Marvel wants their own version of Sandman's Endless family - and are creating it with G.O.D.S.

Marvel's upcoming comic G.O.D.S. was framed by the publisher as creating "The Sandman for the Marvel Universe" (their words, not ours). And now after a closed-door conference with comic book retailers, we now understand just what that comparison really means.

A lot.

G.O.D.S. will be creating (and in some cases redesigning) characters that can act as gods - but as fallable, more human, and as co-creator Jonathan Hickman calls it "more mundane," versions of these abstract concepts.

"[G.O.D.S.] sort of sits at the axis of Saga and Sandman. It’s not Saga and it’s not Sandman, but it has a certain stylistic closeness to both," explains Marvel Comics' executive editor/VP of publishing Tom Brevoort. "It’s definitely a different flavor from a lot of things we do at Marvel."

While some of this new pantheon of characters will be new, some will also be drastic redesigns of older characters, going as far back as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby - including Eternity, the In-Betweener, and Infinity.

"It’s very cool when a giant head shows up and issues some proclamation here... but we also wanted to do a more street-level version of the character so it could be easier for Doctor Strange to run into him and have a character interaction between two everyday kind of people," says Hickman.

Co-creator Valerio Schiti did the designing (and re-designing), and Marvel shared a remarkable tweak on the In-Betweener to participants on the call.

Hickman framed it as a "more mundane" side to their characters - a 'street level' version as we'd call it.

"In the Marvel terms, there’s a Peter Parker version of these characters, and there’s a Spider-Man version," says Hickman. "My belief is that it will make these characters more usable,” adding that he believes these new characters and new versions of existing cosmic characters will appear across the Marvel line moving forward.