Marvel's Fantastic 20

Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada tells The Virtual Stamp Club the upcoming stamps are "fantastic."

"It's another feather in the cap of the comic book industry, as we now become part of the American mainstream, and our being recognized as a very serious art form, and no longer something that was just for little kids," he said earlier today.

Is Captain America coming back?

"Captain America's dead! There's still a Captain America book out there. We produce it monthly, so all I'd advise people is to keep reading that book to see what happens, whether the Marvel Universe can survive with or without a Captain America of one form, fashion or another. I just can say no more than that," Quesada replied.

"I honestly don't know. There's nothing on my planning document in front of me right now that says that Captain America is coming back any time soon."

Quesada promised a new development in Spider-Man.

"I'm not really big on a married Spider-Man," but he advises fans, "Keep your eyes and ears open for Spider-Man series that I'm working on in September, called 'Spider-Man One More Day.'"

Marvel Comic Book Super Heroes is the second set of stamps honoring the genre. Last year, it was DC Comics.
"It's a two-year series. We don't plan to do anything beyond 2007," Dave Failor, executive director of Stamp Services for the U.S. Postal Service said in an interview with VSC in August 2006. "We expect those to be as popular and customers to be just as big fans of those stamps" as for the DC Heroes.

"Our original thought was to do one pane of stamps, 20 stamps, ten of them would be Marvel characters and ten of them would be DC characters," Failor said. "It just didn't work out that both of them wanted to be featured on the same pane of stamps, but in retrospect, it's probably a good thing because we ended up having a two-year program, 20 great stamps for each one. We couldn't be happier."

Quesada himself likes the stamps designs with the earlier art better than the more recent versions.

"The classic creators who were involved in the creation of the stamp designs understand the meaning of being on a postage stamp. It's really an honor, especially as an illustrator, to have a postage stamp with your art on it," Quesada said. "And I think it's just the coolest thing ever."

Click here to listen to the entire interview.

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