Marville Comicbook Series

[Trekker4747]

Last week Linkara's Atop the Fourth Wall reviewed "Marville #1" a comic series from the early 2000s. It's sort of a parody on comic book tropes, real world politics both in government and in the comic book world and, well, other stuff.

So, inspired by Lewis' review I managed to get all of the issues of Marville to give it a read and.... Oy!

The books are just plain stupid. The first two books mostly deal with the "origin story" of the character (a mixture of Superman's, Batman's, Spider-man's and other comic book origins) and then in the third issue the main character and his two female companions travel back in time to the creation of Creation, meet with "God" and he takes them on a billions-year long journey through time to show how evolution and God... work... together?

Along the way they meet a proto-human who is... Wolverine.

The books are the epitome of dumb. But I hate myself so I must subject myself to dumb sometimes.

Anyone else seen/read the Marville books?

(And one of the issues doesn't have word balloons, rather the dialogue is printed over the artwork in regular text. As if the script for the comic was simply overlaid onto the art. In another issue, there's a similar thing where text is written in large boxes under regular comic panels.)

 

[the G-man]

Wasn't this something Bill Jemas threw together on a bet to prove he didn't "need" real writers? Or am I thinking of another of his failed projects?

 

[Trekker4747]

Wasn't this something Bill Jemas threw together on a bet to prove he didn't "need" real writers? Or am I thinking of another of his failed projects?

I think it was, actually.

 

[Guy Gardener]

All Google did was take me to the Wikipedia page of Marville...

Marville was created as part of Marvel's U-Decide event, in which fans would decide which of three books would survive. The event involved one existing book (Peter David's Captain Marvel, whose numbering was restarted at issue #1) and two new books (Marville and Ron Zimmerman's Ultimate Adventures), and was based around a bet between David and Jemas, of which Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada later became a part. Jemas changed the stakes of the bet a few issues into Marville, stating that the loser would take a pie in the face for charity. Despite this, both Marville and Ultimate Adventures ended fairly quickly, while the rebooted Captain Marvel would last three more years and 25 more issues, for a total of 60 issues when combined with the first run.

Then Bill realizing that he was losing, and that his book sucked cheated. He cheated so bad it was unfracking believable. For issue 8 maybe, he wrote down the submission guidelines to Marvels new speculation department, and made a huge deal about how this was the only place that these guidelines were ever going to be listed. So that suddenly everyone who wanted to write a comic for marvel, BECAUSE IT WAS THEIR DREAM, had to buy issue 8.

Gods, I loved Captain Marvel.

 

[shivkala]

I remember this, I had just started collecting comics again and had purchased a TPB of David's first run on Captain Marvel and loved it.

ICv2 has a good summary of the events leading to U-Decide:

This strange competition has its roots in a now defunct scheme to keep three sinking Marvel titles (Captain Marvel, Spider-Girl, and The Black Panther) alive by raising their cover prices by twenty-five cents (see 'Low End Marvels Get Price Boost'). Peter David, who writes Captain Marvel, responded by offering to cut his compensation for writing Captain Marvel if Marvel would forgo the price increase. David and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada engaged in a running skirmish over the issue on the Internet until Quesada finally relented and nixed the price increase (though he refused to lower David's compensation, see 'Marvel Rolls Back Price Hikes'). Quesada made his decision while Jemas was away and he realized that was going to take some heat for it. He probably didn't expect Jemas to come up with the 'write-off' competition, indeed, judging from interviews Quesada has given to Newsarama and Comic Book Resources, the competition has driven something of a wedge between Jemas and his EIC.

It went from there to the U-Decide competition between Jemas, David, and Quesada.

From Peter David himself, two interesting posts:

Quesada vs. David
Upon getting congratulations on Captain Marvel #1 beating the other two titles, but still not cracking the top 50

 

[Myasishchev]

I do love to say "U-DECIDE" so I wouldn't call it a total failure.

 

[OmahaStar]

I hate myself so I must subject myself to dumb sometimes.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

And hearing Quesadilla was involved in the disaster completely makes sense. He's a "special" kind of editor.

 

[Hound of UIster]

I hate myself so I must subject myself to dumb sometimes.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

And hearing Quesadilla was involved in the disaster completely makes sense. He's a "special" kind of editor.

Regardless of your personal feelings of the man (and I think he is a dick) he ushered in a new creative rebirth of Marvel while he was EiC.

 

[Myasishchev]

I wish he was just still an artist. I really thought he did some really good work before he sorta retired. Remember his Daredevil with Mack? Good stuff. It's on the Comixology.