“When all else is lost, the future still remains.” – Christian Nestell Bovee
Okay, unlike last time, I’m actually asking for your comic industry predictions for the next year before the next year begins, so if you have any ideas about where you think this crazy business is headed in 2017, feel free to pile them into the comments section for this post. Just please follow these simple rules:
1. Don’t read the other predictions before entering your own.
2. Don’t criticize other people’s predictions.
3. Don’t predict any real person’s death.
4. Limit of three predictions per person, please! Let me repeat that: THREE PREDICTIONS PER PERSON, PLEASE. Please don’t get carried away with the lengthy multi-part predictions per bullet point! I am grateful for the enthusiasm, however I am but a mortal man, and can only carry so much.
Starting after the first of the year, I’ll go back and look at your 2016 predictions, and thus I foretell testing your patience with about a million posts in the process.
Seriously, though, every year I do this, you folks definitely come through with a bunch of great responses, and it is always appreciated. I know that reader comments in social media gets a bad rap nowadays, and not without reason, but my readers have always been an essential and welcome part of this site and I greatly look forward to your participation. Thanks to you all in advance, and fire away!
1. Comixology will stop providing its pull list service for local comic shops.
2. The age of Trump and the Republicans will see the Big Two retreat from “diversity” books in favor of straight white male superheroics. This will be pitched as “a return to our roots” or “giving the fans what they want.”
3 Batman 66/Maxwell Smart. C’mon DC, you know you want to.
Still no Power Pack ongoing series in the main Marvel Universe.
Despite having the IP of a family of kids who get superpowers from a magic alien horse and have their own sentient spaceship that sucessfully ran for 62 issues Marvel won’t print momey.
Here are my predictions, and I’m willing to be wrong:
1) Marvel will reveal in its books that Inhumans and mutants are the same;
2) As part of its REBIRTH Initiative, DC will reveal that Nite Owl is the Earth-Watchmen’s Batman; and
3) Although larger conventions (like San Diego ComicCon, WizardWorld, etc) will still predominate, more people will attend smaller, local shows due to affordability of larger, turnkey conventions as well as an ability to reach local retailers, creators, etc.
No Swamp Thing predictions this time, sorry.
Titan will announce miniseries for every Doctor they haven’t depicted yet, including the “Shalka” and “Fatal Death” Doctors. None of them will have more than two issues out by the end of the year.
Full-scale campaign for right-wing “representaion” at the Big Two. One of them will cave in and publish a series which will tank for being blatant and dull propaganda.
Marvel sales continue to fall, DC bump from Rebirth finally ends.
DC Comics will finally give Aztek the Ultimate Man his due and give him a brand new series.
People will continue to insist Marvel hates the X-Men even as the number of mutant related books rise and rise.
People will talk about Image again as a viable 3rd company again as they did circa 2013.
Marvel will finally recognize what a talent their Marvel
Com freelancer Tim Stevens is and give him his one boutique style line within the Marvel Universe a la Gerard Way’s Young Animal.
Paul Grist will start a well-received new series that he stop unannounced and never complete.
1) Marvel will continue to try to make the Inhumans into a Thing; however, will also continue to have poorly received results.
2) Marvel’s upcoming Inhumans television series will air the exact same number of episodes as Viva Laughlin before being quietly cancelled.
3) DC Comics will launch a new LSH series. Thanks to its unexpected creative team, the new series will have better than expected sales–particularly in digital and book fair markets.
marvel will manage to get the ff rights back and do a tv show and have doom show up in an avengers film . 2 dc will decide its time for swamp thing to show up in live action again and have him pop up on both the flash and legends then spun off in his own movie and tv show . 3 given him now being part of arrow ragman will get his own comic and at last his own action figure and will be hard to get .
1. At least two more Doctor Who ongoings will happen.
2. The Hasbro universe will add at least one more 80s toyline to boost sales
3. Big Trouble in Little China/Escape From New York will get a second mini series or become an ongoing
1. The DC Rebirth books will gradually return to a 3.99 price point.
2.The Wonder Woman movie will be critically acclaimed, but underperform at the box office.
3. The entire Watchmen invading the DC Universe storyline will be ignored or dropped entirely.
1. Monsters Unleashed will be the first truly fun big ol’ Marvel crossover on a long time, which will be much needed after Civil War II
2. Wonder Woman will be a big ol’ flop, thus further damaging movie studios’ faith in female led superhero movies :(. If that happens, I will not be happy.
3. That FCBD Star Trek TNG Mirror Universe comic will be a big ol’ load of fun, and somehow less bleak than a certain movie that also has the word “Star” in it that came out this year.
1. Marvel will move several flagship titles to a biweekly schedule. (The change might be implemented in the manner of Waid’s current “Avengers” run with .1 issues).
2. DC will launch a “Bat-Man and the Justice League” title.
3. Boom! Studios will announce a December 2017 “Klaus” one-shot from Grant Morrison & Dan Mora, this will become a beloved annual Christmas tradition.
1. There were a lot of comics with Obama covers. Not expecting anywhere near as many Trump ones.
2. Even though the sales are better than most other books, Marvel still decides to shake up Star Wars; with a new number one and setting stories after Empire.
3. Next big comics death? I’m guessing Storm.
1. Marvel will continue its strategy of creating a second version of every hero as well as its strategy of making the original hero temporarily evil (e.g., Superior Spider-Man, Superior Iron Man, the Hydra-fied Captain America) and it will lead to at least one hilarious misfire that will prompt years of “can you believe they did that” internet giggles.
2. The temptation to create a Big Event where the original versions of the Marvel heroes fight the second versions will prove too strong for editorial to resist.
3. The Punisher will pick up a “Mr. Myxyzptlk/Bat-Mite” style puckish magical imp called “Li’l Bang-Bang” to bedevil him with fanboy questions and magical shenanigans during his relentless mission of vengeance.
1.) Trump will NOT appear on comics covers or interiors as President Obama did, instead, he will appear in stories as thinly veiled (but obvious) villains across the Marvel and DC lines.
2.) A Marvel Comics Bronze Age Christmas Story Omnibus will be published. Over-sized and re-colored for your yuletide pleasure.
3.) Batman ’66/Gilligan’s Island mini-series will be published. It will contain a scene where Sherwood Schwartz and Julius Schwartz meet ‘n’ greet. Written by Keith Giffen and drawn by Kevin Maguire! C’mon you know this would be awesome!
1) As Marvel sales continue to drop, DC holds steady, and Image gains ground, we start talking of a “Big 3” comic companies.
2) Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Lego Batman movies earn ALL the money this year, Wonder Woman movie is too dark for parents to take their kids to see and fares poorly, Thor 3 seen as derivative and bombs at box office. Latest Spider-Man reboot and Logan stand-alone movie leave theaters after two weeks having barely made a ripple.
3) Following Life After and Exodus: Life After, the Life After will start its third series–Leviticus: Life After.
1. Retailers will start merging or collapsing.
2. Publishers will keep merging or collapsing.
3. A mainstream comic mag may launch.
Marvel villain Trump (you know, this guy – http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix6/trump.htm ) makes a comeback.
DC launches an equivalent to Marvel Unlimited.
Agents of SHIELD ends in May; its spot in the ABC schedule is taken by a Ghost Rider series.
1/Dr. Oz is not Ozymandias. Clark Kent is really Nite Owl from the Watchmen-verse AND Dr. Oz.
2/The letter Thomas Wayne wrote to his son Bruce were simply the lyrics to “Seasons in The Sun” by Terry Jacks.
3/The DC/Watchmen thing will never be resolved because Trump and Putin will fight over something trivial–perhaps the hidden meaning of “Seasons in The Sun”–and Russia and the US will bomb each other to bits.
1. Daredevil will be the latest Marvel character to be replaced with a PoC legacy character, but there won’t be any wholly new character that receives their own book.
2. Several second and third tier publishers collapse. NuValiant folds as their much needed influx of Hollywood money never arrives.
3. Charles Soule catches a rather bad cold causing him miss his deadlines, resulting in Marvel having a week with no new comics.
1. I’m gonna predict a new Legion series until they give us one. I’m going to go out on a limb and say DC will use some of Tom King’s Batman cred to launch it; he’ll write the first year.
2. While I’m making a wish list, I’ll predict another thing I’d really like: DC will publish a collection reprinting some of the Comico Jonny Quest series.
3. Of the original wave of Rebirth books, the first one cancelled will be Blue Beetle. Jaime Reyes will become a regular in a team book soon afterward.
1. Jaxxon the Giant Green Star Wars Rabbit will get his own five-issue miniseries.
2. Fleishman’s Margarine will become the newest member of either the X-Men or the Inhumans, or both.
3. The crossover event “War of the Spiders” will never finish. Neither will the human race.
1) Star Trek comics will cross over with at least two other franchises. One of them will have the word “Star” in the title.
2) The Watchmen’s involvement in DC Rebirth will ultimately turn out to be neither as interesting nor as important as folks are hoping.
3) Then… KOREA!
I think this is the year DC finally has a digital equivalent to Marvel Unlimited.
Hmmmmm.
1. NetFlix will consider bolstering their Marvel shows (and that sort of but not quite RICHIE RICH thing) with HERBIE (Popnecker, not the Volkswagon or the robot).
2. The Lego BATMAN movie and related tie-ins will make money and bring joy and probably lead some to consider just making the next Batman/Superman movie in Lego.
3. Mike will have fewer GRAPE APE comics in his shop than the previous year.
1. Marvel’s constant rebooting of titles will finally lead to some new sort of system (vs. having the twelfth number one of a given title, perhaps two or three of them in the same year). Such a new system won’t be any clearer, however.
2. Given rising production costs and the maturation of the digital sales market, one of the independent publishers will switch to solely-digital production, allowing for different controls on how “books” are done.
3. DC will start running into trouble as creative teams on the Rebirth books come and go, making it more difficult to line up the conclusion of the promised two-year line-wide arc.
1. At least one high-profile/high-stakes criminal prosecutions for the creation and/or sale of politically/socially/sexually radical comics. Creators, retailers & fans share a serious “waitwhatohshit” moment.
2. DC’s Young Animals imprint continues to make comics designed just for me!
3. Alf makes a big comeback.
— MrJM
1. A forgotten 1950s comic gets a new life when reprinted and becomes the darling of the Internet. The creators are unknown and probably too dead to reap any benefit.
2. Creators bring a modern take to a beloved 1970s cartoon, ignoring what made it popular in the first place. (My vote is for Hong Kong Phooey, but that was never popular.)
3. A big-name creator says something stupid on Twitter, everyone gets upset, boycotts are called, and then promptly forgotten when another big-name creator says something stupid.
(I never used to be this cynical, did I?)
1. Trump will show up in a Marvel comic. Readers will not be pleased.
2. The Watchmen characters’ appearances in various DC books will derail the series’ plot lines and lead to declining sales.
3. Mosaic will be canceled; readers will be blamed for not pre-ordering/ trade-waiting/ Marvel Unlimited-waiting by someone who works for Marvel.
1. Trump references E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E.
2. Harley Quinn will get a (much needed) new creative team.
3. The Fantastic Four will remain M.I.A.
1. Chuck Austen will return with a 48-page adaptation of the 1988 film Action Jackson.
2. Leftover plot points from Secret Wars will be used to justify a crossover between the main Marvel Universe and the Star Wars universe. Galactus will threaten Coruscant and only the 3rd or 4th Death Star or something can be used to defeat him, but it’s powered by Terrigen-infected Ewoks or Hoojibs or something and instead Rey and Quicksilver have to time travel back to the Prequels and stop Anakin and Padme from getting married or something. Meanwhile Jean Grey will kill 80 billion Mon Calamari and be given a pass because Phoenix.
3. Dwayne McDuffie will rise from the grave to destroy us all.
4.
1) A high-schooler teacher on a Marvel movie or TV show will irritably demand to know where Kamala Khan or Miles Morales is. Not necessarily the Spider-Man movie.
2) A new Marvel or DC character will be introduced who is white and from a working-class rural background. They will be firmly established as not racist, sexist, or homophobic.
3) Some kind of Green Lantern adaptation – comic, movie, or TV show – will emphasise the Lanterns as law enforcement officers, and implicitly criticise other superheroes as irresponsible vigilantes.
1. Full frontal face-to-face interaction between Watchmen and DCU characters within the DCU continuity, but then the characters will be back to separate universes with new ongoing Watchmen-related comics.
2. President Trump, or presidential characters inspired by him, will play a significant role in the present-day continuties of both Marvel and DCU comics.
3. The 40th anniversary of Cerebus the Aardvark #1 will result in renewed interest in the character and the restored editions of the trade volumes in spite of Dave Sim’s ongoing awkward and amibivalent approach to promoting his work.
Okay, here we go!
1) DC’s summer event, which will feature the Watchmen characters (or some derivation thereof) interacting with the DCU. will meet with derision and general condemnation by fans online, yet still sell very well.
2) Ms. Marvel collections will continue to be one of Marvel’s best-selling items, with a huge portion of their sales (at least 50%) coming from outside comic shops.
3) A third-tier comics publisher will attempt to jump on the Trump bandwagon by publishing comics designed to appeal to the so-called alt-right.
1. Geoff Johns’s New Years Day tweet with the close up of Dr Manhattan actually relates to his 12 issue magnum opus entitled Northampton that involves an up & coming comic book writer going mad touring the Midlands and encountering a lot of characters from the works of Alan Moore in a biting criticism of mass market pop cultures as a distraction against the random chaos of the universe. Moore’s grumbling can be heard from the International Space Station…
2. The DCEU films will continue to make mistakes that they rectify in the next film, only to produce new, different mistakes attaining an asymptotic relationship to the platonic ideal of super-hero films.
If that’s two predictions because it relates to two films feel free to ignore
3. The Inhumans continue to not be a thing, for the 52nd year running…
1. DC doesn’t think to put out a comic to capitalize on The Lego Batman Movie. Maybe some cover variants, but no comics.
2. Neil Gaiman & Mark Buckingham’s Miracleman comics start coming out again.
3. Kurt Busiek & John Paul Leon’s “Batman: Creature of the Night” finally comes out.
1. We get a Legion book back this year, finally. (Also, the Legion will have a huge role in the CW-verse(s) fall 2017)
2. Still no Fantastic Four Book in 2017.
3. We will get at least two things on this list: New Frank Miller Sin City, A Fourth Scott McCloud nonfiction book, all of Gaiman’s Miracleman: The Silver Age, Matt Wagner’s Mage III, and/or a trade paperback collection of Foglio’s Buck Godot: The Gallumaufry.
@MrJM,
Re: #3: In what form?
Marvel reacquires at least some Fantastic Four rights, and revives Benjy Grimm of “Thing Ring, do your thing” fame/infamy as a Netflix show.
Some sort of live-action Crisis or Convergence or Zero Hour happens to merge the CW shows because Berlanti finally figures out that Earth-1 should not be a world without a Superman. Swamp Thing will play a pivotal role.
The Goldsman/Liefeld deal results in a Supreme movie heavily inspired by Alan Moore’s work. It will make all the money, and heads at Time Warner will roll. Fanboys will be confused when directed Joss Whedon or Quentin Tarantino aim the camera so that Suprema’s feet are in every shot.
1. Legion of Superhero will become the latest DC/CW TV show. People walk in comic shops to buy the latest Legion comics only to find confusing reprints of former series instead.
2. Marvel’s dropping of digital codes drives regular audience away. In order to revitalize sales, Marvel begins releasing exclusive Pogs to drum up sales. It’s a major success leading to a huge Pogs revival.
3. Dc Comics launches a new comic called “Swamp Thing & friends”. The first issue features Swampy investigating a comic stealing crime that leads him directly to Sterling comics. Mike Sterling makes a cameo in a Swamp Thing comic. Swampy’s catches the crook too late and the owner of Sterling comics is killed. Swampy, in an act of kindness take Sterling to becomes part of the green, makes him immortal. They hang out regularly during the course of the series, doing all sorts of fun activities like canoeing, camping, having fondue and talking about the thing Swamp Thing likes the most, himself!
1. Marvel’s sales slide will increase, with fans rejecting their pushing of classic characters into the background for new PC versions. Marvel will ignore this and figure the problem is that they’re not replacing enough classic characters.
2. An Image comic will get a movie deal.
3. A Planet of the Apes/Sugar & Spike crossover will be announced.
1. DC will see another show canceled with POWERLESS flopping on the No Bugger Cares channel. It won’t matter; there’ll be another 12 new DC shows by the end of 2017. On the publishing front, the two-year Rebirth overarc will be looking pretty ridiculous by June as Geoff Johns and his team of trained gerbils try to explain it all. The DC Omnibus program will gain traction and do well. A fanatical group will rise up with Superman’s Red Trunks as its banner.
2. Marvel will continue to pump out omnibus volumes of *everything*. Ike Perlmutter will be eaten by Washington. Marvel’s books will continue to be schizophrenically split between the endless restarts that go thuddy thud thud and the cute, funny, clever books like Ms.Marvel and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Marvel’s movies continue to do well, and some do great, but the non-Netflix TV shows will continue to have issues (although LEGION will get a lot of positive attention) with INHUMANS going down to ignominious doom despite the IMAX opening.
3. Dan Slott will move into a penthouse in Las Vegas, never again to be seen by most men. Reports will periodically come out that he’s lying naked on a bed, watching ICE STATION ZEBRA over and over.
The sleeper hit of the summer 2017 blockbuster season is a gritty live action reimagining of “WordGirl.” Chuck the Evil Sandiwich Making Guy becomes Public Enemy Number One after killing Captain Huggyface with a meat slicer.
In 2018 it sweeps the Oscars, winning the Big Five.
1) Marvel won’t do any crossovers with other companies.
2) Even though fans will want one, there will still not be a solo Swamp Thing animated movie. (REALLY hoping I’m wrong)
3) The rights for the comics of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street will continue to remain lost.