Comic-Con 09: Marvel News

And our wrap-up of news, as covered by Newsarama and Comic Book Resources continues, this time with my highlights of the various Marvel panels. (For some reason, videos are loading way to slow for me today, and I didn’t even finish the Bendis interview at CBR, so I didn’t even try any others.) I have to admit that there was some interesting news coming out of Marvel. Not that I’m happy about everything, but I’m sure your not shocked by that.

• Let’s get Spider-Man out of the way. Things that will be addressed: shouldn’t someone besides Peter know he’s Spider-Man? Like Norman? Also addressed will be what things are like for Spider-Man with his arch nemesis in charge of the SHRA and the Avengers. And we may get some new characters, with old characters getting a makeover. (Electro? Please tell me he’s altering that hood, without looking too much of the look.) Most of it, I still maintain, could have been done with the Spider-Marriage (YES I’M STILL HARPING ON IT!) intact, but I guess now that they aren’t waisting time undoing that, they can focus on writing good stories–which is what they should have done in the first place!
• Apparently there’s going to be a Spidey special called “The Short Halloween”. (Anyone else think of Batman’s The Long Halloween?) It will be written by Saturday Night Live writers Seth Meyers and Bill Hader, who slipped into comicdom during the writer’s strike back in 2008. Since I have trouble finding anyone who finds SNL amusing these days, this may not end well.
• There’s an X-Force series coming up called “Sex and Violence”, featuring Wolverine and Domino. It’s like taking all my non-event related complaints and putting them in one comic.
• There’s a Pet Avengers story coming out, as Lockjaw, frog Thor, Speedball’s cat, Kitty Pride’s dragon, and Ms Lion (who should be a female dog, Chris Eliopoulos, and I hope you just got that wrong in the interview and not the story) in their own crimefighting adventure. It’s like taking all my non-Spidey Marriage requests and putting them all in one comic.

• Dale Eaglesham is moving from DC to Marvel, where he will work on the Fantastic Four. And it’s what I expect a Marvel comic to look like. You know how the big two are going back to the past in the wrong ways because they’ve decided that a character’s full story hasn’t been told because “they” haven’t added anything to it? That’s wrong. Bringing back the art and fun of the past is what I want to see. (Sadly, I’ve never been an FF fan, so that doesn’t do a thing for me.)
• For the 70th Anniversary of Marvel Comics (as a title, since the company name is only about 45 years old), Ed Brubaker is going back to good old days, with the early days of Namor, Steve “soon to be Captain America” Rogers, and the original Human Torch.

Brubaker’s story plans involve tying the original comics’ details into an origin story that enhances rather than undermines. “Mostly it’s just trying to tell this really cool story that’s not a crossover or anything. There’s stuff that we’re revealing that’s never been seen before, but it’s not, ‘Oh yeah! Nick Fury is really the guy who shot Professor Reinstein!’ It’s nothing like that. It’s cool stuff that won’t make people think the original stories as they were sucked.”

That’s a nice change. Outside of Animation and Digital news, which I’m going over separately, are the reports on the Ultimate Universe. After Jeff Loeb wiped out Heroes Ultimate New York in a flood, they’ll be rebooting the Ultimate Universe. Highlights include…

• There’s some teasing as to whether Peter Parker is still going to be Spider-Man in Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man. (All comics will have “Ultimate Comics” in the title, much like the Marvel Adventures titles.) Bendis wants to take the Ultimate Spidey in an entirely new direction, which means you may see new characters that have never been in the 616/Marvel Universe Proper. As the only thing Bendis writes that gets more positive comments in the circles I frequent (unlike what he’s done with Avengers and all the event stories), this does sound interesting. That doesn’t mean we won’t still get “Ultimatised” Marvel characters, just that there will be some original ideas. Original ideas? At the House of Ideas? Shocking!
• The fate of other Ultimate titles are more confusing. Ultimate Fantastic Four is in shambles, I’m not sure what the X-Men are up to, and the Ultimates are being reborn as the Ultimate Avengers. Hopefully, they won’t be as dark and “shocking” as they have been.
• I doubt that’s going to happen, though.

Sadly, there didn’t seem to be anything on the much better than both of these Marvel Adventures line. Seriously, over at the DC panels fans were asking about releasing the DC kids titles as digest stories, but Marvel Adventures seemed to get no love. I did find this part interesting, though. From CBR:

– Why are the prices of comics so high? Quesada: “There’s an argument. When you look at the amount of work that goes into a comic book. We tend to ghettoize ourselves. We do everything we can to keep our prices down. But we live under this crucible that comics used to be ten cents. But when you look at the amount of effort and manpower and artistic talent that it goes into it, it really is a miracle that we can produce them for $2.99 and $3.99. There are lots of other places to go for artists and writings to make more money. But the truth of the matter is I remember handing a comic book to an executive who was dumbfounded that we could produce it for $2.99. I think we suffer from that. I’m not saying we should be charging twenty bucks an issue, but we do work really really hard to keep it at $2.99 and $3.99.”

Quesada also said that it’s increasingly challenging to keep the comics medium competitive, as television and film and so forth offer creators a lot more money.

However, you can find plenty of good writers if you tried. (So could DC, so Geoff Johns and Brian Bendis are writing half of their titles.) Also, high-gloss paper, art that should be in a coffee table book and not a comic book, trying to pad stories for the TPB market instead of having a clean flowing story, the insistence in having all these “names” instead of stories, de-evolving characters to one-note character types so you can write fanfic style tales of characters that have grown beyond what they were in the Silver Age (sometimes in a good way, sometimes not), and all those blasted mega events are probably hurting your sales more than TV and film. Hmm, I’m surprised you didn’t try to blame video games, too. Every other medium does.

Tomorrow is my usual “Pull List”, and then we get to the independents, video games and “digital comics”, including new “motion comics”, and the tv/movie stuff. Except for Watchmen. If you don’t know about Watchmen by now, I can’t help you.