The Big #1: Marvel Legacy

Yesterday's manic ranting about Klingon foreheads and anachronistic holograms was probably triggered by the fact this very issue was sitting in my read pile for the afternoon. Marvel Legacy is, by design, fan wank. Its the event born of that executive who stated to a retailers meeting that nostalgia, not diversity, was the major selling point of comics.

[Insert well-worn, frothing rant about how that's obviously true in a medium that makes no moves towards accessibility to new readers here, I'm too tired to go over that again.]

And the fact is I'm quite looking forward to this. I fear it, as well. Recent issues of Mighty Thor have out and out stated that Jane Foster is going to die soon, which in and of itself is probably not a bad thing. The character has had terminal cancer for some time and given how she's been written in this run I don't think the character would see dying as Thor having saved so many lives at the expense of her own as a “bad death”. If she does out actively bettering the world, well, that's an ending I can get behind.

Simiarly, I do want the real Tony Stark back in some capacity. I love Riri Williams but I miss the dynamic the two had before Tony's Civil War II-induced coma and their Generations issue certainly foreshadowed how good it would be to have them interacting again now Riri has some proper hero time under belt.

Still, I fear...

I fear the fan wank aspect; I fear the collapse of all the interesting new characters that have taken up legacies over the last couple of years, especially in light of how quickly Unstoppable Wasp was cancelled; I fear the further shrinking of the medium in service to fandom-friendly nostalgia over even fractional innovation (because, let's face it, a healthy medium would have been able to introduce Nadia, Riri, Miles, Kamala, Amadeus!Hulk and all those others in their own identities instead of hand-me-downs).

Anyway, that's enough self-indulgent self-analysis. What was the first issue like?

Well, mostly it was bite-sized trailers for the tie-in series which is par for the course for event series first issues these days. Its really just a question of which ones interest me. There does seem to be a thread that actually sets up this series involving Starbrand and one of the many Ghost Riders, neither of which are characters I'm terribly interested in. There's also some business with a Celestial, again not a part of the Marvel Universe I've ever been that keen on.

There's a lot of good art but the many, many different art teams working on this issue just makes it feel even more like a collection of teaser trailers than it already did. The Fantastic Four-related teases are the most interested to me and I hope this means that Perlmutter has been forced to take his head out of his arse by Disney and we're getting a new FF comic sometime soon.

There's also some business with Odin, the Phoenix and some pre-historic Avengers that holds some promise as well as a short scene in which Norman Osborn retreats in shame from Doctor Strange's shrubbery.

Its bitty and sets up a lot of questions that will probably not be addressed in this series itself. Again, basically the format that these event series take nowadays but I find it tests my patience a bit more every year.

Still, a pleasing lack of Nazis so I'm inclined to give this one a chance.