During the Amazing Spider-Man panel at the San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel announced plans for Minimum Carnage and Punisher: War Zone.
The story revolves around Carnage escaping into the Micro-verse, with Venom and Scarlet Spider following in pursuit. This will be an event book that kicks off in Minimum Carnage: Alpha in October and then runs through Venom and Scarlet Spider titles. Cullen Bunn and Chris Yost will be writing, with art by Lan Medina. Declan Shalvey and Khoi Pham will do the art in the regular books.
The second announcement at the panel involved Punisher: War Zone – we’ve seen the teaser art all over the Major Spoilers site a few weeks ago. The five issue mini-series finds the Punisher taking on the Avengers when the team decides he must be stopped. Greg Rucka will write with Marco Checchetto providing the art.
“The question is, of course, what do you do with a ‘Problem Named Castle?’” asks Rucka. “Without giving too much away, let’s just say that events in PUNISHER #15 and PUNISHER #16 go big enough that Earth’s Mightiest Heroes can no longer hope the ‘Castle problem’ will take care of itself. At a certain point, they have to take responsibility for allowing Frank to have run as he has for so long.
“Honestly, everyone and their cousin has seen the traditional ‘two heroes beat each other to pulp,’ and that just won’t work with Frank,” Rucka says. “Against almost any Avenger, head-to-head, he’s going to be going down. One of the things I’m most excited about for this is showing the different takes on Frank and what he does, and the different approaches and arguments about how to effectively solve the ‘Castle problem.’ I don’t want to presume it as arrogance, but the Avengers, when they decide to act, they think they’re getting into one thing, and they discover it’s something very different.
“Because Frank, while he almost certainly knows he will ultimately lose, he’s not going to make it easy, and he’s not going to go quietly.”
2 Comments
Marvel’s misses lately are far outweighing their hits. Almost makes you wish they hadn’t survived their Chapter 11 back in the 90’s. Maybe then their characters would have been sold off to companies that would have focused on storytelling instead of 12+ mutant titles a month coupled with one ‘event’ after another.
Carnage? In the Microverse? That is just awful. I don’t know what’s worse, that a bunch of grown people sat down and came up with that idea, or that they expected people to want to pay to read about it.
The Punisher story could be interesting if I thought there’d be any actual consequences from it.