new Quesada-designed look, Angela will have an immediate impact that carries over into GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #5 in July, written by Bendis and Gaiman.

Wait, what?

There are a couple of reasons that I find this announcement confusing, and I will keep them separate by using bullet points. First though, some background that you should feel free to skip: Marvelman is a pre-Silver Age Captain Marvel rip-off created by Englishman Mick Anglo. In 1980s, Marvelman was revived by Alan Moore as the creator's most extreme consideration of what a real superhero would be like. At some point, Moore gave his percentage of the rights to the character to Neil Gaiman, who continued the series, which ended at issue #24, with the bankruptcy of its second publisher, Eclipse Comics, which had changed the character's name to Miracleman to prevent a lawsuit from Marvel Comics.

Angela is a character that Gaiman created for Todd McFarlane's Spawn in the early 90s. Gaiman and McFarlane had a very, very long running spat about the ownership of the character and the distribution of associated royalties. In 1996, McFarlane purchased the rights to the Marvelman character and initiated a plan to use him in Spawn. The next year, the two creators came to an agreement: McFarlane would receive the full rights to Angela and a couple of other characters that Gaiman had created for Spawn, and Gaiman would receive the Marvelman rights. At some point, McFarlane backed out of this deal. In 2001, Gaiman founded Marvels and Miracles, LLC in order to figure out how to figure out to whom the rights belonged and in 2002, he wrote 1602 for Marvel, the profits of which went to the LLC. The publication of that series was approximately concurrent with my first major period of interest in comic books.

Then a bunch of years pass and, at San Diego Comic Con 2009, Marvel Comics announced that they had purchased the rights to Marvelman from... Mick Anglo, the character's creator. At the time, it was hoped that this meant that Marvel was going to reprint the Moore and Gaiman written material from the 80s and 90s, and the company promptly reprinted... some Mick Anglo material that, frankly, no one was interested in. Somewhere in all of this, Gaiman and McFarlane come to a deal that lets Gaiman use Angela however he wants. At some other point it also became clear that McFarlane owns the rights to some images associated with Marvelman rather than any actual rights to the character.

In hindsight, the idea that Marvel was going to reprint the Marvelman stuff that people actually wanted to read was, well, insane. Read the "Ownership" section of the Wikipedia article to see just how insane-- nobody has any idea who actually owns the rights to any of it, and I think that it might be a distinct possibility that no one ever will. That's why I was so excited about Marvelman, and so disappointed by what's actually going on.

 Ok, so here's those bullet points about why I'm confused:

• Did you read all of that? No wonder I'm confused.
• More importantly: Gaiman fought for a really long time to ensure that he owned a share of Angela. And then he wins! His agreement with McFarlane says that he can use the character however he pleases. And then he turns around and sells, gives, or trades the character to Marvel? I don't understand. 
• I also don't understand this: why would Marvel introduce Angela at all? Is there a group of fans who care enough about a peripheral Spawn character from two decades ago that it'll boost sales of Guardians of the Galaxy, a book almost guaranteed to sell well because, well, Bendis is writing it and they're making one of those movies everybody loves using those particular characters. Are they going to use Angela in the movie? Why not just create a character from scratch? It's not like Angela would sell more movie tickets than something that they came up with because, again, I don't really think that anybody cares.

With all that in mind, I think that there are three possibilities. The first is that Age of Ultron is just one, big, long, expensive jab at McFarlane. I have no idea why it would be, but the series does have covers that are foil embossed. That foil is as much a symbol of 90s comic excess as McFarlane is himself. This one seems unlikely.

The second is that Marvel wanted Gaiman for Guardians of the Galaxy, his presence will certainly increase the book's sales, even though they're likely to start and stay very high, and he told them he would do it if they would introduce Angela into the Marvel Universe. This one seems possible, although I'm still I'm not sure I see from Gaiman's point of view.

The third possibility is a lot more intriguing, and also more plausible. Keeping in mind that Marvel does completely crazy things at relatively regular intervals, it's a distinct possibility that someone from the company, probably Quesada, decided that he would like to use Angela for Guardians of the Galaxy. Again, I have no idea why Marvel would want to do that, but I don't think that its outside the realm of possibility. It's also pretty clear, and has been since 1994, that Gaiman wants to finish the Marvelman story that Eclipse's bankruptcy intervened in. At this point, Marvel has a claim to a character that's as strong as anyone's, and they have Disney's money and legal muscle to back it up. Given all this, I can't help but wonder if Quesada called up Gaiman and said "Yo, Neal, I was wondering if you would be interested in a trade..." That Rich has even suggested that Marvelman is a possibility now makes me all the more suspicious.

What that means is, of course, an open question, and all of this is very, very idle speculation, but its the only way that I can make any sense of any of this, because, again, none of this makes any sense, from any perspective that I can get my mind around, anyway. If nothing else, its an important reminder that the people that pay other people to make the things that I love don't always make decisions I understand. 

I am, however, always glad to read Gaiman's work, and so this is welcome news even if I don't understand it. I would also very much like to see a nice reprinted edition of Marvelman, with the long awaited conclusion to Gaiman's story in it. If this is a step in that direction, well, who cares how we got there?

The Best Way To Promote A Comic?

Earlier this evening, Marvel released a trailer for the upcoming Age of Ultron event, written by Brian Bendis and penciled by Bryan Hitch. Rich Johnston has, very kindly, made it embeddable:

In the past, Jon has fantasized about a future in which comics, and not just the movies based on them, are promoted on billboards in prominent locales, but, save that Fables spot that Vertigo ran on the BBC a few years ago, I'm not sure I've ever seen something quite like this. It's interesting for a few reasons, not least of which is that I hadn't realized that Marvel was releasing Age of Ultron at such a fast clip. Three issues a month seems onerous, and I wonder if it might affect the sales of either the crossover or of some the company's other books. I know that, in terms of my own purchasing, it's a lot easier to take an extra $3.99 out of my wallet once in a given month without thinking about it than it will be for me to do it three times in the same span, so I think I'm going to pass. On the other hand, one of my major complaints about crossovers, Marvel's in particular, is that they last so damn long; even shipping twice monthly, waiting for AvX to conclude was numbing. With AU lasting just three months and change, I can return, blissfully, to stories I actually care about much sooner than before.

To return to the trailer itself: I wonder if this is the best way to advertise comics. It is certainly one way of doing it, but it fails to achieve what's really great about the movie preview, which is that it can give a real sense of the thing that it promotes, while also divulging just enough plot detail to hook an audience. Now, there a few ways to nitpick this particular trailer-- it relies mostly on already revealed covers rather than delivering much in the way of the new, the narration is reminiscent of those old commercials for Power Rangers video tapes, it utilizes animation in a way that is even more insipid than most motion comics and, most egregiously, it doesn't do a good job of explaining who the creators are-- but I wonder if even one that was more well made woud be a good way of giving a sense of what a comic would be like.

Part of the reason that I suspect it can't be is that video and comics work on similar, but fundamentally different, visual principles. Each is a kind of window, yes, but, when you watch a film or a tv show, the size of that window, in this case some kind of screen, tends to be the same when you start the thing as when you end it. This seems likes it would be true with comics-- page sizes tend to be internally consistent-- but the base unit of the comic isn't the page; it's the panel. This is not to say that panel sizes can't be consistent, just that they aren't always, and, specifically, that Bryan Hitch doesn't make his that way. Hitch's "widescreen" art style is neat because it gives comics, very small in physical size, a wonderful sort of scale up, making some of his scenes seem grandiose in a way that is much more common in film. That said, the style only really works when there are also many smaller, less grandiose scenes, which is why no one constructs comics out of splash pages alone, and why they didn't even when the widescreen style was in vogue. The AU trailer, which generalizes panel size by mediating panels, not pages, through both editing techniques like the Ken Burns effect and the consistent size of the YouTube screen-within-a-screen, totally robs Hitch's art of what makes it work. Watching the trailer, it is possible to see that some the art takes the wide view and that some of it does not, but seeing that isn’t really the same as understanding it, isn’t the same as being convinced of it. That comics can make meaning through the way that the size of its building blocks relate to each other is one of the things that makes the form unique, one of the things that makes it great.

That the trailer can’t communicate why I might be interested in AU as a piece of art rather than as a particular story is why it fails. I know it might not be for me--it's too general to be coded for people who are already readers of comics-- but the hook isn’t such a great one that a potential reader would be sold on the book on plot alone. If Marvel really wants to bring new people into the fold, shouldn't they emphasizing what makes their product interesting? And if they want people like me to take a risk on a book that we're not otherwise inclined to buy, particularly if they’re going to ask us to shell out $11.97 a month to follow it, I can't help but wonder if there's some way to give us some of what we love.

Marvel, Then: Intro

I'm hunkered down in my apartment*, waiting for Hurricane Sandy to pass me by. Happily, this means that I am catching up on months worth of reading I have piled up next to my mattress, but I also figured that it was a good time to quickly intro something I'm going to be doing over the next few months, in conjunction with the House of Ideas' Marvel NOW! yearly culling of established ongoing series in order for the company to replace them with new number ones in an attempt to temporarily raise sales relaunch, namely, the consideration, first, of the books whose era has just ended (Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca on Iron Man, Ed Brubaker on Captain America, Jonathan Hickman on the Fantastic Four, and so on) and then of the books that are replacing them.

In some ways, this series started last week, with my review of the initiative's not very good flagship title, Uncanny Avengers #1. That was sort of a false start, though, since the first few posts, which I've not very cleverly titled "Marvel, Then," are going to focus on what's ending, rather than what's new. Because of the staggered roll out of new titles, though, some of those posts will run concurrent with the posts, titled, again very cleverly, "Marvel When?" that deal with what's new NOW! that an era that's a decade old has come to a close.

That time frame, of course, is the same one in which Brian Bendis has been writing The Avengers. His work on that franchise over that span, while hardly the greatest superhero comics produced in the period, made possible the existence of some much better work. If he hadn't brought Luke Cage to the forefront of the Marvel universe through sheer force of will, for example, it seems unlikely that Immortal Iron Fist would have happened. I have a feeling, too, that his use of the Thing in New Avengers is partially responsible for the success of Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four. Bendis's move to other projects, which would have presaged a monumental change even if Marvel hadn't cloaked it in a line wide changing of the guard, presents by far the most important questions of this new era, at least when we think about Marvel as a business: can he replicate his Avengers success with All-New X-Men? Will his high word count writing style, the superhero board room approach, translate well to a much different kind of series? How about Guardians of the Galaxy? Is it going to be any good? Given that it mostly exists to gin up excitement for the movie adaptation, could it possibly be any good?

While Bendis's contributions are important, and while his arrival at Marvel marks the beginning of a renaissance for the publisher, I don't want to minimize how important, maybe even how much more important, I think Hickman, Fraction and Brubaker are to the company's artistic success over the last decade. Before them, too, were people like J. Michael Straczynski and beyond those three there are people like Kieron Gillen, each of whom helped to make Marvel's recent production stronger than anything from the Big Two comics companies in quite a long time. So, for the next few months, besides posts on the new Iron Man, Thor and Captain America series, you can expect commentary on the old ones, as well as whatever else piques my interest during this most fascinating moment in the history of the House of Ideas.

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*Although this is posting Tuesday, I wrote it on Monday after I was sent home from work.

Assembling To Protect A World That Loves and Hates Them

Next month, the Marvel universe is starting over, or, at least, parts of it are. There's a whole slew of new #1's, from an Avengers one pictured above, to new Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man volumes, some of it really interesting sounding and some of it, well, less so. What's going on, though, is not a hard reboot, like the kind DC did a little over a year ago with The New 52. It's not really even a soft reboot, either, since no continuity is being reset; instead, many of Marvel's characters are simply entering new phases of their ongoing stories, with new creative teams on the books that star them.

One series, though, is conspicuously absent from the books that have been solicited so far. There has not, at least not as of yet, been an announcement of a new Uncanny X-Men. That book, the flagship of America's second most popular superhero family,has been published with only two interruptions since it first emerged in the early Sixties, and, so, this disruption, the second in as many years, is much more interesting than any of the various and sundry renumberings that are going on, since, for example, this must be the seventh or eighth volume of Captain America and the above images represent, I think, the fourth volume of The Avengers, which is less ridiculous than the fact that we're on the third volume of New Avengers, a title that Marvel has been using for only seven years. Of course, the fact that there's no new volume of Uncanny is sort of explained by the new Uncanny Avengers series, written by Rick Remender, which is premised on a post Avengers vs. X-Men alliance between the two groups.

On its own, that seems like a typical big two throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks sales strategy, but by publishing an Uncanny Avengers without publishing an Uncanny X-Men, that is, by shifting the Uncanny moniker away from its classic association and towards a new brand, I wonder if Marvel is tipping its hand. The whole thing sort of suggests a solidification of holdings, both in corporate and story terms, under the newly, massively, fortified Avengers brand. We've known for a while that Remender's book is going to prominently feature characters from both groups (and art from John Cassaday!). I remember reading a mention I can now no longer find of preview art for a Wolverine and the X-Men issue with a heavy Avengers presence in the Jean Grey school. And, oddest of all, in the interlocking covers for the first three issues of Jonathan Hickman's new Avengers series, Cannonball and Sunspot, two of the New Mutants, are the only featured characters who are not associated with the team in some prominent, iconic way.

This kind of synergy with the rest of the Marvel universe is sort of new for the X-Men, who were sort of left to do their own thing, particularly since they moved across the country and onto Utopia. The cynic in me says its about weakening a brand that the company doesn't totally control, and thereby strengthening the case for the inclusion of some of these characters in upcoming Avengers spin-offs, Fox be damned. I also suspect that, solely in the terms of the economics of comic books, it will be good for sales, since the two franchises are the best selling in all of American comics, and this sort of permanent crossover builds off of both the premise and success of Avengers v. X-Men. I don't know how wide ranging this effect will be, since I don't know how many New Mutants readers there are who don't already Avengers, but I guess you never know.

In story terms, this new synergy presents some interesting questions-- does the acceptance of mutants into the Avengers on a more general basis than Beast and Wolverine mean that mutants are no longer hated and feared by the society they're sworn to protect? Does that mean Xavier's dream is realized? And is that really only possible because the good professor is now, again, dead?*

All that, of course, sets up some really interesting possibilities having to do with Brian Bendis's All New X-Men series, and my whole theory might fall apart in the pages of that book. If it turns out that All New is Uncanny's replacement within the insular X-Men family, it won't be too surprising. But consider that these characters on the covers are all, excepting Magik and Emma and those two in the background**, iconic X-Men, ones that were used in the nineties cartoon, which is still probably the most recognizable group for much of the comics reading public, and certainly for my generation. They're also, again excepting Magik and the two question marks, characters that have been used in movie versions of the characters, so maybe we're not seeing a solidification so much as a kind of shift, which moves many of the excess X-Men under the Avengers umbrella. This could both strengthen the former brand and broaden the latter one, particularly if Bendis can build on the last few years' good work by Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron, and if Hickman and Remender can manage the onslaught of characters effectively.

I'm surprised to find myself writing this, but I'm actually pretty excited for what comes now-- rather than feeling forced and random, like the New 52, this seems like almost a natural progression, everything seems to fit together, despite the fact that some of the decisions were probably made for artificial reasons. It's All New, and All Different, and that can't possibly be bad.***

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*I haven't read Avengers v. X-Men #11 yet, but, when I do, I suspect I'm going to have some very critical things to say about how the book handled the death of Xavier. As an idea moving forward, it's not bad, particularly in the context I'm talking about above, but it doesn't really ring true in terms of the crossover's plot, in part because he shows up absolutely out of nowhere in #10. I don't even think we've seen him since Matt Fraction left Uncanny and his death just doesn't have any gravity, given how unimportant the character's been since Joss Whedon chastised him a few years ago. But maybe they handled it really well. I won't know until I go to my LCS.

**Is that one on the far right Rachel Grey?

***By the way, the powers that be at Marvel, I have a request-- can we get the 616 Nightcrawler back?  Please?