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Can You Survive the Avengers Arena?

Recently, Marvel has been pimping their big reboot/revamp/re-whatever.

I haven’t been discussing it here because, to tell you the truth, almost everything they’ve announced or teased has seemed to me uninspired and really just the same-old-same-old.

Until now.

A couple weeks ago, Marvel dropped the following teaser image which had people guessing:

But now it’s been revealed exactly what Survive means.

A Q&A with Dennis Hopeless, Kev Walker and Bill Rosemann has revealed that Survive represents a brand new comic called Avengers Arena.

The premise of this comic is that Arcade, longtime thorn in the side of the X-Men, is pitting the teenaged heroes of the Marvel universe against each other in a Battle Royale/Hunger Games style fight-to-the-death tournament.

Bringing together characters from Avengers Academy, Runaways, and more, Avengers Arena seems to me to be the most original idea of Marvel’s revamp yet.

When I say “original,” I’m not saying it’s never been done before. What I’m saying is that this is a controversial move to make by Marvel. In the Q&A, Hopeless, Walker and Rosemann are clear that Avengers Arena is a direct homage to Battle Royale. Even the cover of the first issue almost an exact copy of the Battle Royale poster.

I’m of two minds on this.

What I like is that it appears that Marvel is going to have these characters go full on Lord of the Flies with their teenaged characters. In my opinion there are some glaring omissions to the characters being used, but hey! Maybe they’ll show up for season 2?

But what I’m not too sure of, and why I think this is a risky move on Marvel’s behalf, is that every character is someone’s favorite, even these relatively new teens.

I remember when I used to read Generation-X. During that comic, and even after it ended, various writers thought it would be good for the stories to kill off my favorite members: Mondo (shot to death), Synch (dead by bomb blast, protecting his team), Skin (crucified by mutant haters), Maggott (taken to a mutant concentration camp and executed), and Chamber (left for dead after having his mutant powers stripped from him).

So I understand what it’s like to have favorite characters killed out from under you by silly writers and their silly, pointless ideas.

Also, there’s the fact that Marvel seems to need to brand everything with Avengers now that the movie was so hot this year. But that’s a business decision that I can kind of understand. They gotta make money.

I’m really not sure how to take Avengers Academy. For this to work, it has to be incredible violent or people buying for the obvious Battle Royale homage will not keep buying.

So who exactly is this comic being written for? Not the fans of the characters who are all (presumably) going to be killed off one-by-one.

Anyway, check out the full Q&A for more info and make your own mind up. I know I’m going to at least give this comic a chance as it seems to be one of few ideas out of Marvel that isn’t just the same-old-same-old super heroing.