Captain America, Iron Man – Post-Civil War Spoilers

Updated – 1/22/2007, 8:20 PM

Recently, forum member Blanktoe brought some spoilerish information to our attention, thanks to Amazon’s early-solicitation schedule for trade paperbacks. Continue reading after the jump for a screencap of the listing, a copy of the image it revealed, and some discussion on how believable it may or may not be.

I repeat, last chance to abandon ship –

SPOILER WARNING – SPOILERS BE AHEAD…

The Amazon listing is long gone, but here’s a screencap and the image it showed:

In case you can’t read it – though I can’t imagine why you’d be able to read this if you can’t read that – the book is titled Iron Man: Steve Rogers, and the description reads, “Tony Stark, director of S.H.I.E.L.D. It’s day one of a new role for Tony as he takes up the mantle of the missing Nick Fury to lead S.H.I.E.L.D. into the 21st century! But what does this mean for the future of Iron Man? Collects Iron Man #15-18.” While there’s been much debate on our forums regarding the reality of the picture, the description does indeed match other spoilers floating around the internet, lending a certain level of creditability, at least on that end.

As for the picture itself, in a today’s “Joe Friday” on Newsarama, they asked Joe Quesada (editor-in-chief of Marvel) about it and listing in question. Though the listing was down already, Joe didn’t do his usual jokey, misdirection kind of response to it. Instead, all he said was this –

In all seriousness, this is the constant battle that we have to fight between promoting our books and keeping storylines as secretive as possible. Also, with so many different and growing avenues by which to solicit our product mistakes are bound to occur, especially as all these different avenues have different solicitation cycles.

While he’s recently established an effective policy of misdirection, and releasing fake information to support the misdirection, it seems telling that he didn’t even venture in that direction, but instead expressed actual unhappiness. So either this is starting to seem pretty legitimate, or he’s getting way better at tricking me.

But hey, that’s just my take on it. If you’ve got some thoughts on the matter, join the already-existing discussion in the forum.

UPDATE –

Rich Johnston’s recent Lying In The Gutters Column has further info on the pic – specifically that it’s definitely a fake. As he points out, you can see a copy of what was used for the Captain America shield right here –

– in the cover for The Initiative. It’s clearly been Photoshopped in and edited slightly. He also indicates that it includes other “aspects that have appeared in other artwork for ‘Civil War: The Iniative.'” He has more thoughts and pointers on what he knows so far, in the link provided above. Just scroll about halfway down, and you should recognize the images from above.