Comics Pitch #1

One of the things I’ve always liked about DC over Marvel is their ability to rewrite their own history, whereas Marvel does a lot of these soft retcons. They may be a little more subtle, but they don’t do a lot to get rid of some of the bigger problems. Just look at what Geoff Johns has been able to do with characters like Hawkman and Hal Jordan. I may not like Hal all that much, but I have to give credit where it’s due – he pulled that off his redemption magnificently. It comes from DC having a history of wiping the slate clean, starting with the beginning of the Silver Age and retconing all the Golden Age stuff to a separate universe, and then Crisis on Infinite Earths decades later combined those Earths into a universe that worked so well (minus some hick-ups) for over twenty five years, that people are still bitching about how DC changed it with Flashpoint. And despite that criticism, I’d still say the New 52 has worked out pretty well so far, opening up potential for even more stories.

I guess it’s the idea that DC can do a cosmic level event that allows them to cherry pick all the best moments of their past and put them together into one Greatest Hits continuity. Now, they’ve never really lived up to that potential with their rewrites and retcons, but the potential is still there. I can admire Marvel saying that their continuity isn’t broken, but how can they say that with a straight face when they’ve published stories like Avengers Forever and One More Day? If they didn’t genuinely feel they had moments in their past that they’d like to change, why do they still publish these stories. They haven’t fucked up their characters quite as much as DC tends to do, but that’s far from having a clean record. What I’ve never understood is why they haven’t tried something like COIE at least once; those kinds of stories are fun, readers like them when the effort is put into them to make them halfway decent.  And they have the perfect character to set this kind of story up.

So here’s my pitch to Marvel, and this is an idea that I feel may have been one of MGK’s Dr. Strange pitches so I’m sorry if there’s a lot of similarities to it, it’s been a while since I read those pitches so I don’t know if this is original or if I’m being subconsciously influenced by something I read six months ago. You have Kang, the time warrior, a guy who can travel to the past and does frequently in order to destroy his foes the Avengers. His problem, though, is that he chooses to fight them after they’ve gotten their powers. This time, however, Kang has developed a Magguff-I mean device that lets him skirt around the Gruenwald Law of Marvel time travel.

 He will exist outside the time-stream and he can alter the 616 universe’s past without it creating an alternate timeline. He uses this device to go back and start making subtle changes; now, instead of getting a chest full of shrapnel in a warzone, Tony Stark is rescued by a particularly bad-ass special forces soldier so that in the present, he’s still an arms manufacturing asshole. Instead of Bruce Banner sacrificing himself to save Rick Jones, a brave lab assistant volunteers, and now Bruce is still a gamma ray scientist in the present, married to Betty and has a passive aggressive relationship with his father-in-law. T’Challa’s father is rescued by a loyal guardsman who kills Klaw, so that T’Challa can finish his studies in America and focus on becoming his father’s ambassador to the UN. The list goes on and on, but the alterations are not seamless.

In the present, the Avengers watch as member after member disappears. Nick Fury is the first to realize what’s going wrong and gathers the rest of the surviving Avengers, a group of classics and cult favorites, so that he can send them to the source of the cronal disturbance in the future using experimental SHIELD tech. There they capture Kang’s time device after a long battle, and travel to the past to stop Kang at every moment he alters. This has a negative effect on the timestream though, which starts to warp because of the constant abuse.

While the timestream is restored after a climactic battle, there are minor changes; instead of some things happening the way they used to, now they happened differently. Basically, this gives marvel an excuse to trim out stuff they don’t feel helps the iconic status of their characters, or changes decent moments that didn’t quite hit the mark. It also gives them the opportunity to make some What If things canon. They could do a whole mini-series chronicling all the changes. They could hold a writers summit to brainstorm the things they want to change and the things they want to keep, and then come up with a plan to take those things forward over the next few years. Not only do I think this is an exciting story premise (and does something useful with what I would describe as an underrated villain), but it opens up a world of possibilities. I can think of two changes I would love to make that I think help streamline some of Marvel’s weaker moments. One opens up potential for stories going forward, setting up a status quo for a character they’ve been trying to get for decades, and the second makes one of the most confusing moments in Marvel history suddenly make sense. I’ll get into these changes as time goes on.