While on a field trip to the DC Comics office, Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso wandered off the tour path and stumbled into a room full of men in suits sitting at computers, radiating the eerie green glow of cash money. After being bitten by one of these radioactive sales analysts, Alonso found himself gifted with the ability to relaunch his own company’s titles, hence the announcement of Marvel NOW! on Tuesday. Still in the early stage of his super-powered evolution, Alonso is unable to fully replicate DC’s ability to launch 52 new No. 1s in a single month, so the initiative is restricted to putting out just one first issue per month, to be released between October and February. He’s also failed to develop DC’s secondary mutation of being able to reboot an entire company’s continuity, so readers will just have to continue following the history of the Marvel characters that they’ve presumably already been invested in for years.
In the euphoric daze that came after receiving this otherworldly talent, Alonso had a vision of three new titles, the first of around 20 to come: The All-New X-Men by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen, The Avengers by Jonathan Hickman and Jerome Opeña, and the flagship of it all, Uncanny Avengers by Rick Remender and John Cassaday, which will arise out of the current Avengers Vs. X-Men crossover and blend characters from the two superteams into one. (Entertainment Weekly has even more details and potential spoilers here.) To help ease strangers into these titles, Alonso has turned to the mystical technology of the AR code, a small red box on the cover of all Marvel NOW! books that, when scanned by Marvel’s AR app, will provide backstory and mini-trailers. Alonso then began rambling about “cinematic” covers and Jean Grey time-traveling back into the Marvel universe before swinging away on a rope made of dollar bills.