COMIC-CON 2013 Marvel's Agents Of SHIELD

Why you won't need to be a Marvel fan to enjoy Marvel's Agents Of SHIELD

There hasn't been a more eagerly anticipated new genre TV show than Marvel's Agents Of SHIELD since, well, ever. The audience at the Comic-Con panel was treated to a surprise screening of the pilot, an episode of TV that had previously been kept under tighter wraps than the Tesseract, and featured a cameo appearance from Agent Maria Hill (you know, the one from Avengers Assemble played by Cobie Smulders from How I Met Your Mother . But despite that nod to Joss Whedon's megahit, Marvel's Head of TV Jeph Loeb says an understanding of the Marvel Universe isn't a prerequisite for getting into the TV spin-off.

"It's a pretty simple concept," he told SFX . "That is there's weird and unusual and unexpected things that are out there in the Marvel Universe/the real world, because the Marvel Universe is the real world, and this is a group of individuals who work for a good organisation which is out there and their intent is to be able to find out, is this item, person, phenomenon, add your own word – peanut butter? – is it a threat, and if it is what is the best way of dealing with that threat, or is it a good thing and does it need to be protected from an outside threat. And so as you can probably tell there's like a hundred stories you can come up with, so you don't necessarily need to know anything about the Marvel Universe. You just need to go, these are really six cool people that I want to hang out with."

Marvel's Agents Of SHIELD comes to ABC in the US in September.