Marvel Comics is well known for recycling storylines and gimmicks every few decades in order to drive sales. Their latest retread is coming in the form of the “Heroes Reborn” storyline, looking to release in April 2021. In a tweet released on the social media platform Twitter, Marvel posted an orange banner with white text that is serving as the banner for the upcoming titles.
#MarvelHeroesReborn 2021 pic.twitter.com/zJxkkq0EZp
— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) January 21, 2021
This tweet was followed up with another one 24 hours later that shows off some of the teaser covers for the upcoming titles, all done by artist Carlos Pacheco (Ultimate Avengers), which you can see in the gallery below.
At this point in time, there is nothing revealed outside of these teaser images and the release month. There might be more information when the Marvel Previews go live for preorder at your local comic shop with the February Previews Book that all stores get to promote the comics to the public long before release so the stores can do their orders 2 months ahead of time.
This isn’t the first time that Marvel has done the Heroes Reborn type story. The first one was back in 1996, in which a lot of the heroes who had died at the hands of Onslaught were reborn in a pocket universe created by Franklin Richards. In this pocket universe, a lot of the heroes returned to doing what they do best, but with some changes. A lot of the original Heroes Reborn had to do with modernizing the characters for a new generation of readers, making them relatable to the late 1990s era kids and teenagers.
The changes to some of the characters were so outlandish and controversial that Marvel mandated that things be brought to an end as soon as possible, leading in the story to Franklin having to decide the fate of the pocket universe and the Earth-616 universe (Earth-616 is the mainline Marvel universe). Franklin returns all the heroes who were native to Earth-616 so that they can return to “normality” in their primary universe, but also keep the pocket universe too. The short story format of Heroes Reborn, which was originally meant to be a whole new reboot that stuck around forever, was unresolved for the most part, leading to a limited-run mini-series “Heroes Reborn: The Return” in 1997, and brought to a proper close with the events of “Onslaught Reborn” in 2006.
Marvel loves trying (and mostly failing) at rebooting their mainline universe every few years to “shake things up” (aka drive up readership) before returning to the status-quo later down the track. This could be Marvel’s latest attempt at such a thing, or just wanting to test the waters with new characters or character ideas that could find themselves added to the Earth-616 universe down the track which has happened before, with the dissolving of the Ultimate Universe (aka Earth-1610) in 2015, the character of Miles Morales was placed into the Earth-616 universe where he continues to thrive as a well-written alternative to Peter Parker’s Spider-Man, with both characters sharing the name and costume styles.
Marvel is looking to release Heroes Reborn 2021 in April 2021.
