Post by The Ultimate Nullifier on May 26, 2015 13:22:01 GMT -6
blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/daily-reads-the-secret-history-of-ultimate-marvel-why-your-favorite-tv-show-was-cancelled-and-more-20150526
1. How Ultimate Marvel Gave Birth to the MCU. It started as a publishing experiment, and then turned into a revolutionizing strategy. Marvel Comics took a chance on rebooting its stale franchise through Ultimate Marvel and it ended up becoming "the foundation of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel cinematic empire." How did this happen? Vulture's Abraham Riesman explores that history in depth.
Ever since Marvel's first comic in 1939, nearly every superhero story it published had to fit into a shared, ongoing universe of characters and events. There was some fudging of time frames (Spider-Man was introduced as a teenager in 1962, and by 1999, he was only in his 30s or so), but every story was built on the back of every previous story, and all stories were interconnected: Iron Man might talk about some battle that had occurred in "X-Men," Mr. Fantastic would remember things that happened in comics published 20 years prior, and there were regular companywide “crossover events,” where all the heroes would fight the same evil at the same time. If you're confused by that description, don't worry — so was everyone else. Sixty years of continuity had set an insanely high bar for understanding what was happening in a Marvel comic, even if you were a die-hard fan. (To be fair: DC also had this problem.) What's more, everything in Marvel looked and sounded behind-the-times. In a world where geek audiences were flocking to watch the sleek, leather-clad, hip (by 1999 standards) action of "The Matrix," Marvel’s stories were alienatingly ridiculous. In the pages of Marvel's flailing comics series, you might see the Avengers — wearing uniforms of clownish purple or baby-blue — fighting wooden-dialogued villains with names like Kang the Conqueror and Lord Templar. Spider-Man was a married stiff who spent years trying to solve the mystery of whether or not he was a clone. And the characters were all so old: The phenomenon of ongoing continuity meant the original X-Men hadn't been teenagers for decades. A pop-culture empire lives and dies on young-adult interest, and Marvel's was fast receding.
1. How Ultimate Marvel Gave Birth to the MCU. It started as a publishing experiment, and then turned into a revolutionizing strategy. Marvel Comics took a chance on rebooting its stale franchise through Ultimate Marvel and it ended up becoming "the foundation of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel cinematic empire." How did this happen? Vulture's Abraham Riesman explores that history in depth.
Ever since Marvel's first comic in 1939, nearly every superhero story it published had to fit into a shared, ongoing universe of characters and events. There was some fudging of time frames (Spider-Man was introduced as a teenager in 1962, and by 1999, he was only in his 30s or so), but every story was built on the back of every previous story, and all stories were interconnected: Iron Man might talk about some battle that had occurred in "X-Men," Mr. Fantastic would remember things that happened in comics published 20 years prior, and there were regular companywide “crossover events,” where all the heroes would fight the same evil at the same time. If you're confused by that description, don't worry — so was everyone else. Sixty years of continuity had set an insanely high bar for understanding what was happening in a Marvel comic, even if you were a die-hard fan. (To be fair: DC also had this problem.) What's more, everything in Marvel looked and sounded behind-the-times. In a world where geek audiences were flocking to watch the sleek, leather-clad, hip (by 1999 standards) action of "The Matrix," Marvel’s stories were alienatingly ridiculous. In the pages of Marvel's flailing comics series, you might see the Avengers — wearing uniforms of clownish purple or baby-blue — fighting wooden-dialogued villains with names like Kang the Conqueror and Lord Templar. Spider-Man was a married stiff who spent years trying to solve the mystery of whether or not he was a clone. And the characters were all so old: The phenomenon of ongoing continuity meant the original X-Men hadn't been teenagers for decades. A pop-culture empire lives and dies on young-adult interest, and Marvel's was fast receding.