There were reports circulating last week that Marvel was going to axe ULTIMATE MARVEL MAGAZINE and its sister MARVEL KNIGHTS title. As far as I can tell, those are totally unconfirmed, and both those titles are still in the solicitations for November. So it probably isn't true.

Mind you, it's very plausible, isn't it? Which started me wondering just how well the Ultimate line is doing.

Now, I live in Glasgow. Marvel doesn't even try to distribute the reprint magazines on newsstands over here. I've seen the things in my comics store, of course, but I'm relying entirely on hearsay evidence as to how well the thing is selling in the USA. Most of the reports, though, are to the effect that you can't find the damn things anywhere. Which would suggest that either they're selling incredibly quickly, or they're not making much impact at all. The latter seems more likely.

I can well understand why newsstand retailers would be wary. These are comics. Comics don't sell. The names of the creators involved might mean something to us, but if we were going to buy the books, we'd probably have already done so through the direct market several months previously. That leaves casual readers who don't generally buy comics. So we're trying to persuade retailers that they would like to stock a relatively expensive reprint comic, aimed at people who don't buy comics, containing pretty much the same sort of stories that those people weren't buying in existing comics.

Well gee whiz, thinks the average retailer. I'll order a ton of those things. They'll sell like hot cakes.

What exactly is meant to be the selling point on these things? The material being good is all very well, but nobody's going to know that until they've actually read one. What's supposed to interest these people in comics they were not otherwise interested in? The fact that the pages are a bit larger? The anthology format? The word "magazine"?

What is meant to be the selling point on these things? From what I've seen of them, it's stretching a point to call them magazines. They seem to consist of two or three reprinted stories and a load of glorified house adverts. Putting it on a different shelf and making it look glossier isn't exactly going to shatter preconceptions. Hyping the involvement of Kevin Smith might have helped - I would hope that MARVEL KNIGHTS MAGAZINE had the common sense to push that on its front cover, but I have a sinking feeling they probably didn't. And ULTIMATE was displaying a very bizarre editorial approach in its first few issues, running Spider-Man and X-Men reprints on alternate months (even though this meant two month gaps between chapters of the same story).

Which is unfortunate, given that these two publications were among Marvel's key initiatives to expand the market. If they fail, it leaves the Marvel Knights line looking ever more pointless (what exactly does it do these days that the rest of the line doesn't?), and practically removes the Ultimate imprint's reason to exist. Because the primary rationale for that line is the commercial one - to be a quality, easy access route into Marvel's characters for completely new readers. The separate titles are doing very nicely in the direct market, but that's not their main purpose.

The creative function of the Ultimate books has always been fuzzy. It starts from the reasonable viewpoint that the accumulated history of the Marvel Universe has become a downright nuisance. One solution to that is to quietly draw a line under it and do stories that move forwards without incessantly referencing the past. The other approach is to do the same character again in a new universe, free from baggage.

For ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, this makes sense. Brian Bendis is writing stories about a novice, teenage Spider-Man. You can't do those stories with the mainstream Spider-Man, who is a married man in his mid to late twenties. He can't sensibly be reverted to a teenager, and he's not the sort of character you can kill off and replace. ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP is a bit weird, doing crash course introductions to established characters. The whole thing strikes me as a bit pointless; the book amounts to a tour of the major Marvel trademarks, each appearing in the closest you can get to a nice, character-defining story when for some impenetrable reason Spider-Man has to be worked into every issue. The characters are being tinkered with a bit, but they're basically the same.

If they fail, it practically removes the Ultimate imprint's reason to exist. ULTIMATE X-MEN, on the other hand, is strange. Now granted, I come at this book from the minority viewpoint that Mark Millar is wildly overrated. Even so, the logic of Millar's approach is elusive. With the exception of Wolverine, Millar's versions of the original characters have virtually nothing in common with the originals besides names, powers and character design. The superficial stuff. It's pretty obvious that Millar has no interest in the original characters given that he's effectively hollowed them out and replaced them with completely new characters (all of them pretty much indistinguishable from one another) in the same shells. It does make you wonder why he didn't just create new characters and be done with it.

Millar and Hitch's upcoming ULTIMATES begs the same question. It has the same roster as the Avengers. Millar and Hitch are at pains to emphasise that it is not like the Avengers and that the characters are going to be very different from the original versions. Now, maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but what is the point of doing a cover version of the Avengers which aims to be as unlike the Avengers as possible? Why not just do something else instead, if you find the original idea so unappealing?

Bendis and Millar seem to be operating on completely different philosophies as to what the creative aim of the Ultimate imprint is meant to be. Bendis, for the most part, is getting back to the core of the original character and removing some of the problems with the original concepts that have become obvious in retrospect. Millar seems to be revelling in making his characters as different as possible from the originals, which surely defeats the point of bothering to use the same characters at all. These books are tenuously linked by the commercial rationale that they're meant to be suitable material for the new readers on the newsstands. Take that away and you're left wondering what exactly the line is for. To tell good stories? Sure, but all comics should aspire to that. To create a parallel Marvel Universe to sell to the same people who were buying the old one? Why bother?

Of course, the magazines aren't the only route to the elusive new audience. There's always the trade paperbacks. But I'm sceptical about trade paperbacks as a way to pick up new readers for the superhero genre. Trade paperbacks are not conducive to impulse buying. They cost money. And Marvel's trade paperbacks are not exactly priced for cheapness.

Either DC is pricing its books cheaply, or Marvel is making its trades expensive. Don't believe me? Okay... flicking through August's Previews at random, I see that for a mere US$25.00, Marvel will sell me the SENTRY trade paperback. It's 240 pages long. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Then again, DC will sell me BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN for $20.00, and it's 368 pages long. For $15.00, I could buy five collected issues of X-FORCE. But I could get ten of SUPERGIRL. (Incidentally, that X-FORCE trade paperback is $4.75 more expensive than buying the individual issues.)

Now granted, Marvel's prices are more closely in line with, say, Image. And the trade paperback reader will benefit by not having to wade through the adverts, and getting a nicer looking package to put on his shelf. Even so, something about that price discrepancy is very weird. Either DC is pricing its books absurdly cheaply, or Marvel is making its trades unnecessarily expensive. And in either event, in terms of how long it'll take to read them, most trade paperbacks are terrible value for money compared to the novels they're sharing the space with. I really don't see most superhero stories overcoming that.

If Marvel doesn't want to do a proper magazine - with real articles rather than house adverts - then maybe they'd be better going for the cheap and cheerful reprint option, piling on the page count, paring back the paper quality and production values, and producing a cheap package of decent material that might at least qualify as an impulse purchase. You could reprint a four issue miniseries in one newsstand digest if you really wanted - they'd fit into the space of the "100 page monster" format. Granted, those books apparently run as loss leaders, so the price would have to rise. Perhaps the economics don't add up. But you'd have thought a cheap, black and white digest collection of, say, Garth Ennis' Punisher stories might be reasonably marketable.

The magazines seem to be trying to look classy. They're not managing it, and I doubt that it's the right marketing approach for that material anyway. Whatever you think of ULTIMATE X-MEN's artistic merits, surely the selling point isn't that it's classy. Doesn't it make more sense to play up the attitude and the irreverence?

The ULTIMATE line has the right starting idea - which is that it would like to sell more comics to people who don't already buy them. But it seems to have very confused ideas about just how it's trying to achieve that, both creatively and commercially. They may be good comics, but are they really bringing in the new readers that were supposed to be such a key aim of the line?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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