Marvel Cancels Spider-Man Series
Non-Stop Spider-Man from writer Joe Kelly and the art team of Chris Bachalo and R.B. Silva is drawing to an end, but the creative team behind the book is transitioning over to a new Spider-Man comic launching early next year. Bleeding Cool suggests the long-delayed series, originally set for release in 2020, will end after just five issues -- and on a cliffhanger, at that! -- but that the story will resume in Savage Spider-Man in 2022, a series that seems likely to be tied to Marvel's aggressive slate of event-driven titles set to launch soon.
Last month, Marvel revealed the first details about eight upcoming tentpole titles that they say will shape the future of the Marvel Universe in the months to come, including a number of projects that are evocative of what's going on in their TV and film projects. The series include events centering around the Fantastic Four and Daredevil, as well as stories that see the Avengers as multiverse-hopping champions of reality. It's all kicked off by Timeless, a time-travel story that centers on a threat presented by Kang the Conqueror, who is working his own way through the multiverse, presumably destined to cross paths with those same Avengers.
Non-Stop Spider-Man was the wall-crawler with a James Bond sensibility, and we may have had more issues of the title if not for the covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the series suffer from a brief work stoppage near the start of the pandemic, as did virtually all of Marvel's projects, but artist Chris Bachalo actually had covid.
"It was really more pandemic affected, honestly," Kelly told ComicBook earlier this year. "I feel like we were psyched to have the book, have the launch date, et cetera, and then things started happening. And then I was already a couple of scripts in when, what do you call it, like Diamond shut down. All this stuff seems like 10 years ago, but it's like you start to remember the order of events. And yeah, it was a lot of that. And then once things slowed down, both at Marvel and the industry in general, I think everybody just had to take a break and take stock as to what was what, and when we could release the book with some kind of continuity. And then in the midst of all that, Chris got COVID. So that took him off the board for a little while too. So the world definitely conspired against our little book, for sure."
We will bring you details on the Savage Spider-Man title if and when they become available.