Thursday, June 11, 2015

Rebooting Universes

It's happening again, DC is rebooting the DCU (a "soft" reboot this time, but a reboot none the less) and now Marvel is following suit. When the New 52 came along I gave it a shot, and after a the third month I realized that it's just not for me. I gave up on the DCU, and really the reboot made it easy to walk away. Really, I've always been more of a Marvel man anyway. With the Marvel reboot, I'm faced with the same situation: do I keep going or is this another good opportunity to jump ship?

I'm not really keen on what I'm seeing out of the previews for the new Marvel Universe. So far, it's really Spider-heavy. (I thought the Spider-Gwen idea was great for the Spider-verse storyline, but not as a regular character in the main universe.) Granted, we haven't seen the entirety of the new line-up from Marvel, but so far it's not really all that exciting to me. I'll give it 2-3 months to see what I think, but this may be where Marvel and I part ways (except for their Star Wars series, which have been very good so far).

I have to say that I'm more than just a little bit sad with the Marvel reboot. Marvel typically went the route of the in-story retcon. Many times, these were silly retcons, but sometimes they are done well enough that they don't annoy me. (Dark Phoenix Saga is one of my favorite Marvel storylines, which was really just a big retcon.) Still, silly or not, those story-based retcons are what I prefer because they keep the universe in tact (by and large). Marvel kept the decades of history in tact and didn't reboot the universe everytime they wrote themselves into a corner. I guess those days are over...at least for now. After all, the only constant in comic universes is that nothing is permanent. (Although DC tripping all over themselves with just about every move they make is nearing a level of permanency rarely seen in comic history...)

3 comments:

Eric Sheldahl said...

Actually, Marvel isn't re-booting. The Secret Wars storyline is an old story from the '80s that they're running again in order to combine two of their parallel universes, regular and Ultimate. The idea is that, when the event is over, these two worlds will be fully integrated. Seamlessly? Definitely not. How else can they move the story forward?
I'm no expert at this stuff, but I trust Marvel enough to know that this is probably the best way to go. Heck, Stan Lee himself said that if he were still running things, he probably would have done something like this, too. Just trust them. These people are good at what they do.

kanegrundar said...

We'll see. I do hope that your faith in the folks at Marvel is founded. So far, nothing about the new line-up excites me. I'm still going to give it a shot, after all this isn't the first time that Marvel has disappointed me with a storyline only to win me back over later.

johntapper said...
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