COMIC BOOKS: Marvel Grand Design

Dean Poling, The Valdosta Daily Times, Ga.
·1 min read
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Feb. 25—Marvel's "Grand Design" titles are smart introductions to new readers and a compact tour down memory lane for long-time readers.

So far, Marvel Comics has introduced two "Grand Design" titles. One focused on the X-Men, another featured the Hulk.

What "Grand Design" does, and does well, is encapsulate decades of storylines into a relatively small number of pages.

In other words, "X-Men: Grand Design" and "Hulk: Grand Design" tap into all of the major events in the characters' lives and storylines from the origin stories in the early 1960s into more current storylines in recent years.

All told by a single creator. Jim Rugg serves as writer/artist for Hulk. Ed Piskor is writer/artist for X-Men.

"Grand Design" titles also lend themselves to the dozen or so years theory of Marvel Comics.

As Douglas Wolk theorizes in his book, "All of the Marvels," the timeline of Marvel Comics works roughly on the basis that it's always been a little more than a dozen years since the Marvel Universe started. Even if a story started in the early 1960s, like Hulk and X-Men, it's only been about a dozen years since Hulk became Hulk and the X-Men became the X-Men (granted the current Krakoa/Moira MacTaggert storyline throws a bit of a wrench in that theory for the X-Men) — with decades of adventures crunched within that dozen-or-so years.

"X-Men: Grand Design" was published about five years ago. "Hulk: Grand Design" was released last year.

Are other "Grand Designs" in the works? Only time will tell.