Just one day after Marvel revealed the details and creative team of Spirits Of Vengeance, the book has been undercut with the announcement that it will run for just five issues, which is, according to top Marvel brass, "the death knell" for anything in the Marvel Universe that isn't Star Wars.

Back in April, during Marvel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend wherein candid comments made in a closed door retailer meeting by Marvel executives David Gabriel and Axel Alonso were made public, Gabriel revealed Marvel's true feelings on publishing mini-series:

I'm going to tell you, the limited series is the death knell. The only place that it hasn't been a death knell, which is amazing, is on the Star Wars stuff. Anytime we've called something a limited series, it did not hurt the sales at all. You call anything else in the Marvel Universe a limited series, it's dead on arrival.

With such a stark admission from Gabriel, it's surprising that Marvel would publicly reveal that Spirits of Vengeance by Victor Gischler and David Baldeon will be a five issue mini-series rather than launching it as an ongoing and cancelling it later, but that is indeed what the solicitation reveals:

SPIRITS OF VENGEANCE #1 (of 5)

VICTOR GISCHLER (W) • DAVID BALDEON (A)

COVER BY DAN MORA

WAR AT THE GATES OF HELL Part 1

A dead angel. A silver bullet. A kept promise. For ages, the war between Heaven and Hell raged in the unseen corners of society, both sides in delicate balance that could topple if the right weapons were in the wrong hands… When an undercover angel is murdered, Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider, must find the killers and punish them…But this time he won't do it alone: A deadly team must rise from the darkest depths of the Marvel Universe to form an unholy alliance – HELLSTORM! SATANA! BLADE! They are the SPIRITS OF VENGEANCE!

Spirits of Vengeance #1 of 5 arrives in comic stores this fall as part of Marvel Legacy.