Let's try to imagine that all your favorite Marvel superheroes fight 1930s gangsters while solving crime as Bogart-like detectives. Now imagine something more boring. Can't. It hits rock bottom at Marvel Noir.

Marvel loves their alternate-reality meta-series crossovers. It's one thing when titles crossover in main continuity, but they've taken a selection of heroes and placed them in film comic noir. That means detective stories, femmes fatale and lots of shadows. Good thing our heroes normally hide in the shadows anyway. But do we really need a 1930s Luke Cage fighting crime in Harlem?

Included in the list are Daredevil, Luke Cage, Punisher, Spider-Man, Wolverine and the X-Men, all titled Noir to tie them together. There's not much interaction between them like a tie-in, it's just a theme that they were running with, an excuse if you will. In a time when corrupt government is in bed with "private business", it's only appropriate to analogize it with spandex. I guess spandex didn't exist in the '30s.

To summarize the premises, Spider-Man Noir starts with Ben Urich as The Spider, the boss of an underground group of journalists during the Great Depression. After a violent encounter with Peter Parker and his socialist aunt, an antique Maltese spider statue breaks open with spiders, giving Peter powers in very much the same way as he does normally. Donning a black suit (cough cough), trenchcoat and machine gun, Peter defeats Norman "Goblin" Osborn. Spoiler warning. Jim Howlett (Wolverine) is a detective who must solve a Japanese gang crime... you get the idea.

This series is completely unnecessary, targeted at only a small audience: the intersection of  those who really like noir, those who like comics and those with money to burn during an economic recession. Publication of the Marvel Noir series started in February 2009 and will continue until the end of the year. If you are truly interested in this, I suggest waiting for the trade, which will probably be in two or three volumes.