Wednesday 7 March 2018

I'm trying to care about Marvel's Fresh Start



There's another line-wide Marvel refresh on its way and... ugh. Enough, Marvel. Legacy only just happened. Actually, that's not a bad place to start with this one. There are events teased in the Marvel Legacy one-shot that aren't even going to start happening until Fresh Start. That Wakandan Space Empire won't come up in Black Panther until the series gets its Fresh Start relaunch with exactly the same creative team, far as I can tell. The return of the Fantastic Four is no closer to being a thing now than it was when we saw Franklin and Val space surfing into the distance at the end of the one-shot.

We've reached a point where relaunches are so close together they're outpacing each other.

And its just boring now.

Marvel. Tell good stories. Advertise and distribute them so people know you're telling them. Take advantage of the fact you're owned by a massive multi-media conglomerate that can crush Diamond and get your product into practically every retail space in existence. Stop it with the bloody line-wide relaunches. Accept the fact that you're working in a very slow medium (in terms of release schedule) and that thing need time to build up momentum.

Its not that most of what been announced is bad (though giving Amazing Spider-Man to the “Captain America is a Nazi guy” is a pretty classic example of white guys failing upwards) but given how short the Legacy era has been I see no reason to care.

Some it sounds good. Dan Slott on Iron Man is a good pitch given how long, varied and full of ideas his Spider-Man run has been. It would be better if there was any sense that Riri Williams had any sort of future waiting for her after Bendis floats off to DC but on its own Dan Slott on Iron Man is a damn good pitch.

Not that it even matters. And I don't mean “for me”. It doesn't matter. There'll be the big sales spike on the first issues, a month or so down the line a bunch of promising but not instantly high-selling titles will get the chop and then in probably less than a year we'll be here yet a-bloody-gain just as Legacy led us here because this is a company perfectly happy to maintain a mediocre sales platform solely dedicated to reaching a shrinking niche audience of men who look just like me.

I've seen dying industries before but the comicbook industry might be the first one I've ever seen that's actively suicidal.

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