Wither The Order?!?

Hey, whatever happened to The Order?

You remember The Order, right? Probably the best thing to spin out of Civil War? (Avengers: The Initiative is a perfectly acceptable alternate answer, there...)

Still don't remember them? They were going to be called The Champions, but it turned out at the last minute that Marvel no longer held the trademark for that name? Matt Fraction writing? Great Barry Kitson art?

You're all still shaking your heads? Remember how every state got their own government-sanctioned super-hero team in the wake of Civil War? But unlike every other team, which was pre-existing heroes slapped together, The Order, California's team, was:

A whole original team of heroes? When was the last time that happened?

Meet:

And the leader, former actor/recovering alcoholic Henry Hellrung!

Don't get too attached...1/2 of those guys above are fired after their first mission, and we get replacements, and some folks die...

But there was bound to be turnover, as the story had a little dash of Strikeforce: Moritori to it!

Yeah, they don't die after a year, but they have to give up their powers.

So, ladies and gentlemen--The Order! A team made up of heroic celebrities, granted powers for a year, protecting California against communist nuclear attacks and Namor-generated tidal waves while trying to deal with the stresses of this decidedly different life.

A pretty cool concept...but cancelled after just 10 issues. It's available of Comixology and Marvel Unlimited, so you can read it for yourselves.

But oddly enough, they were never--well, barely--heard from again. A cameo in Avengers: The Initiative during Secret Invasion, an even more passing cameo during Fear Itself, and that's it.As far as I can tell, not even a mention in the past 7+ years.

Why? I mean,..I can see why see why it may not have been popular. Despite being pretty dang good, a team with no previously-known heroes does lack a hook to attract new readers, even if they did spend issues fighting zombie hobos and The M.A.N. from S.H.A.D.O.W. (Seriously!) But still, that's an awful lot of cool intellectual properties just laying around collection metaphorical dust.

But did Marvel cancel The Order? In an interview with Newsarama, Matt Fraction said that he was the one who cancelled them.

That the book wasn't cancelled: I chose to end it. Marvel allowed me to choose to leave the stage, rather than to continue on in a state in which I felt was compromised and decidedly unawesome...it wasn't cancelled. I killed it. And if you're looking for the man that killed The Order, it was me

Now, there's a lot to unpack there, particularly his feeling that if the book continued it would be "compromised and decidedly unawesome." Was Marvel asking him to take it in directions he didn't want to--maybe bringing in established characters? And did Fraction really have the pull to insist the book be cancelled rather than do that, even under a different creative team? Perhaps he had enough ownership interest to insist the concept not be used anymore?

Whatever the reason, it has been a decade since we've really seen this team. It's time the Order came back. I'm just sayin.'