That's a Marvel NOW! joke, that is. Though, I think, the answer is actually All-New All-Different Marvel NOW! Which like, guys, get it together. I guess they can't all be as to-the-point as "the heroic age," but they sure can be as meaningless.
Well geez, it certainly sounds like maybe I'm not super high on Marvel these days, HMM? Jury's still out. That's not entirely fair to say. I WILL say that spending a few years thinking critically about every single thing a company publishes and several of their business moves probably will highlight some cracks for any company. That said, Marvel, for a publisher whose goal was once, roughly stated, "everything should feel like change and then be reset," is doing a pretty good job shifting its focuses. I will give credit forever and ever to their attempts at diversifying their books? Has it come slower and later than it probably should have? Of course, but where hasn't that been true? That said, just a few years from Marvel having, for example, no women-led books among its releases, Marvel now boasts a catalog that seems pretty evenly split between male and female solo titles. They've also more readily introduced non-white, non-straight characters at a relatively good clip (granted, the "relatively" there is relative to the seventy years that preceded the last few). These are all excellent steps. And, perhaps more importantly, they've largely been successful because of the quality of the books, not just the enormity of the statement. Books like MS. MARVEL and SPIDER-GWEN are among the best books the company has right now and, for all my equivocating, it still means something to be on the top of the pile at Marvel.
So Marvel has made a lot of good strides in a pretty short time (again, short meaning "within the last few years, primarily"). It's a little hard to look back objectively to the end of 2012, when I started this blog. I was a huge Marvel fan (still am, despite all this back-and-forth) and I was reading every book still, but I could feel that we were on the precipice of something big. Talent and ideas were clearly in the right place and the slew of books on the horizon seemed very exciting to me. I was right. Got a nose for it, I guess. I should also say, as I warn in just so many of my posts (and feel implicitly warn in the whole idea of this dang ol' blog), I was right for me. For me, these were really great books. SPIDER-MAN was doing something really interesting, the whole AVENGERS/NEW AVENGERS franchise felt like a true powerhouse, Gillen and McKelvie got their hands on the perfect Marvel property in YOUNG AVENGERS, and solo titles, which had been sort of floundering a bit for a few years, had found an incredible groove with HAWKEYE, CAPTAIN MARVEL, DAREDEVIL and X-MEN LEGACY, to name just a few favorites. Sure, Bendis had taken his typical annoy-Tim-as-much-as-possible writing style over to the X-MEN corner of the Marvel Universe, but I could swap that for the interesting Fraction FANTASTIC FOUR/FF run we got in return.
So what happened? Calling out events is probably the hip (and accurate) thing to do and I'm quite hip, you see. The best and worst thing about these massive events is that they envelop everything they touch. For these universe-spanning stories to actually feel big enough, they have to...well, span the universe, I suppose. So books that have their own good thing going have to hit the pause button on that momentum and throw in a couple of issues to aid the event. Best case scenario (and, ultimately, Marvel does get this scenario a fair amount), the series produces a pretty good issue and doesn't stray too far from where it was before the event knocked on its door. Worst case: a series loses all the velocity it had (and maybe a series artist in the process) and can't ever really regain it.
The other thing, though, is that creators are people too. People get tired of the sandbox they're in and want to play in another one for a while. Or, in the case of artists especially, deadlines force series artists to hand the reins to guest artists on occasion (for one or multiple issues) or to simply take a book off their plate entirely. I don't want to point any blame at momentum loss on guest artists or anything like that; they're typically very good artists as well. The best books have a complete feel to them, though, and the artist is every bit as responsible for that feel as the writer (and the colorist, for that matter). Losing a series artist partway through a run can change the entire feel of that run, regardless of how good the replacement is.
So events can disrupt good books and those pesky human creators can just straight up leave good books and then Marvel is left scrambling to put something new and fresh out there. Probably every Renaissance has some sort of cool-down period right after, as the next wave of creators begins to get comfortable.
And here's the thing: I wasn't super jazzed about much of what 2015 (and maybe 2014, even, I don't super remember, you guys) had to offer, but now we're coming to that point again, where people and ideas are in place once more. I don't think the last couple years have been bad for Marvel, necessarily, just slower than the years immediately before that. I'll make a post soon about what I think some of the highlights of Marvel are right now, but I can give you a spoiler: they're mostly solo books these days. And a lot of them are really very good.
Sorry if this came off as weirdly condescending to the creators of the last couple years. For real, I think there are a lot of really talented creators and a lot of great books that have been carrying on the last few years, I just think things were running a little slow in general (maybe we can also attribute that to Marvel proper essentially shutting down for SECRET WARS most of last year).
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