Another year, another relaunch at Marvel comics: on Tuesday, it was announced that it is revamping its output with a project called Fresh Start. Its May launch will be, by my count, Marvel’s seventh or eighth fresh start since 2012, coming just months after the company last rebooted its characters, in September 2017’s Marvel Legacy line, and cementing the company’s reputation as the serial monogamist of the comic book industry.
Over the past couple of years Marvel has made some genuinely significant changes to its core characters: it replaced billionaire inventor Tony Stark in the Iron Man costume with a 15-year-old black girl, Riri Williams; deemed Thor unworthy to wield the hammer Mjolnir and passed the mantle to love interest Jane Foster; and in the most divisive storyline ever, “revealed” that Captain America was a secret sleeper agent for Nazi analogue, Hydra. But Fresh Start is a back-to-basics approach, restoring the original versions of Marvel’s triumvirate, as well as bringing back a dead one: the deceased Bruce Banner, who will reclaim his position as Hulk from current jolly green incumbent, Amadeus Cho.
In a video, Marvel editor in chief CB Cebulski proclaimed that he’s “never seen more excitement and more enthusiasm for where Marvel comics is going this year”, adding that there hasn’t been “such an overarching line-wide change of talent” since … the Marvel NOW! revamp of so long ago (2012).
A number of problems at Marvel led to this revamp. The big one is that most of the characters involved have appeared in Marvel’s movies or TV series (or are about to), including Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Daredevil. Yes, perhaps it makes sense for Marvel comics to mirror what’s going on in the multiplexes if it wants to migrate movie buffs to the printed territories. But new readers who are introduced to the characters by the movies should have their eyes opened to the possibilities of what can be done in comics, which eclipse even the biggest Hollywood special effects budget. They should be offered a wider universe, not just a mirror one. Making the source material reflect the adaptations feels like putting the cart before the horse.
There was also the negative reaction to last year’s Marvel Legacy reboot, which introduced the infamous Captain-America-as-Nazi storyline. Many readers were appalled by the move, which fell around the time Marvel’s vice president of sales complained that the studio’s attempts to diversifying its universe by adding more female, black, Asian and LGBT characters was not going down well with the core readership. Brian Michael Bendis, one of the company’s star writers and the creator of Iron Man’s female replacement Iron Heart and the Miles Morales African-Latino version of Spider-Man, has since left for rivals DC Comics. And two gay characters with their own titles – Iceman and America Chavez – had their books cancelled at the end of 2017, not long after an industry breakfast that Marvel hosted for comic shop owners at New York Comic Con, where some retailers lambasted the diverse additions, with one repeatedly insisting that kids didn’t want to come in to his store and buy a comic that featured “Iceman kissing dudes”.
If Marvel is indeed pandering to a more conservative readership that has grumbled incessantly about the proliferation of black, LGBT and female characters in recent years, then – given the phenomenal box office success of Black Panther this last week – there’s something decidedly rotten in the state of Fresh Start.
Maybe they’ll get back some of white, male Middle America that’s drifted away, but comics are and should be progressive and transgressive. Rather than winning back that demographic, Marvel’s execs should perhaps be looking at the news footage of those astonishing survivors of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, and listening to what those kids are saying about change and reform. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel, that should be your market.
