On Tuesday I received in my inbox an email asking me, “What is this mysterious image?” Marvel didn’t want to tell me much, only that I would have to wait for in-depth interviews “on all the major announcements being made” at Marvel’s “jaw-dropping presentation at the Diamond Retailer Summit.” Well, answers to the mysterious image, and more, have definitely got me excited.

First off, the image to the right is a teaser for the upcoming Marvel Noir. “The Marvel Universe meets Film Noir next year in three limited-series re-imagining Marvel’s most iconic characters in the 30′.” The three titles will be X-Men Noir, Spider-Man Noir, and Daredevil Noir.

“The Noir line came together in one of our editorial meetings,” explains Executive Editor Axel Alonso, who will also be helming Daredevil Noir. “We had a couple of promising pitches that re-imagined Marvel characters against a Noir backdrop so we figured why stop there? If you imagine an icon like Spider-Man or the X-Men or Daredevil as a product of the 30’s, the story possibilities are endless.”

The bigger news, however, pertains to what will come of the Marvel Universe after Secret Invasion is concluded (for a given value of “˜concluded’).

Marvel announced that Dark Reign will be the new branding tag to grace many of Marvel’s books in the wake of SI.

“There’s a war, and then there’s a cold war,” said Dark Reign mastermind Brian Michael Bendis of Civil War and the subsequent The Initiative.

“This was an invasion, and from the invasion, certain people take the hit, certain people rise up as the heroes who you wouldn’t expect, and from that comes a new power status in the Marvel Universe that some would consider a dark reign and some would consider heaven. One man’s dark reign is another man’s ‘Finally!'”

“There’s going to be new books,” vows the writer, one of which will be the new Dark Avengers title, written by him with art by Mike Deodato. “There’s going to be new alliances. There’s going to be new teams and team dynamics. A new world dynamic. What people said about Civil War is that it really changed the dynamic between the super heroes and the rest of the Marvel Universe, and this is even a newer dynamic between the Marvel characters and the world they live in.”

There’s more coming as well.

There’s a war on the cosmic horizon, but at least one king might not make it to the conflict.

This December, writer Christopher Yost and artist Dustin Weaver chart the latest chapter in the saga of Vulcan, Havok, and the Shi’ar Empire leading into 2009’s mega-event War of Kings with the four-issue limited series X-Men: Kingbreaker.