“Never make predictions, especially about the future.” – Casey Stengel
Okay pals, it’s that time of year again, when I, your humble comics bloggerererer, asks you, what remains of people what read the blogs, for your comic book industry predictions for the coming year. That year being 2021, in case you’ve lost track, and I wouldn’t blame you if you had.
So this means I’ll be looking at your predictions for 2020 pretty soon and seeing how y’all did. I haven’t looked at them yet, but if one of you said “the world will fall into plague times, which slightly affects the comic book industry,” I’m gonna plotz.
BUT THAT PLOTZING MUST WAIT, and I need to get your predictions for 2021 right this very moment! Please leave them in the comments to this post, and for the love of all that is good and holy, please please please follow these 4 Simple Rules for Posting Your Predictions:
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!
See? That’s all I ask. That’s not so bad, is it? I’m no tyrant!
Anyway, thanks to everyone who participates in this particular activity of mine…I enjoy your contributions and hopefully you enjoy my coverage of them. So please leave your comical conjectures in the comments and in January of 2022, I’ll read ’em over and see how you did!
#1. There won’t be new issues of Miracleman in 2021.
#2. There will be reprints of First Comics series – not the whole catalog, but a bunch. This is in addition to the Sable reprint being Kickstarted; I get no credit for prophesying things already happening.
#3. There’ll be a livestream of the entire process of making a regular issue of a monthly comic. The creative team and the audience will have fun and the issue won’t be very late.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Three predictions for 2021:
1) LSH cancelled (what else is new). DC continues to blow it with this once-mighty franchise. Even Bendis can’t sell this concept to today’s readers. It needs a Grant Morrison.
2) The Thing will be the most surprising casting announcment for the MCU. It will be a very big name doing VO work for a Digital Grimm ™.
Hulk and Thanos looked so good in the movies there is no reason to do practical effects for this character. It’s cheaper and easier to get a superstar for a short bit in live action with a longer commitment as a voice actor.
3) The Immortal Hulk approach will be used to refresh another Marvel major. Everything you know is wrong, there’s a supernatural explanation for a science-based hero yada yada.
Won’t be Thor (already magic) or Captain America (takes away from WW2 theme) or Iron Man (they kinda tried this already/he’s a cyborg).
“The devil did it” is the new “radiation”.
The more science-y the hero, the more likely it happens, isn’t that right Charles?
Ah, I keep telling you, I’m never right!
1. Has there been a COVID-relief book yet? Feels like there should’ve been, but can’t think of one yet.
2. Is it time for a Legion of Super-Heroes event? When was the last time DC tried to use them as the tentpole for anything? Maybe it’s due.
3. I feel like the CW’s DC shows are all sputtering to a stop. That might not be quite right; those shows were probably successful, but not as big as DC/WB wanted them to be. Maybe Doom Patrol as well, that Alfred show, anything else they had going that wasn’t as big as the Mandalorian.
1. The Boys Amazon show continues to be popular and zeitgeist defining, despite a general critical agreement that the third season’s writing fell off a cliff. This could be due Superhero-decontstruction-fatigue, total deviation from the comic, or choosing the wrong Garth Ennis gross-outs to bring into the adaptation.
2. Disney and Warner Bros, sorry, Marvel and DC, announce an Amalgam level joint effort, but it gets derailed. Leaked proposals germinate on the internet and fuel so many clickbait articles.
3. Wonder Woman 1984 and Dune enter theaters and streams. No one can say if they made or lost money without a clear metric of success; one gets a sequel, one does not.
Ryan North’s Power Pack will be a massive sleeper hit and Disney will recognize they have gold just sitting there in a kid’s super team with a spaceship.
1. Some of the conventions that run in the second half of the year will try to return at a reduced size
2. Marvel/Disney will finally start cracking down on unauthorized use of the Punisher skull by cops and other right wing yahoos (this one is wishful thinking)
3. Despite hopes to the contrary, there will continue to be be no posthumous revelations about Steve Ditko
1. HBO is going to announce a ton of DC property streaming TV shows, including let’s 3 of these properties: Wonder Woman, Amethyst, Transmetropolitan, Legion of Super-Heroes, and Animal Man.
2. In 2021 the number of major marvel characters who are literally immortal will outnumber those who are not.
3. Someone, maybe HBO again greenlight’s Elf*Quest as a prestige tv project.
1. With the recent explosion of 70s reprints, someone will repackage and reprint the complete run of the legendary Atlas/Seaboard line.
2. Archie Comics will present a line of new Archie stories set in the 1950s, with the same light-hearted approach as the originals.
3. DC will announce a new line of specialty comics aimed at a traditionally-ignored demographic. It will fail to immediately catch on and be cancelled in eight months.
And a special, bonus, cheating prediction that I already know is coming true:
4. I will complete my collection of Atlas/Seaboard comics when I finally track down a reasonably-priced copy of VICKI #4.
1. DC will continue to awkwardly fumble around while trying to “patch” their storytelling, both in print and in film. The mishmash of post-Future State will almost immediately slide back to an even more awkward form of status quo.
2. Marvel will basically do that with print. But the MCU will evolve more naturally because actors age. Ironically, THIS will be the first time that a comics-based continuity will generally follow a more real world timeline.
3. Rather than just putting “Heroes in Crisis” out of continuity and saying, “Yeah, we fucked that up,” DC will make a third (fourth?) attempts to try to paper over Wally West having murdered a lot of people and “rehabilitiating” him, because it almost worked with Hal Jordan. (Attempts #1 & 2 being that Lobdell mini and the Reverse Flash basically being Parallax).
1. In the latest of his escalating series of gimmicks, Robert Kirkman will stealth-cancel Walking Dead Deluxe after issue #12, and the world will learn this when retailers open their shipments of Walking Dead Deluxe #13 to find… Solid Blood #1.
2. To everyone’s great surprise, confirmation of Pete Davidson being cast as Adam Neramani in Guardians of The Galaxy 3 causes X-Froce Annual #2 to explode in value.
3. There will be at least one lawsuit involving Crossover.
1. Marvel and DC both do a “superheroes get vaccinated” campaign.
2. At some point, Kamala Khan meets Kamala Harris.
3. Lots of local comic shops don’t recover from the virus downturn and close permanently.
Marvel will launch a COVID-masked hero which will ship the very month that COVID is declared not-a-problem and everyone will go back to everything.
Scholastic will start a non-parody kids superhero GN line.
The Obama’s media company will start dipping a toe into comics.
I’ve been terrible at actually reading comics this year (I did make it through the complete works of Aristotle, though, in case you want me to make predictions in Metaphysics!), so I’ll keep to other media…
1. As theater openings and scheduling remain more fluid, the core metaplot of the MCU will become more centered in the Disney+ miniseries, with the films being used for big stories with big effects (think of one-shots versus serial storylines), drawing the cinematic universe oddly more towards its parent in style.
2. With Disney+ and HBO Max getting attention for their superhero and genre properties, we’ll see a new round of “studio shops around to create/curate a cinematic universe from another set of comics properties,” just on a streaming service instead of in theaters.
3. As we all get used to the new media status quo, then…Korea!
1. Warner Brothers’ gambit of moving all their films day and date streaming will backfire financially. They will be scrambling to cut costs and DC Comics will be a main target of these cuts. It could mean massive layoffs or a massive reduction in their publishing.
2. There will be a new Image title from a heretofore unknown creator that will become the next “Walking Dead.” Meaning crossing over into other media and becoming a cultural phenomenon.
3. Marvel will at some point either announce or publish a “Predator Kills the Marvel Universe” book.
1) Some things will get worse, and
2) Some things will get better, and
3) People will disagree about which things got worse and which things got better.
— MrJM
1) The New Warriors mini-series that was solicited will have at least one issue released this year, for trademark purposes, if nothing else.
2) Some DC creators will try to push towards “Future State” being the actual future, while others rebel against it, creating a confusing mess that will require a reboot in 2022.
3) My podcast (welcome2geektown.com) will hit Episode 100.
1. Marvel/DC do some series that go from digital serialization straight to collected version. No printed single issues.
2. Another publisher goes the A Wave Blue World route of only printing first issues and then releasing a collection. (Digital single issues still available.)
3. No major in-person comic/publishing conventions/events in Canada/USA in 2021. Some declare they’re never happening again (see: Book Expo)
1: DC will launch a “Bat-Man and the New Gods” title with Space Cabbie as the chauffeur of a hybrid Batmbobile/Whiz Wagon.
2: We will get a Morisson/Mora KLAUS one-shot, with a sub-plot explaining why KLAUS didn’t appear in 2020 when we needed him the most! Seriously, what gives? C’mon, dudes.
3: DC will publish a “Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch Omnibus” that will include the unpublished issue 88. This leads to a younger generation experiencing a Veitchaissance.
disney marvel will find out they own the rights to omega the unknown and annouce it as a tv series with steve gerbes blessing and use his never told original ending disney will finaly let kevin smith have another crack at howard the duck as a live action tv show. the cw will announce they have given the short lived swamp thing tv series a two season full order with recurring character ragman back in the dc live action fold at last
1. As I predicted last year, DC gives up on traditional serial comics publication in favour of some other format.
2. Both Marvel and DC do plots in which a long-established big-name character comes out as LGBT. One of them is created by people who know what they’re doing and is praised by all except bigots, the other isn’t and becomes a notorious disaster.
3. One of the proposed Lumberjanes comics after the end of the main series is a Lumberjanes/Swamp Thing crossover. It ends up unexpectedly controversial, as the team-up involves the Lumberjanes making a major breakthrough in their understanding of the occult stuff going on around them by cooking Swampie’s tubers in the ashes of their campfire and tripping balls.
Step up to the plate. Here’s the pitch…
1- All DC’s new hire star writers for the monthlies, from outside of comics, will be gone, gone, gone by 2021, but one book will finish in 2022, limping along until it is put out of its misery.
2- Geoff John’s Legion reboot/original Legionnaires will be back somehow, someway, somewhere. (Honestly, this should be a 2022 prediction. I’m pre-predicting.)
3- I was gonna say DC abandons the monthly single story comic, but that’s been a regular prediction for a while, so I’m gonna go wild with this: DC brings back Batman Family as a $9.99 monthly comic in a test to see if they could eliminate the monthly single story comic. The cover is great, pin-ups look good, and one story has a star writer/artist team. The other stories are kinda… meh. By issue 4 people have lost interest.
I wanted to predict Marvel announces a Fantastic Four movie with John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic, Jenna Fischer as The Invisible Woman, Rainn Wilson as The Thing, and B.J. Novak as The Human Torch but didn’t want to burn a prediction on that piece of nonsense. Man, I’d pay good money to see that, though. Creed as Willy Lumpkin would be pure comedy gold!
Here’s hoping 2021 was a better year for your eyes.
1. Riverdale of the Apes
2. IDW hires Roger Langridge & Chris Samnee to finish their Thor: The Mighty Avenger series.
3. DC hires Michel Fiffe to create a Grand Design-style limited series for the Legion of Superheroes.
1. Milestone’s relaunch gets pushed back another year/canceled.
2. Marvel acquires the license to the Hasbro books, and starts reprints of Micronauts and ROM
3. DC goes all digital with periodicals, with collections and OGNs becoming their primary physical product.
1. Marvel will announce the wrap-up to Hickman’s big X-Men storyline by the end of the year.
2. I guess I can stop predicting the return of Injection at Image. The comic series and the show will both likely be announced as officially canceled.
3. One new issue of Miracleman is published in 2021.
1. Brian Michael Bendis will leave comics to pursue hollywood full time…and then return to Marvel in 3 years to a triumphant (in the Kirby sense of the word) return.
2. Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal will surprisingly be followed-up this year by Dark Night: Bluegrass…not so surprisingly, Dark Swamp-Thing plays a major role in the storyline.
3. Dark Nights: Ambush Bug will debut in 2020 and actually get me to read my first Dark Nights story…
My prediction: I will be part of a creative team on a bunch of indy comics that will be published with Diamond Catalog distribution in 2021 and Mike will reference me in an “End of Civilization” post.
DC’s distributor will continue to alternate between semi-professional and amateurish at best, with no rhyme or reason, driving shop owners nuts. Instead of rethinking things, DC will double down on the “going it alone without Diamond” thing. (They won’t actually *do* anything about the situation until 2022 though.)
1) As always, I’ll include a hopeful Legion prediction: I expect that the Legion of Superheroes title will continue after Future State, and Brian Bendis will continue to write the series through at least issue 20 (which would bring his run to 24 issues, with Future State and Millenium included).
2) Kirkman and Samnee’s Firepower gets a TV series deal at Disney+.
3) There’s an attempt to resurrect some Harvey properties in the same vein as DC’s Hanna Barbera line a few years ago. Mark Russell is tapped to write Hot Stuff. Gail Simone writes Richie Rich.
After the hilarious disaster of my predictions last year, I’m just going with:
1. A film will be released in some way.
2. We will tell ourselves that something cannot possibly get worse, and it will.
3. Following the pandemic, we have a second Roaring Twenties, with a resurgence of flappers, radio serials, and jazz. Superhero comics desperately try to hold on until 2038.
1. Miracleman by Gaiman and Buckingham: The Silver Age #1 is released. Is there a sunk-cost fallacy to these predictions? I’ve been pulling for this for so long that I’d hate to drop it and then it actually happens. 2021 shows a lot of promise and maybe it even delivers this! Just one issue. Not all six issues. Not even new content.
2. Some new Astro City is released. It will be through a new publisher which also starts reprinting the earlier volumes, maybe even in a new format.
3. The new Spider-Man movie will include a connection to Into the Spider-Verse with cartoon Miles Morales appearing.
1. LSH will be cancelled again, in a new record for shortest run. DC will continue to reprint the Silver Age stuff, because there is still a demand for the zero personality Legion I guess.
2. Still no new Miracleman. Gaiman will now start denying that he has ever heard of the character.
3. DC will finally pull the plug on floppies, figuring they have 80 years of content that they don’t know how to exploit anyway, so why deal with the hassle of creating more. Instead they will ramp up repackaging the stuff they have produced despite themselves, the largely continuity free stuff with an actual ending.
I couldn’t possible be more wrong than I was for my 2020 predictions, Right?
1) DC’s Kids & YA OGN line gets farmed out, in part or in whole, to one of the Warner book publishers imprints.
2) The threads of Event Leviathan are picked up in Bendis’s Justice League.
3) A manga title I’ve never heard of becomes a best seller due to an anime version I didn’t know existed showing up on a streaming platform.
1) a Black Orchid TV show
2) Disney will buy DC
With the loss of yet more licensed properties to Marvel, Dark Horse will merge with another company in a “Kitchen Sink buys Tundra” kind of way, which will involve a media push for the “Comics Greatest World” Properties.
DC will continue to haphazardly add old comics to their digital service, but will continue to ignore Sugar and Spike.
Marvel will finally release the 2001 By Kirby Omnibus.
Okay, in fairness, I’m going to throw in my own predictions here so I can make fun of me in about a year.
1. The comics division of Marvel will see cutbacks…not to the extent of DC’s current travails, but Disney’s gonna put the partial-kibosh on the publishing line.
2. We’re gonna find out who Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous cartoonist of the Nancy comic strip, really is.
3. A significant portion of DC’s comics line will switch over to a thicker, more expensive (but still comic-sized, not like Black Label album-sized) format. Like, $5.99 for 48 pages will be the norm, rather than reserved for specials and one-shots. Not everything, we’ll still have $3.99 books. But the cheaper format will clearly be on the way out.
Once again I predict that this year, comics shall be printed on delicious deli ham.
Also: one or more DC 12-issue limited series will be abandoned by the publisher mid-series.
1 – Archie will cease publishing their own books.
2 – Another new distributor will appear to battle Diamond & whoever the others are
3 – Jim Lee will leave DC as they change their publishing strategy. Fewer comics, more prestige books for them.
I predict that DC Comics will fold entirely.
1. A whole slew of new titles will be announced, each promising to be the next big thing.
2. 92% of said titles will fizzle out by the third issue, becoming nothing more than footnotes in comics history, relegated to quarter bins for all eternity.
3. A lack of consistent updates regarding the Fantastic Four movie leads to the CW commissioning a Terrifics series set in the Arrowverse. Nevermind the fact that Simon Stagg was killed off in a very early episode of The Flash.
1. Something drastic will happen at IDW- either a closure or a takeover. There’s a lot of smoke there. I’m not rooting for this, especially since I love the reprintings of old newspaper comics, and I hate to see any comics employees lose their jobs.
2. DC will launch a new digital comics platform just for their comics, separate from Comixology. There will be some comic that is exclusive to the platform.
3. We will see new Miracleman comics. We will not see new Saga comics.
1. The new power-that-be at DC will finally have some time to sort out what they inherited from Didio and we’ll start to hear announcements that will freak everyone out (continuity refactoring), but which are actually a good idea.
2. DC will keep the monthly format, but also have in-continuity OGNs closer in format to those books published at younger readers.
3. Marvel will change SPidey’s costume back just as the solicits for the new but mid-00’s looking outfit appears on action figures, statues, etc…
4. X-book sales fall precipitously once it becomes clear they painted themselves into a narrative corner and magical swords could not get them out
5. Big build up for The Big Wheel as Marvel’s new Galactus-level threat
6. Swamp Thing will be rebranded as a hip teen with a shock of green hair who rides a hoverboard and tells people to recycle, along with sidekick/ pal J-Con, a wise-cracking British kid with, I dunno, a nosering
I just realized we were supposed to only do three. Uh, any three you please, I guess.
Late to the party, Mike. Hope your eyes stay great, my Big Wish for 2021.
1/DC will think out of the box for a change and give us a Swamp Thing/Mogo maxi-series. Black Label, of course, so it doesn’t end up like Space Cabbie.
2/DC will continue to exist as a comic company.
3/When Wayne buys Sterling Silver’s Bunches of Back Issues to help the economy, owner Mike Sterling will stop including copies of CYBER FORCE#2. (Thank you.)
Let me make that clearer, sorry.
Mike, I honestly do not need three copies of CUBER FORCE #anything. Peace, brother.
Also late to the party but here nonetheless!
1) Marvel will begin introducing the Aliens and Predator IP into their super-hero continuity by April.
2) Marvel will choose not to retire/cancel the Punisher character. Instead, they will release a story arc where he unflinchingly fights against white supremacists and racial hatred.
3) Mike Sterling will continue to bring us joy in 2021 through his kind, patient, fantastic sense of humor and insight into the human condition!
‘Mazing Man: The Absolute Edition
1. DC will relaunch the Showcase Presents line so that they can finally publish the Sugar and Spike collection and make all the money.
2. There will be a big change in the management structure at Marvel with a surprise hire as Creative Director. Maybe a return to Marvel for Jim Lee or Brian Michael Bendis.
3. A major comics feud will end when Alan Moore and Grant Morrison9 get married. They will claim that the ghosts of Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were their bridesmaids but no one will believe them.
1) Marvel will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of Deadpool with a six issue limited series. Each issue will have 30 variant covers.