Unchained Doggerel: Marvel’s Avengers Vs. X-Men Panel and Quentin Tarantino’s SDCC 2012 Announcement

We’ve seen a lot of cool things at San Diego Comic-Con over the past couple of days, but the Marvel Comic Avengers Vs. X-Men panel held this afternoon wasn’t one of them. Iron Man’s new armor from the upcoming Iron Man 3 movie was, so here it is. Get a good look? Good. Now let’s get back to the bad news.

Avengers Vs. X-Men is Marvel’s marquee summer event for 2012, and we are at about the midpoint of the story, and shit is heating up. We’ve got five X-Men possessed by the Phoenix Force, Hope is being trained by Iron Fist’s sensei to learn to repel the Phoenix, Tony Stark is working with Black Panther to find a way to defeat the Phoenix Force with a combination of science and magic, and Spider-Man is getting at least one of the best moments in a comic set in the 616 universe he’s had in years. So while the event isn’t perfect, there’s a lot of fan excitement around the event and what it has in store for us for the rest of the summer.

So it was with a palpable sense of excitement that we filled the third-biggest room at the San Diego Convention Center at 2:45 this afternoon to discover some tidbits about what the Marvel House of Ideas might have coming up for the fans.

Turns out? It’s hats.

Yeah, the biggest announcement that Marvel Editorial had that hadn’t already been announced at the Cup O’ Joe panel yesterday was that New Era’s made a deal with Marvel to produce a line of Avengers Vs. X-Men-inspired baseball caps. They also announced that there will be an Avengers Vs. X-Men module added to the Avengers Facebook game that will allow people to play any member of the Phoenix Five. Except for Namor; you can’t play him. No reason was given, but based on his recently-shown predilections, I’m guessing it’s because they’re afraid players would take Namor into Farmville looking for a little God-mode, unauthorized NPC action.

And really, when it came to new information (other than re-announcing A+X, Avengers Vs. X-Men: Consequences and AvX Babies, which they already announced yesterday, that was all we got. Here are my notes from the panel, copied verbatim: “New Era offering AvX line of hats. Fucking really? I’m at a panel for an ongoing event comic, and I have to hear about fucking hats? Oh, Henry on Once Upon A Time read a copy of AvX? The fuck I don’t give? It is enormous. If I pitched AvX-Brand Soothing Taint Cream, I’d be on that Goddamned stage right now.”

Oh sure, once the crowd questions started we got a few tidbits. Senior X-Men Editor Nick Lowe said, “AvX has huge ramifications on the Marvel Universe,” and Editor In Chief Axel Alonso added, “AvX ends with a bang. A lot of you are gonna be pissed at us.”

Oh, that’s not true, Axel… at least not at that point. The point I got pissed was when the only other things that were revealed at the panel were that Nick Lowe had written a NextWave theme song, and that Monica Rambeaux from NextWave would have some kind of appearance or mention in the next five months. Again, back to my notes: “Nick Lowe just sane a NextWave theme song. I flew across the country to hear a comics creator sing me fucking doggerel?”

Make no mistake: DC Comics’s panels have problems of their own; they had plenty of repetition of their own, and there were times where I felt like I’d been  told that Talon had a useful background as an escape artist about two times two many. And I will discuss those DC problems a little later on, but there’s one thing you can’t deny: at least they made some useful and pertinent comics announcements. Like Neil Gaiman’s return to Sandman. And then there was today, at the Before Watchmen panel.

When Quentin Tarantino showed up to announce that he’s giving his Django Unchained script to DC Comics to produce a 5 issue miniseries. His uncut, original script, that… ah, hell; I’ll let this exclusive Crisis On Infinite Midlives video of Tarantino’s announcement tell you:

Okay, that’s it for now. We attended a couple of DC panels today, including the DC Original Graphic Novel panel with Tony Bourdain, Geoff Johns and JMS and the details of the Before Watchmen panel that we’ll share as soon as we sober up (including some video in the near future). And today’s live-tweet feed will be posted first thing tomorrow morning.

In the meantime? I’m in search of more liquor to drive that NextWave theme out of my skull.