Requiem for Nu Marvel

Reading Secret Invasion #3 this week, I’d turned to the last page when it suddenly dawned on me that I was a lobster.

I should probably explain (no matter how tempted I am not to).

If you ever try cooking a lobster (neither as hard nor as expensive as I always thought, by the way) you are eventually faced with that moment where you, a normal, relatively kind person, have to boil an animal alive in your house. How you approach this moment is largely determined by what kind of person you are; either you feel like a monster, or you feel like the lobster is, and with a hearty cry of “Take that, you scarlet-clawed sea roach!” you drop it in the pot before it can chop your pinkie off. Despite my reputation, I tend towards the former, and I could never bring myself to make the attempt until a cook friend of mine let me in on a secret.

“You don’t just drop lobsters screaming into a roiling cauldron,” he said. “You put them in a pot of nice, comfortable room-temperature water, and then you graaadually turn up the heat. Before they even know what happened, yum yum they’re wearing garnish on the china.”

That having been said: I like Secret Invasion. Genuinely, I do. I liked the lion’s share of Civil War. Until the last issue, when the Scarlet Witch forgot to call no backsies, I even liked House of M. But anyone who has had the misfortune to stumble upon my recent unsolicited reviews of The Mighty Avengers has opened a window into unraveling madness. After a year’s worth of issues (stretched out over two years– hey-o! Take that, Cho!) featuring a specific type of story told in a specific style with a specific type of artist, suddenly The Mighty Avengers cut to a completely different story in a flat brown photorealistic style featuring none of the characters that had been in the book up to that moment. God help anybody just reading this one book. After two issues, just when the new story was about to do something, we cut to a completely different story. Where had the old one gone? Oh, it would pop up somewhere. This was a crossover. The reader’s buying every book we publish, right? The story starts in Secret War, vanishes for a year, pops up in The New Avengers, vanishes, gets two issues in The Mighty Avengers, and then BOOP there it is in Secret Invasion. To be continued in New Warriors! Or Anita Blake, or something! We’ll figure it out! The books are handled as being so willy-nilly interchangeable that as I was writing this I twice typed “Mighty Invasion.”

That last page of #3 was when I realized I was boiling. The water was not this way when I dropped in.

I took a long hiatus from comics right around 9th grade or so, after blowing every dime of lawn-cutting and birthday money on them from roughly 1984-1990ish. I still haven’t gone back through the boxes CSI-style and determined exactly when I said goodbye, but I know I left the X-Men before Claremont did. I would dip a toe into the water every now and then, just long enough to say, “Yikes! Spider-clones?” or “What the–? Star Trek vs. X-Men?!” but I largely left the medium behind me until the X-Men’s movie prompted me to rescue the longboxes from my childhood basement in the summer of 2000. That was when I began exploring the glorious room-temperature waters of Nu Marvel.

“Nu Marvel” was the (largely pejorative) term being used by fanboys to refer to the regime of Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada that had come to power at Marvel Comics at the beginning of 2000 and the changes they had brought about in their books. Controversy was the coin of the realm at the time, and a lot of long-time readers were polishing up their pitchforks, but as far as I was concerned Nu Marvel was publishing exactly the right books at exactly the right time.

For years now, I’ve been trying to remember exactly which book brought me back (I’d have made note of it if I’d realized it would end up consuming so much of my free time years later). I would love for it to be something classy, but no matter how much 33-year-old me keeps admonishing 25-year-old me for being a Kevin Smith fan I suspect it may have been the trade of Smith’s Daredevil run. I do know that I said, at some point, “J. Michael Straczynski just took over The Amazing Spider-Man? I know that name! If he’s good enough for UHF sci-fi syndication, by cracky, he’s good enough for me!” JMS’ run was a couple of months old, but I correctly guessed that his first issue would still be collecting dust at my local grocery store and from there I was in. I subscribed the next week.

Then came Alias.

When I was 11 years old, I started hearing more and more people say, “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, you know. This is an evolving medium like television or movies. Comics are telling more mature, adult stories now for mature, adult people.” In later years, I would reflect on this statement and realize that everyone in my life who ever said it to me was also an 11-year-old boy. But a lot had changed since I left comics, and it was clear from Alias that Nu Marvel wasn’t screwing around.

Alias was the story of Jessica Jones, a former superhero who had left the costumed lifestyle behind her and opened a private investigation firm. The first word in the book was “fuck!” and by the end of the first issue I would see Jessica take it from behind from Luke Cage, a character I had last seen wearing a silver tiara in Secret Wars II.

To people who had stuck with comics all along, people who had already read Maus and Sandman and had been keeping the faith on the indie scene, this was probably nothing new, but to my Evolutionary War-owning ass it was like a bomb had been dropped on childhood. Who were these characters now? What had happened? Where could I get more? Alias is single-handedly responsible for my continued readership of comics, my love of the work of Brian Bendis, and the hundreds upon hundreds of dollars that my child’s college fund will simply never see. Sorry, kid! Skrulls!

From there, I discovered that there was a whole new world waiting for the Marvel zombie. There was Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, a series that showed the ripple effect that Spidey created in the world around him; it was a Spider-Man series that almost never featured Spider-Man, a Spider-Man series that instead featured creators like Paul Pope, Sean Philips, Garth Ennis, and Darwyn Cooke. I didn’t know who any of those people were when I read it; I only knew that they were blowing my frickin’ mind. The last issue of the series was typical of why I loved it; it featured a one-shot story about those petty crooks who get webbed to the lamppost by Spidey and showed that 90% of them get released immediately because there are no witnesses, no evidence, no one to press charges… it was a magnificent-yet-depressing injection of reality into the stories I had read as a kid.

There was Muties, the 2002 anthology series that followed a similar line of thought as Tangled Web; each issue told the story of a different mutant from somewhere on the globe and how his/her mutation had changed everything. Happy endings were few and far between. Around this same time, “Nu Marvel” published a miniseries named X-Factor by Jeff Jensen and Arthur Ranson that followed two federal agents a la X-Files on the trail of mutant hate crimes and featured the familiar X-Men characters for roughly a page and a half.

All of these series pursued an angle of storytelling I loved as an adult: never mind the guys in the outfits, what would it actually be like to live in this insane world? What effect does a Spider-Man have, or do mutants have, or does the superpower-endowing accident have? Given this outlandish premise, what happens to the people?

I could not get enough, and soon I was forking over the cash all over again. I don’t even know where to begin as I remember the books. Do I touch on Morrison’s New X-Men again? Do I mention Banner, the Brian Azzarello mini about what dealing with the Hulk would actually be like? Do I sing the praises of X-Force/X-Statix by Milligan and Allred, which looked at the X-Men phenomenon in a postmodern celebrity context? What about Deadline, the mini about being a cub reporter at the Daily Bugle? Or, my God, how could I neglect The Craptacular B-Sides, the best superhero team ever to come out of Raven’s Perch, New Jersey? Or Unstable Molecules, the most high-concept book ever created by human hands (based with a stony straight face on the premise that The Fantastic Four was based on real people, and this was their biography)? These were just the new books that sprung from the “Nu” ethos; I haven’t even mentioned Waid & Wieringo’s Fantastic Four (the only team that ever made me care about this book) or even Bruce Jones’ Hulk (featuring some of the best covers to appear on superhero comics in years, those covers being the only place one would see the goddamn Hulk in the book for months at a time).

Not every one of these books was a home run. A couple were not even ground rule doubles. But I was so deliriously gobsmacked by the fact that they even existed in the marketplace that I didn’t care. “Peter Bagge’s Megalomaniacal Spider-Man? Are you kidding me? Evan Dorkin doing a Thing mini? Wait, did you just say they’re telling Wolverine’s origin story?!”

Decompression was king, and pin-up covers were vice king. Dead meant dead. Continuity didn’t go completely out the window, but it sure was hanging onto the ledge by its fingertips. Just because Thor parked Asgard atop Manhattan in his book didn’t mean the guy writing Daredevil had to deal with that bullshit; all that mattered was telling a good story in your own book. Joe Quesada seemed to get off a zinger about variant covers killing the industry in just about every interview I read.

Obviously, this is not where we are now.

At the moment, characters are basically dying and coming back like they’re effing Super Mario. Writing this piece, I tried to research Joe Quesada’s original stance on variant covers, but all my Google search returned was a list of the variant covers that have been drawn by Joe Quesada over the last couple of years. I was too depressed to continue. Alias became The Pulse, and from there we got Front Line. And continuity? Well, maybe I’ll start talking about that here and suddenly continue the essay over on my blog; you’re reading both, right?

So, when did the water get so bubbly? I can’t pinpoint it, can’t figure out exactly how we got here from there. Was it when Tsunami didn’t take off? Was it U-Decide, or Trouble? Was it just when Marvel starting making money again? As fondly as I remember all these books, there weren’t many of them that survived more than a year or two. Muties: 6 issues. Tangled Web: 22 issues. You haven’t seen my beloved B-Sides anywhere in years. In the end, maybe there just wasn’t any money in it. On the other hand, it made them all of my money for the last seven years, so who knows? They say everything is cyclical; this is a stage of the cycle I wouldn’t mind seeing again. It’s getting hot in this pot.

 

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If you trick Jim Mroczkowski into saying his name backwards, he has to go back to the 5th dimension. He is too young to be nostalgic for his twenties. He can be found never updating Jimski.com or by e-mailing jim@ifanboy.com.