Should Marvel Reboot?

By Barry Dutter

There is a rumor that the Marvel Universe will be rebooting in May of 2015.
This leads me to ask: Should Marvel Reboot? As a guy whose been reading Marvel Comics for over 40 years, I say… yes.
Wait. Hear me out.

I started reading Marvel Comics in 1974, and I’ve always felt one of the greatest things about the Marvel Universe was that it had so much history to it. All the characters were tied together, and it was fun learning all their back stories.
But at the time I started reading comics, the Marvel Universe was only 13 years old. There were some errors in continuity, many of them due to the faulty memory of Stan Lee, who had written the bulk of the Marvel books for the first decade or so. But it was a pretty cohesive universe over all.
Flash-forward to all these years later. Now the Marvel Universe is a convoluted mess. It’s hard to sustain the continuity of one character over 50 years. Now try doing it with hundreds, even thousands of characters over the course of five decades. (How many different versions of Deathlok have there been? How many different versions of the Guardians of the Galaxy? And are they all part of the same universe?)

Not only are mistakes going to occur, but there is another factor at work here. There were over 700 issues of the original Amazing Spider-Man series. There have been about 200 issues of Marvel Team-Up, most of which featured Spidey. Web-head also appeared in 264 issues of SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, 131 issues of WEB OF SPIDER-MAN, 98 issues of the adjective-less SPIDER-MAN book, plus a few other titles that didn’t last that long.In addition, Spidey has apperaed in hundreds of other comics, including annuals, specials, graphic novels, a  lengthy stint with the Avengers.
This means Spidey has had well over 2,000 adventures. Fought over 2,000 battles (and won just about all of them!) Encountered hundreds of different super-villains -- some of them on multiple occasions.
It definitely reaches a point where it stretches the bounds of credibility to the breaking point. I mean, Spidey has battled Doc Ock like 30 or 40 times. He’s fought the Green Goblin 40 or 50 times. And so on.
 It starts to push the willing suspension of disbelief of even the most die-hard Marvelite. How could one hero have so many adventures in one lifetime -- and not even have a scar to show for it?
The Marvel Universe is the greatest fictional universe ever created. It essentially started in 1961 with the publication of Fantastic Four #1. Yes, I know the company started in 1939 as Timely Comics, but let’s face it, most of the stories before 1961 are dated and silly and really do not fit the post-1961 continuity.
So let’s go with 1961 as our starting point. That’s 53 years of continuity, and, as any longtime Marvelite can tell you, there are gaping inconsistencies. Such as? Well, for starters, there are the powers of Thor’s hammer. Does the hammer really have the power to suck the magnetic field out of Magneto? Why would it have that power? Does the Sub-Mariner really have the power to turn himself into a blowfish and shoot electricity like an electric eel? Does Nightcrawler really have the power to become invisible when he is in the shadows? If that’s true, why is half of his face shown in shadows all the time -- but still clearly visible? How many different versions are there of the story of how Nick Fury lost his eye, or how Prof. X lost the use of his legs?
These are just a few random examples. There are hundreds, probably thousands more.
The DC Universe, which started in 1938 with the publication of ACTION COMICS #1, has rebooted many times. The first time, most famously, was in 1956, with the publication of SHOWCASE #4 which launched the Silver Age of Comics.
Things were fairly stagnant at DC for the next 3 decades, with the next major reboot coming in 1985 at the conclusion of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. That was when John Byrne famously relaunched SUPERMAN with #1, and George Perez did the same with WONDER WOMAN. Inexplicably, BATMAN did not get a new #1, even though the company published Frank Miller’s acclaimed  BATMAN YEAR ONE series at the time.
The reboots started coming fast and furious after that. Just 8 years later, DC published an epic mini-series called ZERO HOUR: CRISIS IN TIME, which reset everything back to square one.
And then, in 2011, DC famously scrapped just about everything and started their universe all over again with the New 52.
Meanwhile, over at Marvel, the company just kept chugging along with one consistent universe.
If any Marvel hero sat down and told you his life’s story, it would be the most depressing thing you ever heard. (It’s no wonder so many huge chunks of Marvel continuity are never referred to in the comics.)
Take a look at a hero like Iron Man and all he has been through over the past 50 years: first he had to wear an armored chest plate just to keep his heart beating. Then he battled alcoholism. Then he got a perm. Then he was shot by a crazed ex-lover and paralyzed. Then he was exposed as a villainous servant of Kang, died in battle, and was replaced by a teenage version of himself. (The less said about that storyline, the better!)
The point is, how many adventures can one hero have on one lifetime?  How much tragedy can one hero bear? How many of his ex-lovers can Daredevil watch die? How many times can Peter Parker see his friends and loved ones killed off one by one by his enemies? How can Peter face the fact that if he had never become Spider-Man, just about all of his friends and lovers would still be alive? How many times can Professor X die, come back, be crippled, regain his ability to walk?

THIS IS FOR REAL! Ehhh...maybe not so much!

To paraphrase Bruce Willis in the movie DIE HARD 2: “How could the same sh*t happen to the same guy so many times?”

Now, some of you will say, “But didn’t Marvel already try to relaunch their whole line with the Ultimate Universe, and wasn’t it basically a failure?”
To that I would say, yes and no. The biggest problem with the Ultimate line is that it was designed to coexist alongside the OMU (Original Marvel Universe.)
I was not a big fan of the Ultimate Line, but what if it had been our only option? What if Marvel had completely replaced the OMU with the Ultimate Line? Fans of the Marvel heroes would have had no choice but to embrace the Ultimate books. If the Ultimate Line had been the only option, perhaps it would have been much more effective.
But as an adjunct to the OMU, fans never really warmed up to it. Why follow these cheap imitations of the Marvel heroes when you could still get the real thing?
No, it would seem the Ultimate line was doomed from the start.
If you’re going to reboot your universe, you have to go all in. And that’s what I feel needs to be done today.
Aside from the obvious benefits, (great publicity and an initial sales boost), it would give hundreds of thousands of new fans a chance to witness the birth of the Marvel Universe from the beginning. And all of the new books could be made to resemble their cinematic counterparts even more, which seems to be the direction that Marvel wants to go in. 
So yes, I’m proposing a fresh start for the Marvel Universe. A clean break. A chance to do it all over again, from the beginning. And maybe correct some of the mistakes that were made over the years. For starters, Spider-Man will never have to endure the Clone Saga. Gwen Stacy will never have babies with the Green Goblin. Peter Parker will never make a deal with Mephisto to save the life of Aunt May. And maybe, just maybe, if we're lucky, Tony Stark will never have to get a perm!

The movie X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST won over fans and critics alike when it ended with a  reboot of the franchise that fixed all the mistakes that had been made in previous movies. Now it's time to bring the same treatment to the entire Marvel Universe.
I’m not naive enough to think that a restart means they will get everything right this time. They may not make the same mistakes, but I’m sure they will find plenty of new ones to make.
But it would be fun to go along for the ride. It would be an amazing opportunity to say goodbye to the Marvel heroes we’ve known and loved all our lives, and say hello to them all over again.
A Marvel Reboot?
I say, why not?

Namor has electric eel powers? Really?