Marvel has been known as one of the biggest names in comic book publishing for most of its history as a company. With the unprecedented success of their superhero movies in theMarvel Cinematic Universe, they seem to be primarily a company focused on movies and TV, and they just so happen to publish a bunch of comic books as well. But it looks like fans may not be seeing any moreX-Mencomics being published by Marvel in the near future.
A new report fromNerdisthas uncoverd what looks to beMarvel Comicssolicitations for the month of October, which shows a preview of comics books that will be coming out that month. As it turns out, there is only one title that has anything to do withX-Men, which isDeath of X. That being the only title to have anything to do with theX-Mendoesn’t paint a bright future for themutantsin the Marvel Comics. But why would Marvel stop publishing books about some of their most popular characters? Well, probably because they can’t make movies about those characters.
Long before Marvel Studios was making their own comic book movies, the publisher licensed out the rights to many of their characters to various studios. Fox wound up with the rights to all thingsX-MenandFantastic Fourrelated. This has led to some very ugly, behind the scenes happenings between Fox and Marvel, as the publisher has slowly been limiting their production of anything related to these properties, because Fox owns the rights to the characters. If these leaked solicitations for October appear to be accurate, it looks like Marvel is finally getting ready to pull the trigger and truly stop makingX-Men comics.
The report also noted that it appears Marvel is havingThe Inhumans(a team that Marvel does have the rights to) kill off theX-Menwithin the comic books. Not only that, but Marvel has banned any of their writers from creating newX-Mencharacters, because those characters rights would instantly belong to Fox, and they have been killing off big time characters likeWolverine. Plus, in theInfinitystoryline, a bomb went off that wound up leaving all mutants who were exposed to it sterile, meaning none of them can have children, which will essentially help to kill off mutants in Marvel Comics entirely.
Marvel Studioswants the rights to their characters back, and until they can get them back, they are going to play rough. This is something that has seemingly been a long time coming, but given just how popular theX-Menare, it seemed unlikely that Marvel would ever go so far as to wipe them out entirely on the comic book side of things. But if this report turns out to be true, that looks to be the case. Granted, this report may not be entirely accurate, being that it didn’t come directly from Marvel, and the publisher may have something planned more long-term for the mutants, but it seems more likely that they would want to promote characters they can use on film. Be sure to check out the full list of Marvel’s leaked 2016 solicitations below.
