Last month, after a week of vague creative team teases, Marvel announced Marvel Comics #1000. The giant-sized 80th anniversary celebration, releasing in August, is masterminded by Immortal Hulk scribe Al Ewing and features one-page stories from a collection of classic Marvel creators and brand-new comics talent. Apparently one issue isn’t enough to tell that story, though, and there were still some creators left out of the festivities, so late yesterday the House of Ideas announced Marvel Comics #1001another one-shot featuring another massive line-up of creative talent.
Details around the issue are still under wraps, but they’re teased to be about something called The Eternity Mask, presumably an artifact that’s introduced in Marvel Comics #1000. The list of creators announced as working on #1001 is as follows:

  • Rod Reis
  • Al Ewing
  • Nick Spencer
  • G. Willow Wilson
  • Scott Aukerman
  • ACO
  • Brian Posehn
  • Howard Chaykin
  • Vita Ayala
  • Humberto Ramos
  • Audrey Loeb
  • Dario Brizuela
  • Ann Nocenti
  • Kim Jacinto
  • Jimmy Palmiotti
  • Amanda Conner
  • Declan Shalvey
  • Kaare Andrews
  • Amy Reeder
  • Natacha Bustos
  • Frank Tieri
  • Dan Panosian
  • André Lima Araújo
  • Bill Morrison
  • Trina Robbins
  • Marc Guggenheim
  • and more…

As with #1000, this is a murderer’s row of creative talent, but there’s one big difference between the two line-ups: this one contains a lot more non-male creators. From a purely numbers perspective, of the 25 creators announced, eight of them—nearly one-third—are non-male-identifying creators. Compare that to the announced line-up on Marvel Comics #1000, which featured only nine non-male-identifying creators out of 100. Marvel took a lot of flack on social media for the lack of gender diversity in the line-up, and rightly so. It’s good to see them working to correct that with Marvel Comics #1001, though it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that #1001 is an attempt to make up for the mistake they made on #1000.
You can check out the cover by artist Rod Reis to Marvel Comic #1001 below. The image, which features Spider-Man, Wolverine, She-Hulk, and The Thing bursting out of the pages of the #1000 one-shot, is a nice conceptual companion to Alex Ross’s cover to#1000 in which the entire Marvel Universe burst out of Marvel Comics #1. If that’s any indication, the scope of this one-shot will likely be smaller than that of its predecessor.
Will there be a Marvel Comics #1002? And if there is, can we stop calling these one-shots and start calling them an ongoing series? Check back next month to find out. Marvel Comics #1001 goes on sale September 25th.
Marvel Comics #1001 Cover by Rod Reis

1 COMMENT

  1. Still not a true reflection of the number of non-male creators available to work on the project. No reflection on those chosen, but this does seem like a knee-jerk reaction by Marvel to the criticism rightly aimed at the original list.

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