The Marvel Way

You know I love to harp on Marvel as much as I can. It may be that I'm just a DC guy at heart, or it might just be me trying to get back at them for making me buy five copies of everything back in the early nineties. But once again, I have found something that Marvel is doing right for a change, and I think it's pretty noteworthy.

One of the biggest gripes among comic fans in general for years has been the fact that Wolverine is in twenty different books. Well, do you know how many he's in right now? Three! And two of them are his own titles, less even than Spider-man! This leaves him in only Astonishing X-Men, Wolverine, and Wolverine Origins. What about New Avengers, you ask? Well, he's not in it anymore. As a matter of fact we really don't who is on the Avengers anymore. Carol Danvers, aka Ms Marvel, keeps spouting off that she and Wonder Man are Avengers, but frankly, right now there's no one to stand up and say "No you're not." There is no New Avengers, and there won't be one until the Civil War is over, when there are apparently going to be two teams. Blue and Gold anyone? And no, Ultimate X-Men does not count, being another universe and all.

Anyway, getting back to the main thread of this blog, I really like that Marvel has, in this instance, taken a very reasonable suggestion from the fans, and toned down the exposure on one of their main properties. Each book tells a very different kind of story, and don't really step on each others toes. Astonishing covers his time with the X-Men, Wolverine is the hack and slash brawler stories, and Origins seems like a whole new type of Wolverine story, the smart covert ops type of stuff we only use to get bits and pieces of. I also like their bravery on the fact that in the new Wolverine Civil War arc, Marc Guggenheim breathed new life into the second most overused line in comics: "I'm the best there is at what I do..." Now this is usually followed up by some sort of b.s., but Guggenheim took it to it's most natural state by adding on this: "And what I do is kill people." F'ing A, man! 'Bout time.

-Dan