More One More Day

This Marvel house ad has been appearing in a few magazines this month. I can only speculate that this means the story arc that will ultimately conclude with the return of Steve Rogers as Captain America is going to begin.

I'm curious as to why the star is inverted, the familiar symbol of Captain America corrupted and referencing a pentagram. Does this mean that Marvel is going to continue using Mephisto as their own "Black Lantern"? When a reboot is required, when someone needs to be brought back from the dead is a contract with the devil going to be used as the plot device to accomplish it?

This appears to be the case.

From what I've read and seen in online chats with comic professionals, Marvel and DC are working somewhat parallel in regards to their respective universes. Deceased or forgotten characters can be returned as a Black Lantern without messy retcons or cheesing off the fans too much. Admittedly, this is only as effective as the execution of the story. Depending upon the popularity or story requirements of the reanimated character they can be freed of the Lantern influence and live again either as a member of the Corps or a citizen of the DC Universe in some other capacity be it supporting character, villain, hero or otherwise. The same, after a slug-fest of some sort presumably, could be done with returning a Marvel character to the most marketable or fan favorite status quo.

For Marvel's purposes, Mephisto is serving as the big reboot device. Someone agrees to a bargain and Monkey's Paw style, they get their wish. As one source in the industry notes, this is good for years of cross-overs. Want dead heroes or villains back? Easy, just call up the Devil and get it done. One More Day aside, Marvel can't really get away with this easy out more than once unless there is an over-all plan already in place. Of course, for the characters nothing will go to smoothly and there will rarely be any happy endings. The Devil doesn't play fair. Over time all the heroes and villains and regular people who made their desperate bargains will come to realize that they were manipulated and the bill remitted by Mephisto will come due. Let's face it: There is an entire story arc to be had from someone wishing the Hector Ayala White Tiger to be alive again even as someone else makes a bargain for him to be dead.

Eventually, all this bargaining and "soft-reboots", as a source let slip, will lead to the cosmic-level Mephisto War mega event a few years from now. This could be Marvel's opportunity to merge the 616 and Ultimate Universes, do some house-cleaning and refresh the stable of characters without starting from scratch. It is I'm told, "planned to be a cross between Inferno and Heroes Reborn but without the horrible creative missteps and suckage." I'd take this thing with a grain of salt, though. It reads like typical hyped solicitation.

Yet erasing decades of stories is risky. Companies rightly worry about turning off what fans they have remaining. DC balked when resetting their universe at Day One after the 1986 Crisis event and the Heroes Reborn debacle showed how resistant fans were to sweeping wholesale changes even during the 90s, surprising considering the main readership didn't care how good a story was as long as there were plenty of giant guns, bandoleers and pouches. Marvel also became hesitant in the execution of the Ultimate line. Reading Ultimate X-Men in its entirety reveals an evolutionary dead-end and not for fictional humanity. What started out as a unique vision quickly became indistinguishable from the regular line of X-Books.

Hopefully, the Mepshisto War won't have the rushed, half-assed climax that seems to be typical of the last several years of mega events that plague the comic book companies. But it is at least two years and several mini-series yet distant, so maybe the editors will grow some berries and reign in the egos of their superstars and the creative teams will manage to pitch and accomplish a cohesive, fun and exciting story by then.