Posted in: Comics | Tagged: adam kubert, C.B. Cebulski, charles soule, Comics, entertainment, greg pak, Janine Schafer, mahmud asrar, marvel, Ryan Stegman, wolverine

Wolverine Won't Be Back Until At Least 2016 It Seems – The Marvel Panel At Fan Expo

Diana McCallum writes for Bleeding Cool from Fan Expo in Toronto

It's always interesting to see the different panel styles of Marvel and DC at Fan Expo. Whereas DC has an itinerary, a powerpoint, audiences prizes and a short Q&A session at the end, Marvel does their panels entirely as open Q&A's with no prepared presentation.

This year's panel included Adam Kubert, Mahmud Asrar, Ryan Stegman, Greg Pak, C.B. Cebulski, Charles Soule and Janine Schafer.

Charles Soule spent some time talking about She-Hulk and how his own experience as an attorney has helped him shape a few of her stories with a real world feel. Regarding upcoming She-Hulk stories he said Daredevil and She-Hulk will be going up against each other in court on different sides which he believes is the first time that's happened in comics.

"The Defendant is Captain America," he revealed, though he didn't specify which Cap it would be, Steve Rogers or Sam Wilson, but did say the story was "dark and momentous and means a lot for all three characters."

Soule then spent a lot more time talking about Death of Wolverine and what will follow for the character and the Marvel universe.

"The idea is not to bring him back," Soule reiterated. "This isn't one of those stories where he's back in two weeks. The point is to tell an awesome ending story for Wolverine. I'm not gonna say he will never be brought back. I will say for sure that I'm very involved in all the Wolverine related discussions at Marvel right now and the thing we have not talked about at all is how to bring him back and I'm involved in discussions for stuff out into 2016 at this point."

The plans beyond the Death of Wolverine are going to be a direct sequel in the fall, which will be five issues, called Weapon X Project, which Soule is writing.

"And we're also doing another series that runs in parallel with it called Logan's Legacy" which will look at the Marvel universe without Wolverine. Specifically they will look at Sabretooth, X-23, Mystique, and the unknown lead of the Weapon X project book who is "a guy who is kind of intertwined with a huge bad guy from Wolverine's history. I can't talk about any details, but when we revisit this next year and you know what all these things are I hope you'll be as excited about it as I am. There are big plans to do everything except bring him back."

The only thing Soule would say about the death itself was, "The last five pages or so, spoiler, that's where he goes."

Switching over to talk about Inhuman, series artist Ryan Stegman talked about how he has been collaborating with Charles Soule to create some of the many new characters introduced.

"It's rare for me to create characters and have the full backing of Marvel, which we do," Stegman said, then added that "issue 5 [of Inhumans] has a new character named Naja."

An audience question regarding the online cynicism towards the Inhumans and the possibility that they're trying to replace the X-Men was answered by Stegman.

"I read a lot of that cynicism that you talked about and I feel like none of that really matters, we're just creating new characters that you can now latch onto. If we're successful this discussion won't even be happening in five years, you'll just have this awesome team of new characters. … A lot of people say oh they're just rehashing the same old stories, nobody creates new characters, all this stuff, and then we create new characters and everybody's mad about that."

To which C.B. Cebulski also added:

"Internally from a corporate stand point we just kind of look at it and laugh. You know, there's a British gossip columnist who comes up with some wacky theory and puts it out there then the Hollywood Reporter picks up on it and it's suddenly on all this stuff and we just look at it and it's like wow that's really not the case at all in many instances."

[Rich adds: for "comes up with some wacky theory", read "talks to Marvel staffers"…]

Diana McCallum is a writer and the co-creator of Texts from Superheroes. If you like fun stuff, follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/WordsOfDiana

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