The Big Reveal

Fantastic Four #587 comes out today with the dramatic death of one of its members. It’s been a closely guarded secret for a long time and the issue is being sold in a black plastic bag to limit spoiler-age. Then Tuesday, Marvel goes and ruins it by announcing who died in an official press release. You have to understand, it’s really hard to keep a secret.

(Before I go on, I just have to gush about how awesome this comic turned out. I told Kris something vague about “have the cast standing in heroic poses” and he comes back with this awesomeness. He’s experimenting with changing his style again, so expect some more really cool stuff like this. Very exciting!)

The news of who died in FF 588 had started to leak out already, so Marvel decided that the best way to do damage control was to officially announce it and then send out the creative team to do interviews about it. The emotionless, objective side of me understands their reasoning and could see how it was the best course of action. The emotional comics fan side screamed “NO! How could they announce that!?!” and then quickly tried to find all the information I could online. We’re not going to say who was killed today for the handful of you who read this blog and don’t want the story ruined. Once we actually read the issue and are doing the pull list notes on Friday, I don’t guarantee we’ll be as circumspect. Comics Alliance had a really good breakdown of the teasers from the series that hinted at who it was going to be. They also have a pretty good interview with Jonathan Hickman explaining why he did this storyline and what it means for the future of the comic.

One of the things that struck me about death in the Marvel Universe is how weird it could become when looking at the main Marvel universe versus the Marvel Ultimate universe. When DC kills off a character, like their recent death of Batman, they only have one continuity to deal with. Once Bruce was dead and gone, he was dead and gone (except for Superman/Batman which continued to tell old stories with Bruce still in them). Marvel has two co-existing continuities, the main Marvel Universe and then the Marvel Ultimate Universe. The same characters exist in both universes, but have completely different, independent stories and can have different origins. For example, in the main universe Nick Fury is a white guy who fought in World War II and afterward took some sort of Infinity Serum which slowed his aging process, which is why he’s still kicking butt70 years later. In the Ultimates universe, Nick Fury is Samuel L. Jackson.

Right now in the Ultimates universe, Ultimate Spiderman is running a storyline called “The Death of Spiderman” where all of Spiderman’s major villains are coming back in one big slugfest against the web slinger. I don’t know whether the outcome of this story will actually result in the death of Peter Parker, but if it does what would this do to the regular Spiderman books? I don’t know whether the Fantastic Four exists in the Ultimate universe, but if they do will [REDACTED] now be dead in that universe? I could see how a new reader who’s not familiar with the Marvel versus Marvel Ultimates dichotomy could be confused by reading FF 588 followed by an Ultimates book where in walks [REDACTED] like nothing special happened. How did Marvel address this when they killed Captain America or did they? Am I over-thinking this? I’m sure the answer is yes to the last question, but it’s still something that makes you wonder.