Let me preface this by saying, generally speaking, I am happy with what Marvel is doing with many of their characters. That said, here are my wishes for the Marvel genie.
Civil War II has been a disaster. Far too many tie-ins for an idea that was too simple and frankly lazy. It wasn't that long ago that literally every single 616 book got sucked into Secret Wars for months, and many of those tie-ins were mediocre or bad. Less than a year later, once again, almost all their books get sucked into yet another huge event, and, worse, the event isn't good enough to support the massive number of tie-ins.
I like events. I have read every Marvel event since Disassembled. The tie-ins have gotten out of hand. My understanding is tie-ins are voluntary in many cases. Why put that choice before a creative team? Struggling titles are going to get on board regardless of whether or not they have a solid, original idea for the tie-in or not. And most if not all of those books will not get enough of a sales bump to survive much longer anyway. Editorial mandates are needed to preserve the integrity of these titles and to prevent the absurd glut of tie-ins we see on shelves now. So that's one.
Furthermore, events have been coming too quickly. We are about to watch some books in the Spider family move directly from CWII to Clone Conspiracy without taking a breath. I'm not familiar with the list of Death of X tie-ins, but I suspect there won't be much of a break for some of these titles between DoX, Ivx, and whatever Resurrexion is. That's just insane. That is not the way to restore the X-books to greatness. That is mangling a corpse with a weedwacker. So my second wish would be, if a book must do tie-ins, let's keep it to one per book per year at the most.
Three. Core books in their major families are frequently not central enough to the shared universe, and while some are enjoyable enough, they just aren't as good as they should be for the pillars of the universe. In particular, the X-Men family of books is in terrible shape. These books need bold creative choices and teams. I appreciate the risks Marvel is taking with many of their characters...yes, even Foolkiller. But their conservative strategy with, for the most part, mid-tier talent on their big team books is a drastic and unflattering contrast to the days when Hickman was on Avengers, or when Remender and Aaron were writing X-books. For my third and final wish, I want to see them taking some chances on those books. The talent doesn't need to be an all-star cast, but those books need all-star concepts and approaches. And when a creative team really clicks with a book, make more of an effort to keep them at the House of Ideas.
That's my two cents for the "what would you have them do" question.
