Days of future past: At Newsarama, Matt Brady sits down with Joe Quesada, Marvel Comics' editor and chief, and Dan DiDio, DC Comics' vice president-executive editor, DC Universe (unfortunately, not at the same time). Here, both men talk about editorial plans for the near future:

Quesada: "... 2005 will almost certainly bring that [a return to the 'shared universe' concept] on, it will be almost impossible not to do it with so many things happening in the Avengers and so many major icons involved either directly or indirectly with the Avenger's part of the world.

"What's most fun about this is that our Marvel creative community is so into this as well, it must be in the air. … There are strings of e-mail I wish I could show you in which our creators are spitballing about events involving the Marvel U and trying to keep things cohesive. What's also wonderful about that is that within that you get even more collaboration and even more ideas. JMS gets briefed on a big event happening in one of our books and spins a plate or two that develops more ideas and then I hear from Joss and he has his take on it and we add more fuel to the fire and before you know ... it's great to be a Marvel fan!"

DiDio: "This was always a long term plan. It always was. There were several stages in what we did here. The first stage was identifying the talent pool that we had confidence in and felt could really improve and moves our books into the future. The second part was to concentrate on building a strong foundation of the individual characters – that’s where the conversation always comes back to, putting continuity aside for a moment - let’s really concentrate on what makes these characters great, what makes these characters strong, and what we love and remember most about them. We did that – we started to scratch away at the surface, and really identify the strengths of who our characters are.

"The third stage is to try and figure out how everything works as a world – what does the DC Universe stand for, and how do we create an environment that people re going to be excited about, and want to visit on a monthly basis.

"We haven’t hit that last stage yet, but we’re getting there."

Aren't you excited? Yeah, me neither.