Marvel sure loves their oblique teaser images. They’ve released three so far today, with probably more to come as the day progresses, all teasing an upcoming event in March 2019. Each image promises to reveal the truth behind a famous Marvel moment, and sports a cryptic tagline: “Marvel history is destroyed.” Here are the ones that are out now, focusing on the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Avengers:
Enigmatic! But what do they mean?
Marvel may not take part in reality-altering events very often, but they do have a tendency to tweak their characters’ histories with relative frequency. From smaller scale changes like the recent Life of Captain Marvel miniseries, which retcons the origin of Carol Danvers and her entire family, to larger events like the 2014 miniseries Original Sin, in which the past misdeeds of many of Marvel’s biggest characters were exposed to the world.
Still, these teasers make it sound like there’s just one figure behind all of the biggest events in Marvel history. Who could it be? (Besides Stan Lee, of course.) The ‘Who’ in all of the teasers looks like it’s on fire…fire as in Hell…Hell as in Mephisto? It’s not like he’s never meddled with our heroes’ lives before.
We’ll be updating this post with any additional teasers Marvel sends out, and more info on this event is sure to be revealed before it hits in March of next year.
UPDATED (3:45 PM Eastern): Marvel has released yet another teaser, this one related to the X-Men.
Welcome to the festival of retcons!
Who the Hell even cares? Is there anyone who’s really excited by this? It seems so boring and uninspired. Marvel only seems to have three stories anymore – bringing someone back from the dead; heroes vs heroes; and everything you knew was wrong.
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee
Steve Ditko and Stan Lee
Whoever wrote the 50s Cap issues
Chris Claremont and John Byrne–or, if you want to go with the “Jean isn’t Phoenix” retcon, Kurt Busiek.
That wasn’t so hard, right?
Donita was the artist on Spider-Man by that point.
Romita. dang autocorrect LOL
Ah, you’re right. Sorry about that. Still.
I will agree that “here is something that happened between the pages that you didn’t know about before” is a pretty tired trope. BTW, we also apparently need another word for this stuff. Because there’s a big difference between adding history and changing history, but we use “retcon” for both.
Chris Hero said: “Who the Hell even cares? Is there anyone who’s really excited by this?”
That’s how I feel about this, and pretty much everything from Marvel and DC these days. But there are alternatives, as Jimmy Palmiotti pointed out in an excellent tweet:
“If you think all comics are either MARVEL or DC, then you really need to go to a local comic shop and ask the retailer to show you some alternatives. Tell them what kind of books and films you like and let them open up the doors to some new exciting worlds.”
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