Topics: Marvel, Comics, X-Men, Race, Civil Rights, Editor's Picks, Entertainment News

Superman has been the same age for roughy 77 years. He originally landed on Earth in the early 1910s. DC has fixed this problem several times since 1938 with reboots. That means they start the fictional Universe over, usually with a story-based explanation of the incontinuity. Think time-travel paradoxes and alternate Universes colliding. Suddenly Superman dropped on Earth a decade or two after he originally landed. A reboot can fix most time issues by simply moving a character’s origin story forward.

DC’s younger competitor Marvel hasn’t ever done a hard reboot. They generally solve the weird time problem by sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring concrete numbers whenever possible.

The long history of both major comic publishers has created a more difficult problem: the ongoing lack of diversity in comics. Hundreds of thousand of words have been devoted to dissecting this issue, but it’s actually pretty simple. All the icons of comics and the perennial best-sellers come from a time when America was way more openly racist. Stories were told only about good looking, cis-gendered, white men.

Comics are trying to course-correct, but the process is slow. Publishers are afraid to move away from characters (and skin colors) that have historically sold well. And fans who grew up with a certain version of a character have a hard time letting go of the past. (Also, unfortunately, a bunch of fans are way racist.)

This summer Marvel Comics, home of The Avengers, The Fantastic Four,The X-men, and Spider-Man, is smashing all their alternate realities together in a story event called “Secret Wars.” Alternate-reality versions of all the heroes must battle for supremacy in a gigantic cross-over that will affect every single comic that Marvel publishes.

No one knows what version of the Marvel Universe will emerge from the wreckage and become the one that we read stories about. But it looks like Marvel will get its first hard reboot. It’s a great opportunity for Marvel to up their diversity, and to fix a lingering origin issue that can’t get swept away by gently fudging numbers.