next Big Thing: Shattered Heroes Interview with Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction

WARNING: Read the interview before you read my write-up!

Interview with Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction - at IGN

Time for Marvel's Next Big Thing - Shattered Heroes!  Much like Dark Reign and Heroic Age, this won't be one big sweeping storyline, but instead just a general tone and direction for a many (or most) or Marvel's books...but that means its JUST like Dark Reign AND Heroic Age.

Fear itself has been very exciting with a lot of action, character developments, and more then one pointless tie-in series, but its also coming off the Heroic Age where Marvel swore to us that they were done with large sweeping crossovers.  Let's also not forget the Heroic AGE only lasted a year.  It was supposed to be the new status quo for the Marvel Universe but at most it was about 12 issues in each of the Avengers books and the first 4 issues of many other books (and one Uncanny X-men special).  Personally, I was just getting really comfortable with the current teams and now it seems that anything and everything is changing...YET AGAIN.  Are we going to get a slew of new #1s also??

And there is at least a small chance that Thor will be dead by the end of Fear Itself, again, and that leaves me wondering what are we going to get in Fear Itself 7.3?  Are we getting a new God of Thunder (much like the old new Captain America and the new Ultimate Spider-man)? Or will it just be a depressing mourning issue showing the reaction of the other Asgardians?  Didn't they just make a big deal about Cap, Iron Man and Thor being back together again??? I guess people got bored with that.

Now I am very intrigued to see where Iron Man goes from here.  He, in my honest opinion, that voluntarily gave up the most.  I understand that Captain America lost his best friend, and Thor is either dead or possibly at odds with all of Asgard, but Tony had to make the conscious choice to leave his friends and comrades in the midst of a war. He also had to sacrifice his hard earned sobriety in the hopes that All-Father Odin will not only choose to NOT incinerate him on the spot but also will listen to him and help him save the planet that Odin is ready to raze...

Now if Shattered Heroes ends up just being Fear Itself 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, Battle Scars and the Fearless then I'll be ok with that.  However, if it turns into Dark Reign year of fallout and backlash from the even then I'll honestly be more then just a little disappointed.  I just don't think that every big event needs to be followed by a company reset of the status quo in order to keep it interesting.  I mean really, after only 1 year of Avengers stories, they can't possibly have exhausted all the angles from these groupings of characters, and if they think that they have then they just aren't trying hard enough. 

I'm definitely going to read Shattered Heroes, and I definitely want to know what happening to everyone afterwards.  I just wondering if it needs to be a huge storyline that covers every book.  I remember years ago after Onslaught, which covered basically every Marvel book, they didn't follow it up with a huge storyline covering every book.  It led into Heroes Reborn (which only included 4 books) and everything else had an issue or 2 to just show the fallout from the storyline.  I think that this should be more like that rather then drag out a big Dark/Heroic Reign/Age.  I don't want to see the Shattered Heroes banner all the way until next Summer.