Yesterday was a dark day for comic fans.
Two shining lights of Marvel’s list of publications – Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s “Young Avengers” and Jason Aaron’s (and friends!) “Wolverine and the X-Men” – were announced as titles that were ending early next year, and the response was unified sadness from both fan bases.
And a big part of me is with them. Jason Aaron (and friends!) managed to make “Wolverine and the X-Men” a joyous read each and every month (sometimes doubly so), making us love a diverse and strange lot of characters, while Gillen and McKelvie bridged the gap between style and substance to create something unlike anything else being published in comics. Both books are the bee’s knees and they’re a whole lot of fun, but both sides are finishing their stories the way they wanted to.
As Gillen said:
Jamie and my plan was always to do a season telling a contained story, leaving room to continue it if we felt we had something else to say. When the time came around and Marvel asked if we wanted to do more issues, Jamie and I decided we’d actually made our statement, and should leave the stage.
Aaron, in his goodbye to the series, shared:
As seen in the Marvel solicits for February, issue #42 will be the end of my run on WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN. The original plan was for me to write both WatXM and AMAZING X-MEN as sister titles. One dealing with the school, the other with the X-Men from that school going on adventures out in the world. But unfortunately my schedule just didn’t allow that. So I’ve been writing the post-Battle of the Atom arc of WatXM as my goodbye to that series and to the Jean Grey School.
So, as they said, both books are ending on the terms of the creators that made them special. That’s instead of continuing on in the hands of other creators and losing the identities that made them something we cared about to begin with.
And how cool is that?
Would we rather creators tell the stories they want and be done, or stay on long enough that we’re writing articles lamenting how good the book “used to be”? There are plenty of books that have had creative teams that stayed on way past their prime or switched creative teams and lost all of the momentum and all of what the book was about. I’d rather these books end then, and maybe get relaunched as new numbers ones later on with new creative teams that get to tell their own story that won’t get endlessly compared to what preceded them (or at least compared a little less).
Many people have issues with Marvel relaunching books all of the time, like with Fantastic Four already getting a new #1 just a little over a year after the last one. But the new team of James Robinson and Leonard Kirk are completely different than Matt Fraction and Mark Bagley, and this allows them to find their own voice in their own world. It’s a fresh perspective that happens to be good for readers and good for the publisher who releases them, as the book will assuredly receive a sales boost by getting a new number one.
Plus, who doesn’t want to buy a “Wolverine and the X-Men” omnibus and an extra sized “Young Avengers” hardcover from those teams? That might be your Christmas present in 2014, and you’ll be able to revisit what they accomplished whenever you’d like while maybe, just maybe, reading a new team on those books doing something exciting and different from what preceded them.
So yeah, it’s a bummer that we’re losing two good comics.
But I can’t help but think the way they’re going out is a good thing for everyone.
