Article 10: Return To Old Marvel

As regime change starts to take effect at the publisher formerly known as New Marvel, Paul O'Brien looks at what the implications might be for the realignment of Marvel Knights and the launch of Marvel Age.
02 February 2004

It's been a little over three months now since Bill Jemas left Marvel, so perhaps it's time to see how things are going for the company in its brave new world. Well, its new world, at any event.

Now, in all fairness, three months isn't a vast amount of time. Projects initiated under the new management will still probably be working their way through the pipeline. On the other hand, it's a lot quicker to cancel comics than to launch them. So it's hardly surprising that the early stages of the new regime appear largely to be a retreat from Bill Jemas' projects.

Besides which, you can make a strong objective case for many of these cancellations. I've written about this before, but to take the most obvious examples, Epic was quite probably a money pit for Marvel, and those cancelled Tsunami books were selling pretty badly. Frankly, there was a pretty good economic case for taking the axe to them.

With all that in mind, though, what have we seen from the new administration so far?

Marvel's solicitations for April 2004 get very worked up about the "MK0404" event. It's a very curious piece of publicity. It starts off looking like some kind of actual event. When you look closer, you realise that it's a complete non-event. And when you look closer still, you start to wonder if the real story is going on somewhere else.

In theory, MK0404 involves four new ongoing titles joining the Marvel Knights imprint in April 2004. The catch is that only one of them is new. That's SPIDER-MAN, by Mark Millar and Terry Dodson. It's been in the pipeline for absolutely ages, and it brings the number of ongoing Spider-Man titles to five (if you count the Ultimate title). It is not immediately apparent what's supposed to distinguish it from the other core Spider-Man titles, by J Michael Straczynski and Paul Jenkins - the preview pages don't seem dramatically different in tone.

The other three titles are X-STATIX, INCREDIBLE HULK and WOLVERINE, all of which seem to be pretty much carrying on business as usual. In fact, WOLVERINE is still working through the scripts that Greg Rucka provided before signing an exclusive deal with DC. It's hard to avoid concluding that absolutely nothing is happening here - all Marvel is doing is putting a Marvel Knights logo on the cover of four titles that were going to exist anyway, and that will be completely unchanged in terms of their contents.

So what's the point of the exercise? Well, the Marvel Knights imprint has been looking a little shaky over the last couple of years. It originated back in the dimly remembered prehistory when Bob Harras was editor-in-chief. Marvel Knights was a vehicle for contracting out some titles to Joe Quesada's Event Comics, and the result was a set of superhero titles that were broadly aimed at a somewhat more adult tone than the rest of Marvel's line.

Subsequently, under Jemas and Quesada, that style of storytelling spread out to effectively become the Marvel house style. Marvel Knights continued to have some significance in terms of the backstage arrangements with Event, but in terms of the style and tone of the comics, there was no longer clear blue water between Marvel Knights and the rest of Marvel. It didn't help that Marvel Knights also got used as the imprint for the misjudged relaunch of CAPTAIN AMERICA, a character who just doesn't work in that style.

The natural reading of MK0404 is that Marvel is trying to re-establish the separate identity of Marvel Knights as an imprint. But it's not doing that by changing the style of the comics involved, or the Marvel Knights imprint. Promotional material sticks to the established buzzwords - "the edgy corner of the Marvel Universe", "edgy mainstream superheroes", "topical and challenging." All very well, but it was ever thus.

My impression is that Marvel has decided to shore up the divide between Marvel Knights and mainstream Marvel, not by changing Marvel Knights, but by reigning in mainstream Marvel and returning to a much more traditional approach. Three misaligned books get kicked over to Marvel Knights where they belong - the idea of a conventional approach to X-STATIX is self-evidently ludicrous - and the mainstream Marvel superhero titles drift back towards their more traditional approach. After all, there's no point in this exercise if Marvel's not going to make the divide mean something again.

(In this vein, it's interesting to note that the second storyline in NEW MUTANTS is being drastically rewritten in order to remove plot elements that were considered unsuitable for targeting at a younger audience - resulting in a delay of several months.)

Then again, perhaps it really is all just completely meaningless, and it's a publicity stunt designed to fill a fallow period in the Marvel schedules. After all, NYX and ELEKTRA both carry mature-reader advisories for sex and violence, but neither of them is being reallocated to Marvel Knights. Even though NYX, in particular, would seem a natural fit.

So much for Marvel Knights. Marvel's other current initiative is the Marvel Age titles, which presumably started their development under the previous administration. Marvel Age appears to be a line of titles intended primarily for the bookstore market. Some of them are all ages titles, some are rated at 12+. Marvel realised a while back that it needed to engage with the manga audience somehow or other. One result of that was the abortive Tsunami line, which took a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach. The answer turned out to be that a few X-books stuck and pretty much everything else slid to the bottom of the charts, although in fairness RUNAWAYS may be starting to turn the corner.

Still, the intentions were good, and this time Marvel seems to be taking a slightly more studied approach. As a result, it's adopted the manga digest format. With a trade dress rather obviously inspired by TokyoPop's, in fact. This is a perfectly sensible strategy.

More doubtful is the choice of material. Two Tsunami books, RUNAWAYS and SENTINEL have been drafted into the project. These are fairly good choices, but they have their problems. SENTINEL has already been cancelled, so if it actually does well, there's no material to take the title past volume 2. RUNAWAYS has also been less than successful in the direct market, despite generally favourable reviews; its future is still open to doubt. SPIDER-GIRL, a perennial borderline title, is also being reprinted, starting from the beginning. Although it has a loyal fanbase who've always maintained it would be ideal for this audience, it does have an unfortunate habit of riffing on Marvel continuity.

Then there's MARVEL AGE: SPIDER-MAN and MARVEL AGE: FANTASTIC FOUR, which seem to be the product of that old adage: if in doubt, recycle Stan and Jack. In fact, even if not in doubt, recycle them anyway. These titles are simply retellings of old stories from the early 1960s, apparently sticking rather closely to the original plots.

The most obvious objection is to point out that Marvel already did this only a few years ago with the Ultimate line. But then, the Ultimate imprint turned out to be a much looser interpretation of the original characters, particularly when it came to Mark Millar's stories. This appears to be a much more literal exercise in cloning the originals and giving them a polish to make them look modern.

However good those early stories may be, I remain completely unconvinced that the best way to appeal to kids and teenagers in 2004 is to simply repeat stories designed for an audience forty years ago. Aside from anything else, if Marvel is pursuing the manga digest audience, then those are readers who have already chosen manga in preference to superhero comics. It's hard to see why they should feel all that different about these ones. RUNAWAYS and SENTINEL can at least be credibly positioned as unconventional superhero titles (and SENTINEL, really, isn't a superhero book at all).

Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before, with PROFESSOR XAVIER AND THE X-MEN and the Marvel Remix stories. It never works. It's hard to see why this time should be any different.

At this stage, then, the Marvel Age line looks like one part good idea to one part bad old habit. Marvel faces an uphill struggle getting into this market, and I'm not at all convinced that it's read the audience correctly. But at least it's putting in the effort to try and get into that market. Despite the worrying undertone of conservatism in Marvel's recent behaviour, it still has its priorities straight in that regard.

Still, it's hard to avoid the feeling that we're seeing a definite swing back in terms of conservatism when it comes to the actual content of the comics, with Marvel Knights being restored to its original ghetto status. Things should become clearer over the next few months, when we see what sort of new projects are being commissioned under the new regime; but even allowing for the time lag, I'm left with a worrying sense that Marvel is backsliding.

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

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