Alex, shhhhh! Well, too late.
The Daily Beast recently published an interview with legendary comics artist Alex Ross entitled “The Michelangelo of Superheroes”. It’s a good article. You should go read it.
But in case you don’t, or do and miss something that really jumped out at me regarding Marvel Comics and their superhugemassive Secret Wars event, let me highlight a couple of nuggets for you. The gist is that it will pretty much be business as usual for Marvel after Secret Wars concludes.
When asked to speculate on why Marvel was resetting their comic book universe:
I don’t know how much of that “resetting their universe” is true. I’m on the other side of working on stuff post-reset and as far as I can tell, it looks exactly as it was just before the Secret Wars event. They are not doing a “New 52,” I can tell you that.
More post-Secret Wars observations when asked about changes in Spider-Man:
This is still the Peter Parker who is picking up after he had the year or two that Doctor Octopus had stolen his body—that story is still canon. Nothing has rebooted about him. As far as I understand, the biggest change is that now you have Miles Morales in the regular Marvel Universe. Look at the Avengers lineup: Falcon is still Captain America, we still have a female Thor. Everything is still where our storylines last led up to. I’m not aware of any other major thing.
So there you have it. From what Alex Ross can tell, there is no reset at all, or even truly big changes, to the Marvel comic universe post-Secret Wars.
A couple of other interesting tidbits…
Thoughts on the tone of comics these days:
Now it’s all post-Watchmen. Everybody’s trying to make their stuff seem as serious as something like that. It was thought that after Watchmen came out in the ’80s we entered this dark comic spirit. Well, if you compare what’s being going on in the last 15 years of publishing versus the ’90s, we didn’t even know about dark back then.
Ross doesn’t use computers:
I don’t know how to use a computer. I’ve never typed a single sentence or sent a single email by myself. Generally, I try to keep all my efforts to working on paper.
The full article has a lot more , including his Secret Wars cover designs, the difference between comic book and video game art projects, his new costume design for the Peter Parker Spider-Man (which I personally dislike, as much as I like Alex Ross’s work in general), and proposing Spider-Man costumer designs for two of the Sam Raimey movies.
Full article on The Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/09/the-michelangelo-of-superheroes.html