Marvel Books delays [UPDATED 11-01-15]

It's been well over 6 months since I've seen an X-Men book, and I'm starting to wonder what's going on with Marvel. I certainly miss the good old days when my favorite characters were in several ongoing books simultaneously, but those days are certainly over.

I'm hoping that #600 will brings something worth while, but I doubt it. I guess all I can do is wait and see.

Extraordinary Xmen has been delayed due UXM #600.

Hi Icefanatic -

I think UXM #600 which is suppose to be some landmark issue - has problems.

It's possible, there have been re-writes. Maybe not but ... I think the story they thought would be so poignant might not be, guess we'll see.

Bendis can deny anything he wants - just because he didn't do any rewrites does not mean there may not have been rewrites. I am saying there was plenty of time for rewrites. He won't be told if Marvel decided to change things either. He turned in his script and there was art. Plenty of time to change the art as well.

Whether it was or not is another thing. TBH - by now, either publish the book or forget about it.

My two cents(apologies for the length, might be more like a buck-fifty) on the WHOLE thing:

Marvel was aware there was a small faction that genuinely thought Iceman was secretly gay; and a somewhat larger though still small group that pushed it without necessarily believing it for the purposes of trolling on the internet. They thought they had crafted something that would play to both those groups(out young Iceman in a troll-ish manner and then ultimately pay off that stunt with a more serious, thoughtful portrayal for the character down the line), while confirming the adult character was still straight for the rest of the fans in Uncanny #600.

They didn't take into account two things: That people wouldn't wait for Uncanny #600 and would just assume adult Iceman had been made gay, and two, just how popular and well known Iceman actually is as a character; and how much his attraction to women and his relationships with them are a part of that.

Putting aside the comics, most of the general public first got to know Iceman from the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon from 1981. While the X-Men made a couple of guest appearances, Iceman got three seasons on a show over a decade before the X-Men even HAD a cartoon. It's been in perpetual reruns ever since, and on Netflix for a decade. IGN ranks it 59th of best all-time cartoons. Iceman's attraction to women and Firestar in particular was an ongoing plot-point which finally got paid off in a comic for the show's 25th anniversary.

The Iceman-centric episode of the 90's X-Men: The Animated Series was one of the most popular of the entire series with fans(so much so the producers wanted to bring Iceman back as a regular, but was nixed by Fox who was planning at the time on ending the series the next season after an abbreviated number of episodes). Much of the plot revolved around his doomed love of Lorna Dane and her love for Havok, a triangle that has played out, on-and-off, for five decades in the comics.

He also had a clear attraction to Kitty(and Emma Frost in a funny scene in the latter) in X-Men Evolution AND Wolverine and the X-Men(and it wasn't some showy, over-the-top thing meant to fool people into thinking he liked girls). He also had romantic subplots with female characters in some of the X-Men games. He has a huge presence in merchandise, not just for the X-Men, but with Spider-Man and the Marvel Universe as a whole.

He's been prominently featured in four X-Men movies, his relationship with Rogue was a major plot-point in the first two films, and the love triangle with Rogue and Kitty a major plot-point in the other two, with huge amounts of fan interest and shipping for all of that.

In the comics, he's had numerous team-ups and friendly rivalries with Spider-Man and the Human Torch, numerous guest appearances in the Avengers(I've lost count of how many times he's been considered for membership, he's been offered and declined twice). Had runs in non-X-Teams The Champions and The Defenders. He's had several relationships with strong ships through all of that(except Opal, Iceman fans almost to a person HATE Opal Tanaka). As a result of all that, Iceman is VERY well known and well liked by generations of fans far outside of just X-Men comics and even comics period, most of whom don't see the character as anything other than straight and really enjoy stories revolving around his attraction to women and certain female characters in particular.

So Marvel starts the story in ANXM, with the expectation that the trolling stuff(Jeen reading his mind and telling him he's "full gay", etc.) will play well on the message boards and making an iteration of a popular silver age character gay will play well with Marvel's current diversity push(We've got a female Thor! A Black Captain America! A Gay Iceman! A(n) Transgender Asian Hulk!).

...and the leak hits.

The news breaks that "Iceman, one of the Original X-Men, would be coming out as gay in the next issue of X-Men" and the internet cracks in half! A level of fan controversy probably ranked somewhere between Marvel erasing two decades of Spider-Man's marriage and DC's 'Death of Superman'. It was insane.

Many longtime fans were mad as hell. Many of the LGBTQ crowd called the move pandering and had major objections to the way the outing was handled and some of the comments(bisexual erasure)in the issue itself. Something that I imagine those at Marvel thought would somewhat titillate while proving outrage on message boards and earning them much-needed diversity cred turned into something WAY bigger, messier and problematic than they had planned for.

Now they were going to have a LOT more eyes on Uncanny 600 than they could have expected, and while they would surely love high sales, the way what Bendis wrote in ANXM got picked apart and lambasted in various media outlets, they likely wanted to give the issue a thorough evaluation before releasing it to that kind of scrutiny.

So it got delayed from May until June. By then Secret Wars was underway and the discussion about Iceman and speculation about Uncanny #600 was eclipsing all of that. So they delayed it until after Secret Wars in October. Then came a new wrinkle. Revealing the adult character as straight and that the '05 are from an alternate universe
in October could hurt initial sales on both Extraordinary X-Men and All-New X-Men, so they pushed Uncanny until after the release of the first two issues of Extraordinary and to coincide with the first issue of All-New.

Which resulted in many people swearing they weren't going to even get Uncanny #600 at all, that Extraordinary would make anything that had happened in Uncanny #600 irrelevant, which is the LAST thing Marvel wanted. I, along with others, recently declared on message boards and social media that we weren't ordering anything else from Marvel until #600 finally ships(also something Marvel doesn't want).

So now we get the current schedule with Uncanny, Extraordinary and All-New:

Uncanny X-Men #600        November 04
Extraordinary X-Men #1     November 04
All-New X-Men #1            November 11
Extraordinary X-Men #2     November 18.
Extraordinary X-Men #3     November 25

Which I don't expect to see changed unless they ship Uncanny a week EARLY at the end of October(that's what I would do).

I strongly doubt they did much, if any, rewriting of what Bendis wrote; maybe a minor tweak or two to be more sensitive on a sensitive subject, but that's probably about it. I expect most of the delays were to generate discussion and interest while trying to figure out when and in what order to release things for maximum profit.

As Bendis himself said "delayed for editorial and commercial reasons".

I could be wrong, but that's what I think.

I think I read in an interview that whomever it is that has Bobby stated that it would be the gay version. Now, that could mean adult Bobby is outed or it could be teen Bobby taking a character slot on a team.

I think the whole outing was handled poorly. But I've said that before. In addition, if they leave it as it is and I recall those uncolored pages, #600 is a rehash of the two pages that outed teen Bobby. And if done in the same fashion - that is lazy writing on Bendis' part.

I do love that variant with Gambit - I would love to have that team in a book.

I'm definitely going to try and find the Iceman version of that cover. I recently took my kiddo to the book store I use to visit back in high school, so we both got a kick out of being there. I didn't see any X-Men books except for old school novels from the mid nineties, but it was good revisiting my past.