New Marvel Universe promo picture and the shrinking of the MU in comics

[Tycon]

IDK about how I feel about the actual content on it, but it sure makes a nice desktop background.

[Rogue Star]

Marvel released another promo picture of the Marvel Universe for licensing purposes recently and I noticed something.

At first we had:


How about the new MU pic? Here is it:

Just a bunch of MCU heroes and a handful of legacies.

Thoughts on the matter?

Funny how Rogue went from FRONT ROW to NO SHOW. >_>

[dragonmp93]

Or maybe they realize no matter what they saw complainers will never listen.

Or they let sales charts speak for themselves at lest for trades-where Ms Marvel is still on top and the only X-men book in the top 100 on amazon are Deadpool, X-Men runs from 7 years ago and the hated yet FULLY supported Inhumans put X-Men in their place book-Inhumans vs X-Men.

For a HATED storyline line X-Men had no trouble buying it.

And people says that the X-men fans are the rabid ones.

Sales figures from 2015 will not help us figure out how an F4 book would do today. Hopefully we will get an idea soon, because I am still convinced it will be relaunched in the first part of 2018.

Just like people was convinced that they would be part of Marvel Now(est).

[Jokerz79]

Saying the FF was selling better when cancelled than some books now based on the sales information isn't bashing those books or complaining about them it's simply pointing out Marvel has a bias against the Fantastic Four due to them not controlling all their rights something Tom Brevoort admitted that they are more interested in characters they own all the rights too. The sad fact is selling the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four helped saved the company. In 2000 my dad inherited a nice chunk of money when my grandmother died and he asked me what stocks to invest in I told him Marvel Entertainment. It was trading at 2.20 and I knew Blade and X-Men were hits and Spider-Man 2002 was coming out so he bought it and within two years it jumped to over 20.00 dollars and kept climbing and eventually transferred to Disney stock. Those early films brought Marvel back and now them and their fans are being punished and it sucks.

[Knives]

Only Business some would say but it is really sad.

[Colossus1980]

Marvel has indeed shrunk down to what seems to be only IPs that can be brought on the big or small screen. Sad to see the once powerful universe decimated due to licensing/property issues.

Surprised to see no Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur on the poster. What's up with that?

[JKtheMac]

Saying the FF was selling better when cancelled than some books now based on the sales information isn't bashing those books or complaining about them it's simply pointing out Marvel has a bias against the Fantastic Four due to them not controlling all their rights something Tom Brevoort admitted that they are more interested in characters they own all the rights too. The sad fact is selling the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four helped saved the company. In 2000 my dad inherited a nice chunk of money when my grandmother died and he asked me what stocks to invest in I told him Marvel Entertainment. It was trading at 2.20 and I knew Blade and X-Men were hits and Spider-Man 2002 was coming out so he bought it and within two years it jumped to over 20.00 dollars and kept climbing and eventually transferred to Disney stock. Those early films brought Marvel back and now them and their fans are being punished and it sucks.

If you pay attention to these things, then surely you will have noticed that the relationship between Fox and Marvel has thawed considerably in the last few months. We have Marvel personnel giving notes and acting in a nominal executive producer role on Fox TV shows, Marvel bringing out thematic tie-in stories for X-Men movies, and now we will have Skrulls in the Captain Marvel flick. We even have a potential climb down over the Maximoff parentage in the offing.

The conditions are perfect for a bringing back of the Fantastic Four. Something that I can assure you the Marvel editors are as keen on as we are. To suggest somebody like Brevoort is happy that the beating heart of Marvel is not present in current continuity is to totally underestimate both the Fantastic Four and Brevoort.

[Jokerz79]

If you pay attention to these things, then surely you will have noticed that the relationship between Fox and Marvel has thawed considerably in the last few months. We have Marvel personnel giving notes and acting in a nominal executive producer role on Fox TV shows, Marvel bringing out thematic tie-in stories for X-Men movies, and now we will have Skrulls in the Captain Marvel flick. We even have a potential climb down over the Maximoff parentage in the offing.

The conditions are perfect for a bringing back of the Fantastic Four. Something that I can assure you the Marvel editors are as keen on as we are. To suggest somebody like Brevoort is happy that the beating heart of Marvel is not present in current continuity is to totally underestimate both the Fantastic Four and Brevoort.

The Skrulls don't really count considering Marvel has access to them and didn't need a deal it's specific Skrulls like Super-Skrull Marvel never had access too. But things have thawed on some levels with Fox the joined television ventures of Legion, Gifted, and animated Deadpool are evidence as is the Ego and Negasonic Teenage Warhead deal. But until I see movement on the FF front I will call Marvel out. Also I wasn't suggesting anything about Brevoort In was quoting the man here's his full quote.

"If you had two things, and on one you earned 100% of the revenues from the efforts that you put into making it, and the other you earned a much smaller percentage for the same amount of time and effort, you’d be more likely to concentrate more heavily on the first, wouldn’t you?"

[JKtheMac]

The Skrulls don't really count considering Marvel has access to them and didn't need a deal it's specific Skrulls like Super-Skrull Marvel never had access too. But things have thawed on some levels with Fox the joined television ventures of Legion, Gifted, and animated Deadpool are evidence as is the Ego and Negasonic Teenage Warhead deal. But until I see movement on the FF front I will call Marvel out. Also I wasn't suggesting anything about Brevoort In was quoting the man here's his full quote.

"If you had two things, and on one you earned 100% of the revenues from the efforts that you put into making it, and the other you earned a much smaller percentage for the same amount of time and effort, you’d be more likely to concentrate more heavily on the first, wouldn’t you?"

Yes I was well aware of the quote, and I agree with it. He is really talking about the overall licensing structure of properties, not the axing of a title. Specifically he was talking about toys. It was widely reported around the time F4 was dropped but the quote actually dates back to the previous year.

[Raye]

If the rest of the market is like the 80 % by now; then wouldnt DisMarvel would be bragging about that, like they did with Ms Marvel's digital sales ?.

They never bragged about Ms Marvel's sales. There was never a press release, nothing. What happened was that at a convention, they talked about Ms Marvel's sales, not on a panel or anything, just between themselves, because Ms Marvel was selling way more digital copies than it was selling in print, which is nearly unheard of for a book that is not a digital first, and that made the book one of their top sellers overall. Other people got wind of this chatter and it spread via places like Bleeding Cool and twitter, among writer's private accounts, most notably Dan Slott. No official 'bragging' from Marvel ever happened.

Marvel (nor any other publisher) has ever really revealed just how much they sell via digital, because they have no reason to, and the exact numbers are a trade secret. The only reason we get print number guesstimates is because Diamond releases the rankings (which the numbers are extrapolated from, and many people have gone on record that these estimates are pretty inaccurate and should be taken with a big grain of salt) so that retailers can get an idea of what kind of stuff is selling across the North American market. They aren't released for our benefit, they aren't released so the publishers can brag, and they are not meant to show how well books are doing overall, just in that particular market. Though, the publishers know the charts are out there, and if they have a book that's topping them, yeah, they'll say something. But that's still not the reason the charts are put out.

[Morsoth]

I just bought this poster:



Still my favorite of the bunch, but it's unfortunate that X-Men and Fantastic Four characters is missing...

[Anthony W]

If those series are good maybe it'll get Marvel to think differently, if not then Marvel will still remember that not a lot of people bought Fantastic 4 no matter how much the internet says differently

If it's a matter of sales then how is Ms Marvel, Sam Alexander and Miles Morales still around? Or is Digital Sales that Marvel won't release to the public? Or does it just come down to the fact that Marvel doesn't own the movie rights to the FF?

[Green Goblin of Sector 2814]

How about the new MU pic? Here is it:

Just a bunch of MCU heroes and a handful of legacies.

It's a very lacking roster, and I'm not talking just about the Fox related IPs, but all the other minor Marvel owned IPs that were ignored. It also reflects the state of the comics at the moment considering the Marvel Legacy solicits that were revealed, since just movie and legacy characters have ongoings and all the other characters are only getting one-shots or straight out ignored. Most of the modern writers at Marvel use the same characters over and over with just a tiny group of writers like Ewing and Bunn not treating obscure characters like a joke.

Thoughts on the matter?

It's a promo image for licensing purposes. If anything, narrowing the focus helps characters to stand out. In the first two images, there's many faces that may as well not even be there because they're lost in a sea of other faces and so small in order to squeeze them all in so that even the most hardcore Marvel-ite would need a magnifying glass and a Marvel Encyclopedia to identify them all. Not exactly the best way to market your characters. Seeing as one of the big complaints in recent times was that Marvel publishes too many books with too many characters that supposedly no one cares about, having a more focused promo image doesn't seem like such a bad move. Being more streamlined in this regard just makes sense and reflects modern marketing sensibilities.

If the comic line was limited to these characters exclusively, I'd balk at that but it doesn't.

I'm not opposed to slimming down a promotion to focus on fewer characters or streamlining anything. I'm not even that opposed to making the characters slightly more like their movie counterparts. But what's telling about this image is who they've chosen to exclude. I can't help but notice that the latter two images in the OP have either buried or completely omitted both the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, two teams without which Marvel as we know it wouldn't even exist. They've replaced the X-Men with the Inhumans (who ironically are closely linked to the FF) and the FF with the Guardians of the Galaxy. And I'm not opposed to those characters getting promoted, but why does it have to come at the expense of two teams that essentially helped build the Marvel Universe?