I’m back, well-rested, and ready to launch into the final time period of Venture Comics (at least to date):
History of Venture Comics, Pt. 14: Dawn of the Diamond Age
In 2018, Venture Comics launched its final cross-company event to date. Once again, the lines had become increasingly tangled, complicated by contradictions, reboots, and crossovers that demanded ever-growing attention, and the editors had agreed that it was time for a change.
This event, “Passing the Torch”, had no grand villain. There were no crossovers between issues. The editors didn’t want the event to be seen as a pale imitation of the massive Oblivaeon event that had taken place only two years earlier. Instead, the event became smaller-scale. Over the course of October 2018 through February 2019, each comic wrapped up their major storylines, and came to a conclusion.
The Celestial Travelers resolved the civil war raging on the edges of the Galactic Union, bringing more worlds into the fold. The Twilight Carnival established itself as a safe haven for monsters and magical folk from around the world. Skybreaker and Solace welcomed a second child, one that Solace had thought that her half-banshee nature wouldn’t allow her. Protean graduated college and finally started dating Cassie. And so on.
As “Passing the Torch” concluded, hints and whispers of what came next began to circulate. Pitches for unusual new comics. Stories about wiser, older heroes and a new generation of hopefuls. And finally, “Venture Comics: The New Age” was revealed. Beginning in March 2019, on the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Venture Comics, a new set of ten comics would be unveiled, taking place fifteen years after the end of “Passing the Torch”. These comics would be a mixture of revisiting classic Venture heroes, now much older and more established, and unveiling the new heroes of the age.
A new sliding timescale was put into place, organizing Venture’s history to account for the new timeskip. The revised timeline for Venture Comics, with a certain amount of wiggle room and uncertainty, was as follows:
- Comics published in the Golden Age occurred in roughly the years that they were published, taking place between 1939 and 1954.
- There was a nebulous period of about twenty-five years during which heroes had faded into the background and the world had moved on normally.
- Comics published in the Silver Age (between 1956 and 1970) remained a five-year period of history, but was moved up to occur in the early 80s.
- The span of publications from 1970 to 1985 was revised to be a roughly ten-year period between 1985 and 1995. It was further assumed that the Sovereign’s magic caused a number of heroes to become younger at the end of this time.
- The span of time running from 1985 to 2000 was revised to be a roughly five-year period between 1995 and 2000.
- The complicated span of time running from 2000 to 2018 was revised to be a very chaotic five-year period between 2000 and 2005.
- The new era of comics would begin in the very near future of 2020, which the editors were well-aware would catch up to comic time quite quickly. There was the risk of this creating odd divergences, but it seemed unlikely that there would be any cataclysmic global events early in 2020 that would leave Venture’s setting noticeably different from the real world.
The result of all of this was that most of the established heroes of Venture Comics had been active for up to twenty-five years of comics time (with a de-aging process to account for anyone who clearly weren’t in the forties after Sovereign of Silence), followed by a fifteen-year timeskip, giving them up to forty years of active practice and twenty-five to forty years of aging and moving most of them to the status of elders of the community.
It wasn’t clear whether this new direction would be a bold success or a disastrous failure, but what was clear was that it was something very new and different in the current world of comics…
Behind the Scenes
Here we go! I’ve been thinking about a Diamond Age timeskip for a while, and I decided to go for it. It’s a good way to wipe the slate clean enough while reassuring the older fans that everything they read matters. The exact timing of it means that Venture Comics didn’t have a Covid outbreak, which I admittedly think is kind of funny. I suspect that Covid is both a huge wrench and a potential benefit to the early comics, pushing Venture more online and boosting sales as people are home, but with corresponding delays and missed issues right as they’re launching.
And now, it’s time for another quick look into how our main metaversal company is doing. Sentinel Comics’ metaversal history in the post-Oblivaeon era is bizarre, in part because of the real-world pressures that shaped it*.*
For reference, Marvel and DC comics were each running around seventy titles a month in the late 2010s; both then trimmed down during Covid and are currently holding stable at about fifty titles per month.
Up to this point, Sentinels has been far behind the IRL curve in terms of number of total titles, with only around sixteen to eighteen monthly titles (counting limited series) in 2016, all of which ended in 2016-2017 during and immediately after Oblivaeon.
In 2017, they launch twenty new titles, which means an immediate but slight increase over their 2016 numbers, and in 2018, they add another seven new titles and a series of limited-run comics, bringing them to twenty-eight monthly titles, nearly double what they were putting out two years earlier. In 2019, the main Sentinels line adds another currently-undisclosed number of titles, but also Vertex starts up, adding six titles of its own. Vertex goes up to twelve titles in 2020 and then nineteen in 2021 plus various one-shots and limited runs, and then starts shedding titles at a rapid pace until everything is gone by 2024; at the very end, two new titles join the main line in 2025. In total, Vertex only lasts about five years, with a couple of stragglers making it to six.
Depending on the size of the third wave of Sentinel Comics, this means that the company probably briefly reach around fifty titles a month in 2021, with 40% of those titles taking place in a second universe, after which the second universe collapses over the course of three years. By comparison, Ultimate Marvel, the closest example in the real world, only had around five consistent titles plus around two or three limited runs in any given month for its first ten years, then spent five years slowly declining to a low of two monthly issues before finally being cancelled in a miniseries in 2015.
Vertex is weird. It starts too close to a company-wide reboot, it grows too fast, it almost overtakes the main line, and then it collapses at a truly shocking speed. I suspect that this is because it was originally intended to be the main line post-Oblivaeon, and it got revised to being the secondary one when Sentinel Tactics failed, but it really should have only had a handful of titles. The rise and fall would have made sense if, say, there were four titles in 2019, growing to six in 2020, eight in 2021, and then they push their luck and try to jump to twelve in 2022 and everything starts falling apart, with a much longer tail on the collapse and the whole thing winding down around 2028-2030.