Over three months since it was first announced, Marvel (represented by SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort and EIC Axel Alonso) revealed in a press conference at Midtown Comics this afternoon that the main Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Marvel universe would collide, as a result of the incursions in Jonathan Hickman’s “Avengers” run, and that the resulting collision would make up the Battleworld readers have been teased with since October. Battleworld, said Alonso via CBR, will then “[be] the Marvel Universe moving forward.”
Brevoort said that the buildup to “Secret Wars” has been years in the making, and that the current creative teams have all been made aware that it was on the horizon. “We’ve had a line of demarcation in the sand. Get your most immediate business done by this point because we’re going into ‘Secret Wars’ and it’s going to have an impact on everything.” Titles published under the auspices of “Secret Wars” will be instrumental in building the Marvel Universe moving forward from the event. Alonso did mention that the number of titles put out during the event might be less than the publisher’s usual line, but not remarkably so. “There may not be a ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ book,” said Brevoort as an example, “but there’s probably going to be something that involves some bit of that business, or stuff that may be done in ‘Guardians’ in the future.”
Marvel will be making further announcements regarding “Secret Wars” over the next few weeks, but it seems interests to me (and at least one other Multiversity contributor) that both Marvel and DC are going to end up having what appears to be simultaneous events about continuity-reshaping conflicts between various combinations of popular storylines from their publishing past. Not that this is inherently a bad thing; identical premises can have completely different and still-satisfying executions. I do find it interesting that both companies have come to a point where this kind of line-wide rebooting/restructuring/reconcentration was deemed necessary at the same time. Maybe independent of each other, maybe not, given Brevoort’s mention of “Secret Wars” being an idea building since Marvel NOW, and that initiative looking like a response to DC’s New 52 (the handling of which leading to the necessity of the “Convergence” streamlining as much as DC’s West Coast move). Sometimes it’s a shame that publishing company continuity can’t be rebooted as easily as their characters’ continuities can.
