All Of The Marvel Comics Summer 2015 Event Teasers So Far
By Nick Tylwalk
What exactly does Marvel have up its sleeve for its comics in 2015?
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It looks like the company is going to be taking us down memory lane, but with a twist. It started with the announcement during New York Comic Con that there would be a new version of Secret Wars coming in 2015 from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Esad Ribic. Where the original 1984 series pitted heroes versus villains at the command of the Beyonder, the Alex Ross promotional image Marvel released for the year-long 2015 series showed heroes from various times (past, present and 2099) and imprints (New Universe, Shadowline and more) fighting each other. Even Obnoxio the Clown made an appearance.
That was followed up by a series of teaser images Marvel released without comment, all simply sporting the tagline “Summer 2015.” While the first one made it look like it was simply a revisiting of a famous event series, the others have shown quite a few deviations from their source material. This had led fans to theorize that they all have something to do with Secret Wars, as if that series will touch on previous stories and reinterpret them through the lens of whatever multidimensional craziness Hickman and Ribic have in store. The “#1” indicators suggest that these might be tie-ins or limited series of their own, but even that is simply a guess.
All we can do is speculate for the time being, since Marvel isn’t commenting … yet. While we wait for more concrete details, let’s take a look at all of the Summer 2015 event teasers we’ve seen to date.
Civil War
Since this image came out the same day that the news broke about Robert Downey Jr. agreeing to appear in Captain America 3, many people (us included) assumed that maybe it had something to do with upcoming storylines in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe the presence of Spider-Man should have hinted that might not necessarily be the case, but that’s easy to say in hindsight.
Marvel did a nice job keeping us off-balance for what we would see the rest of the week, as this is a pretty straight-up callback to the original story. Peter Parker did wear the Iron Spider suit during Civil War, and while he was never involved in a literal tug-of-war between Iron Man and Captain America, he certainly was in a figurative sense. Spider-Man originally sided with Iron Man’s pro-registration forces before a crisis of conscience — coming after he had already revealed his secret identity to the world — caused him to reconsider.
Regardless, without any context it appeared Marvel might just be getting Civil War back out in front of people again, but after the teasers kept coming, it forced us to reconsider.