With the first shots yet to be fired in April’s line-wide War of the Realms story, Marvel announced a pair of major new superhero publishing initiatives at the C2E2 event Saturday in Chicago.
As The Beat has reported, Jonathan Hickman will return to Marvel in July to write a pair of six-issue X-Men miniseries, dubbed House of X and Powers of X, drawn by Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva, respectively, with Marte Garcia doing colors for both. The following month, meanwhile, the usual Venom creative team of Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman will launch the four issue series Absolute Carnage, which is being teased with the tagline, Everyone is a target!
More interestingly, though, was that in the midst of all these announcements Marvel put out this graphic that teases what is presumably another high-profile bit of superheroics for December, represented here by that silver question mark.
During the “Marvel’s Next Big Thing Panel” where this graphic was unveiled, editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski said little about the mystery notch on the publishing timeline, revealing only that it will be a “payoff” to the connective tissue of preceding events that date back to early 2018. The only substantial dangling thread that dates back that far (at least that I can recall) is Jason Aaron’s Avengers B.C. concept that first appeared in September 2017’s Marvel Legacy one-shot and has been sort of foundational to the story he’s been telling in the flagship Avengers title, popping up here and there between larger arcs about celestial gods and vampire revolutions.
A millennia-spanning Avengers-through-history sort of story (likely courtesy of presumed Marvel showrunner Jason Aaron) seems most likely. That is, of course, just a guess, and all will likely become clear over the summer, right around the time of SDCC. For those keeping track, last year saw major initiatives centered around the infinity stones (Infinity Wars), Wolverine (The Hunt For/Return of), and all kinds of Spider-people (Spider-Geddon).
Also interesting and maybe even a little encouraging (to me, anyway) is that (so far) there’s been no indication of a line-wide set of relaunches with jostled around concepts, creative teams, and new #1s, which had been happening sometimes as frequently as twice within the course of one year, as noted by this excellent cover from Fall 2015…
