There’s a recent interview with Tom Breevort on the Word Balloon podcast where he says:
“When fans can actually get in on that and go, ‘Oh my god, they killed Captain America in Civil War, and he’s actually dead. What’s going to happen to the Captain America comic now? Oh my god.’ And go on that journey even though, inevitably, invariably, eventually, Steve Rogers is going to come back. The fact that you can have that experience and that purity of response, I think, is great. So, I love it whenever they do that. And so, to a certain extent, for all that it’s driving a lot of people absolutely crazy, I like the reaction to Paul because it means they’re feeling something. They’re having a reaction to this piece of fiction, and I’ll take that over studied indifference every time.”
Truthfully, I fully understand the feeling. You want to elicit an emotion in the reader, no matter what that emotion is, because feeling it is better than feeling apathy.
But then, you look at the state of Marvel Comics in the past few years. Constant relaunches and renumberings, series’ being cancelled before they even have a chance to catch their footing. In a 2024 interview with ICv2, Dan Buckley (President of Marvel Entertainment) said:
“I’m not going to say there won’t be limited series, but I am at the moment approving some series for 10 issues at a time, not 4 or 5. Hopefully I can get to 15 or 20. That is the intent. Because, to be honest, it’s a lot of work on our editorial staff, too, to restart books all the time; there’s a lot of work on our marketing staff, to re-market a book coming out. It’s to the benefit of everyone to figure this out.”
Which is good and all, it’s a fine promise. 10 issues can end up being 2 arcs, which is enough space for a book to figure itself out, but then you look at recurring trends, such as books going on for 10 issues before being relaunched (see: Steve Orlando, et al.’s Scarlet Witch, Gene Luen Yang, Dike Ruan and Marcus To’s Shang-Chi, Ashley Allen and Germán Peralta’s Magik, Jed Mackay et al.’s Black Cat). But worse than that is that they didn’t even live up to that statement, which is precisely what is happening to the Imperial line.
How do you expect anyone to even invest any time in a book or a line when you know it’s going to be on the chopping block and have nothing interesting resolve itself? It doesn’t help that the line being cancelled was confirmed before Imperial Guardians #1 even came out, which made me feel nothing but apathy when reading it. Why should I care about what’s happening in this book when I already know that none of this will reach a satisfying conclusion in any way. What is the point?
It’s a shame, especially since Imperial was marketed as a big return for the Marvel Cosmic line, a line that I adore, especially because of the long term storytelling Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning did following up on Annihilation and ending with The Thanos Imperative. It helped that Imperial was written by Jonathan Hickman, my favourite writer working today, illustrated by Iban Coello and Federico Vicentini, and more so that (controversially), it was a really good book with a lot of ideas going for it (even if you can tell on some level that it does feel phoned in, at least it’s thematically congruent with the rest of his Marvel work).
What’s the point of all this buildup, all the teases to really make that corner of the universe flourish through books like Nova: Centurion, Black Panther: Intergalactic, Planet She-Hulk, Imperial Guardians and Exiles (a book that never even released outside of the one-shot, it seems), if you’re not going to capitalize on it. I don’t expect readers to even care or buy in if they too are aware of the fact that it’ll either be cancelled or not followed up on, because that’s how I feel about even considering investing myself emotionally into a Marvel Comic nowadays. I don’t even feel disappointed, because this entirely lines up with what I expected from the company, and I think that’s the most disappointing thing of all.
