History of Venture Comics, Pt. 13: The Plutonium Age
First up, our conversation about the age itself, and how it affected Sentinel Comics! I discussed this briefly above, but more in-depth: the Plutonium Age is a term I use and which I originally saw online, but which is not in highly widespread use. It describes the period in modern comics starting around Identity Crisis in 2004 and House of M in 2005, and covers the period in which the status quo was constantly exploding and being rebuilt, with a new company-wide crossover every year or two to try and draw eyeballs. My general feeling is that the Plutonium Age isn’t actually over, but I think we’re in a cooldown period for it, with crossovers starting to be between a handful of titles again rather than with literally everyone. I have also seen this referred to as the Event Age, for basically the same reason. Other people peg the turnover of ages as being between the Iron Age and the Diamond Age around 2012, with a shift to digital comics, an increasing focus on cinematic tie-ins and comics being changed to reflect live-action counterparts, and a desire to blend Silver Age optimism with Iron Age grittiness. But essentially, there’s no real agreement about what age of comics history we’re currently in.
One of the decisions explicitly made by Christopher and Adam is that Sentinel Comics doesn’t have a Plutonium Age, because Sentinel Comics largely avoids the escalating company-wide crossovers, constant reboots, and stunt events that dominated the late 2000s and 2010s and doesn’t have the same cinematic kickoff. Instead, Sentinel Comics simply expands at a steady clip for fourteen years. Disparation Vol. 2 launches in 2002, Ra becomes Arcane Tales again in 2006, and Alpha: the Wolf Woman and Cosmic Concurrence join the team in 2008, taking us to twelve monthly and one bi-monthly comic.
2011-2012 is a bit more confusing. We definitely get five new books (Southwest Sentinels, Time and Time Again, Prime Wardens, The Guise Book, and Revocorp Presents) and one cancellation (Dark Watch). But the lead-up to the relaunch of Prime Wardens is the last time that either Fanatic or Savage Haka are mentioned anywhere, with no specific notes about their cancellation. They aren’t mentioned in the lead-up to Oblivaeon either, so I think they’re cancelled here, but I’m not sure. So we could be anywhere from fourteen to sixteen monthly titles, one bi-monthly, and various limited runs.
Finally, a new Dark Watch launches in 2015, along with the reboot of the Southwest Sentinels through the Deepest Space limited series into Void Guard, taking us to a total of fifteen to seventeen monthly titles, one bi-monthly, and the limited runs. For those who are curious, this is about a quarter the size of Marvel or DC in the same era. All of these comics are then cancelled in 2016 and 2017 in and around Oblivaeon in a company-wide reboot.
Obviously, Venture is doing quite a bit worse than that, thanks to the chaos. And speaking of chaos, we begin with…
Randomizers:
Options: 49 (Heretic/Razorline), 82 (Scion of Silence), 71 (Empress of Ash), 21 (Drifter)
Cancellation: 16 (Liberty’s Dream)
New Comic: 20 - 16 (New Solo Hero), 8 (Classic Title Reboot: Vanguards!)
Ashes to Ashes (2005)
Main Comic: Twilight Carnival #243-250, March-October 2005
Major Crossovers: Earthwatch #54-57 (Apr-July), Champions of Truth #392-395 (June-Sep), Liberty’s Dream #32-36 (June-Oct),
Minor Crossovers: Cryptic Trails #32-33 (Apr-May), Spectacular Skybreaker #221 (May), Vanguards (Vol. 2) #1 (Aug)
The first major crossover of the Plutonium Era was a magic-focused one that ran through much of 2005, touching on seven different comics and ultimately collected in six trade paperbacks (one of which also included the classic Sovereign of Secrets finale from 1984 to help explain the setup.) Writers had noticed that the hero Heretic, who had made a handful of minor appearances since the end of Remnants ten years earlier, shouldn’t have powers according to the rules they had set up - the Sovereign of Secrets was gone, and they had been the source of Heretic’s abilities.
It seemed like a good time for a bit of 90s nostalgia and a test of major crossover events, so the Ashes to Ashes event unfolded in the pages of Twilight Carnival, focusing on Heretic and pushing the usual main cast to supporting roles. Heretic, who was still trying to atone for mistaking the Sovereign for a holy being, discovered that his powers did not stem from the Sovereign at all - they drew from the Empress of Ash, and the light and flames that he channeled were Her terrible forces! The Empress was planning to use the Heretic as a link to devour the Sovereign’s realm, adding their power to her own and becoming an unstoppable threat to every dimension. As her power reached out, mingling the frenzy of flame with wishcrafting, Heretic was forced to turn to the least likely ally imaginable - the Scion of Silence. Together, and supported by the Twilight Carnival, the hero and the villain delved into the dimensions, working to break the link that the Empress had forged between her own magic and the Sovereign’s.
Three major storylines branched off from this event. In the pages of Earthwatch, Nightguard and Gale Force were caught in the Empress’s new magic, drawn into a vision of a world in which their powers were burned away, leaving them as civilians in their ideal bodies. At the same time, monstrous forces using their powers attacked the rest of the team. In the end, the two heroes were forced to sacrifice their dreams to save their friends, but they came out of the story in a new relationship and with even more determination. In Champions of Truth, the Empress assailed the Earth’s greatest heroes, her forces threatening to burn the world to keep them from assisting her enemies; only quick action by Wonderer was able to protect the team as they developed countermeasures. And in Liberty’s Dream, the four heroes were joined by Moon Angel, whose powers were retconned to be fae-related, as they fought to save worlds on the fringes of existence from being absorbed as the twin realms of the Sovereign and the Empress pressed in on them from both sides. Greenheart and Skybreaker also had solo events in their own comics, and the newly-launched Vanguards Volume 2 began with the team, now including Partisan once again, dispatched to the Jotari realm to save the provisional government from the newly-reinforced Cult of the Flames.
In the grand conclusion, Heretic did what comics fans joked he did in every issue - he sacrificed himself, cutting off the Empress’s influence, becoming the lock on the Sovereign’s tomb and sealing the Scion away once again when he tried to betray the hero and unleash his master. This time, however, Heretic understood that a thread of power was needed to prevent the dimensional god from gathering its power and breaking free in another few years. As such, the spirit of the Heretic went searching for a new hero to bear his mantle, one who would be willing to give up their soul to save the world, channelling dark power for the greater good. The new Heretic series, featuring the ghostly Heretic and his new disciple, would launch in November 2005.
Behind the Scenes
Our first event turned out to be a magical one! There has been some interest expressed in Heretic getting his own series, so when he showed up at the very beginning, and alongside the source of his powers no less, I had to go for it (doubly when we had a new hero debuted after the event!) I went back and forth for a bit on whether I wanted to have the Drifter or the Empress be the third character; with the Drifter, it becomes more of a mirror worlds thing, whereas for the Empress it would be a “one great monster tries to eat another, using the Heretic as her tool.” But since our other new comic was Vanguards, and they were Empress-related, we went for the latter. I like how it turned out, but boy, it must have been exhausting to try to read all of it.
Also: poor Madame Liberty. Her titles get cancelled a lot.