FalcomAdol

Blade was in Mighty Avengers, and fought Deathwalker Prime before the book changed into Captain America & The Mighty Avengers.

Rumor is that Pepper might be the Iron Man here.

I'm super excited about this. After Hickman, I need something that's more like Nova or Ms. Marvel and less like ... Hickman.

Also, is this Vision, or is this Jonas?

Marvel Now megashipped a lot of books though. Fraction was really writing a 28-issue series in two books over the course of a year. You can only take that kind of breakneck pace for so long.

Avengers has already shipped more than 20 issues in Marvel Now, and New Avengers another dozen as of this week (plus Infinity). Superior Spider-Man has already shipped 20 issues this year (plus Avenging and Team-Up). It's craziness.

It's no surprise they have to rotate creative teams at this point.

Captain Marvel and Fearless Defenders are both well ahead of where we've been for over a decade. Journey Into Mystery and Red She-Hulk were also good ones...unfortunate they got canned.

Honestly feels like Marvel has a real push on for female characters right now. They seem to have taken the criticism to heart this year, and pushed several well known titles as female books, and teams that used to be mixed now have only female characters etc. It's an interesting experiment. Doesn't hurt that Marvel has so may of the top female writers and artists under contract.

Avengers Arena should also get some recognition here for interesting and honest depictions of women and girls. Not every woman/girl in there has the same motivations, and they interact in generally interesting ways (mostly).

Even Hawkeye (Hawkguy) has some interesting relationships that aren't entirely about sex. Clint's past done caught up with him, and the "work wife"/"ex-wife"/"girlfriend"/"daughter" thing is really interesting.

@sasquatch888 said:

Batman is the world's number one superhero because he fits in best with the spirit of the age. He's dark, conflicted, obsessive, a loner by choice who forms incredibly powerful bonds with his compatriots (the reason he chooses to be a loner, he's afraid of again experiencing the pain of loss).

He's tailor made for the generations that grew up as latchkey kids, who saw themselves as potential robins (Tim Drake is the ultimate reflection of the people I'm talking about), and have grown up with those Robins through the "death" of Bruce. They're adults with their own kids who related to the relationship between Bruce and Damian, and who have experience with the difficulties of having or being a single parent.

In 20 years, Batman may not be the world's number one superhero. Over time, these things shift. In the 90s, it was the time for Klax, but it was also the time for the X-Men. In the 80s it was the time for Teenage Ninjas. In the 70s it was the time for comic characters to be dealing with real-world issues in a new way through this medium (Tony's alcoholism, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Howard the Duck).

The characters remain mostly the same, but different characters are most appropriate for different times, and a good chunk of that comes from who is writing their stories.

Winter Soldier wins this in his sleep if he's able to set up a hit without Batman knowing he's potentially being targeted, but in a heads-up street rumble, I have to say it's too close to call.

Probably Nightcrawler. It's less that he can win, than that he can avoid losing.

How about instead of putting them up against each other you put them each up against three random mid-level (but super powered) villains (if you can find 3 such villains in the Marvel Universe these days).

Also, this fight is more interesting if the city has a power outage, and it's completely in the dark.

Marvel Wrote themselves into the position of having universe level crises when they made the vast majority of their super-villains into heroes. The only significant threats that are left are the ones that are cosmic-level or which are more insidious (prejudice, politics).

I'd blame Bendis and Millar for the Avenger's Initiative, but that would let Kurt Busiek (Thunderbolts) off the hook, plus Marvel's had a 50 year history of turning villains into heroes (Clint Barton first appearance 1964, Avenger 1965).

The trouble now is no more new "normal" villains. They amped the power level up so high that street level is in a completely different world from the more popular comics (Spiderman is no longer ruling the Marvel roost, it's Avengers, FF and X-Men, all of whom have conflicts that are way beyond street level pretty much every day).

Redemption is a great story, but you can't redeem everyone or you have no conflict.

Shit, even Galactus has been a misunderstood character that we should all kind of pity for decades, and that dude drains planets of their essential life force.

It COINCIDES with the corporate desire to throw more events out there, but it's supported by the way they've written things all these years.

Unless something has radically changed, the only way you can determine that comics have been sold-through is if a shop reorders. It's not like video rental shops (used to be) or movie theaters where most of the transactions are uploaded nightly so that the revenue tracking for retail/distributor splits can be calculated (the revenue splits are way more complicated). This is a simple one-way transaction (leaving aside special situations where the distributor will accept returns on a specific title).

Why? Tony Fucking Moore.

Moonstone. Think about it.