Opinion: Marvel Gets A Brand New Day And It’s About Time

After decades of being the world outside their window, Marvel Comics will no longer have a New York City view. In a stunning (or not stunning depending on the audience) move, the publisher has announced they are pulling up stakes and heading to the opposite coast in 2027.

That’s right Marvel Comics is going Hollywood (again), as the comic publishing wing will be housed alongside the movie, television, and other elements that make up the whole of Marvel Entertainment under the Walt Disney Company’s umbrella.

There are a great many elements that come with this change that can and will be talked about here and across the internet. (Check out my good pal Tony Thornley’s upcoming piece on the impact on the employees of Marvel.) In this piece, as the title suggests, I’m going to focus on what impact this has for the comics and why this move clearly had to be made.

Marvel Comics kind of sucked.

I say this as a life-long True Believer or Marvelite or Marvel Zombie or whatever other term can be used to describe invested fans. Since I could read and understand things I have had comic books in my hands. Most of them have been Marvel (a steady diet of X-Men) and were picked up in grocery stores or drug stores when they used to sell them there. My acts of “rebellion” included sneaking into my parents’ room to sneak into my mom’s X-Men collection, when I likely could have just asked.

Over the last decade, coincidentally the time that C.B. Cebulski has been the editor-in-chief, the quality and focus of Marvel has been circling the drain. There were high-points along the way. From the Krakoan age of the X-Men to the various runs of Black Cat or some Hulk books and the always “a pretty darn good read” status that Daredevil has enjoyed for like four decades.

Nostalgia has plagued the publisher, sending them tumbling down the sales list as their competition, especially DC Comics, have rocketed up the charts, through innovation and creativity, letting creators cook and do what they do best rather than trying to constantly only chase a dwindling audience and status quo that went stale multiple decades ago.

Speaking of Cebulski, part of the change for Marvel is that he’s out as EIC, getting to move to Japan for a cushy dream job for the man who once pretended to be Japanese writer Akira Yoshida. I’ll have more to say on Cebulski himself in the coming days, but his tenure has marked a downward trend that couldn’t be ignored any longer.

With the film division also struggling, their desperation-scented move to get Robert Downey Jr. back was clear, eyes seemed to have centered on the comics. For years the bottom of the ship that is Marvel was taking on water, and it wasn’t till the top was starting to rattle that it was fully noticed.

Now, we’ll never really know the full reasons all these changes are happening, beyond the real estate or corporate move. Marvel’s lease at their space is up next year and Marvel Entertainment’s new regime saw a chance to fold everything together. Comic book creators are global, more of them on the west coast of the country than the east, so the move away from a centralized NYC does have some sense to it beyond the clear corporate ones.

On the comics side we can only speculate the reason for the EIC change, that being former Marvel editor Stephen Wacker taking over. Yet, reading through the press release, there is a lot of corporate shaded speak that seems to indicate a “thank you but no thank you” in regard to Cebulski’s tenure and the need to change.

Marvel Television, Animation, Comics & Franchise Head Brad Winderbaum said of Cebulski that he was “grateful for his partnership over the past decade” and that he was “thrilled that he’ll be on the ground in Japan, connecting with local artists” as well as overseeing Marvel’s push into original works for the region.

Of Wacker, though, Winderbaum said, “he is a tremendous editor, a passionate advocate for the creators, and someone who deeply understands that Marvel Comics is the source code for our entire enterprise” among other things.

Kind of really sounds like someone that came in and saw that the bottom of the proverbial ship, where all the ideas and structure comes from, was rotting away and needed to make a captain change quickly. This analogy has holes of its own, but you get where I’m going with this. Probably.

During the last decade Marvel has been hemorrhaging young creators who had diverse, representative, and unique voices to offer the publisher. Many ended up over at DC Comics where their talents were utilized and they could tell the stories they wanted. At the same time, Marvel turned more and more to old creators to return to their previous works for vanity nostalgia projects. Just looking at their current publishing output, you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting some between the raindrops style nostalgia fest that no one asked for.

Wacker on the other hand was a very well regarded editor at both DC and Marvel in the past. He was someone that helped spearhead the weekly 52 series at DC in the aftermath of the Infinite Crisis event in the early 2000s. Marvel jumped quick to entice him over and he came in to ring in the Brand New Day era of Spider-Man, which coincidentally is now part of the just about to release fourth MCU Spider-Man film.

Winderbaum’s mention of advocacy seems to speak to the fact that Marvel knows it needs to build back bridges. With creators especially but also others in the industry and potentially fans as well. There are many avenues that DC Comics and others are capitalizing on outside of the standard channels that Marvel has declined to really check. The fact that Scott Snyder recently revealed that he pitched a linewide revitalizing thing to Marvel while pitching the now massive hit Absolute DC to DC Comics isn’t the best look.

Sure the new Ultimate Marvel line did fine, but Marvel just ended it to let Hickman wrap up his story as it was also losing steam. Meanwhile the Absolute DC line just seems to be getting stronger and stronger. The Green Arrow as a serial killer book just got extended from 6 issues to 12. Poison Ivy is holding down a title that began as a mini in 2022 and is now about to reach 50 issues, and Catwoman is close to 100 issues after running since 2018.

These are just a few examples of how DC is lapping their competitor and is doing so without having to constantly revert their books back to a new #1 with the same creative team and a confusing new title. Wacker’s ascension to EIC bodes well for the company in the long-term and should herald their return to better storytelling, more diverse characters and creators, and a higher place on the sales charts. If one cares about that sort of thing, which I don’t.

All I want is a return to the Marvel Comics that thrilled me, not as a kid, but as an adult before the last decade. A period where Wacker was instrumental in shepherding things like the birth of Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, the rise of the young heroes, books like Hawkeye and Jane Foster as Thor. Where Nova held down a long comic book run, the Guardians were in the forefront, the Avengers had tons going on, the X-Men could be interesting (even if they were having a down moment), and nostalgia was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

After spending most of the last year watching my reading list become more and more DC focused, I’m ready once more. Ready to make mine Marvel again.