Embrace change: Why All-New, All-Different isn’t just a Marvel thing

My wife bought me the first volume of Essential Avengers for my birthday, featuring the first 24 issues of the series from the 1960s. Among the book’s supporting cast then was a club of ham radio enthusiasts called the Teen Brigade, led by Rick Jones, who would warn the Avengers of trouble and occasionally get kidnapped.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m reading these issues in black and white, but these kids all look exactly alike: all male, all white, all clean-cut. There wasn’t even a fat kid or a beard guy or a dude who wore a remarkable hat. Hell, I don’t even think any of them had names apart from Rick Jones, and Stan Lee couldn’t even get his name right – every couple issues a narration box or word balloon would refer to him as Rick Brown.

Flash forward to 2015. Promos for what Marvel will look like after Secret Wars wraps later this year show a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a mixed-race Spider-Man, a female Thor, a black Captain America, Old Man Steve Rogers AND Old Man Logan, a female Wolverine, and a native American character with whom I am unfamiliar. On top of that, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso has promised us a “controversial” new Hulk who is not Bruce Banner.

Granted, many of these were pre-existing characters and character-role changes. But it shows the company is wholly uninterested in snapping back to a status quo in which all its major characters are the same ones from the early 1960s.

Thank God. Most of those early Avengers and X-Men stories were terrible.

A few years ago, during its promotional push for Secret Invasion, Marvel told us to “embrace change.” While the campaign went away with the crossover, the message never really did. There are no new readers without change. There are also no new readers if Marvel spends all its efforts appealing to the old ones.

Frankly, I’m all about comics working to expand the market. In the days before the Internet, when I was 13 and had just started spending my allowance on X-Men books every week, I had one other person I could talk to about this thing I was really into (you may recognize him as the proprietor of this blog/godfather of my child). I would have loved to have been able to talk to other people about that kind of stuff, especially, you know, GIRLS.

Heck, my wife didn’t start reading comics until last year, after 12 years of being with me, and her first book was Ms. Marvel. Kamala, not Carol. She didn’t think it was pandering to women or a minority. She didn’t care about “that name already exists, why don’t they make their own superheroes?” She just genuinely enjoyed the book, and it led her to seek out collections of the old Ms. Marvel (Carol, not Kamala), She-Hulk, and Spider-Woman stories. That, dear reader, is what comics are supposed to do: Let more people in da club.

Marvel’s not the only company embracing change this year. Look at the Distinguished Competition’s DCYou campaign, in which the company abandons the New 52 thinking of the past four years to focus on creating a wider range of titles. Characters like Cyborg, Starfire and Black Canary are getting their own books. There’s new all-ages series like Bat-Mite and Bizarro, for the kids who may have been introduced to those characters through the most recent Lego Batman specials. Even Batman’s changing: The new Dark Knight is Jim Gordon in a mostly badass (I’m not crazy about those antennae) Bat-battlesuit!

God, even Archie’s got a new look, starting from scratch this summer in a brand-new series by Mark Waid (Daredevil, Flash) and Fiona Staples (Saga). And lemme tell ya, if you don’t want to see the gang from Riverdale as drawn by Fiona Staples, as opposed to that collection of mayonnaise jars that have been haunting supermarket checkout racks for decades, then I just feel sorry for you.

Not everything’s becoming All-New, All-Different, though. On Saturday, Marvel announced a new Invincible Iron Man series written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by David Marquez. Not only is Iron Man, who has been front and center in the latest Marvel promos, back in the red-and-gold armor, but Bendis is returning to a character he’s already quite familiar with, having written him in various and sundry Avengers series over the past decade.

And Peter Parker’s still Spider-Man. He’s just got a coterie of similarly spider-powered amazing friends to pal around with, such as Miles Morales, Silk and an alternate-reality version of his long-dead ex-girlfriend.

So go ahead, make Cap black. Make Thor a woman. Make the Hulk controversial, whatever the hell that means. Put Hank Pym in a wheelchair … no, really, do that, because another thing I’ve learned reading old Avengers comics is that Hank Pym was never not the worst.

I just have one question based on these All-New, All-Different promos: WHERE’S DEADPOOL?! Come on Marvel, you know he ain’t gonna stay dead with a movie coming out next year!

In addition to writing for The Matt Signal, Dan Grote is now the official comics blogger for The Press of Atlantic City. New posts appear Wednesday mornings at PressofAC.com/Life. His new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He and Matt have been friends since the days when Onslaught was just a glimmer in Charles Xavier's eye. Follow @danielpgrote on Twitter.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 4/29

Avengers #44

Story:  Jonathan Hickman

Art: Stefano Caselli, Kev Walker and Frank Martin

New Avengers #33

Story: Jonathan Hickman

Art: Mike Deodato and Frank Martin

Congratulations, Jonathan Hickman, you did it. You blew up the Earth, on my birthday no less. Now I know how Molly Ringwald felt.

Hickman’s long-game multiverse-smushing saga comes full circle in his final issues of Avengers and New Avengers, in an everything bagel of a plot that involves the main and Ultimate Marvel universes colliding into (and waging war on) each other, the Beyonders as the architects of destruction, Dr. Doom as the god of a doomsday cult, Molecule Man (hey, comics geezers, remember this guy?) serving as a multiversal martyr, Marvel’s top minds fleeing Earth to rebuild it, Thanos playing one world off another, President Obama not understanding what’s going on and more.

But before the world ends, let’s watch Steve Rogers and Tony Stark play Civil War one last time. In the last minutes of pre-Secret Wars 616 Earth, the elderly Rogers, wearing a suit of armor, assaults post-Axis Jerkface Stark, realizing Tony had known since the current volume of Avengers began that their Earth’s destruction was imminent and there was nothing he or anyone could do about it (which seems not to gibe with the whole “I believe in the future” message of Kieron Gillen’s first arc on Iron Man, which ran concurrently). So he essentially tricked Steve into remodeling the Avengers and sending them running around in circles to busy themselves, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Circle imagery has been a hit-you-over-the-head big part of Hickman’s run, right down to the character lineup pages in the front of each issue. The final issue of Avengers also includes multiple flashbacks to the first issue, juxtaposing Steve and Tony building the “Avengers Machine” with Old Steve and Jerkface Tony just beating the snot out of each other because it’s all they can do as the world burns.

Meanwhile, in New Avengers, the bad guys are trying just as hard as the good guys to salvage Earth, for what good is a shattered world that Doom cannot rule? (Read that in your Dr. Doom voice. It’ll feel good, trust me.) The Beyonders, the cosmic beings whose existence date to the original Secret Wars in 1984, apparently set up retired supervillain Molecule Man as a bomb in every reality, so Doom has been dimension-hopping, seeking out each world’s MM and killing him, and amassing followers called Black Swans to speed the process along (and worship him, because why not?). The Beyonders, of course, saw all this coming, so the issue ends with Doom realizing his own hubris was once again used against him, with the punishment being the destruction of Earth.

There’s also a ton of B-plot to unpack, which frankly, if you haven’t been reading either or both books and the past years’ events, you’re gonna be left scratching your head about. The recap pages are like recap scenes before a TV show: If you have no context for them, you don’t know why they’re the on the Island, let alone what the significance of the Hatch is. But the important thing to know is this is the end for both books. Now, there is only Secret Wars.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events- Part 4: X-Cutioner’s Song to Age of Apocalypse: More X-overs

For more than a year from the debut of X-Men #1 in fall 1991, the X-books remained crossover-free. The interim saw some creative upheaval, with Chris Claremont, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and John Byrne all leaving, and Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza becoming the main architects of the X-verse, with new names like Andy Kubert and Greg Capullo coming up on art.

The new crew got their first big story in 1992’s “X-Cutioner’s Song,” a 12-part event that spanned Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Force, and X-Factor. The main antagonist of the Song was Stryfe, the pointy, silver-suited supervillain who had shown up about the same time as Cable, the paramilitary leader who turned the New Mutants into X-Force. Stryfe is out for revenge on a number of important X-characters, including Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Cable and Apocalypse. Late in the story, he appears to reveal himself as the baby Cyclops sent to the future in X-Factor #68, all grown up. This is later debunked, with Cable proven to be the child and Stryfe the clone. Stryfe is defeated, but in a last act of villainy tricks Mister Sinister into releasing the Legacy Virus, a disease that will go on to kill a number of mutants. He also unleashes Stryfe’s Strike File upon the world, so that’s two posthumous F-Yous.

In 1993, after 30 years of existing, Magneto gets to be the main bad guy of a crossover. “Fatal Attractions” sees Big M build a new orbiting space base, regain control of the Acolytes from Fabian Cortez and invite along any X-Men who would like to completely isolate themselves from civilization. Colossus bites, getting up in the middle of his sister’s funeral (she died of the Legacy Virus) to join the X-Men’s sworn enemy. Professor X launches an attack on Magneto’s new digs, which results in Magneto ripping the adamantium from Wolverine’s body, which remains one of the most badass things I’ve seen in a comic. Xavier responds by turning Magneto into a vegetable. Wolverine – whose claws are revealed to have been part of his skeleton all along – leaves the team to go find himself.

Magneto’s goons weren’t done playing with the X-Men, though. “Fatal Attractions” was quickly followed by “Bloodties,” an X-Men/Avengers story in which Fabian Cortez, the former leader of the Acolytes, kidnaps Luna, Magneto’s granddaughter by Quicksilver and the Inhuman Crystal, and foments civil unrest in Genosha, which can’t get its act together in a post "X-tinction Agenda" world. Things go from bad to worse when Exodus, Magneto’s current capo di mutie, shows up and drops and big-ol’ psionic dome over the Genoshan capital. The good guys win, but the Avengers lose their U.N. charter for interfering in Genoshan political stuff.

As the crossovers continue through the years, the number of X-books expands, and writers and editors struggle to spread the events to all the books in the line, as opposed to three or four books. “The Phalanx Covenant,” for example, is spread out over Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Cable, and Wolverine (By today’s standards, that’s a downright reasonable number of X-books. Scary). The Phalanx are a techno-organic alien race that crept on the scene immediately after Fatal Attractions (and who would many years later team up with Ultron to menace the Kree Emprie in Annihilation: Conquest), assimilating thought-dead characters such as Stephen Lang, Cameron Hodge, Doug Ramsey and Candy Southern. At the opening of the covenant, the Phalanx have taken the X-Men, and it’s up to a B-team made up of Banshee, Emma Frost, Jubilee and Sabretooth to gather more mutants, specifically the team that would become Generation X. Elsewhere, Cyclops and Jean Grey, fresh from their honeymoon in the future raising Baby Cable, team up with long-rogue Wolverine and Adult Cable to shoot, snikt, teke-blast, and eyeball-laser their way to the rest of the X-Men. The ancillary teams, meanwhile (Factor, Force and Calibur), are charged with figuring out a way to stop the Phalanx on Earth from contacting reinforcements from their home planet.

Just a few short months later, Xavier’s son, Legion, goes back in time and accidentally kills his father (he was gunning for Magneto), forking the timestream and creating everyone’s favorite Age, “The Age of Apocalypse.” For 30 years, Bishop is trapped in a world where Apocalypse rules all of North America, Magneto leads the X-Men, Cyclops has one eye, Wolverine has one hand, Colossus has one red do-rag and so-on. All the X-books, right down to the just-started Generation X, were put on hold for four months to create an alternate reality that Marvel’s revisited a couple times since and is making part of the Secret Wars’ Battleworld. Uncanny and adjectiveless X-Men became Astonishing and Amazing X-Men and were about Magento’s core team. X-Force became Gambit & the Xternals, in which the thief is hired to swipe the Shi’ar M’Kraan Crystal. X-Factor became Factor X, about the Summers Brothers working for Mr. Sinister. Excalibur became X-Calibre, about Nightcrawler’s adventures in the Savage Land. Generation X became Generation Next, about a team of young mutants overseen by Colossus and Kitty Pryde. Wolverine became Weapon X, about Wolverine and Jean Grey running covert ops. And Cable became X-Man, about the genetically engineered child of Scott Summers and Jean Grey. In the end, Magneto (quite awesomely) kills Apocalypse, and four characters – Nate Grey, Holocaust, the Sugar Man and the AoA version of the Beast – escape to the restored 616 reality. As a result, the X-Man series became an ongoing. For those of you keeping score at home, that means we’re up to nine ongoing X-titles, plus the quarterly X-Men Unlimited.

In our next installment, we’ll traipse through yet more X-overs, from Onslaught as far as my self-imposed word counts will allow. Expect Bastion to show up a lot.

5 Reasons You Should Care About … The Masters of Evil

On last week’s Agents of SHIELD, Cal (Kyle MacLachlan), whom nerds may know better from the comics as Mr. Hyde, assembled a team of random supervillains (Angar the Screamer!) in a revenge play against Director Coulson. It reminded me of Marvel’s best-known team of random rotating supervillains, the Masters of Evil. And with Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds) believed to be cast as Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War, now seems like a good time to familiarize oneself with the nasty brigade.

The basics: The Masters of Evil were created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Chic Stone and first appeared in 1964’s Avengers #6, during a time when villain teams kept some variation of evil in their name to let obtuse Silver Age readers know where they stood. See also the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (X-Men) and DC’s Legion of Super-Villains.

1. Seemingly anyone can be a Master of Evil: Past Masters include both Barons Zemo (Heinrich and Helmut), two Black Knights, the Melter, Radioactive Man (the green Chinese scientist, not the Simpsons character), the Enchantress and her Executioner, Wonder Man, Ultron, Klaw, Whirlwind, Egghead, Moonstone, the Scorpion, Tiger Shark, the Beetle, the Shocker, the Absorbing Man, Blackout, Black Mamba, Fixer, Goliath, Grey Gargoyle, Mr. Hyde, Screaming Mimi, Titania, the Wrecking Crew, Yellowjacket, Doctor Octopus, Gargantua, Jackhammer, Powderkeg, Puff Adder, Justine Hammer, Cyclone, Flying Tiger, Man-Killer, Aqueduct, Bison, Blackwing, Boomerang, Cardinal, Constrictor, Dragonfly, Eel, Icemaster, Joystick, Lodestone, Man-Ape, Quicksand, Scorcher, Shatterfist, Shockwave, Slyde, Sunstroke, Supercharger, Gypsy Moth, Hydro-Man, Machinesmith, Max Fury, Princess Python, Vengeance, Black Talon, Brothers, Grimm, Carrion, Crossfire, Diablo, Firebrand, Griffin, Killer Shrike, Lady Stilt-Man, Pink Pearl, Squid, Taskmaster, Bi-Beast, Madcap, Ringer, Madame Masque, Daimon Hellstrom, Cullen Bloodstone and Lightmaster. Not gonna lie, I have no idea who half these people are, but I assure you they’re all evil. EVIL!

2. They once trashed Avengers Mansion: The fourth incarnation of the Masters, gathered by Helmut Zemo, was so large they managed to outnumber and overwhelm the Avengers, taking over their base of operations, torturing Jarvis the butler, beating Hercules into a coma, kidnapping Captain America and leaving Wasp the only Avenger left standing. The team inevitably crumbled due to clashing agendas and egos, especially between the younger Zemo and Moonstone.

3. They turn good guys bad: In his very first appearance in Avengers #9, Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man, was pitted against the Avengers as a pawn of Zemo. He originally died in that issue but was brought back nearly a decade later in 1972’s Avengers #102. Another Avenger who once joined the Masters was Dane Whitman, the Black Knight, who infiltrated the team to defeat them from the inside. Whitman is the nephew of the previous Black Knight, Nathan Garrett, who was one of the original Masters.

4. And bad guys good: After Onslaught, when the Fantastic Four and Avengers got sucked into a pocket dimension for a year, a new superhero team emerged called the Thunderbolts, who turned out to be the Masters of Evil in disguise. Some of the team’s members went native and ended up becoming legitimate good guys, including Songbird (formerly Screaming Mimi), and the Beetle. Beetle, aka Mach V, is used to hilarious effect as Boomerang’s parole officer in Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber’s much-missed Superior Foes of Spider-Man series. As the Thunderbolts, Zemo’s team ended up fighting a separate Masters of Evil organized by Justine Hammer, daughter of Justin Hammer, industrialist and foe of Tony Stark.

5. They made the Thunderbolts name stick: A book with the Thunderbolts title has been published fairly consistently since the original series by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley debuted in 1997, with slight tweaks to the concept along the way (and a rather dubious one in which the book became about an underground supervillain fight club). After Civil War, they became a team of unreformed supervillains on tight, Norman Osborn-controlled leashes. After Siege, they became Luke Cage’s team of reformed baddies. And after A vs. X, they became the Red Hulk’s team of anti-heroes.

Read this: “Avengers Under Siege” by Roger Stern and John Buscema (Avengers #270-276), the 1986 storyline in which the Masters trash Avengers Mansion. Also read Busiek and Bagley’s original run on Thunderbolts.

Watch that: Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which adapted a number of Masters of Evil stories, including “Avengers Under Siege.”

Dan Grote’s new novel, Magic Pier, is available however you get your books online. He has been writing for The Matt Signal since 2014. He and Matt have been friends since the days when making it to issue 25 guaranteed you a foil cover.

5 Reasons You Should Care About … Monica Rambeau

When I think about Avengers who have gotten a raw deal over the years, Monica Rambeau comes to mind pretty quickly. She’s easily one of the most powerful members the team’s ever had, plus she even led them for a time. But she hasn’t appeared in any iteration of the Avengers cartoons, and there have been no reported plans to incorporate her into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Heck, she’s never even had a codename someone else hasn’t tried to steal. This February, we here at the Matt Signal think it’s time Monica got some lovin’.

The Basics:

Rambeau was created by Roger Stern and John Romita Jr. and first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 in 1982. Her powers – gained through exposure to extradimensional energy – allow her to convert her body into any form of energy within the electromagnetic spectrum, from electricity to gamma rays.

The Reasons:

1. She’s a better representative of New Orleans than Gambit: Rambeau grew up in N’Awlins and went on to become a member of the city police department’s Harbor Patrol, before she became a superhero. She was later a captain for a shipping company. After Hurricane Katrina, she, Blade, Black Panther, Luke Cage and Dr. Voodoo (Brother Voodoo was Sorcerer Supreme for a time) teamed up to fight vampires in her hometown.

2. She was Captain Marvel for most of the 1980s: Rambeau was the second Marvel character to take the codename of Captain Marvel (not including DC’s Billy Batson). The original captain, Mar-Vell, died of cancer in 1982. Many more Captains Marvel followed, including the original captain’s son, Genis-Vell; his sister, Phylla-Vell; a Skrull imposter; Noh-Varr, aka Marvel Boy; and the current captain, Carol Danvers.

3. She’s had a few other codenames: Rambeau ceded the Captain Marvel name once Genis-Vell began superheroing in the 1990s. She subsequently went by Photon (1996), Pulsar (2005) and Spectrum (2013), her current codename in the book Captain America and the Mighty Avengers. She changed her name from Photon to Pulsar after Genis-Vell decided to change his codename from Captain Marvel to Photon, because the son of Mar-Vell’s powers apparently included the ability to blow up Rambeau’s spot. Additionally, during a post-Heroes Return Avengers story in which the sorceress Morgan Le Fay warps reality, Rambeau ends up doing Le Fay’s bidding under the name Daystar.

4. She once led the Avengers: Rambeau appeared in the original run of Avengers between issues #222 and #347, and was the first female African-American member of the team. In issue #279, she takes over leadership of the team from the Wasp, a reign that lasts until she fries herself touching the ocean while in an electrical state. This happened during a battle with a giant sea beast called Leviathan (There’s that name again!). Monica’s memories of leading Earth’s Mightiest Heroes became a point of annoyance among her teammates in Warren Ellis’ brilliant Nextwave series.

5. She was the Miranda in a Marvel attempt at Sex and the City: Rambeau shared a four-issue Marvel Divas series with Spider-Man ally Black Cat, Golden Age romance-book character-turned-superhero Hellcat, and New Warrior Firestar. Around this time Monica was dating Brother Voodoo and was getting over a crush on Black Panther, who’d recently married the X-Men’s Storm.

Read this: Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #1-12 by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immomen, in which a group of random heroes (including Boom-Boom, Elsa Bloodstone, Machine Man and “The Captain”) are recruited for a SHIELDish agency run by a man named Dirk Anger (get it?) to stop weird weapons of mass destruction. Also Fin Fang Foom tries to stick Boom-Boom down his pants.

Watch that: Rambeau has never appeared in an animated or live-action Marvel property.


Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.