Marvel Comics recently released their solicitations for April 2015, which give us an interesting glimpse into what’s on the horizon for the House of Ideas. Aside from seeing the expansion of their newly added ‘Star Wars’ line and a cadre of books starring unexpectedly awesome heroes like Squirrel Girl, Ant-Man, and Howard the Duck, it appears that a number of the company’s flagship titles like ‘Avengers,’ ‘New Avengers,’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ are coming to an end. But of the books culminating that month, the most telling is ‘Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man.’ We’ve known since New York Comic Con that ‘Secret Wars’ was coming and many have been speculating that the Ultimate Universe would be no more thanks to the ‘Ultimate Universe: The End’ teaser, but the cover and blurb that says “Is this the end?” for Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez’s twelfth issue of Miles’ solo series definitely had True Believers fearing the worst for the Ultimate Spider-Man. Well, while we don’t know for sure that the worst is coming, but thanks to the press conference on Tuesday afternoon, it’s obvious that the biggest event in all of Marvel history is on its way.
Last week, Marvel teased “the announcement to end all announcements” to hype up the coming of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s ‘Secret Wars’ later this year. Today, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso and Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort appeared at Midtown Comics in New York City to reveal to the world exactly what going to happen. To put it bluntly, the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe as we know them are both done and they will be combined into one big entity:
Alonso: The Ultimate Universe, the Marvel Universe, they’re going to slap together. Imagine two pizzas: They’re going to combine toppings, some toppings are going to drop off. And that is the Marvel Universe moving forward. It’s more than the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe, it’s all the universes you can imagine. That is the Marvel Universe going forward.
Brevoort: Once you hit ‘Secret Wars’ #1, there’s no Marvel Universe, there’s no Ultimate Universe. It’s all Battleworld.
Alonso: None of these stories are What Ifs are alternate reality stories. And they will have legs. They will impart new things into the Marvel Universe going forward.
Of course, this news sparks a whole new set of questions, but Brevoort answered a big one when he revealed that this incursion of the two universes happens in the final issues of ‘Avengers’ and ‘New Avengers’. “The heroes of those two worlds will have eight hours to figure out what to do about it before both universes are destroyed,” says the executive editor. However, if you haven’t been following these amazing books for some reason, you shouldn’t worry because Marvel’s Free Comic Book Day offering will act as a primer for the event to get people up to speed. It will also include the Marvel/’Attack On Titan’ crossover that was previously only available in Japan.
To hear the announcement in it’s entirety, check out the replay of the press conference below:
Finally, many fans have taken all this ‘Secret Wars’ talk to mean that a Marvel reboot is actually coming. This is something that people have been worrying about since DC launched the New 52 and things didn’t lighten up when events like ‘Age of Ultron’, ‘Original Sin’, and ‘Axis’ extenuated matters. While the editor-in-chief didn’t give a definitive answer, Alonso responded by saying that Marvel’s history doesn’t need to be fixed:
“Like I said, we are taking some chances here, but I will stand by — I think Tom will back me — our history’s not broken. We don’t view our history as being broken or something that we need to fix. If anything we think we are building upon that history and we are taking the best and biggest pieces of it and seeing how easily they coexist with one another. We don’t expect all our moves to make everyone happy, but we think it will make for a really fascinating read through ‘Secret Wars’ and beyond.”
That’s a lot to take in, but Marvel promises that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Within the next two weeks, even more ‘Secret Wars’ information will make it’s way out into the world, so stay tuned right here at ScienceFiction.com to find out the latest about this massive upcoming event. Until then, let us know what you think about these Marvel Universe happenings in the comments below.
Source: Comic Book Resources, ComicBook.com
