Marvel‘s relationship with writer Jonathan Hickman has been one of the most fruitful teamings of the 21st century. Hickman rose through the ranks at Marvel since the mid to late ’00s, and has written all three of Marvel’s biggest teams — the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the X-Men — as well as solo books starring Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Doctor Doom. Hickman is a talent that doesn’t come around very often, a writer who can take anything Marvel gives him and spin it into something special. Putting Hickman’s name on a book is usually a guarantee that a book that will sell well, but two years ago that was put to the test with one of the most mysterious books in Marvel history — G.O.D.S.
Videos by ComicBook.com
G.O.D.S was Hickman’s first work after helping to create the X-Men’s Krakoa Era, teaming him with Valerio Schiti, who Hickman had worked with both on the X-Men books and the Avengers. G.O.D.S. was sold as a book that would change the cosmic side of the Marvel Universe forever, introducing a new pantheon of all-powerful beings to readers. Many thought it would be something like The Sandman in the Marvel Universe, but what readers got was entirely different, a book so mysterious that we still don’t really know what was going on with it.
G.O.D.S. Is Hickman At His Most Inscrutable
Hickman wrote some of the best Avengers stories and Fantastic Four stories ever, and was all about melding sci-fi to his superhero comics. Hickman and sci-fi went together since his early works at Image, so when Marvel announced a new series from Hickman that was going to deal with the cosmic side of the Marvel Universe, fans were ecstatic. Marvel has some of the greatest cosmic beings in comics, and unleashing Hickman on that side of thing was exciting prospect for many fans. Hickman was always about bringing big ideas to his work, and G.O.D.S felt like it was going to be very special.
G.O.D.S starred Wyn, who was an avatar of The-Powers-That-Be, abstract beings that represented magic, dealing with a crisis between The-Powers-That-Be and The-Natural-Order-of-Things, who represented science, when a being called Cubisk Core stole the Staff of the Living Tribunal. The book introduced a new pantheon of characters that represented the two “gods”, and their struggle to save all of reality, with Doctor Strange showing up as the touchstone character. Hickman built up the characters over the eight-issue series, illustrating the war between science and magic, using that to deal with philosophical themes about the nature of humanity and our existence.
G.O.D.S. is a book that never felt like it fit the monthly issue format; it would have been a great oversized graphic novel. It was certainly an interesting comic, but it demanded a lot from the reader. It was introducing entirely new characters and a new mythology for the Marvel Universe, and it was honestly one of the most opaque comics I’ve ever read. Hickman opened up entirely new facets of the Marvel Universe, introducing readers to entirely new characters and ideas. It was a book where you basically needed to read every issue before reading the next one, and even then you’d still be a little confused by the book at times. It also didn’t help that the first issue was $9.99. Fans were rabid for Hickman’s post-X-Men work, but that was asking a lot of them.
G.O.D.S. was a hugely complicated comic from Marvel’s best writer and one of their best artists of the last decade and a half that cost ten dollars for the first issue. It was an entirely new property and it honestly felt like Marvel set it up for failure by making the first issue so expensive. The cosmic side of Marvel hasn’t been very lucrative for Marvel since Annihilation and its assorted sequels petered out in the ’10s, and even Hickman’s name couldn’t get fans to pay ten dollars for a book meant to change the deities of Marvel forever.
G.O.D.S. Is Hickman’s Most Ambitious Failure
G.O.D.S. seems like it shouldn’t have been a tough sell, but it honestly makes sense that it was. It didn’t have very much “name brand” recognition other than Hickman and Schiti, and dealt with a corner of the Marvel Universe that had never been overly popular. It was a very different book from the more simplistic superhero fare that Marvel was known for, and the cover price was high right from the start. The last issue of the series didn’t even feel like a final issue; it closed up the opening plot of the book but didn’t explain anything, not even what its acronym meant.
Not every comic is going to succeed, even with the best available talent on it, and G.O.D.S. proves that. It was a book with loads of potential but you can tell that Hickman wasn’t doing a simple book that would explain everything in the first story. It was supposed to be a long unfolding story that would change Marvel forever, building new characters and ideas that went in bizarre directions. I feel like the book would have gone better if it was a Doctor Strange book than what it was. G.O.D.S. proves that even the best writer in mainstream comics can’t make everything a hit.
What do you think? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
Most Viewed
-
Image courtesy of Paramount+ -
A closeup of a PlayStation 5 with a controller on top. -
Image courtesy of Seeker Games
