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There are a lot of similar-sounding terms thrown around when talking about comics. We’ve got reboots, revivals, relaunches, retcons… they’re all important terms, but if you’re not familiar with what each one means, it can be really confusing. A reboot is the resetting of a universe. A “hard” reboot is something like DC’s 2011 New 52, where all of the canon and continuity up to that point was tossed out the window and they started fresh. A “soft” reboot would be more along the lines of Marvel NOW!, where a lot of books are started over again at #1, but the continuity is kept intact – it’s more of a place for new readers to jump in than a fresh start. Soft reboots even tend to reintroduce some of the characters’ origins, history, and motivations, where a hard reboot pretty much just starts from square one. A relaunch, on the other hand, is when a title that had previously been cancelled gets a new run. A relaunch technically is a revival – of a book, a character, or even a name; in some cases, it’s a combination of two of those, or even all three. Relaunches also tend to involve at least a little bit of retconning, or changing of retroactive continuity. Basically, a retcon is changing something in a character’s past and pretending it’s always been that way – like the retcon of Iron Man’s origins, which brought them from Vietnam to Afghanistan to make it more modern. With these terms in mind, let’s talk about Captain Marvel.

Serial storytelling is popular on television, but as far as print goes, it’s a dying art. There used to be a time when people regularly followed installments of actual books, printed a chapter at a time in magazines, but now magazines themselves are struggling to keep the public’s interest in the face of the internet. You can find serial stories on the internet—web comics and fanfiction for example—but the business of it isn’t the same. The comic book industry is one of the few businesses that still maintains that original serial model and because of that it usually takes six or twelve issues of a comic to tell a single story arc. The last few months I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what titles to trim from my pull list in favor of waiting for the graphic novel releases. As I’ve evaluated titles, I’ve thought a lot about the downsides of serial storytelling. The obvious downside for the consumer is the price. I bought the first six issues of Avengers by Jonathan Hickman for a cover price of $3.99 which meant I spent approximately $24.00. The graphic novel collection of those issues is currently being sold for $15.00 on Amazon.com. For someone with a tight budget, that kind of difference is noteworthy.

As you’ve no doubt already heard, the new Fantastic Four movie has cast its Human Torch. Meet Michael B. Jordan, the new Johnny Storm: Even though this is a topic that Eric has already covered, I’d like to offer my thoughts on why casting an actor of color for Johnny Storm isn’t just a good idea, but a really important move. It’s no secret that representation in media is a big deal. There has been a push in the past ten years for the superhero genre to expand past the cookie cutter of “white heterosexual man,” and while the comics have been slowly expanding their repertoire, the movies… have not. The Avengers movie universe has War Machine, Black Widow, and Falcon, who have all been relegated to sidekick status; the X-Men movie franchise has revolved around the trio of Wolverine, Professor X, and Magneto, even when the stories they’re trying to tell really revolve around other characters. DC’s movie division has made movie after movie featuring Batman and Superman while outright refusing to focus a movie on Wonder Woman; their Green Lantern movie focused on Hal Jordan, the most stereotypical white guy in all the Lantern Corps.

The internet is abuzz about the recent news by 20th Century Fox to have Johnny Storm played by an African American actor in the next Fantastic Four movie. The featured image of this article should be a reminder that this isn’t the first time we’ve had this happen. Of course, that flip’s nowhere near as famous as the Nick Fury race flip.

The first full-length trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy was released this week and it marks the tenth movie that will be released in the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, joining the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Avengers movie franchises as well as The Incredible Hulk movie and the television show Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Also coming from Marvel Studios this year is Captain America: The Winter Soldier which continues the Captain America franchise and seems to be tied very closely to the S.H.I.E.L.D. stories and characters that featured in Avengers. These will be the last two movies before all the interconnecting threads meet again in Avengers: Age of Ultron and I thought I’d do an early overview of them both.

In 1962 Marvel Comics changed the face of the comic industry by creating Spider-Man. Peter Parker was a teenager who wasn’t stuck in the role of sidekick. He was able to be the hero of his own story and he managed to do it while balancing the struggles and drama of teenage life. Over the years from the X-Men to the Young Avengers, Marvel has continued making dynamic teen heroes that struggle to come of age against the backdrop of superhero life. The most recent addition is Kamala Khan, a young Muslim girl trying to find her place among her peers in New Jersey while taking up the mantle of Ms. Marvel. This title has already drawn a massive amount of attention because it’s the first time a Muslim character is headlining their own book at Marvel. Now, just to be clear, Kamala is not the first Muslim hero at Marvel. She’s not even the first Muslim heroine, but creating a title around her and giving her a beloved legacy title is an extremely important step toward diversifying comics and broadening representation.

Regular readers of Comic POW know I’m a huge fan of Brandon Graham. When I discover a new creator that I like, I tend to binge on their works. Fortunately for my bank account, Brandon Graham has a pretty small canon of work in which he is both writer and artist. Prior to working on Multiple Warheads his major non-porn was was King City. King City started off on Tokyo Pop and then the American division went belly up. The story was left untold until Image Comics picked it up for the second half. The story is, in my eyes, a cross between Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. From Pulp Fiction it takes a couple low level gangsters - a professional burglar and a human smuggler who are best friends and then spends a large portion of the story dealing with their lives outside their jobs. From Scott Pilgrim it borrows a world that’s ALMOST, but not quite our world. One of the characters is a veteran of the Korean Zombie war. The cat burglar literally uses a cat that can become nearly any device with the right injection.

Continuing from a few weeks ago, here are a slew of comics Image Comics will be releasing in 2014. Nameless Nameless All Image released was the above image and that it will be written by Grant Morrison with art by Chris Burnham. However, I loved their work on Batman Incorporated, so I look forward to this. Nailbiter Nailbiter This series is neither my cup of tea nor do I recognize the creators, so I’m going to go with Image’s press release: ...

By now, dear reader, you are familiar with the argument that Disney needs to get its Marvel characters back from Sony Pictures and Fox. They’ve done a pretty great job weaving together the Marvel cinematic universe around the Avengers. In the comics we have members of the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Thing from the Fantastic Four as members of the Avengers or New Avengers. Imagine how great things could be in the cinematic (and now, thanks to SHIELD, TV world). But there’s another place Disney could and should be leveraging its characters - it should have a Marvel park at Walt Disney World. As someone who grew up in Florida I went to theme parks a lot. In the last few months I revisited both Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure Orlando and Walt Disney World. There is no doubt in my mind that WDW is the king of immersive theme park experiences. Universal Studios is a mismatch of rides just randomly dropped on the property. The Islands of Adventure Side does a better job of grouping rides into themes, but the park is too small to do justice to the expansive universe that is Marvel comics.

I really love reading comics about teams. Individual titles are interesting. They let you get a sense for what a character thinks of him or herself, and they show you what that person’s thoughts and actions are like when they’re interacting with a few other heroes, but for the most part, they’re about solo crime-fighting activities or what the character does with their family or friends. Take the current run of Hawkeye, for instance: it alternates between Clint and Kate (and occasionally Pizza Dog) taking on their own enemies, but it also has Clint dealing with relationship issues and his brother showing up, and Kate leaving home and moving across the country. The book focuses on who they are as people, as it rightly should – it’s a book about them, after all. Team books are different. Where individual titles give you a sense of who the characters are as people, a team book gives you a sense of who they are as heroes. Batman on his own is different than he is while he’s part of the Justice League. Iron Man’s behavior in his solo title is different from how he behaves in a group dynamic. Team stories show what I feel are more honest interactions – ones where the heroes aren’t hiding their skills behind civilian identities or lying about who they are. Even in the case of heroes whose civilian identities aren’t known to their teammates, the hero in question – let’s just call him Batman, for sake of discussion – is still more able to be honest with his colleagues as Batman than he is in his day-to-day life as Bruce Wayne, head of Wayne Enterprises.