Remember the Architects? That group of Marvel writers who basically shaped the future of the Marvel Universe at the time? Oh, sure, there were artist Architects too, but nobody ever talked about them.
Well, now Marvel is going artist-first with the announcement of their “Young Guns,” a revamp of an old promotional gimmick employed years ago to highlight then-rising artists of the time. Today’s “Young Guns” will continue to spotlight current artists on the rise who are soon to be superstars, and Marvel named their talents today: Mahmud Asrar (“Wolverine and the X-Men”), Nick Bradshaw and Sara Pichelli (“Guardians of the Galaxy”), David Marquez (“Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man”), Valerio Schiti (“New Avengers”) and Ryan Stegman (“Inhuman”).
As detailed in an interview with Axel Alonso at CBR, Marvel has been trying to cultivate a variety of styles in their books rather than stick to any singular look, so this is a chance to really promote the different styles. There’s a direct mention of Marvel not having a house style, which seems like a coy nod to certain comments made recently about other companies, but it really is different to put an artist first these days at Big Two comics as they’ve all become rather writer-driven vehicles.
This quote from Alonso is actually quite good, if a bit self-praising, but it does the job of driving home the “Young Guns” idea rather well:
Marvel is about characters, writers and artists. These are the things we promote. Our writers and artists are very important to us. When we pick a writer, we pick a writer not to write a story we want them to write, we pick a writer to write a story. And we’re there to be their first reader. With artists, we pick artists that span a range of styles, and we think it’s a very generous span. We look for artists who we think have a unique style that we, in our gut, feel will connect with readers. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong, but we go for it. We don’t sit around saying, “Well, that’s not the way comics should be drawn.” We understand that there are fans out there who enjoy Humberto Ramos on the one end, and Steve McNiven on the other end. From stylized, to more representational. It’s all about the swagger and style of the artist or the writer. And that’s why we put them on the cover. And that’s why we do Young Guns.
All the artists mentioned here will have variants for the upcoming “Legendary Star-Lord” #1, which will be the first showcase of their work in a single place. Outside of that, you can find their work in their various aforementioned titles. It’s nice to see Marvel putting an emphasis on their artists like this, and I suppose it’s worth mentioning that previous “Young Guns” featured names like Jim Cheung, Olivier Coipel, David Fench, Adi Granov, Steve McNiven and more, and they’ve certainly become superstar artists. If this isn’t a vote of confidence for the current batch of “Young Guns,” I don’t know what else it could be.
