Today was the day that Marvel was going to “shake the comic book industry” with its Legacy reveal. Speculation, excitement, and anxiety consumed the Marvel fan community. After a day full of reveals, Marvel Legacy is mostly a mixed bag of confusion.
Seven rounds of reveals across seven different sites delivered nothing but variant covers and the same quote over and over again about “shattering the industry.” One new title was announced, Spirits Of Vengeance. Everything else was simply a variant of a current series returning to legacy numbering.
Marvel publicly stated that art doesn’t sell books, then tried to sell their entire line of books with new homage art. Without any creative teams tied to these books, assuming they’re at all different, what exactly are we supposed to be excited about?
I struggle to see the difference between a month’s worth of Legacy variant covers and what they’ve already been doing (Venomverse, Hip-Hop Variants, AoA, etc.).
These variants will likely sell but, just like their current sales tactics, it’s not sustainable. Legacy numbering and homage covers are no different than cancelling and rebooting all your titles every year. This can’t be all that Legacy is.
Assuming that the content of the covers is actually somewhat related to what’s inside, some of these look pretty great. The X-Men titles in particular look promising (LONGSHOT FTW). We might be getting the first interesting Spider-Man arc in a while with Miles facing off against the Sinister Six.
It’s not all bad, but it’s certainly not anywhere enough to win back the readers they so desperately miss. If this were a soft reveal out of nowhere, they would probably have gotten the response they wanted. Instead, after hyping up this earth shattering announcement and delivering almost nothing, it hurts more than helps.
For a lot of Marvel diehards, until we see Fantastic Four in some capacity there will be no celebration. The Legacy covers paying homage to FF are a slap in the face to fans of the first family.
At the end of the day, we don’t really know much more about Marvel Legacy than we did yesterday. For most of us, our pull lists will likely contain the same amount of Marvel titles this fall.
There’s no way they showed all their cards today, no major publisher can be that oblivious to its industry. Expect more from Marvel as Secret Empire comes to a close and we actually get closer to the next era.
What do you make of Marvel Legacy? Let us know in the comments below!
