Well, I have to say I'm hurt.

If you believe the rumour columns, Marvel has been going round half the Internet inviting people to pitch books for its new Epic imprint. Some people have even suggested that this might compromise editorial independence. Well, you can rest assured that my editorial independence is thoroughly uncompromised, because they never asked me.

Now, sure, if you want to be technical about it, I neither draw nor write fiction. But that's not the point. It's the principle of the thing, isn't it? Bastards.

And I so desperately wanted to bring to the world my magnum opus WOLVERINE: THE UNINTERESTING YEARS. In a logical extrapolation from Marvel's desire to fill in every gap in the character's history, this miniseries will cover central gaps in Wolverine's life, hitherto untouched because of their total irrelevance. In issue #1, for example, Wolverine goes for a drink in a seedy bar with an old army friend. Wolverine learns that his friend now runs a garden centre with his wife, and is having a great life. Our hero returns home after a pleasant evening and catches the end of THE TONIGHT SHOW before going to bed and getting a good night's sleep. Meanwhile, in a running subplot throughout the series, Sabretooth learns macramé.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Because Epic is positively inviting submissions from all-comers.

Obviously, it's premature to be making judgments about Epic at this stage. Point one, we don't know what the financial arrangements are. It seems from the submission guidelines that in due course they're going to be posted on the website - a necessity if you want people to sign up to them before making the pitch. So we can come back to that point at a later date. Anyhow, the claim is that with sufficient sales, the pay catches up with mainstream Marvel work-for-hire arrangements.

'Marvel positively wants novice creators pitching under this system.' Point two, we don't know what the ownership arrangements are, save that Jemas seemed surprisingly confused about the whole thing when he spoke to Newsarama. (By the way, if ALIAS is a creator-owned character in the Marvel Universe, somebody might want to bring that to the attention of Marvel's legal department, because that's certainly not what the indicia says.)

And point three, we still don't have a clue what's going to be in the Epic imprint, save for two things: the launch book is Mark Millar's romance comic TROUBLE, and the first wave of books "will focus on reviving Marvel characters who don't presently have their own series".

Which, come to think of it, poses a problem for anyone thinking of pitching. At this stage, it's very hard to know what Marvel is looking for. The only real guidance from the Epic website is that the imprint "strives for a broader creative scope than Marvel", although the promise of an opening wave of superhero revivals seems a little hard to square with that. Assuming that they are all superhero comics, I suppose. Maybe 15 LOVE is an Epic book as well.

Until now, Quesada and Jemas' position on creator ownership has been that it's all very well as an internal industry debate, but it's really of no great interest to most readers. And I think that's probably correct - I can't imagine the average reader caring about the contract arrangements, at least not to the degree that it becomes a selling point. But then, everything we've heard about Epic so far has been about the creators' side of it. It may be a very interesting arrangement, but what's the imprint for? Does it have any agenda other than "a wider version of Marvel"? What's the Epic brand name supposed to imply to ordinary readers?

'At this stage, it's very hard to know what Marvel is looking for.' These things will hopefully become clearer in time. For the moment, however, the mere fact that Epic exists is interesting. The conventional wisdom for years has been that if you want to break into comics, you don't start by writing to Marvel or DC, even if that's who you really want to work for. You go to an indie publisher, or you self-publish, and you build up a track record there.

Instead, here we have Marvel saying the exact opposite: it positively wants novice creators pitching under this system. That's certainly a novel development. Since Marvel is insisting that writers send an entire first issue script rather than a springboard, I can only fear for the sanity of the submissions editors. The poor sods. I suppose the theory is that requiring a full script will weed out the people who aren't committed, and that the complete no-hopers will be readily obvious within a few pages.

Still, the thought of some beleaguered editor struggling bleary-eyed into work on Monday morning and being confronted with another huge pile of bad scripts for Venom minis is not a pleasant one. I hope they have trained psychiatric staff on hand to assist.

The arrangement apparently involves Marvel cutting costs to the bone by commissioning the series and then pretty much leaving it to the creators to get on with it. What happens if the creative team turn in something totally unpublishable is a good question, and something tells me we'll find out soon enough. (If Jemas is serious about having sixty Epic books, at least one of them is going to turn out to be a glaring misfire the moment the first issue arrives in New York.)

The set-up is not totally unprecedented. It has obvious similarities with Image Central's arrangement. There are key differences, of course, not least that Image only accepts submissions from complete creative teams. Epic, in contrast, allows writers and artists to pitch in order to get into the approved creator list, and then lets the writer recruit a creative team from the pool once his script has been approved. The financial arrangements are also somewhat different. And, if rumours are to be believed, Epic is not offering a creator-ownership deal on a par with Image's admirably purist approach.

'The set-up has obvious similarities to Image Central.' Nonetheless, that gives Epic two clear advantages - if you don't have a creative team already lined up, or you specifically want to do a story about a Marvel character, then Epic is the obvious option. The other advantages are more debatable. Marvel and DC seem to have sewn up the market in superhero comics; other publishers struggle to make any headway at all in that genre. So if that's what you want to do, Epic is likely to offer you a bigger audience than the indie route. And then there's the added profile from working on a Marvel book - after all, even if the financial package does turn out to be terrible, it's arguable that that's a fair trade-off for jumping the queue and cutting straight to Marvel.

But then, if Marvel is going to deluge the market with comics by people nobody's heard of, are they going to go unnoticed? After all, B-SIDES sounds like the sort of thing that would have appeared in Epic, and it crashed and burned badly. Epic will get more publicity than that, but it's still not an easy sell. The positive spin (for creators) is that it's an exciting new opportunity to produce work for a top publisher, with minimal editorial interference once the book is commissioned. As the submissions guidelines say: "EPIC books will be written, drawn, colored, lettered and composited by YOU. No editor will be working with you, calling to bug you for materials, or checking for mistakes."

Somewhat appealing if you're a creator. From the reader's point of view, however, this seems dangerously close to translating as: "We're going to publish an imprint full of superhero revival comics produced by unsupervised fanfic writers who have no experience." The thought sends chills down the spine.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with fanfic. Sure, 99% of it is total dross. But then, 99% of everything is crap. Since anybody can publish fanfic, that means there's no filter and the rubbish gets given equal prominence. From a certain viewpoint, most superhero comics published today are fanfic - for that matter, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN comes within the definition as well. No, it's more the fact that the creators are being largely left to their own devices which raises concerns.

It's up to the first wave of Epic books to establish the credibility of the imprint. TROUBLE does look like a good start, but since it's by established creators, it doesn't really tell us much beyond, "Epic is willing to do romance comics". Is Epic going to produce unexpected new quality creators from the slush pile, with a wider range of genres? Or are we about to witness the march of the fanfic hordes?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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