Marville (comics)

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Marville is comic book limited series published by Marvel Comics in 2002. The series was written by Bill Jemas, and the stories generally involved satirical comment on comic book industry conventions and trends.

The title was based on the TV series Smallville and issue one featured the main character tied up as a scarecrow with a red 'M' painted on his chest, much as Tom Welling was in the first episode of Smallville and in related publicity material.

The series was critically panned and not well received by most fans who felt that the humour was very lowbrow and that its wit failed to appeal to its target audience. Accusations were made by some critics that its satire of other comics, especially DC Comics, was mean-spirited, while Marvel escaped without criticism. Further, the covers frequently featured painted images of a young woman (not readily recognizable as any of the characters from the actual book) in various states of undress; usually completely nude, but somehow covered enough to avoided being flagged as pornography. This was widely seen as a cheap stunt to pump up sales of a fairly uninteresting book.

The series revisited several existing points of Marvel continuity in a completely irreverent and contradictory manner. For example, the issue titled "Originville" (referencing Origin) visited a prehistoric setting in which Wolverine was a mutant Neanderthal. Despite this, the series' main character, The Marvel (Kal-AOL Turner, the son of Ted Turner, who came from the future) made a cameo appearance in the Marvel Universe series GLA and received a profile in The All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A to Z.

The final issue of Marville, issue #7, did not actually contain a story; instead, it contained the submissions guidelines to Marvel's new Epic Comics imprint.

[edit] U-Decide

Marville was created as part of Marvel's U-Decide event, in which fans would decide which of three books would survive. The event involved one existing book (Peter David's Captain Marvel, which was rebooted to issue #1) and two new books (Marville and Ron Zimmerman's Ultimate Adventures), and was based around a bet between David and Jemas, of which Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada later became a part. Jemas changed the stakes of the bet a few issues into Marville, stating that the loser would take a pie in the face for charity. Despite this, both Marville and Ultimate Adventures ended fairly quickly, while the rebooted Captain Marvel would last three more years and 25 more issues, for a total of 60 issues when combined with the first run.