Why Marvel Needs its Own Young Animal Line

DC Comic’s Young Animal imprint is one of the best things happening in comics at the moment, a firecracker that's been tossed into fandom's collective lap, waking us up to remind us just how great the medium can be.

Curated by rockstar-cum-comicbook writer Gerard Way, Young Animal is what happens when a major publisher allows creators with unique visions t tell the stories they want, unabated by the baggage that typically comes with writing a superhero comic for the Big Two. That’s not to say something like the recent Wonder Woman run isn’t the execution of Greg Rucka, Liam Sharp and Nicola Scott’s vision, of course. The difference is that a series like Wonder Woman feels distinctly like a DC comic, while a book like Gerard Way and Nick Derington’s Doom Patrol feels more rooted in the vein of a '90s Vertigo series, or even something you’d see at Image. They’re different from your average DC comic -- they’re experimental, and willing to take more risks.

It’s been around for less than a year, and the imprint has already garnered critical praise from a multitude of publications, with Doom Patrol and Shade, The Changing Girl in particular popping up on various “Best of 2016” and “Best of 2017 (So Far)” lists.

More often than not, sharing the space on these lists are two Marvel series: The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and Moon Knight by Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood, Francesco Francavilla and James Stokoe. It's no coincidence that both of these titles encompass the same aforementioned uniqueness of the Young Animal series. They’re strange. They’re fresh.

The Vision is a meditation on artificial intelligence and what it means to be human, while Moon Knight explores mental illness and the subjectivity of reality. They don’t feel like any other Marvel comic currently on the stands. So if Marvel is willing to take a chance on these kinds of stories, why not expand it to a full imprint, using the Young Animal as a model as a jumping off point?

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A Brief History of Marvel's Imprints

DC’s Vertigo is the imprint by which all others are usually judged by. That’s fair, considering that line alone is responsible for housing multiple “Must Read,” “Greatest of All Time” series like Sandman, Preacher, The Invisibles and Y: The Last Man. While not every Vertigo title is golden, as a whole the imprint is a strong argument for encouraging idiosyncratic takes on both new and pre-existing characters, and allowing creators to execute their specific visions. When speaking about Young Animal, Way openly discussed wanting to recapture the feel of classic Vertigo.

While Marvel titles, both The Vision and Moon Knight have the same feel as earlier Vertigo series like Shade, the Changing Man, Black Orchid and Kid Eternity. Those were comics based on pre-existing DC Comics characters that took their core concepts and reshaped them into something new. While Marvel never had anything as monumental as Vertigo, the publisher has launched its fair share of imprints to varying degrees of critical success and iconicity. It's from those imprints that the publisher can find the model it needs.

Founded by Jim Shooter in the early '80s, the Epic Comics imprint was an avenue for creators to tell non-Marvel stories that they owned, giving us classics like Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar. The first Epic series to use pre-existing Marvel characters, Elektra: Assassin, was created at the height of Frank Miller’s popularity in the 1980s with careering defining art by Bill Sienkiewicz. The imprint also produced Silver Surfer: Parable, which is the best thing written by late- career Stan Lee, and worth a read for Moebius's artwork if nothing else.

In 2001, Marvel launched MAX, an imprint that would allow creators to tell R-rated, mature stories. While the imprint produced its fair share of stinkers, where the concept of “mature” was often translated to “How many uncensored curse words and over the top acts of violence can we fit into an issue without any substance," when MAX books hit, they hit hard.

The first title created under the banner, Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos’s Alias, gave us Jessica Jones and holds up incredibly well, standing as one of Bendis’s best works.

The MAX line also gave us the 2004 The Punisher series written by Garth Ennis -- with art by Lewis Larosa, Leandro Fernandez and Goran Parlov -- which is widely considered to be the definitive run for the character. In 60 issues, Ennis and his team of artist recreated Frank Castle, transforming him from the white go-go boot wearing anti-hero into a brutal vigilante. The Punisher is set in a separate universe where superheroes don’t seem to exist, and where the only way to fight the monsters of the real world is to become a monster yourself. It's non-canon series that has somehow become recognized as the Punisher run.

Marvel's next imprint, Icon Comics, was launched in 2004 as a place for writers and artists to publish creator-owned work, resulting in titles like Matt Fraction, Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s trippy sci-fi series Casanova, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal and Incognito, along with a good chunk of Mark Millar’s MillarWorld series. While it still exists, it's chiefly thought of as the place to find Brian Michael Bendis’ and collaborators' various creator-owned works.

Separately Epic, MAX and Icon are all imprints that stand deep in the shadow of Vertigo. Together, however, they're the answer to it -- a strong mix of creator-owned works and unique takes on pre-existing Marvel characters. Learning from these strengths of the best of these titles could provide a solid foundation for Marvel's answer to Young Animal.

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Fresh Blood Breeds New, Stronger Ideas

One of the biggest criticisms of both Marvel and DC is the lack of new creative voices. Young Animal has subverted this, as none of the writers had previously worked for DC Comics proper (Bug! writer Lee Allred wrote for Batman ’66 and a short for Batman: Black and White, while Shade's Cecil Castellucci wrote a single issue of the Green Lantern: The Animated Series tie-in comic). Bringing in new creators is important because it helps build representation both on and behind the page. Fresh voices and ideas will hopefully lead to equally fresh stories, giving audiences something more diverse that goes beyond usual superhero fare.

It’s not as though Marvel isn't willing to bring in new creative voices to tell unique and personal stories, of course. Look at David F. Walker and Ramon Villalobos’s Nighthawk, or Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk’s Mockingbird. Mariko Tamaki is currently using She-Hulk to discuss the effect of post-traumatic stress disorder in a Hulk series that doesn't like a Hulk series at all. Marvel's got Magdalene Visaggio writing shorts for Secret Empire and Venomverse tie-ins, and we'd love to see what big ideas and stories she could tell if given the chance. Even going back a decade, novelist Jonathan Lethem and artist Farel Dalrymple gave us the criminally underrated Omega The Unknown.

Marvel is also clearly open to writers remixing its characters to form something new. There’s Spider-Gwen, a one-off character from a Spider-Verse tie-in who grew into her own ongoing series which rips up and rebuilds the Spider-Man mythos. It’s because of Spider-Gwen that we got The Unbelievable Gwenpool, a series that started as a Gwen Stacy themed variant cover and has since become a consistently fun series that’s way smarter than a Gwen Stacy-Deadpool mash up has any right to be.

The canonicity of Young Animal is vague. There are strands that definitely tie the line's books in the main DC universe – for example, Mother Panic features both Batman and Batwoman, while Bug! acts as a sequel to Cosmic Odyssey and appears at times to brush up against the DCU's current Rebirth plot lines – but there's an impression that trying to fit into continuity isn't a major concern.

With an imprint that’s semi-separate or totally separate from the main Marvel Universe, creators would be given even more room to play around in the the publisher's toy box. If something doesn't fit with the Marvel universe it can exist outside of it in the imprint, similar to the MAX Punisher series. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther and the spin-off The Crew series are both distinctly Coates’s visions, but I don’t think it’s too out there to suggest that the writer might have Marvel related ideas that would benefit from the freedom afforded him by writing free of continuity.

Young Animal has allowed some incredibly talented creators tell some fantastic stories. Based on the varying successes of its previous imprints in the past, and the critical success of recent series like The Vision and Moon Knight, it would see Marvel could easily create a similar space within its publishing line. Marvel's been doing some good work recently when it comes to unique stories, and has shown that it's willing to take chances with characters and stories (to a certain degree). But it could really help create something amazing by simply allowing creators – both pre-existing and new – to really cut loose and produce unique stories.