Sometimes big marketing announcements can take the wind out of the sails of the comic event you're reading.

Let me explain: Late Wednesday, Marvel began rolling out promo images for the "All-New, All-Different Marvel Universe," and yes, I can almost see your eyes rolling. As of this afternoon, there are two teasers of Iron Man coming at you with a motley assortment of characters, refreshed or re-costumed, or just different, all under this "All-New" banner. So, even as I'm trying to enjoy the complicated chaos of Secret Wars, I'm already thinking ahead to what fictional life will be like once the event is over and speculating who will be all-new or all-different. I know this is just how comics are solicited -- months ahead of time -- but, man, it can really bum me out sometimes.

The way this is pitched, it doesn't really seem like a reboot at all. Some characters will be relatively new, and others will be different than they were before, but ... it's still the Marvel Universe. Time still seems to be a constant, moving forward rather than backward to retell origins. Some past elements may be negated, but does that really constitute a reboot? And why is that word so bothersome? Why do comics resort to them as this cure-all, but the very mention of one makes longtime fans grind their teeth?

WARNING: I spoil who the current new Thor is at the very end of this post. Otherwise, I am free of insider knowledge and full of outsider musings. Read on!



Reboots make sense for such a long-running serials. Stories that were a product of their time can be reset and reenter the public consciousness in step with the times. They reintroduce characters to modern audiences, often placing them back at the beginning of their stories. Ultimate Spider-Man started Peter Parker back in high school, and, last year, there was some talk about rebooting The Shadow for the big screen. Could such a classic character click with modern audiences? Not without some adjustments, thus a reboot would be necessary.

Reboots can often redefine characters, restating or refocusing their motivations, or altering some of the details around them. Again, to use the Ultimate Universe, Thor wasn't Thor Odinson, nor was he Donald Blake, but he was still a Norse god who had come to Midgard, where he battled his brother Loki and aided Earth's Mightiest Heroes. The details changed, but the core concept remained.

The sticking point of a reboot is that it restarts history. To restart anything, you have to assume it has first stopped. That's fine for a property like the Squadron Supreme, which hasn't had an ongoing title since the 1980s, so transforming it into a MAX title in 2003 made sense. However, reboots demand a rewind of continuity, negating history in favor of a fresh start, which tends to bother comic fans.

Wiping out years of a backstory effectively negates us as longtime readers. Everything we experienced through those stories and momentous moments no longer "matters," giving us empty memories. A lot of fans have been reading The Amazing Spider-Man for years, tracking him through multiple titles, turning pages through his history. He's a friend, and friends can get haircuts, new jobs and new girlfriends, but they should never forget you.

Perhaps feeling this, perhaps not wanting to be bothered with the huge undertaking a full restart involves, Marvel has tended toward what some call "soft reboots," but even that I don't think is fair. As the Marvel Universe moves forward, the publisher keeps up with the times, straining how much a character can remain "timeless" if the details of his origin reminds us of the past. So, Tony Stark is no longer injured in Vietnam; he was taken prisoner during the Gulf War, and, currently, he became Iron Man through an injury in Afghanistan. Really, we simply referring to it as "the war" would have just as much impact on the story, but placing it within a modern context fleshes out the world and brings us closer to the character. Stark's history remains the same; he still battles the Mandarin and alcoholism, but the timeline is blurry. The momentum of time is still there and so are the readers.



If we want to get down to it, the best reboot is death. Death effectively stops the stories being told. It gives us a definitive end to the arc: Mar-Vell lived, he was a hero, he died. The end. The stories with him told moving forward will be different, and viewed in a different light. If anything, Mar-Vell's past holds more weight after his demise. Story arcs we might not have liked when they were happening look better when we've seen the progression to their eventual end. Of course, just because a character dies, it doesn't necessarily mean their story is over, just that everything that comes next is absolved of what came before.

I've often thought that Charles Xavier and Magneto could benefit from a good death in the Marvel Universe so they can be brought back without all of their history and returned to their fascinating core dynamics. Dying would put to bed all the conflicting history that's been written and retconned and bring back their philosophical differences. Sometimes death can be a blessing.

Marvel effectively killed the 616 universe, didn't tit? We do hear "Everything dies" quite a bit, and all these "Last Days" books are driving home the idea that, if this is Our Universe, we're all toast. Battleworld is a composite of different realities, but only portions of them, so if something of the 616 survived, it's probably only a piece of Manhattan. Maybe that feeling of closure will loom larger as more comics are released and the story is furthered along. Maybe the old world had to stop to start once more.

If 1939 (or thereabouts) to 2015 was volume one of the Marvel Universe as a whole, then what we'll be seeing in August is volume two. Some characters are going to be "new," as in non-regulars to the Marvel Universe we knew before or characters whose stories had stopped and deserve to start again. Some characters are going to be "different," as in old favorites in new jobs (see: Jane Foster as Thor) or characters from the multiverse who now live here (see: past incarnations of Cable). These kinds of a changes aren't all that new or different than what's been done in the past, but on this kind of scale, with this kind of event to rewrite history, it feels like that. None of us want to be forgotten.