A tough pill to swallow.
No two words, except perhaps Clone Saga, will bring a groan out of a Marvel comic book fan quicker than Heroes Reborn. Even from people that weren’t reading comics at the time. Well I have a controversial truth for everyone: Heroes Reborn was good for us.
A little background. Heroes Reborn was an experiment where Marvel canceled five titles (it was going to be six) and outsourced to the Image guys four series for one year. Fantastic Four and Iron Man were taken over by Jim Lee’s Wildstorm studio while Avengers and Captain America were given over to Rob Liefeld’s Extreme/Awesome/whatever-the-hell-it-was-being-called-that-week studio. (Avengers and Cap were also handed over to Wildstorm halfway through.) I consider Thor to have been canceled as well because Thor moved over to the Heroes Reborn Avengers and his series was returned to its original name, Journey Into Mystery. For a while it starred the supporting cast from Thor but then it changed into an anthology series. The Incredible Hulk was also going to be canceled but fans and Peter David were finally able to convince Marvel, at just about the last minute, to keep Hulk going. Because it was so late in the process and the Hulk was featured prominently in some of the planned Heroes Reborn stories what they did was to split him in half, having Banner go into the Heroes Reborn alternate universe and then become the Hulk yet again while in the regular Marvel Universe the Hulk continued on without the influence of puny Banner in his head.
Yes, it is confusing. And long time fans and creators were outraged that their series were taken away and handed over to guys at another company, guys that some still considered to be traitors for having jumped ship years before to create Image. But what so many people fail to pay any attention to is the fact that something needed to be done. Only one of the six series was really good. Captain America was being done by Mark Waid and Ron Garney and was getting a lot of critical notice for well thought out and interesting stories. Unfortunately the sales weren’t picking up quickly enough. Critics, fans, and the creators all said that it just needed more time and more internal support, and this is probably true. (Marvel seemed to eventually realize this as Cap was returned to Waid and Garney at the end of Heroes Reborn.)
Captain America is the exception though. Hulk was decent but was beginning to flounder. Meanwhile Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Thor had been spinning their wheels jumping from one pointless crisis to the next in the attempt to increase sales. And Iron Man… Iron Man was so gawdawful that the only thing capable of saving it was a wholesale reality change. For those of you who don’t know what was going on in Iron Man at this time they had a storyline that revealed that Tony Stark was evil, and to make the ret in ret-con stand for retarded, they revealed that he was in fact evil from the very beginning. To stop him the Avengers went back in time to get a Tony before he ever became evil, and to find one they had to get him as a teenager. So they brought back a teenaged Tony to the present and thus Iron Man became an Iron Teen. This still hurts my brain. Something needed to happen to these titles to really inject some new energy into them.
Now, I’m not going to actually discuss the four Heroes Reborn titles themselves here because that’s not the point of this essay. Maybe I will at some later point. I will say this about the Hulk: separating the Hulk from Banner for an extended time was fantastic. This wasn’t the first time this was done, but it was the first time it was done and Banner was nowhere to be found. Not only did the Hulk not have to share his head with Banner but he also didn’t have to share his book with him either. This allowed for a great deal of characterization of a pure, uninfluenced Hulk. Nothing could be attributed to the subconscious influence of Banner. Not again until the current Planet Hulk has the character of the Hulk himself been so well fleshed out. Extremely interesting and engaging stories resulted from the influence of Heroes Reborn, and in my mind that shows success.
As far as the other titles go, Marvel got what they wanted. High profile artists brought in outside fans, fans that had sworn off reading a Marvel title but couldn’t pass up Jim Lee or Whilce Portacio or Rob Liefeld. (Yes, Liefeld does have fans.) And some of these readers stuck around afterwards. Sales increased enough that when the event ended and the titles returned Marvel was able to get some high profile artists and writers that would not have been interested, or affordable, a year before, people like Kurt Busiek, George Perez, Alan Davis, Dan Jurgens, and John Romita Jr. Top talents that kept the moment going and made the titles better and better, to the point where some of these titles are now hot properties when once some of them were, let’s be honest here, perfect examples of the worst that Marvel had to offer in the nineties. Again, fans have benefited greatly by getting consistently excellent stories. And Heroes Reborn helped it happen.
A little background. Heroes Reborn was an experiment where Marvel canceled five titles (it was going to be six) and outsourced to the Image guys four series for one year. Fantastic Four and Iron Man were taken over by Jim Lee’s Wildstorm studio while Avengers and Captain America were given over to Rob Liefeld’s Extreme/Awesome/whatever-the-hell-it-was-being-called-that-week studio. (Avengers and Cap were also handed over to Wildstorm halfway through.) I consider Thor to have been canceled as well because Thor moved over to the Heroes Reborn Avengers and his series was returned to its original name, Journey Into Mystery. For a while it starred the supporting cast from Thor but then it changed into an anthology series. The Incredible Hulk was also going to be canceled but fans and Peter David were finally able to convince Marvel, at just about the last minute, to keep Hulk going. Because it was so late in the process and the Hulk was featured prominently in some of the planned Heroes Reborn stories what they did was to split him in half, having Banner go into the Heroes Reborn alternate universe and then become the Hulk yet again while in the regular Marvel Universe the Hulk continued on without the influence of puny Banner in his head.
Yes, it is confusing. And long time fans and creators were outraged that their series were taken away and handed over to guys at another company, guys that some still considered to be traitors for having jumped ship years before to create Image. But what so many people fail to pay any attention to is the fact that something needed to be done. Only one of the six series was really good. Captain America was being done by Mark Waid and Ron Garney and was getting a lot of critical notice for well thought out and interesting stories. Unfortunately the sales weren’t picking up quickly enough. Critics, fans, and the creators all said that it just needed more time and more internal support, and this is probably true. (Marvel seemed to eventually realize this as Cap was returned to Waid and Garney at the end of Heroes Reborn.)
Captain America is the exception though. Hulk was decent but was beginning to flounder. Meanwhile Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Thor had been spinning their wheels jumping from one pointless crisis to the next in the attempt to increase sales. And Iron Man… Iron Man was so gawdawful that the only thing capable of saving it was a wholesale reality change. For those of you who don’t know what was going on in Iron Man at this time they had a storyline that revealed that Tony Stark was evil, and to make the ret in ret-con stand for retarded, they revealed that he was in fact evil from the very beginning. To stop him the Avengers went back in time to get a Tony before he ever became evil, and to find one they had to get him as a teenager. So they brought back a teenaged Tony to the present and thus Iron Man became an Iron Teen. This still hurts my brain. Something needed to happen to these titles to really inject some new energy into them.
Now, I’m not going to actually discuss the four Heroes Reborn titles themselves here because that’s not the point of this essay. Maybe I will at some later point. I will say this about the Hulk: separating the Hulk from Banner for an extended time was fantastic. This wasn’t the first time this was done, but it was the first time it was done and Banner was nowhere to be found. Not only did the Hulk not have to share his head with Banner but he also didn’t have to share his book with him either. This allowed for a great deal of characterization of a pure, uninfluenced Hulk. Nothing could be attributed to the subconscious influence of Banner. Not again until the current Planet Hulk has the character of the Hulk himself been so well fleshed out. Extremely interesting and engaging stories resulted from the influence of Heroes Reborn, and in my mind that shows success.
As far as the other titles go, Marvel got what they wanted. High profile artists brought in outside fans, fans that had sworn off reading a Marvel title but couldn’t pass up Jim Lee or Whilce Portacio or Rob Liefeld. (Yes, Liefeld does have fans.) And some of these readers stuck around afterwards. Sales increased enough that when the event ended and the titles returned Marvel was able to get some high profile artists and writers that would not have been interested, or affordable, a year before, people like Kurt Busiek, George Perez, Alan Davis, Dan Jurgens, and John Romita Jr. Top talents that kept the moment going and made the titles better and better, to the point where some of these titles are now hot properties when once some of them were, let’s be honest here, perfect examples of the worst that Marvel had to offer in the nineties. Again, fans have benefited greatly by getting consistently excellent stories. And Heroes Reborn helped it happen.