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Marvel Continues To Reinvigorate Itself; Partners With TRU for X-Men
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 It's no secret that the past few years have been rough ones for the comic industry as a whole, and Marvel Comics in particular. Once the undisputed king of the comic book world, Marvel has had to deal with everything from bankruptcy, loss of key creative and editorial folks, slumping sales and plummeting stock prices.But, all is not lost. The House of Ideas is fighting their way back with a vengeance. Currently, the company has a lot of their hopes pinned on the upcoming X-Men and Spider-Man movies. In an effort to attract new readers to the medium, which the industry desperately needs, Marvel has created a new Ultimate line of books. The Ultimate line, which will launch with The Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimate Spider-Man feature fresh relaunches of these classic characters, devoid of 40 years of continuity and baggage in hopes of making the books more attractive to new readers. To further garner attention from the current non-comics readers and capitalize on the X-Men movie, Marvel is planning to give away free special editions of the upcoming Wolverine comic that serves as a prequel to the movie at theaters showing the film. Also, Marvel is teaming up with Toys R Us stores to set up a X-Men boutique in the front of the stores (similar to the Star Wars section last year), offering various X-Men and Marvel products such as the extensive Toy Biz X-Men movie action figures, and other tie-in products. Toysrus.com also features a section of the online store completely devoted to Marvel's Merry Mutants. As part of the deal, Toys R Us will eventually offer the Unlimited line of comics, as well as some key Marvel titles.  Another salvo in the bid to attract new fans is the upcoming X-Men Evolution animated series coming to the Kids WB! network this fall. The series also starts from it's own fresh continuity, with teenage versions of Cyclops, Rogue, Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde as students at Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters still learning about and developing their mutant powers. (For more information on the animated series, as well as a group shot of the show's cast, check out Comics Continuum)
Toy Biz is, of course, hard at work on an accompanying toyline based on the animated series. All of this, together with the other Marvel properties in various stages of development as movies or television series, show distinct signs of life for the house that Stan and Jack built, and that's good for the industry as a whole. [Posted 5/18/2000]
  
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