Who Watches The Watcher? Anyone, Because He Is Dead: Marvel Announces Original Sin by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, Jr.

We are well and truly into a new year, which is a downer on a few fronts. All the holiday vacation time is burned away, which means we will be forced to go to work in this shitty weather (it is currently eight balmy degrees outside the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and that’s degrees Fahrenheit, not those wussy degrees Centigrade that you whimpering pleaders overseas use to try to convince people you’re not wandering blithely through simple sweater weather). And further, it means that the Big Two are gonna start announcing their big summer crossover events.

And, since we have been publishing over the last two and a half years or so, this has not necessarily been great news. Just in the last year, we have been hyped for, and then had to all but suffer through, Age of Ultron and Infinity from Marvel and The Trinity War and Forever Evil from DC, and they have not particularly grabbed us when they weren’t busy actively irritating us with arbitrary epic plots that often seemed more interested in involving everyone in the universe than making it clear why we should give a fuck about anyone involved (With God as my witness, I began pulling for Thanos about 2/3rds of the way through Infinity because at least I knew what he was trying to accomplish and why).

So I have been waiting without any particular enthusiasm to start hearing announcements about the upcoming big events that will change everything… so imagine my surprise when I heard about Marvel’s first big plans for 2014, and actually got a little excited, in spite of myself. Because while yes, the upcoming Original Sin four-month event involves a huge cast and some cosmic elements, at its heart, it’s a simple murder mystery.

A simple murder mystery written by Jason Aaron, who has been writing some of the most fun and character-driven books at Marvel over the last couple of years, and drawn by Mike Deodato, Jr., who is one of my favorite artists working for Marvel today.

From USA Today:

When the all-seeing, all-knowing Uatu the Watcher is found dead in his lunar lair, the Avengers and the rest of Earth’s superheroes scramble to keep their deepest and darkest secrets from being revealed, in Marvel Comics’ annual major crossover event Original Sin, launching in May.

“It’s all the skeletons, all the dark things that you never know, all the interesting and intriguing information — not all of it even bad,” says Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort. “And it will all expand out into dozens of stories that will cut to the core of who these characters are.”

Apparently Marvel’s heroes will be breaking up into two teams, with Nick Fury, Captain America, Iron Man and Thor on one side and Black Panther, Ant-Man, Emma Frost, Doctor Strange and The Punisher (One of these things is not like the other…) on the other, trying to hunt down The Watcher’s… records? Database? iPad? I don’t know, but apparently Uatu has been saving his personal shit unencrypted, which means it’s only a matter of time before his stuff gets leaked by Edward Snowden.

But most encouraging to me is that, while there are a lot of players to be involved in this storyline, it is not gonna be some huge-scale battle to show off how intricate a plot one can come up with ready access to Adderall:

Whereas last year’s Infinity main event was galactic in scale, “the stakes involved in Original Sin are much more personally involved,” Brevoort says. “It’s all the characters having to deal with something that really throws their whole world for a loop in a very cutting-close-to-the-heart way.”

Okay, so here’s why I’m actually looking forward to this one: Jason Aaron has spent a while, since the age of the Marvel Architects quietly came to a close last year when Ed Brubaker left Marvel to work on creator-owned stuff and the phrase “Architects” quietly began dropping out of Marvel press releases, working on books with big casts like Wolverine And The X-Men while never letting the plots become more important than the characters. Aaron’s run on The Incredible Hulk in 2012 was giant, balls-out fun, and his work on Punisher: Max after Garth Ennis left shows that he can write the hell out of that character.

Further, this is, at first glance, a simple story. After a couple of years of trying to parse time travel and intergalactic politics and detailed interstellar military strategy on multiple fronts, Original Sin sounds like a story about people. The motivation of “I want to keep my secrets” is a powerful one for getting into a person’s head and seeing how they look when they feel internally put up against the wall. And seeing four or five people trying desperately to keep their secrets will always be more entertaining than any number of spaceships blowing each other up for the greater glory of some ancillary character we don’t know, or because some artist really wants to draw a widescreen spaceship fight.

Not that I would necessarily mind that with Mike Deodato, Jr. drawing the thing. Deodato’s work on Brian Michael Bendis’s version of The New Avengers was some of my favorite art of the past few years: highly detailed and realistic with excellent, dynamic action. So it’s gonna be nice to see him on this, as opposed to on the current New Avengers, when more often than not he is asked to illustrate the dynamic fluidity of Reed Richards and Tony Stark arguing at each other across a table.

Original Sin starts up in April, with a one-shot written by Mark Waid with art by Jim Cheung, and the main event will be kicking off in May.