The Four Color Media Monitor

In an article on CBR, Rick Remender, who's currently writing the latest version of [Uncanny] X-Force, makes the mistake of promoting a coming issue based on character deaths and reboots:

"After issue #27 there will be a death in the team. There will be a new member and there will almost be a complete reset. A ball-peen hammer is going to come down around issue #27 in a pretty huge and crazy way. If you've been a fan of the series so far you're not going to want to miss this," Remender said. "This was something that I didn't think would get approved, to be honest. Nick Lowe and I worked on it quite a bit and made sure that it was natural, unpredictable, and was much bigger than 'The Dark Angel Saga.' That was a huge challenge too because I went pretty big in that story. I wanted to make sure that if we were going to do another big epic that this thing was an escalation and we definitely have that. I think people will see that by issue #27."

Not me, because I've long found promoting the story based on character deaths very unappealing, ditto relaunchings. And even if the character they intend to terminate is resurrected later, it's nerve-wracking that they should even have to resort to deaths in the first place, because that alone has come down to serving as a publicity stunt. For all we know, modern comics have practically been awash with far too many deaths of all sorts, in contrast to stories of the Silver/Bronze Age where they were usually kept to a minimum and far between.

On top of all that, whatever Remender's got planned is not helping that the X-Men franchise has long gone flat as a pancake and still lacking any real direction.

Labels: dreadful writers, golden calf of death, marvel comics, X-Men