Marvel to Launch Expansive New Comic Series ‘The Marvels’

Marvel Entertainment is adding a new comic book title to its lineup this summer, but The Marvels isn’t the average superhero team that the title might suggest. Indeed, the new series from Avengers and Astro City writer Kurt Busiek is described by the publisher as “the most sprawling series to ever hit the Marvel Universe.”

“The Marvels is intended as a freewheeling book that can go anywhere, do anything, use anyone. It’s a smorgasbord of Marvel heroes and history,” Busiek told Marvel.com, where the news was first broken. “It’s not a team. It’s a concept, or a universe, depending on how you look at it. The Marvels features the marvels — all the many and varied characters of the Marvel Universe. The heroes, the villains, the oddities — all of it. There’ll be popular characters of today, there’ll be obscure characters from long ago — heck, there’ll be story threads that take place in the past, or possibly the future. We’re not limited to just the present. And there’ll be new characters, too, from the street-level to the cosmic.”

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As the title might suggest, The Marvels is a spinoff from the critically acclaimed 1994 miniseries Marvels, which retold the events of the earliest Marvel comics from the point of view of a photojournalist. In the past two years, Marvels has been reprinted as Marvels Annotated, adapted into a podcast and been the inspiration for a number of spinoff comic books, including Marvel, Marvels X and Marvels Snapshot.

The new series will be illustrated by Yildiray Cinar, with covers and character designs from Alex Ross, Busiek’s partner on the Marvels miniseries.

“We knew we needed someone who could draw whatever part of Marvel we threw at him, from gritty mean-streets stuff for a Punisher scene to hi-tech Super Heroes with the Avengers to cosmic oddities and ancient history and more,” Busiek said of the series’ artist. “And Yildiray can do all that and make it feel spectacular and active and human and quirky, all at once… Having Alex and Yildiray both involved give me a lot of confidence that wherever the stories go, we’re in very good hands.”

The first issue of the series is set to be released in May.