Marvel Reboot

[monty--]

I've been trawling the web for nostalgic purposes because I was a big fan of Marvel comics in the eighties. However, I've come across something known as a 'reboot' what Marvel did in the mid-nineties. What exactly is this? Apparently, the impression that I got was that Marvel scrapped the Marvel Universe continuity and restarted from scratch. Can anyone clarify this? I'm puzzled why Marvel would do this. It's like..'oh, all the heroes will be old by now if we keep the time line canonized so we need to start again.' This basically cheapens Marvel in general in my opinion. Its like 'Sod it.We've ran out of ideas'. Anyone know what exactly happened?
 

[Bico]

Sounds more like the post-Crisis On Infinite Earths DC to me.
Maybe it was the retelling of some of Marvel's flagship characters' origins that happened after they went bankrupt and got bought out by a toy company - the only one I read was the Spider-Man reboot by John Byrne, which was just *awful*, and got cancelled pretty sharpish (a smarter move would be to push the first few issues of Ultimate Spider-Man as the new origin, imo).
Or maybe it was the so-called 'pocket universe' thing that happened at the end of the whole 'Onslaught' event, where the Avengers, Hulk, Iron Man, and Captain America all got their origins redone in highly disappointing fashion?  The reset button got pushed on that turkey after about a year, as I recall.

[Cliffy]

Yeah, I think it's Onslaught he's thinking of.

Basically, there was a big crossover event one summer in the mid-'90's where all the non-mutant heroes crossed over into another universe to save Earth (I don't remember why).  For some maguffin reason, no mutant could join them, or Spider-Man neither.  So for a time, the X-Men, Spidey, and other mutant books were taking place on an Earth with no Avengers, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, etc.

The whole thing was an excuse to have the low-selling non-mutant books juiced by farming them out to two then-popular Image studios (Jim Lee's Wildstorm and Rob Liefeld's Awesome Ent., neither of which are with Image anymore).

New #1 issues (called "Heroes Reborn!") came out for Cap, Hulk, FF, and something else (Avengers?), all done by the Image folks (although IIRC still officially published by Marvel).  In the books, the stories all started from scratch.  I didn't read many, but I did see the first new FF, which had a retelling of the famous FF origin story with the typical mid-'90's trappings of a secretive government agency and black ops missions, yadda yadda yadda.  In a way, it was sorta like the Ultimate universe of a few years later in that it was based on old characters but retold their origins and went from there without the characters having lived through other stories from the previous continuity.

The experiment was not generally considered a great success, esp. when Liefeld missed his deadlines so often.  After a year or so, they did another event (Heroes Return!) which had all the non-mutants who had been in the HR universe come back to the regular Earth and their books were all relaunched by yet another #1 done in-house at Marvel.  (The whole thing turned out to be some kind of dreamworld or something.)  AFAIK, the returning heroes didn't remember much about their somewhat-different, somewhat-similar lives in the other universe.

So basically, after Heroes Return, it was a wash, and the whole thing was quickly forgotten.  (Indeed, a few years ago they even started ignoring the relaunched issue numbers and returned the numbering system on most books to what it would have been if the clock had never been reset twice.)

One thing, I've heard that the upcoming Marvel event House of M will also be a minor reboot, although nothing as drastic as some of DC's reboots like Crisis or Zero Hour.

--Cliffy

[longmanshort]

There was also the Age of Apocalypse, which saw all the X titles transformed into an alternate universe. Being a geeky X-fanboy teenager that I was at the time, I remember getting very upset and my friend and I writing a stern letter to Marvel warning that it would destroy the X-Men as a series and that it would really, really make us angry ... and you wouldn't like us when we're angry.

It never got sent after we'd read the first issue ...

[Tiplodocus]

So where do all the ULTIMATE comics fit into this?

(I actually quite enjoyed ULTIMATE SPIDERMAN and ULTIMATE X-MEN because I've never really been a big marvel fan and these gave me an opportunity to try out some of the stories from the beginning. I also really liked, for my sins, Millar's THE ULTIMATES)

[Dan Kelly]

The Ultimate line could also be considered a reboot, the whole idea being to take the existing marvel characters and "reinvent" them so that they are more relevant to today - quite a neat way of getting around the problem that most of Marvel's cast should be at least 40 by now...

Dan

[Matt Timson]

And the rest.  Victor Von Doom met Hitler while on his journey to become Doctor Doom and Reed Richards was a member of OSI- some WWII intel outfit- making them both octogenarians!

[Wils]

Don't Marvel and DC try and get around this by saying that their universes are in 'Super-Hyper-Time', or some other wanky excuse for their characters not aging?

[Matt Timson]

I think it's five years for us, one year for the comic characters- which is fine, it just doesn't explain 'Doom meets Hitler'.  There ought to be *some* kind of revision- just not one that includes Rob Liefield.

Even the invisible woman would be an old bint with tits down to her knees by now- forcefields or not...

[GordonR]

"most of Marvel's cast should be at least 40 by now..."


And the rest.  Peter Parker was a high school student when he became Spidey, and that was back in the mid-sixties, which would make him about 55 now.

Unlike DC, Marvel don't go in much for revising their continuity, operating on the theory that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".  I was working on a book for the Marvels line (it never came out, of course) which went into Marvel Universe history, the story beginning in 1944 and ending in 1994, and I was told by the editor that the Marvel Universe officially begins with the events of Fantastic Four #1, and that those events are always assumed to have happened about 10 years from the present point.

[Matt Timson]

Yeah, I remember an issue of Spiderman where Spidey notes that he put the Rocket Racer "months ago".

Months?!?  It was about eight sodding years!

[GordonR]

I remember someone once pointing out one of the more entertaining flaws in Marvel's static timeline theory:

If Peter Parker's always supposed to have been Spidey for about 7-8 years, then how come there's been about 30 Spider-Man Christmas stories, huh?

[Quirkafleeg]

About 4 stories happen simulatiously each Christmas... and he's just remembering them.

[Dudley]

When Dredd gets a touch of arthritis, we can all start criticising...

[Bico]

Flash Thompson was in Vietnam as well - as was Tony Stark.