Marvel held their “mega press” event for their upcoming Secret Wars event today and plenty was revealed about what we can expect. Not only did those Miles Morales rumors clear up a bit, but we also found out that this is not a reboot. The only problem is that it smells a lot like a reboot, especially when there’s talk of bringing Gwen Stacey back from the dead again.
Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso joined Tom Brevoort to discuss what the event meant for everybody’s favorite characters and what we can expect to see in the series from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic. The short of it? Everything is combining. From Comic Book Resources:
“The Ultimate Universe, the Marvel Universe, they’re going to slap together,” Alonso said. “Imagine two pizzas: They’re going to combine toppings, some toppings are going to drop off. And that is the Marvel Universe moving forward. It’s more than the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe, it’s all the universes you can imagine. That is the Marvel Universe going forward…
“Once you hit ‘Secret Wars’ #1, there’s no Marvel Universe, there’s no Ultimate Universe,” Brevoort said. “It’s all Battleworld.” “None of these stories are What Ifs are alternate reality stories,” Alonso added. “And they will have legs. They will impart new things into the Marvel Universe going forward.”
I wrote about this being a reboot back in October and a lot of folks took issue with the use of the term reboot. “Marvel doesn’t do reboots” was common and there was talk of Viagra infused hard reboots and soft, limp, feeble reboots that only changed little things.
Now there is nothing firm from Marvel calling this a reboot, but they are hinting and winking at the notion left and right:
“Read and find out,” Alonso said of the possibility of a reboot. “Like I said, we are taking some chances here, but I will stand by — I think Tom will back me — our history’s not broken. We don’t view our history as being broken or something that we need to fix. If anything we think we are building upon that history and we are taking the best and biggest pieces of it and seeing how easily they coexist with one another. We don’t expect all our moves to make everyone happy, but we think it will make for a really fascinating read through ‘Secret Wars’ and beyond.” (via)
Reboot shouldn’t be a bad word. It carries a lot of weight with it and people don’t like to feel like they’ve wasted their time, but it should be about the stories at the end of the day. If they don’t all jive together, it won’t matter if the stories are good. A lot of the tools that have been used to sell books over the years are pretty tired at this point, namely the death of major characters and soft resetting of certain titles (Iron Man for example).
I hope that this is a good story and not just a bunch of stuff slapped together. I think if the DC Comics New 52 reboot says anything, it’s that good stories will outweigh the idea of everything being different. The Court of Owls storyline in Batman is a fine example.
There’s plenty of announcements to come, including information about all of those tie-in books that were being teased since the summer. It should be interesting and hopefully more than just a typical comic event. I think we’ve gotten enough of those in the past few years.
UPDATED: Brian Michael Bendis was actually a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers and he talked about Secret Wars and the reception surrounding Miles Morales as Spider-Man:
(Via Newsarama / Comic Book Resources)