If this really were a war movie, Marvel editor Tom Brevoort would be the tough sergeant who tries to get everyone out alive but doesn’t make too many friends along the way. John Glenn, say. He really went above and beyond at Newsarama, answering posters questions into the small hours of the night. His answers didn’t make everyone happy, but he stood by his guns, and showed, we think, commendable candor.

A few selections:

My point is that the only reason our industry runs on a thirty day cycle is because it’s a holdover from the days when comic books were newsstand-oriented periodicals, and everybody’s used to that. But if you look at the entire field over the last five years, you can see that starting to change. And, like with any change, not everybody is going to be equally comfortable with it.

We put out monthly comics because that’s the way we’ve always largely done it. But the reason for why the comics are produced monthly in this format has kind of fallen away–and because of this fact, you’ve begun to see a metamorphosis in the way the industry operates, in my opinion.


and

Originally Posted by Bobo Da Hobo

I love Tom Breevort. If you disagree with him, you hate Marvel Comics, simple as that


Well, no, not really.

But if you spell my name wrong, then you clearly hate Marvel Comics.


and

I could have stuck somebody else onto CIVIL WAR in a fill-in capacity and been pretty confident that the sales numbers would have held up all the way through the end of the series–the momentum is clearly that strong. But as I said in the main piece, I’m trying to take a long-term view on this, which also means taking into account the shelf life of the eventual collection, and the reader enthusiasm going into the CIVIL WAR spin-out titles and everything else that’s coming up in the Marvel U next year. I think it’s pretty plain that the casualty of the negative downturn in reader response to the end of CIVIL WAR was the ONE YEAR LATER books. And so, I choose to learn from that.


Along the way he also discloses that Mark Millar has yet to finish the script to issue 7, but just turned in his final, 7th draft of the script to #6. So that should settle that.

1 COMMENT

  1. He may have courage, but my opinion of him is still very, very low. Why?

    An editor is like a good baseball manager. The best managers take the blame when something goes wrong and deflect credit when something goes right. Mr Brevoort used every excuse in the book and blamed both Millar and McNiven for HIS poor planning. I have zero respect for someone who is willing to take credit but unwilling to take the blame. Nowhere in his Newsarama responses did you see him say “It’s MY fault, don’t get on Millar and McNiven, they’re working as hard as they can.” Had he done that, I doubt there would be the outrage.

  2. Poor planning, indeed. I don’t read comics as soon as they come out. I just don’t have the time. I generally stockpile them for a burst of free time reading, so it doesn’t effect me. But one would assume that a media company (comics, book publishing, television, cinema) would want to ride the building momentum until the very end. It would be like a television, like Lost or ER, postponing a continuing storyline until next season. Could cause excitement to build to a fever pitch among the public but could also screw the pooch.

  3. I think you’re devaluing the term hero here.
    Provided one is able to detach oneself emotionally from the argument there is nothing particularly frightening about the Newsarama board. Sure, they have their fair share of idiots, but they are easy to ignore and the hard questions are equally easily dodged or ignored; if necessary drawing on the idiots as excuse. (e.g. http://forum.newsarama.com/showpost.php?p=2353781&postcount=182 in reply to 24)
    And then there’s the no especially heroic stuff like offering the tripe you quote first. It’s nice to have Breevorts take on the long term, but as long as Marvel operates within the monthly DM and schedules its books monthly they can be expected to deliver them monthly. The CW situation isn’t a “metamorphosis”, it’s a case of staggering ineptitude and carelessness.

  4. As long as there were so many other titles tethered to the release of Civil War on a regular schedule, then it is definitely the editor’s scheduling prowess that is at play here, and so is knowing the talent’s production levels. The editor(s) that gave the go-ahead for the solicitation for all the tethered Civil War titles over-estimated their production capacity and the retailers (and Marvel) will suffer in the short-term as the stores play catch-up with 2 handfuls of tethered comics being delayed, which impacts the ordering strategies of the direct market comic stores as well.

  5. Whether you agree with him or not, in the past decade or so, Brevoort has been one of the most fan-accessible comic book industry executives around. For that, he gets a tip of my hat. In addition, Brevoort is one of the few guys who has pushed to keep “legacy materialâ€? (i.e., the old stuff that I really like) on the shelves. Consider that to be tip of the hat #2.

  6. I don’t know much about Mr. Brevoort but blaming the changing marketplace for the fact that Civil War is horrendously behind schedule is disingenuous at best.

    Somebody is going to get sacked for this. I just wonder who it will be.