This Month in All-New OHOTMU A-Z #6...

[Sean McQuaid]

Avengers-related subjects profiled in this issue include Korvac, the Kree, Loki, Mach-4, Machine Man, Madame Masque, Magdalene & more. 64 pages, $3.99 cover price, on sale this week...

-Sean

[Leebenhouse]

Where was the Vance Astrovik Justice?

[Sean McQuaid]

Where was the Vance Astrovik Justice?

Vance got a 2-page profile in the Avengers 2005 handbook just last year, so he was passed over this time around.

-Sean

[Leebenhouse]

Question, back in the day there was an update book on new/ characters that had significant changes. This included Iron Man with his new armor post-Armor Wars.

Nowadays, on an almost annual basis characters undergo radical changes, I.e. Justice and Firestar's breakup, and Iron Man having powers now(?). Who if at all anyone, will recieve updated profiles? And what about some of the Cosmic Characters? Are the ones not thusfar featured in the Handbook going to appear in the Anihilation handbook?

[Sean McQuaid]

Question, back in the day there was an update book on new/ characters that had significant changes. This included Iron Man with his new armor post-Armor Wars. Nowadays, on an almost annual basis characters undergo radical changes, I.e. Justice and Firestar's breakup, and Iron Man having powers now(?). Who if at all anyone, will recieve updated profiles?

We'd like to update all dramatically changed characters eventually, but for the current A-Z run, we've mostly tried to avoid updating profiles done within the last year-plus since we didn't want to saddle regular handbook readers with too many "repeats".

There are exceptions, such as Quicksilver getting a do-over profile in the current A-Z run even though he was already covered in one of our Avengers handbooks; we're doing that partly because Pietro has changed a *LOT* in recent times, and partly because he was a bit shortchanged the first time we profiled him (a pretty major long-running character squeezed into a single page). Similarly, his sister Wanda's already been profiled twice -- she got a fairly full profile in the same Avengers handbook, followed by a one-page update in the Women of Marvel Handbook after Bendis changed her into something else altogether.

Of course, opinions vary as to what urgently requires an update; taking your examples, I'd agree that Iron Man needs an update soon, having changed a lot in multiple ways. Justice (Vance) doesn't seem nearly so pressing, though; he and Angelica have broken up (or at least broken off their engagement), but that one change in his situation or status quo hasn't really altered Vance himself all that much, and could probably be addressed with a sentence or two -- not really the sort of thing that cries out for a new profile. Probably be a little while longer before Vance needs one of those, unless something changes drastically in the near future.

Regardless, I suspect you'll be seeing more updates and rewrites next year, as more time passes between our first wave of handbooks and the present.

And what about some of the Cosmic Characters? Are the ones not thus far featured in the Handbook going to appear in the Anihilation handbook?

The Annihilation book features plenty of characters already featured in recent handbooks (though the profiles are new), and plenty who haven't been featured in recent handbooks (some of whom have never appeared in handbooks before).

For side projects like Annihilation, the line-up's determined largely by the event itself (in this case, concentrating on characters featured in Annihilation books, regardless of whether the Handbooks have profiled them recently). How these side project line-ups affect the standard Handbooks can vary -- there's no one-size-fits-all policy, but a character's appearance in a handbookish side project might make them slightly less likely to make a near-future Handbook appearance. Take the NEW AVENGERS MOST WANTED FILES, for instance: most of the characters featured in that haven't been covered in recent Handbooks yet, partly because their FILES appearance made them a lower priority on the huge Handbook waiting list.

-Sean