Once Again, We Return
A flagship Marvel title is relaunched
Editor’s Note: It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s New Comic Book Day and another edition of Amazing Journey!
The Amazing Journey column will touch on a comics-related topic, such as writing the first issue of a series, what it’s like to run a comic book store, working with artists, and how writing comics is different from writing prose.
Now that Guild of Magic is done and I have a little bit more time, I have turned back to comic writing and am going to do a full-blown “issue” of Amazing Journey once a month, with weekly Wednesday new issue spotlights in between.
Amazing Journey back issues
True believers unite (#1) | My comics origin story (#2) | Comic event series (#3) | The comics of Kickstarter (#4) | Single issues or trades? (#5) | From prose to comics (#6) | Adapting a celebrated fantasy series into a comic (#7) | Charting a career in comics (#8)
Marvel more-so than DC will relaunch its books when bringing on a new creative team and reset the issue number to 1. This annoys some people who want to know with one glance that a thousand issues of their superhero tale have preceded the one they are about to purchase. And the practice is not entirely consistent (see, e.g. the Marvel Legacy initiative in 2017 when a number of books reverted to their legacy numbering for a span), or Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s Daredevil being relaunched at number 1 after Devil’s Reign even though the creative team did not change).
But most people don’t mind the new numbering, as long as legacy numbering appears somewhere on the cover.
Today, though, we have a relaunch of a flagship Marvel title that has been ongoing for the past five years:
That’s right, it’s The Avengers from Jed MacKay and C.F. Villa!
The Star. The Icon. The Witch. The Construct. The God. The Engineer. The King. The world is ever in peril, and a new team of Avengers mobilizes to meet any dangers that dare threaten the planet. But when TERMINUS attacks, a new and insidious danger rears its head: one that the Avengers know all too well, and one that comes to them in the most dangerous of guises—that of a friend.
MacKay, writer of Moon Knight, Black Cat, and Strange (both Doctor and titleless) of late, also authored the recent look-ahead one-shot Timeless, which foreshadowed some of the happenings we can expect in this book. And although this current roster largely resembles the initial roster of Jason Aaron’s run, having enjoyed MacKay’s other books, I am looking forward to what is in store!
I am also interested to see how the book balances bringing on new readers on a more frequent basis versus telling a longer-form story. Aaron’s recent run had a simmering plot in the background that (probably)1 was resolved at the end, but along the way, there were mini-arcs that only lasted a few issues, such as Enter the Phoenix, Age of Khonshu, and also longer plots, like Heroes Reborn, which took over the place of the book for three months and had a dozen or so tie-in titles. We likely won’t know for a few months what MacKay has planned past the arc, so time will tell!
What (else) I’m reading this week
Fantastic Four #7/#700: FF has reached another century milestone issue. At the half-century, we saw Ben and Alicia’s wedding, and at the last century, it was the return of the title after “ending” at issue 588. Here’s hoping for something equally momentous in today’s issue.
X-Men #22: Another Orchis-focused issue, and with Dr. Stasis and Nimrod on the cover, and Fall of X right around the corner, I suspect things are about to take a dark turn.
Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Normally I would not pick up a DC anthology series, but
wrote a compelling pitch over at The Indirect Market and so I added it to my pulls.Hulk Annual #1: Friend-of-the-Stack David Pepose spins a found-footage tale of a documentary crew that has the severe misfortune of crossing paths with the Hulk!
The Vigil #1: This is a late addition to the list, as I had not heard of Ram V’s latest series until yesterday, when I came across this interview with Ram over at AIPT.
Guardians of the Galaxy #2: The first issue launched this run with a bang and now we are headed toward Grootfall. Plus, this cover from Marco Checchetto of Gamora wielding Godslayer is 🔥🔥🔥.
Backlist Pick!
With the upcoming Secret Invasion Disney+ series a month away, I decided to do some pre-reading. I normally try to steer clear of spoilers (such as which characters Emilia Clarke and Olivia Colman are playing), but I read enough online to know that Robbie Thompson +
’s 2019 miniseries Meet the Skrulls2 would be additive to my viewing experience:The Warners are your typical family. Dad works at Stark. Mom works in a senator’s office. Jennifer and Alice are students at Stamford High School. The only thing that makes them different is that they’re shape-shifting Skrulls and have infiltrated our society to pave the way for a Skrull invasion.
So, it’s basically The Americans meets the Marvel universe. It’s a super-fun spy thriller with a dash of family drama, Marvel lore, and teenage angst. And Henrichon’s art is the icing on the cake. If you’ve already read the original Secret Invasion event, this should definitely be on your pile before the show premieres. Next up for me will be Ryan North and Franceso Mobili’s New(TM) Secret Invasion miniseries from last winter, which looks to more directly tie in to the plot of the show.
I am maybe two dozens issues behind in the prior Avengers/Avengers Forever run, so I still don’t know what happened at the end of the Avengers Assemble event.
I read Meet the Skrulls in the collected edition Secret Invasion: Meet the Skrulls trade paperback. It includes some classic issues featuring the Skrulls and the more recent the Road to Empyre: The Kree-Skrull War one-shot, which despite its descriptive-sounding name, is a good primer on said war and also relevant to the aforementioned mini-series.