7 Marvel Experiments That Went Horribly Wrong

Marvel Comics has been changing the superhero genre for decades now. If you look at the history of the House of Ideas, they’re more about changing things than being the inventor of them. Over the years, they’ve done their own experiments with superheroes, bringing in ideas like the shared universe, making their heroes more human and relatable, pushing anti-heroes, and other ideas that helped revolutionize the comic industry. For years, the publisher was able to come up with ideas that made their comics more palatable for fans and they rode that to the top of the sales charts, creating legends that millions of fans have loved.

However, not every experiment can go well; that’s just the nature of things. Sometimes, Marvel has tried something different and fell flat on their face. These seven Marvel experiments went completely awry, doing the opposite of what the publisher wanted.

7) Marvel Legacy

DC Rebirth was massive in 2016, driving readers interest in the original superhero universe after the doldrums of the New 52. Marvel was selling better, but fans overall weren’t in love with everything going on, which led to the House of Ideas trying to copy DC with the Marvel Legacy publishing initiative. You’d think this would mean that they brought back old school heroes or fixed something, but instead they just copied some names and went on the way they were. Fans were mystified by the whole thing, as it was branding that proved meaningless, fading away by the time the book it was setting up – Jason Aaron’s Avengers (Vol. 8) – came out. Marvel tried to copy DC rather obviously, assuming that fans wouldn’t notice, but they did.

6) Tom Brevoort as Editor of the X-Men

Tom Brevoort has been one of Marvel’s most successful editors. For years, he edited the Marvel Heroes office, steering the adventures of the Avengers, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the yearly event comics, and more, a key to the ’00s success of the publisher. While not every book he edited was amazing, he was able to help push the best Marvel creators further and gave readers some great stories. One Marvel group it seemed he had little interest in was the X-Men – something he has admitted in the past – which is why it was so weird that the publisher made him the editor of the X-Men line in 2024, kicking off with the “From the Ashes” publishing initiative. It started out well, but broke down within the first six months. Calling his time on the books uneven is something of an understatement, and many X-fans are extremely unhappy with the books.

5) The Krakoa Era

The Krakoa Era started out like a house on fire. Putting Jonathan Hickman on the X-Men books, allowing him and a group of handpicked creators to build a mutant nation, was just the ticket after years of Marvel marginalization of the mutants. However, cracks started to form immediately, as Hickman changed his outline to fit what the other creators wanted to do and ended up leaving the books. After Hickman left, the whole thing fell apart in a lot of ways. There were still some excellent comics, but there was a time when the entire line was unmissable. After Hickman left, a good portion of the books were terrible (including the flagship book X-Men (Vol. 6)) and the ending was an abortion, as Marvel cut out six months of stories to rush to Brevoort taking over and ’90s-ing the mutants up because of X-Men ’97‘s success. It started out great, but by the end, even the most diehard X-Men fans had problems were unhappy.

4) Wolverine’s Hot Claws

Return of Wolverine was legitimately terrible, bringing the ol’Canucklehead back in the worst way you can imagine. For some reason, it also tried to give him a superfluous new power. In the first issue, Wolverine claws shows the ability to get hot. He would go into berserker rages and lost his healing factor while using, and fans started mocking it immediately. His claws could already cut through anything, so there was no good reason for this. Everyone hated it, it was never explained, and other than appearing in the absymal Wolverine and the Infinity Watch (also teased by Marvel Legacy almost two years before), it’s been completely forgotten.

3) The New Universe

Nowadays, Marvel creating a new universe isn’t all that weird; they’ve done it several times over the 21st century, but the first time they did was a massive failure. This was the New Universe, where the House of Ideas tried to recapture the energy of the Silver Age Marvel Universe by making all-new heroes with the best creators of the ’80s. The House of Ideas released a bunch of books at once, but they just didn’t connect with fans. It didn’t last long – three years all told – and was almost completely forgotten by Marvel fans until relatively recently.

2) The Inhumans Push

The MCU has brought a lot of changes to the Marvel Universe and the vast majority of them have been rather bad, honestly (I could literally write a whole list about bad MCU synergy). One of the worst was the Inhumans push. This came because Marvel didn’t own the film rights to the X-Men, so they decided to start pushing the Inhumans. They pushed the X-Men into their own corner and gave their spot in event comics to the Inhumans. New heroes that would have been mutants were now Inhumans. However, fans didn’t care. The Inhumans were C-list before this, so giving them numerous books was a massive mistake, and Marvel didn’t even put A-list creators on the books. They tried to replace their civil rights metaphor team with a slave-owning, eugenics-based monarchy. That sentence is reason alone for the whole thing to be stupid.

1) The Clone Saga

The Clone Saga isn’t as terrible as younger fans think, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing didn’t go awry. Bringing the Spider-Clone back was an idea with legs and the books sold well at first. However, the Spider-Man office never came up with an ending, allowing them to leave it open-ended and squeeze as many sales out of it as possible. The story went on much too long and that was the main problem with it. The House of Ideas should have actually come up with some kind of ending for it, but instead they milked it dry and damaged the Spider-books for years to come.

What Marvel experiments do you think went wrong? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!

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