How Does Marvel Legacy Compare To DC Rebirth?

Marvel Legacy isn’t just a single comic book released to set up the next year or so of Marvel’s publishing line -- it's the publishing line itself. Legacy is, at its core, a way for Marvel to try to win back any lapsed fans or curious first-time reader with a message that says, “We know what you want, and this is it.”

The tone of Marvel Legacy is strikingly similar to DC’s Rebirth initiative, which began last summer and continues to be a huge hit for the publisher. Even before Marvel Legacy was officially announced, there was speculation that Marvel needed its own Rebirth to get things back on track once the controversial Secret Empire event had wrapped up. Now that we have a better look at the landscape of what Marvel Legacy is and has the potential to be, we can see all the ways it successfully apes DC Rebirth, as well as how it's falling short.

The Rebirth of a Legacy

To start out, the one-shot titled Marvel Legacy #1 is shockingly similar in presentation, structure and format to last year’s DC Universe Rebirth #1. In DC Universe Rebirth, there’s an overarching mystery narrated by a returning fan-favorite character as the comic’s story jumps from vignette to vignette of what different characters are doing, setting up the status quos of their solo books as part of the upcoming initiative. In that case, it was Wally West narrating the mystery of a missing ten years and the presence of Doctor Manhattan in the DCU. Marvel Legacy #1 has the narration of Valeria Richards talking about the concept of legacy within the Marvel Universe, as the mystery of The Fallen, a so-called rabid Celestial seemingly searching for something on Earth, is re-discovered after a billion years by Loki.

It’s definitely an effective way to set up a new line of comics, and you can’t fault Marvel Legacy for copying the Rebirth formula. Even more interestingly, however, is that in a way Legacy manages to do it even better than Rebirth did. While DC Universe Rebirth #1 features shots of what characters such as Superman, Blue Beetle, The Atom and others will be up to in their DC Rebirth branded titles, Marvel Legacy accomplishes that same sort of set-up more effectively. When the story drifts towards Captain America, Thor or Iron Man, and teases the upcoming stories in their titles, it does so with Chris Samnee, Russell Dauterman and Alex Maleev, all artists currently associated with those characters and books going forward. If you want to know what Marvel Two-In-One is going to look like, the Human Torch and Thing page is drawn by Jim Cheung, who will be drawing that title. It gives the Marvel Universe a look of more variety, whereas the message of DC Rebirth was that the DC Universe either looks like Gary Frank, Ivan Reis or Ethan Van Sciver.

The new Marvel titles even look like the Rebirth titles simply in terms of trade dress. One of the smallest but most effective changes of DC Rebirth is that every issue has a story title, or at least the arc itself has a title, and those titles are displayed prominently at the very top of the comic. That way, you don’t just know that you’re buying Action Comics, you know that you’re buying “The Oz Effect.” Marvel Legacy is doing the exact same thing, advertising each Legacy book with its own story title, placed prominently on the front cover; if you’re at all wavering on picking up Invincible Iron Man, the fact that you can see that the story is called “The Search For Tony Stark” might sway you into checking it out. It’s an effective marketing strategy that puts story first and helps readers make their buying choices that much easier.

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One of the biggest gambles Marvel is taking with Legacy is the renumbering of all of its titles to their “Legacy numbering,” incorporating all previous volumes into the count to come up with a linear number that the book should be at, had it remained consecutive through all of its iterations. That leaves us with comics such as Captain America #695, The Amazing Spider-Man #789 and The Mighty Thor #700, which all look to be great jumping on points for their respective series. However, it also means that readers of Chip Zdarsky and Adam Kubert’s Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man will find the comic going from #6 to #297 in the space of a month. Similarly, All-New Guardians of the Galaxy jumps from #12 to #146, and other titles barely out the gate like Luke Cage and Iron Fist are also making big jumps from single digits to double-and-triple figures.

It’s also odd that there are certain titles not making the jump to their Legacy numbering, despite closing in on milestone issues. The first volume of Kamala Khan’s tenure as Ms. Marvel clocked in at nineteen issues while the new volume joins Marvel Legacy with #25. That means Kamala is only six issues away from hitting fifty misses under writer G. Willow Wilson, which is the sort of milestone you’d think Marvel would be wanting to capitalize on. Similarly, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl would be at #35 with Legacy numbering but is retaining its current volume’s numbering, as are Defenders, Spider-Gwen and Champions.

The biggest selling point of Marvel Legacy is that it is indeed a fresh-start for fans, which DC Rebirth did by kickstarting back to fresh #1s for every character (with the exception of Action Comics and Detective Comics, both of which are in sniffing distance of #1000). Marvel Legacy instead is reverting to old numbering, and in the majority of cases, the creative teams are staying the same. Dan Slott is still writing The Amazing Spider-Man, Brian Michael Bendis is still on Invincible Iron Man, Greg Pak is still on The Incredible Hulk. It doesn’t feel as much of a fresh-start as DC Rebirth, but neither does it feel like a re-arranging of the deck chairs. If anything, the deck chairs are staying where they are, and the people sat on them are picking at the paint to show the wood underneath.

Marvel Legacy seems to have successfully aped DC Rebirth at least in terms of visuals and presentation, but its the DNA of the books that has kept DC Rebirth a success for the last year-and-a-half. It's not yet clear whether Marvel has cottoned on to that part of the equation, though it's clearly where Marvel Legacy's ultimate success will lie. Can the publisher successfully prove to its audience that it has turned over a new leaf, or will readers just see more of the same from Marvel and grow tired with the publisher's stubborn refusal to embrace genuine change at a fundamental level? It's tough to say for sure at this point, though if there are more storylines in the works along the lines of what the recently announced Avengers: No Surrender promises (though the idea of a $4 weekly series may be a bit much for fans), Legacy's future may turn out as bright as DC's Rebirth has proven to be.