Marvel Reveals Plans for Heroic Age

Today Marvel revealed their plans for the Heroic Age. Joe Quesada asked how many people remember the start of the Marvel Age in 1961 and noted that almost no one remembers.

“That was a time of great heroics and when our heroes were brave, tried and true. Therefore we are going to be essentially remaking the exact same issues of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, the Avengers and the rest. In the spirit of such classic movie remakes like the “3:10 to Yuma”. We think it can be essentially the same but with modern art techniques and great dialoguing like Bendis does, it will be better.”

Joe continues “Let’s face we have worked hard to almost come into a complete circle since Marvel stared 50 years ago and failed in developing newer characters or a new generation of heroes, so why try. The first ten issues of most of those series can be spread out and have story points filled in that will last us at least five years. Plus the fans can thrill to looking up the old issues to see what is coming next and guess what minor points we might change. Nothing was more heroic then what Stan, Jack, Steve and the rest of the gang did then, so why reinvent the wheel.”

Some of the creators announced are Hickman and Hitch for the “Incredible Hulk”, which was explained by Marvel as a quarterly book to give Hitch a few years to duplicate the original six issue run.

Fraction and Immonen on Spider-Man, this was thought to be a big help for Fraction as he hasn’t been able to write the X-Men that well, now all he has to do is drag out the story line a little and change Stan’s old corny dialogue into modern corny dialogue.

More teams are to be announced as the launch gets closer.

Asked how he can hit the reset button on the whole line, Joe says, “You haven’t been paying attention as we have done that with a lot of individual characters anyway. But the plan is something about a white event, but I can’t say anymore.”

It is rumored that if this does not work that the Scarlet Witch will make a comeback and say no more retro-cons or magical fixes and the MU will return to where it was in April 2010.

DC Announces Major Diversity Program

DC has announced that in an effort to provide true diversification to their line up of heroes that changes will be made to their three main iconic characters.

Superman will be gay. The plan is that with the return of Krypton Superman realizes that he has been playing into the American ideal and that his long suppressed feelings have emerged as he discovers his true heritage.

Batman will be black. The plan is that as Bruce Wayne comes back through time he discovers that his family owned slaves and that Bruce is actually bi-racial. This discovery triggers a change in his skin pigmentation and Bruce is now black.

Wonder Woman will be a transgendered hero. A radical rewriting of her origin will reveal that she was never made out of clay, but was actually a baby boy that somehow washed up on the island. As only females were allowed Queen Hippolyta asked the gods to change the child and give the child her/his powers also. She then created the made of clay story to cover what she had done.

These changes are to be introduced slowly over the next year or so as to allow the changes to feel like an evolution of the character as opposed to just changing the character to bow to some changes being mandated internally.

Finally there are rumors that if the changes create too much controversy and sales drop off the changes will be explained as being a different world in the multi-verse and essentially nullifying any impact to the “real” continuity.