Board Thread:Policies/@comment-16461120-20161107075255/@comment-61022-20161107210614

The Many-Angled One wrote: I agree with you, but I disagree that it should cover the prequel comic books to upcoming films (at least the ones that have a "Marvel Cinematic Universe Official Tie-In" seal on their covers).

Still, I'd avoid mixing the two together. We can't be sure that someone who is going to be penning the next movie or TV show is going to bother with these comic books and write something completely contradictory. That's the big problem with these "prequel" comics.

For example, in the recent Marvel's Captain America: Civil War Prelude Vol 1, War Machine is rebranded Iron Patriot in those comics, but he's back to being called War Machine in Captain America: Civil War.

There's no guarantees that someone won't have someone take on the Iron Patriot roll in future Marvel films. If this is not until three or four years down the road, will they even bother that there was this one comic book published? I doubt it.

I think it's more likely to be ignored over anything else.

However, I think that if we insist on incorporating this stuff into the Earth-19999 profiles then there must be some way to identify what items are purely from the films and what items are from supplement material so people can tell the difference and put a stub at the top of the page identifying what the differences mean.

Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha usually put the stuff of dubious canonicity at the bottom of the page. Which I'm not a fan of because it's kind of a sloppy way to organize it.

A better example is over at the Transformers Wiki. When it comes to detailing the Marvel Comics stuff there's an interesting conundrum there. There were two different Transformers comics published by Marvel in the 80s. A US version and a UK version. At the time UK Comics were published weekly and because Transformers was such a hot property at the time and the material they could take from Marvel US so sparse, creators at Marvel UK began writing their own original stories that tied into the US comic.

That said, both versions more or less follow the same timeline, except the UK book has expanded material that weaves in an out of the continuity established by the American book.

That said, the way that the Transformers Wiki organizes it is they have the Marvel US stuff in regular font while the Marvel UK material is in italics Each page this affects starts with an stub identifying the differences.

Perhaps the happy medium here is to keep the movie stuff in regular text and anything that pertains to comic books, novels, or whatever, be in italics and slotted into the "appropriate" chronological placement. Add a stub that says that the items in italics are from media other than the films and might not be considered cannon in the future. Problem solved.