Marvel recently disclosed a few new details about its upcoming Avengers reboot along with some teaser images for other upcoming books.
“Avengers is a big book, a special book,” said series writer Jonathan Hickman in an interview over on Next Big Thing, Marvel’s blog about upcoming comics. “I’m working with a small brigade of Marvel’s best artists. It’s a cool gig. We’ve got some stuff we’re excited for fans to see.”
This starts with some new artwork. These are covers for New Avengers #s 1 &2 and Avengers #4 (You can check out the covers for the first three issues here):
Hickman went on to talk about how Avengers and New Avengers will both feature large teams, something we already knew would be part of the new book, but just how big, many of us likely underestimated. The main Avengers team will consist of 24 members, 12 of which, he says will be “female or minorities” in an attempt to more accurately represent world population. However, the full team won’t be assembled until next summer with Issue #8, so it will be building slowly, picking up members as it goes until then.
The first arc of Avengers – slated to be divided into three issues – will be titled Avengers World. The plot is expected to follow Iron Man and Captain America as they put into place a long-standing, and secret, emergency plan in reaction to a series of disastrous events.
The big shocker announcement, at least for me, of this whole thing is about the nature of New Avengers. Here’s the thing: New Avengers and Avengers will not take place in the same story-world. Avengers will be in the Marvel Universe being established by Marvel NOW!, as expected, but NewAvengers will be set in “the dark, apocalyptic world as it is,” which I can only imagine means that it will be a continuity that flows from the events of the current Marvel Universe… Avengers is the day book and New Avengers is night. Avengers is how we want the world to be, New Avengers is how it is. One book is about life, one is about death. The logos reflect all this.”
Strange to hear him talk about the Marvel NOW! universe as if it’s not the official canon, so it will certainly l be interesting to see how this is treated in the books themselves.
He also mentioned that while Captain America will lead the team in Avengers, the New Avengers team will have no official leader. The team comes together in reaction to the events of the Illuminati. Black Panther will be the one assembling them.
A little later in the same day, The Marvel blog posted the images below in the same format as the one-word teasers so far, each regarding some property of a future ongoing line which will premiere in January 2013, and the names of the writer and artists. These aren’t quite as obvious in nature as most of the past ones, and the actual titles are not announced, so we’re left guessing. More details will likely become clear during New York Comic-con later this week:
If I had to guess I’d say that that first one is likely a Spider-Man title with that blue and red coloring. The second one might be Young Avengers. The final one with only the writer announced so far could be another Wolverine title, with those three claw-marks, but Wolverine’s slashes are usually depicted as much cleaner, so really, I have no ideas on that one.
New Avengers and Avengers both star in December 2012 as part of the Avengers NOW! relaunch event.
