28 Comments

Are we going to see a cosmic team in this new era of X-Men? S.W.O.R.D. was a great book that unfortunately didn’t have enough time to fully flesh out, and X-Men Red was amazing but it was all Arakko-focused. I know Phoenix will be *the* cosmic book for the X-Line, but I’d love to see a mutant space squad again.

Expand full comment

A few weeks ago you answered a question about Jason Aaron’s (phenomenal) Punisher run and confirmed that it was at least partially done to take Frank off the board because of real-world events surrounding his symbol and ideology. I have two related questions about that:

1) What was the thought process behind the way in which Frank was taken off the board? It seems like it was meant to feel permanent, but the actual circumstances mean that someone could fairly easily bring him back and restart the controversy if they wanted to.

2) Are there characters who, if a writer pitches you a story involving them, are automatic “no’s” for reasons of controversy/confusion/etc?

Expand full comment

Interested in your comments about artists keeping to a monthly schedule. Back in the day, many artists drew one (or more) books per month and I'm not talking about sub-par creators. Why is it that now only a selected few current Marvel artists are able to keep to a regular monthly schedule on a lengthy basis?

Expand full comment

John (and Sal) Buscema, JRJR, Ron Lim are a few that jump to mind. Remember also when books in the 80s went bi weekly for the summer?

Expand full comment

Probably the answer to this is "wait and see," but--the X-Men turned into killers in the fight against Orchis. For me, it was a bit jarring. Will this be addressed in some fashion, or should I just assume that the X-Men think "That's how it goes in war" and any PTSD is dealt with in therapy? Thanks!

Expand full comment

I miss having a NEW AVENGERS title on sale. It was my Avengers book, so I would love for it to keep existing. I also think it never got to celebrate a 100th issue and so on (it did the 50th), so that's a pity as well. It's nice when books like Hunt for Wolverine: Adamantium Agenda go back to those characters as a group.

Question: is it gonna be Kitty Pride or Kate Pride in From the Ashes? I love that she now goes by Kate, and I hope it keeps being that way.

Expand full comment

If I'm doing the math correctly the final issue of Volume 4 was New Avengers #149 in legacy numbering, so technically it did cross 100 issues it just wasn't celebrated.

Expand full comment

Yeah, that's what I wanted to mean, that it wasn't celebrated. I think the 100th was around Hickman's beginning, so it probably didn't fit the calendar well.

Expand full comment

Any particular reason you think the time is right for multiple solo X-titles? As far as I can recall, while there've been quite a few mini-series over the years, the only two long-term successful solo X-titles have been Wolverine and Cable (I don't count Dazzler's run from before joining the team, and Beast's long ago solo run was in the single digits). The thing about Logan and Cable would seem to me to be they were introduced as having a lot of mystery in their backgrounds along with an implied history of *not* being part of the team, and that made it easier to set up stories outside of the team. But for decades now the X-Men and associates have really had no significant lives outside of the team(s). So while characters are familiar, they have to start their solo series almost from scratch; they need motivations and goals outside of the team, they need what's usually a whole new supporting cast and have to establish relations with them, they have to be interesting enough to carry the solo book as opposed to being part of a team with multiple characters having subplots and characterization, etc. And if anything, it'd seem to me you wouldn't want to write any of the established characters as dominating a team book, so a solo-ish base hasn't been created, at least recently.

Expand full comment

Once you solve the Characters + Creators + Concept = Comic equation, how do you decide on fill-in/rotational artists? Do the core creators weigh in, and how much, if at all, does the shipping schedule (particularly 12 issues vs. 18 per year) impact your decision making?

Expand full comment

I love the photos of you and Nick in my old corner digital office with Cerilli & crew. In part because you two were fabulous, but also the background gawkers such as Aubtey.

Expand full comment

I have to agree with Zach Rabiroff (and Al Kennedy and Ralph Macchio) on the want for a FOOLKILLER collection. That and Kirby’s 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY are two series that I reread at least yearly in single issues because they have never been collected.

Expand full comment

Without naming names, has anyone pitched you a specific story (Captain America quits the Avengers to start a zydeco band!), you said no for whatever reasons, and then a few years later you saw the author pen a similar story (Superman quits the Justice League to start a klezmer band!) elsewhere?

Expand full comment

Time travel seems problematic to me. It appears to be difficult to create rules and it causes as many questions as it answers.

How do you and other creators feel about time travel? I think I’d stay away from it as a creator, but then again, I don’t have a compelling story (maybe I just answered my own question)

Expand full comment

I've got kind of an odd ad question. For years now, Marvel books have routinely featured full-page movie poster ads for various MCU projects...BUT if you read them more closely, they're always advertising the streaming release of the soundtracks for these projects. It's always seemed odd to me; is there some kind of movie advertising loophole this gets around, or is there just a desire to get people to listen to the scores of the new releases?

Expand full comment

What do you consider is THE best marvel comic book run of the last six years (since the start of the "Frest Start" era in mid-2018) ?

Expand full comment

I really do love the wigs.

This was the issue where I started to get REALLY frustrated. I wasn't sure whether I had any right to be, or not, or who exactly to be frustrated WITH. I CHOSE to do the crossover issues with Punisher and Ghost Rider...which pushed back my story that utilized John Kelly's memories that were stuck inside Deathlok's head. But I had no idea Dwayne planned to do THIS story with the mutated brain so early...I thought he was doing the Moses Magnum story. I didn't mind that he had Deathlok coming home this early. But he started introducing factors that we never discussed...not that I didn't want these new parts of Deathlok's life to be there, just not comfortable that we didn't discus them as all of this was going to affect the book going forward. So Tracy's pregnancy, her sister and Michal coming home like it was normal...sort of like how Dwayne thought it was normal for him to get on an airplane...frustrated me. And when I discussed it after I saw what he was doing, he got really stubborn and did that thing he's really could at..CONVINCING ME IT WAS RIGHT. LOL. Dwayne was really good at that. I don;t know if this was too much for the readers at this point...making it more family drama...but I definitely enjoyed writing later issues delving into all of it myself. It seemed like Denys abandoned his more ABSTRACT style all of a sudden here as well.

Expand full comment

Hi Tom, just a couple of questions. They might be a bit retentive, but that's just what you get with hardcore comic fans.

1. At least from the early marketing, it seems that Jed's Adjectiveless X-Men is going to be the main book of the era, while Simone's Uncanny X-Men is the spinoff title. What went into this decision given that Uncanny is the original X-Title. Should we expect Uncanny to no longer be the main book long term?

2. I found your discussion on Xavier fascinating. You mention that he has been increasingly seen/portrayed as incorrect in his eternal argument with Magnus. It seems to me that this coincides with larger cultural discussions about the downsides of assimilation and "White normativity". Will there ever come a moment when the entire franchise should pivot its morality away from assimilation and towards a new, less problematic Cyclops-style dream that embraces mutant self-rule?

3. I realize this last question might be a bit sensitive, but there's a lot of discussion of it within the fan community. Recent runs of Deadpool, Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy and other B-list books have all ended at around 10 issues. From the outside there doesn't seem to be a problem with sales, so why do these runs keep getting smaller? As a fan, longer runs tend to produce deeper stories more worth following, so this has been frustrating.

Expand full comment

Related to your last question, Marvel has also been doing this recent trend where they announce some comics as "ongoing" only for it to be later revealed on Amazon that they were just comics with set amount of issues all along which has also been really annoying. They just did this with Vengeance of the Moon Knight.

Expand full comment

You talked about the increasing lateness of DAREDEVIL: FATHER, and that touches on something I've always wondered about.

I remember an interview with Joe Quesada during its run in which he was asked about the lateness, and Joe (to the best of my memory) replied with a clearly annoyed "Gee, I DO have this other job you may have heard of!" (or something to that effect). And for a number of us, that response wasn't even irritating so much as... baffling? Like--of COURSE you do. That isn't news to us. But it also wouldn't have been an unknown factor to you, or to Marvel! So... wouldn't it have made more sense to "bank" the issues until the series was close to being done?

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the reason this is rarely done is financial: If you're paying a team of creators, but aren't yet selling the results of their work, then you end up being (at least temporarily) in the red. But I've always felt the equally-obvious response to that is twofold:

One, that a corporation like Marvel could presumably absorb that (very short-term) loss of capital. Yes, they would be deferring the profit they would normally get from those sales... but I would think that when the product is then finished (or nearly), and starts being solicited and ordered, the reverse would be equally true: The publisher would at that point be absorbing profit for issues effectively released without the usual related costs (for that time period), since those wages had already been paid.

Secondly: Before there were multiple distributors, Diamond released (approximate) sales data every month. And every time a series ran late - and then later, and later - it turns out that what had previously been the expected and gradual drop of standard attrition quickly became a steep plummeting to the bottom, as more and more readers decided they'd lost interest. Two notable examples of this happening from the previous decade were SECRET WARS and FINAL CRISIS. In both cases, the increasingly months-long delays meant that these series were absolutely SHEDDING readers by the end. In other words, by prioritizing short-term ROI, DC and Marvel actually ended up selling significantly fewer copies than they would have if the titles had come out every month. (Or so it appears to the layperson, at least.)

I've always felt that the best way to sustain reader/viewer interest is to have the content come out on a frequent, consistent basis. (I also think a lot of Netflix shows would have MUCH better numbers if their binge model didn't mean that the collective discourse has generally already moved on to the new shiny thing after two weeks.) Has Marvel ever experimented with the above approach on other high-profile releases, and seen the sales drops significantly mitigated as a result?

Expand full comment