Humberto Ramos

This month in Marvel's February solicitations, there's a fight you never knew you wanted, answers you've been clamoring for for over a year, and an odd reunion of an odd superhero team, of a sorts.

The weekend is here! Take a look back at what’s happened in the past seven days. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

Y'all, Sideshow Collectibles has been on an absolute tear with its Premium Format Figure line. Whether it's Star Wars, horror characters, Marvel or DC (or their respective cinematic universes), the massive mixed-media statues have been straight fire from the California company. While all the pieces can stand on their own magnificence, a number of them come together under a common theme. That's the case with the latest Marvel piece --- the Black Cat --- which fits nicely in the running Spider-Man series Sideshow's been assembling.

Champions #2, by Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos, features Cyclops joining a team that doesn't start with "X" for the first time ever. To be clear, this is the young Cyclops who came to the present in All-New X-Men, not the older Cyclops who as far as we know is dead. But either way, Scott Summers is a character inseparable from the X-Men, and now he's going to be a Champion instead.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona and Christina Strain's Runaways has been an obvious choice for live action adaptation since it first debuted in the early 2000s. The tale of a group of teens who discover their parents are supervillains and go on the run has the potential to be a huge hit, and this week it was announced that Hulu has ordered the Marvel property to series under the supervision of the creators of Gossip Girl. But who are The Runaways? They haven't been a team in comics for quite some time, and haven't had an ongoing series in even longer. We've put together a Crash Course to make you a Runaways expert in no-time.

Well now we know what those "I Quit" promo images were all about. Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, and Nova are quitting the Avengers, leaving the All-New All-Different team without so much of the new and different. Thanks to Entertainment Weekly, we now know for sure that they're forming their own team along with Cyclops (the teenage version), Hulk (Amadeus Cho, that is) and Viv Vision (the daughter from Tom King's Vision book). And for once the team that splits off from the Avengers isn't called the Something Something Avengers. These young heroes are taking on a name Marvel hasn't used in decades, the Champions.

Humberto Ramos has been a consistent presence on the Spider-Man titles for the past 14 years or so, but he actually came to the character nearly a decade into his career. Before tackling Spidey, Ramos worked on Milestone books, including Hardware, and numerous books for DC Comics, most notably a two-year run on Impulse with writer Mark Waid. Then he moved onto Wildstorm and helped found the Cliffhanger publishing imprint, where he produced 24 issues of his creator-owned comic Crimson with writer Brian Augustyn. It wasn't until 2002 that Ramos worked on a Spider-book.

Marvel launching an event story to tie into an upcoming movie is the least surprising thing, even when the movie is from Fox. So with that in mind, Apocalypse Wars is soon to be upon us, running through the main three X-books. The first chapter happens in Extraordinary X-Men #8, by Jeff Lemire and Humberto Ramos, which comes out March 16th. The preview pages don't feature Apocalypse or the promised trip to the future; they mostly focus on Storm and Old Man Logan being friendly, in a way that makes me really hope they're not re-igniting the Storm/Wolverine romance but with an older grosser Logan. You won me over to that one, Marvel, but this would be pushing it.

The "All-New All-Different" X-books have announced their first crossover, sort of, starting in March of 2016. X-Men: Apocalypse Wars is being described as three separate stories, in each of the three main X-books (and each lasting only one issue, apparently) that all center on the X-villain who also happens to be the focus of the upcoming movie X-Men: Apocalypse. The issues also sport three matching covers, featuring Apocalypse, Archangel, and Kid Apocalypse.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe was built out of spare parts. With heavy-hitters like Spider-Man and the X-Men owned by different studios, Marvel Studios bet big on less popular characters and emerged victorious. Suddenly, Iron Man and Captain America became a big deal for ordinary, non-nerd people. Marvel no longer needs their big guns to matter. And now, they’re showcasing their clout by ruthlessly removing the X-Men from the comic book landscape using the characters they intend to replace them with – the Inhumans.