Marvel Ending 33 Series Before Secret Wars

Game over, man! Game over! A mighty culling is coming prior to the mega-event that is this summer’s Secret Wars, as had been foretold by our ancestors…Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort. Yes, it would appear that all the ‘Time Runs Out’ banners atop many a Marvel book were leading to this point and we now know which titles are no longer long for this world. Ashcan to ashcan, dust jacket to dust jacket, here are the 33 (yes, 33!) current ongoing series that will come to a close prior to warring in secret:

• All-New Captain America
• All-New Ghost Rider
• All-New X-Men
• Amazing Spider-Man
• Amazing X-Men
• Angela: Asgard’s Assassin
• Avengers
• Avengers World
• Captain Marvel
• Cyclops
• Deadpool
• Elektra
• Fantastic Four
• Guardians 3000
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Hulk
• Inhuman
• Iron Fist: The Living Weapon
• Legendary Star-Lord
• Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man
• New Avengers
• Nightcrawler
• Nova
• Rocket Raccoon
• Secret Avengers
• Spider-Man & The X-Men
• Spider-Man 2099
• Storm
• Superior Iron Man
• Thor
• Uncanny X-Men
• Wolverines
• X-Men

Goodness, that’s quite a list. Collectively these titles are reaching what Marvel’s SVP of Sales & Marketing, David Gabriel, in an interview with ComicBook.com, calls the “616 Finale!” What exactly does that entail?

“It means that there will be a “616 finale!” and that means exactly what many fans have suspected – everything ends. We’ve been saying it over and over again but at the core,Battleworld IS the Marvel Universe when Secret Wars #1 hits in May. But before that, there will be a number of titles reaching, what we’re calling, a “616 finale,” ending those stories and characters as you knew them – for now!”

All-New Marvel For Now! might be a bit bulky on the banners of each book, no? How exactly all these series are going to come to a conclusion appears to have been a collaborative process.

“Now in a perfect world, we’d have stopped every book with its April issue, putting out a nice clean May Previews catalog. Everyone would have seen upfront all those titles that had their finale, and all those titles that were starting fresh. But things don’t always go so easily,” Gabriel explained. “Instead we gave our creators the option to end their stories the way they wanted to; we let them tell “Last Days” stories if they wanted to; we let them tell Secret Wars stories if they wanted to. So in the end Secret Wars truly has been a creative driven process.”

Secret Wars is shaping up to be an all-encompassing, inescapable, line-wide event that will leave “Battleworld” as THE Marvel Unvierse throughout. Absent from the above list are recently launched and well received titles such as Spider-Gwen, Silk, Howard The Duck and many others, but Gabriel makes it clear that “Secret Wars will affect every title in some way shape or form.”

Does this mean that all of our beloved Marvel titles, from X-Men to Thor to Avengers are going away forever, never again to be held in our hands and in our hearts? Yes, obviously. Things will never be the same again! Okay, no, not really. What it does indicate is that Marvel is going all-in with Secret Wars and reshaping their entire line in a fairly unprecedented manner. For the better? For the worse? That’s yet to be decided, but for now, relish the closing chapters of the aforementioned 33 titles if you’ve been enjoying them because yes, time is running out and exactly what lies ahead remains a mystery. Shhh….secrets!