When Will Marvel Now End
Eric_C
Posts: 263
This shows how confused and lost I am in Marvel these days. Simply, when am I gonna stop seeing the big red MARVEL NOW on the bottom and things more or less get settled, it has been nearly 2 years and I hate it, when are we gonna see things not be so in flux. Around Avengers 2 time? Or am I never going to find a place to get back in?
Comments
I think I have asked this before-- but what would you consider to have been the Marvel years you liked? And in what ways was that time different from the comics that have "Marvel Now!" somewhere on the cover?
Personally, there are a lot of Marvel Now! titles I am enjoying, but there were also a lot of, for lack of a better term, Marvel Then! titles I read and enjoyed. Some talent shifted around. Some new titles got launched. But that is always happening. It wasn't a reboot or new continuity.
It is clear that you dislike it (though I am not sure what that dislike is, specifically) Is Marvel Now! really that different? I feel like "in flux" has been the game at Marvel for a long time. Because in flux is the appearance of change. And the appearance of change sells.
Just think of all the team affiliation, mantle, and life-and-death-and-back-to-life changes that happened between, say 2002 and 2007? You know what I mean?
Also thanks @David_D
When Harris was the X-Men editor, Scott Lobdell was ask what was coming up in the X-Men book he was writing and he famously said, “I don’t know. I usually don’t know what’s coming up until I get the art to script from.”
I also agree that Marvel Now is just the trade dress, and I don’t pay a lot of attention to it, much like how DC is calling their books the New 52 three years after they rebooted and they no longer publish 52 monthly books any more. I would look for another big shakeup and possible rebranding when they finish the Hickman Avengers run/story.
Marvel Now and New 52 is just window dressing, but if you haven't been reading Cap or Thor or Spider-Man or Iron Man in the past 18-24 months with any regularity, you may be totally lost. Things like that happen so much (Scarlet Spider, resurrections, gray Hulk, etc) you just have to roll with it @Eric_C . Maybe the books aren't catching people up enough to allow a jumping on point every issue. Just dive in and enjoy what you can. If you're truly very busy with college, hold off for a few months and pick up the trades when a few issues get collected.
I still miss the *editor's notes that were prevalent in the bronze-copper age...
I don't know if you are currently reading Avengers or New Avengers. Those books recently took an 8 month jump into the future. And therefore, in that future, we have seen some of the mantle changes (Sam Wilson becoming Cap; the new Thor) in place in the Avengers lineup. I am behind on Cap and Thor, so I don't know if those changes have happened yet in the solo title. I know that change can be jarring, but- like the One Year Later jump that DC did back in 2006 (man, I can't believe that was that long ago!) I think the idea is to make a bold jump forward, and then later the details get filled in and we get caught up.
To be fair, though, at least as I remember it, even in the Bendis era, you could read Avengers or New Avengers, and there would be changes happening in the solo books that you would just have to roll with. For example, in the midst of Bendis' run on New Avengers, Spider-Man went from married to MJ, to wearing Iron Spider armor, to being someone with a public identity, to the Brand New Day era guy who the Avengers suddenly barely knew, to that guy, only in a white Future Foundation suit. And all those changes wouldn't get explained in the pages of New Avengers. You would just know that stuff was going on in Spider-Man, and if you wanted that whole story, you'd have to go read Spider-Man. But I don't think you had to go read that story to get what he was doing when he was in Avengers. And I think that is still true.
I'm not saying it can't get confusing. Or that team books-- especially ones featuring characters that appear a lot of other places-- don't leave you with the feeling that there is a lot of story you aren't getting. I get that. But I think, as @bralinator suggests above, the best bet is to just roll with it and try to enjoy the story you are reading without worrying too much about what you might be missing. If changes to characters are interesting, you can always catch up on what led this or that character to change later (heck, when you are busy in college, just think of all those stories stacking up into collections you can get out of the library down the road). And hopefully the role those characters, even the changed characters, are playing in the story in front of you is clear enough to roll with.
But yeah, maybe I just need to stop looking for that little place to jump back in and just jump and see what happens. (Unpopular opinion alert!) My major problem is I don't like Hickman and Avengers has always been my rock in comics so I guess I need to find a way to navigate without it. What books would you suggest that give a good view of the Marvel U, if any at all?
Thanks to everyone, maybe I just need to man up.
I can't say I've ever had a hard time finding my bearings even when I jumped on board titles that had been going on for years. My first issue of Amazing Spider-Man was #394. My first issue of Uncanny X-Men was #334. My very first DC comic was Green Lantern Vol. 2 #128. It really comes down to how long you plan on investing in a certain series.
I continued to read all of those series for quite some time afterwards and also collected quite a few of the back issues and was just fine. As long as the creative team is doing their job right every issue should be a jumping on point.
There are a lot of options and a lot more #1's out there now. Find something that looks fun, read it for a couple months and if you like it, keep reading. By doing so, I've already found a bunch of new titles in the past year such as Ms. Marvel, Cyclops, All-New X-Factor and Silver Surfer.
That being said, since Marvel Now, they have cut down on event branding, so outside of that red Marvel Now banner, there's less line wide trade dress on the shelves now.
For example, during the 34 issues of Avengers Vol. 4 the title was branded more times than it wasn't:
THE HEROIC AGE (6 issues)
FEAR ITSELF (5 issues)
SHATTERED HEROES (4 issues)
AvsX (6 issues)
I can't even remember what "Shattered Heroes" was...
In the first 34 issues of Avengers Vol. 5 it was branded twice:
INFINITY (8 issues)
ORIGINAL SIN (6 issues)
Now, part of that reason is because Avengers Vol. 5 has come out faster than Vol. 4 (34 issues in 21 months vs. 34 in 31 months).
And that is likely the biggest reason they it's hard to get a footing with Marvel Now. The constant double shipping of the big titles means from the outside it might look like things are moving fast (readers of those titles may say it's just taking them twice as long to tell the stories).