By: Russ Burlingame on July 5, 2012
The still-fresh fires of Avengers vs. X-Men are likely to be stoked in Uncanny Avengers, Rick Remender and John Cassaday’s upcoming title that stars Captain America, Havok, Thor, Wolverine…and now, Rogue and Scarlet Witch.
Remender describes to Entertainment Weekly as “the Wolverine of the team now. Her adoptive step-mother was Mystique, so she was raised tohate the Avengers.”
Scarlet Witch, who hasn’t exactly had the easiest relationship with the mutant community since the events of House of M, will be on the team along with Rogue, so it’s safe to say the pair won’t exactly be fast. Remender, acknowledging that it’s Scarlet Witch from whom Captain America and company arguably should have protected the mutants in the first place, says that her story in Uncanny Avengers will be a “redemption arc,” and presumably developing a relationship with Rogue will play into that by the time all is said and done.
The series’ first-issue cover was revealed at EW‘s website earlier today, a first look at what Marvel’s Joe Quesada called earlier this week a more “cinematic” look for the company’s trade dress. With writer’s names up top and the typical comic book cornerbox eliminated, its information is shunted to the bottom of the cover.
This may be in recognition of the fact that the traditional comic book cover is designed to look good on a newsstand–a location where Marvel doesn’t sell many of their issues anymore. While Barnes & Noble and certain other brick-and-mortar retailers like the grocery chain Wegmans do carry comic books, those numbers aren’t taken into account when doing the monthly Diamond sales reports and are arguably more seen as a way to get the titles in front of as many eyes as possible, thus creating product awareness, than an actual opportunity to generate revenue.
Of course, a #1 issue is difficult to judge a series by. On a team book in particular, there’s a kind of mission statement to get everyone on the cover and not to make it too plot-specific, so that it’s less intimidating to casual readers and in order to present a better trade paperback cover for the bookstore market. We won’t have a real sense of what, if anything, this cover means for Marvel NOW! until we’ve seen a couple of more titles–or maybe even once we’ve seen the second issues of one or two of them.
