New Marvel Comics Series ‘The Marvels’ Set to Take Fans Across the Marvel Universe

Marvel fans, rejoice! This year, we’re going to be taken on a journey unlike any other. Marvel.com released an exclusive announcement that sets us up for ‘endless possibilities’ within the realm of all things Marvel.

What exactly does that mean? Well, there are so many things it’s hard to put them all into words. With the universe (not just the characters) at the heart of this project, there is no way to predict what we’ll see or when.

Lucky for us, Kurt Busiek revealed a little bit about his project with Yildiray Cinar. Here’s just some of what we can expect with the release of The Marvels this May.

This is a huge series with seemingly endless possibilities. What was your pitch for this book?

I think I started with “Anyone. Anywhere. Any time.”

The whole idea of THE MARVELS is to be able to use the whole Marvel Universe—not just all the characters in it, but all the history of it. The sweeping scope of the whole thing. I think I described it to Tom Brevoort as something like a Tom Clancy thriller, in that there would be multiple threads of story going on, and those threads could come together and split apart again, or maybe never even meet—there could be characters involved in a story that do something important but never meet the other characters in the story, which will very much be the case in the opening storyline, at least.

Big stuff can happen in the Marvel Universe, but we usually see it confined largely to the Avengers in AVENGERS, to the FF in FANTASTIC FOUR, and so on. THE MARVELS is intended as a freewheeling book that can go anywhere, do anything, use anyone. It’s a smorgasbord of Marvel heroes and history.

It’s not a team. It’s a concept, or a universe, depending on how you look at it. THE MARVELS features the marvels—all the many and varied characters of the Marvel Universe. The heroes, the villains, the oddities—all of it. So where MARVELS (1994) was about an ordinary guy’s view of the marvels, THE MARVELS is about the marvels themselves. We’re focusing on the super-characters here, and big, sweeping adventure.

He went on to discuss not wanting to make it a ‘costume party’ – he wanted to explore the characters, what makes them who they are, and to allow us to see them outside of their ‘normal’. This gives us the chance to get to know our existing favorites on new levels and to see our most hated villains in a new light. There is so much to explore with a possibility like this one.

Busiek isn’t stopping with ‘sky’s the limit’ either, and this may be one of our favorite phrases to come out of an interview in a long time.

I’d say “the sky’s the limit,” except in the Marvel Universe, there’s a lot going on beyond that sky. And it’s all open to us.

He went on to say that the book is something he’s had in mind for a while but didn’t really have the “right idea” for making it happen.

Is the idea for this book something you’ve had in mind for a while? How did it come about?

It’s been kicking around for a while, yeah. I think it started back when I was writing Avengers, or maybe even earlier, and I’d hear people suggesting that Wolverine or Spider-Man or the Punisher or whoever was big at the time should be an Avenger because they were big, important characters. And I thought they probably shouldn’t, not in Avengers, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a book like that anyway…

I talked to Tom about it way back then, about a book where you could use all the big characters at once, in big, expansive stories that didn’t require them all to be on the same team, or even be allies. And the best title I could come up with was The Marvels, which I thought might be confusing back then.

I didn’t really have the idea right, back then—I had in mind a character who’d bring these characters together for missions, and it kept sounding to me like Raven assembling the New Teen Titans or whatever had been going on with the Secret Defenders, and it didn’t quite feel right to me. So I kept chewing on it, mentally trying out new approaches.

This book, as was said above, allows the entire Marvel Universe to be at his disposal. So how did he choose what characters would be featured in the first arc? Will we see something big right out the gate or will the beginning take us to the more obscure, first?

We kinda wanted to go extra-big with the first arc, and show off the big sweep of it all, so we deliberately wanted to do something that involved characters from many areas of Marvel. Avengers, FF members, X-characters, someone from the Spider-side of things, and so on. To have a real crossroads feeling going on. We talked about but didn’t include, Guardians of the Galaxy characters, but we can always get to them later.

There are a lot of characters we hope to see within this series and we trust the vision completely. How incredible will it be to watch so many heroes and villains we’ve grown to love – and hate – come together in ways we’ve never seen before? How wonderful will it be to see our larger than life favorites in new settings with new experiences? There’s nothing like peeking into the mind of someone who is willing to take our most loved characters and do something new with them.

What can readers expect to see in in the initial arc?

Well, the first issue starts out in Southeast Asia in 1947, shortly after World War II, when trouble was brewing there, and we also get to see Reed Richards before the FF’s flight, Flash Thompson in the Army, classic 1970s Thor and Iron Man fighting monsters, and more. We see the near future, we see an unusual tour of Manhattan, we see the Punisher, we see the return of possibly the least-expected Peter David character ever…

If you’re anything like us, your heart jumped at the news of Thor and Iron Man working alongside (or against) The Punisher. We’re crossing our fingers that those scenes are something completely mindblowing.

We don’t like wishing time away, but we do have to say we can’t wait until May so we can cancel our plans the weekend this series comes out and curl up with the most amazing universe in the pop culture realm!