The Four Color Media Monitor

Their latest stunt is called "Marvel NOW!" and clearly exists only to draw in speculators by relaunching/starting series from number one, with the same writing/editing staff as before:

With characters that have been around that long, a renewal is needed from time to time, from generation to generation. But Marvel NOW!, the publisher's latest initiative, is arguably its biggest sea change ever, with a relaunch or launch of more than 20 books, new costumes, new identities, new digital experiences for readers and a shifting of Marvel's top writing and art talent among the titles.

"The thing that keeps them contemporary and modern and of the moment is new people, new creators, come in and come on board and reinvent and make relevant once again the stories these characters are involved in," says Tom Brevoort, Marvel's executive editor. "This is the ongoing process that is the engine that drives the Marvel Universe."

There's never been an instant with such critical mass and everything happening at once, though. Most of the launches will spin out of Marvel's current event series Avengers vs. X-Men and occur between October and February, with three major books beginning with new No. 1 issues before the end of the year:

I am so tired of hearing them say "relevant" or even "reinvent" when they clearly aren't making them so or doing it in a way that remains true to the original view. And just what new talent are they bringing in? Almost no one really new, and there is one writer they're still employing who's reason enough to stay away:

All New X-Men (November), by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Stuart Immonen, features the original five X-Men who have found their way from the past to the present — including the long-dead Jean Grey. [...]

Marvel NOW! all started due to happenstance more than anything else, according to Brevoort. Bendis realized he was reaching the natural end of his run writing The Avengers, which he started in 2004, and wanted to move on to a new challenge. The X-Men made sense for him, and the musical chairs began there, with [Jonathan] Hickman moving from Fantastic Four to Avengers.

"Hopefully that's exciting to people, that you're going to get to see and hear and experience a new voice and a new perspective on all the Marvel Universe characters," Brevoort says.

Nope, not exciting one bit. As they say, it's just musical chairs, and doesn't equal fresh new talent at all. Nor does it add any new voices on any of the MCU's cast of characters, since it's just most of the people already working for them who are dealing with this. The renumbering is no doubt derived from DC, and the sad part is that the premiere issues will sell - to the speculator crowd; that's why all the news about debut issues going back to press in past months, but not the consecutive issues of the same series.

"Everything's going to be one nice melting pot of Marvel Universe goodness," says Brevoort, who insists that Marvel NOW! is not a reboot. "This is the same Marvel Universe you were reading about the month before and the same characters. They haven't gone back to square one — all of that history isn't out the window."

Sorry, but they haven't been the same cast or universe for a long time. Not since Joe Quesada first got his foot in the door. And there's a certain history that was thrown out the window - Spider-Man's marriage.

One twist is interesting for those familiar with Marvel history: the return of Jean Grey, who first perished after turning into the Dark Phoenix and has gone through multiple lives and deaths ever since. But the Marvel Girl in All New X-Men will come from a time before all that.

Time-travel is no substitute for the real deal, and they've been rehashing the Phoenix saga for too long now, and have never even tried to fix the damage Grant Morrison left behind. As Bendis' interloping on the X-Men shows, there's really no difference in who the new writing staff are, no matter what series they're working on.

Labels: Avengers, bad editors, crossoverloading, dreadful writers, Fantastic Four, marvel comics, msm propaganda, X-Men