Marvel NOW.

Well the other shoe has dropped, DC having done "well"* with their new 52. Marvel wants a bit of the Reboot action as well. So they will be launching the "it's not a reboot really" Relaunch of many of their big titles called Marvel NOW. Launching "new and daring" new versions of some of their popular titles. But call it a reboot and Marvel will kick your ass. Marvel is very touchy about this whole reboot business, trying much of the last year to re craft their universe without a continuity shift, which lets be honest Marvel's pretty broken and could use one.

But Why is Marvel so, so, so, resistant to calling everything that their doing what it is. A Reboot. probably because they created this whole continuity business to begin with. See no matter what the fanboys'll tell you. DC really doesn't have a proper continuity before 1986. Sure there was a consistency of story and occasionally, very occasionally, they would reference an old story. There was Earth 2, but that really wasn't to "preserve" the golden age continuity as many claim, but kind of a retirement home for the golden age characters. But in the late seventies and eighties DC started to get the continuity bug, which led to the first real reboot in comics history, Crisis on the Infinite Earths. But why this change, one guess is that across town Marvel Comics was killing them and DC was trying to be more like them, even luring Jack Kirby away. And Marvel had this thing called continuity.

DC is over 77 years old and their characters have changed greatly with the ebb and flow of the years. but Marvel on the other hand for all intents and purposes is only 51. And for the first ten years all of the Marvel comics where made by only a handful of men, notably Jack Kirby, and Editor writer Stan Lee. So what happened with marvel, is that for ten years and hundreds of issues, they produced mass market comics with an auteur sensibility. And this included a rich well maintained history which we comics fans call continuity. And it continued well after the founders of Marvel moved on. It's actually really neat to this sometime. Get a run of any marvel comic that started under Stan Lee + and read it until about what was published in the late 80s. It's really amazing how well it flows as one story even with more obtuse titles like  X-men. This however started to fray in the 1990s when more titles and creative teams got involved. And into the first decade of the twenty first, Where a year is a long run for a creative team and two is forever. There have now been so many cooks in the kitchen, that it should be nos surprise Marvel is serving spoilt soup. Marvels continuity was a good run but fifty years is a long time to be telling one story, and a reboot isn't a bad idea if they want to keep these media properties fresh and exciting. But one has to understand Marvel's reluctance, the whole notion of continuity and timeline is what their company is built upon.  


* It's not really clear how well the new 52 is doing, the initial sales where great but now the sales of DC are apparently back to pre New 52 levels, and their farce of a Nielsen survey is close to useless. Of course it's never been exactly clear what exactly DC wanted out of the reboot.   

+I recommend the essentials collections for this exercise.