Marvel

Marvel continue to roll out announcements today, with the news that Sam Humphries and Paco Medina will be the creative team for an ongoing...

Two issues of Uncanny X-Men will tie into the big Original Sin event at Marvel this year - issues #23 and #24. Writer Brian...

Marvel are kicking off a weekend of announcements today with news about some Original Sin tie-ins. The main Original Sin series will see The...

Marvel's House of Ideas panel at C2E2 2015 was hosted by Ryan Penagos and features Nick Lowe, Joshua Hale Fialkov, and Mark Waid on stage, focusing heavily on Marvel's digital endeavors with brief mentions of the 75th anniversary of Marvel Comics, the Marvel Gaming Universe, and a new documentary series called Tales to Astonish. Joshua Hale Fialkov and Juan Bobilo will be bringing Amazing Spider-man: Who Am I? to the Marvel Infinite Comics lineup, but unlike titles like AvX and Wolverine, Who Am I? will be released in a batch on May 6 containing the first four chapters, with another batch of chapters to be released approximately a month later.

As I've written before, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 is probably my favorite superhero movie after the original Christopher Reeve Superman. (I'm not in love with the Nolan Batmans although I get why people like them.) It's one of the very few superhero films with an autuer's imprimatur, and it's just plain goofy as heck, veering between horror pastiche of the directors own work, sappy musical and a sad meditation on middle-aged loneliness. Raimi is old enough to have the original Ditko Spidey as his inspiration, from the upside down kiss to the rogue's gallery of old men in greying wife-beaters—supposedly one of the reasons Raimi and the studio parted ways on Spidey 4 was that Raimi wanted the Vulture as the villain, and the studio wanted a more up to date bad guy. In Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man 2, all the references have been updated. This is the ultimate world of Bryan Hitch, Greg Land and Greg Horn, all blazing cgi and mottled, gloomy photoshop. The soundtrack has been similarly updated, with a group known as the Magnificent Six—which includes everyone from Pharrell Williams to Johnny Marr—blasting catchy singles. In what passes for innovation here, a scene where Peter Parker does the obligatory Google search to find out a mystery, instead of the chugging string music of every other superhero movie, we get a Phillip Phillips song.

If you want to know what Marvel is shipping in July, the answer is GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY!

Now before we get deep into the numbers, I want to point out a trend that I’ve been noticing, and would love to hear your thoughts on in the comments below. So there are two types of All-New Marvel Now #1s. The first is something like Black Widow or She-Hulk, where the new #1 is a new series featuring a new or returning character and a new creative team, so basically a new book. The other is what I call the soft relaunch. They take an ongoing series with falling sales and they give it a new #1, but not much else changes, same creative team or if maybe the artists changes, the writer stays, and maybe a slight tweak on the storyline or premise. Examples of this are Secret Avengers or X-Factor.


It seems that Fox—which controls the X-men and Fantastic Four film franchises— and Sony—which controls Spider-Man—have come to an agreement to create their OWN variant earth-2 Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting with a cut scene at the end of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2. Foreign viewers are already tweeting about it. I've greyed out the relevant info below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsjtg7m1MMM Spoiler: I am totally going to see this movie. Unlike past teaser trailers this one is all about the plot, and all the "You...

Brief and to the point -- over on his Formspring Tom Brevoort was asked about Marvel's continued hammer-blows of relaunches, Do you think the frequent...

Despite my previous move towards being chipper, there are still some distress signals out there. Marvel's full court press on their next event, Original...

The two most powerful people in comics— Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige—were both the subject of fairly hagiographic profiles recently. The Feige piece in Businessweek was probably the more revelatory, as it offered ACTUAL INFORMATION on the very secretive Marvel Studios process, and the legacy of Ike, such as the following account of the dorm-level offices.