Tom Brevoort Interview, Marvel Editor & VP: Part 1 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor and Vice President of Publishing of Marvel Comics discussing his childhood reading comics off the 7-11 spinner rack, his 1989 internship at Marvel with Bob Budiansky & Dwayne McDuffie, the highs and lows of Marvel in the 1990s including the Image Revolution, bankruptcy, ToyBiz acquisition, getting ready for the new century in the 2000's and beyond with Digital comics and the Disney acquisition.  This is the first of a two parter. Edited & Produced by Alex Grand. 

Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders, CBH Podcast ©Comic Book Historians. Thumbnail Artwork ©Comic Book Historians.  Music ©Lost European

Transcript

Alex Grand:
Welcome back to the Comic Book Historians podcast with Alex Grand and Jim Thompson. Some also call us the Colgate Comedy Hour. I don’t know if you guys know that. Jim, wave to the audience.

Jim Thompson:
I didn’t know that.

Alex Grand:
Anyway, we have a fun guest today, Mr. Tom Brevoort, Executive Editor and VP over at Marvel Comics. Tom, thanks for joining us today.

Tom Brevoort:
Sure. Happy to be here.

Alex Grand:
So we’re going to go hopscotch through your life. Jim’s going to start in your early years, then I’m going to hit you with some Marvel in the 90s. So go ahead, Jim.

Jim Thompson:
Okay, so you were born in 1967? Was it in New York? I wasn’t quite sure.

Tom Brevoort:
It was in New York, yes. In Queens.

Jim Thompson:
Okay, and your dad worked at a bank or was he a banker or what was his job there?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. My dad worked for Chase Manhattan Bank. He was like a loan officer and dealt with banking things.

Jim Thompson:
What about your mom?

Tom Brevoort:
My mom had worked for the bank as well. When they got married, she became a homemaker and took care of the kids and was just a mom for the longest time. Eventually, she went back to work and did other things, but during all of my formative years, she was around constantly.

Jim Thompson:
I know you had one brother, did you have other siblings?

Tom Brevoort:
I have three brothers. So I am the oldest and the others are all separated from me by periods of three years. So three, six, nine.

Jim Thompson:
So there was a schedule?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes. Yes, it was very regimented. It all timed out perfectly.

Jim Thompson:
Now, I was reading about your early reading and comics and things and how you would go in and I think it was 1973, your dad took you in a 7-Eleven and said, “Hey, you want a comic?” You said yes, because you’re no fool and that’s how it started. Is that right?

Tom Brevoort:
That is exactly right. My dad was a smoking fiend. He smoked a lot as a lot of people did in 1973. So he’d go through a carton or two of cigarettes a week. So 7-Eleven was a regular stop on our travels. So that particular day, and I don’t know why this was other than they must have been cleaning some area or doing something. Typically, it was a comic book spinner rack like the one behind me that I got the book off of and typically, that was further into the 7-Eleven more in the back where the magazines and things were, but this day, for whatever reason, it was right up in the front, right near the front door, which is an awful place to put it if you’re a 7-Eleven, because it’s the easiest thing in the world for somebody to grab a book and head out the door immediately.

Tom Brevoort:
For whatever reason, we were waiting in line to buy those cigarettes, to pay for them and I wandered over and was looking at the spinner rack, just looking at it and my dad said, “Do you want one?” I said, “Yeah, okay, fine.” I can still remember books that were on the rack that I didn’t buy, but I ended up with the safest choice you could make, which is I bought an issue of Superman.

Jim Thompson:
That was Superman 268 with Bat Girl, a Nick Cardy cover with Bat Girl and Batman’s inside of it.

Tom Brevoort:
Yep, wild weekend in Washington. Right.

Jim Thompson:
So that’s your first one, but out of that first year, and you’re six years old at the time, within that year, was there a better comic that spoke to you more, or is that the one that hooked you?

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t know if I was completely hooked at that point. At six, I could read but I was only so so at it. I was still learning. Really probably the book that kicked me over the edge and really made me a fanatic, I would have had maybe my second book, my third book, something like that was 100 Page Flash Super Spectacular that reprinted Flash stories from the 60s and even a Jay Garrick story from the 40s and an Elongated Man story and a Johnny Quick story and that book in particularly, and particularly the Flash and Carmine Infantino and John Broome and that period really clicked with me. That was I think, more than anything, the one book that got me on board full time.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s great. Now, I noticed that even though you were buying DC books, when Halloween came around in October, you were dressed up as Spider-Man.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, yes.

Jim Thompson:
Your younger brother was dressed up as Batman. You were the Marvel guy.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. Again, that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the comic reading yet. That was just in those days, you had the Ben Cooper costumes and every year we would go out to the drugstore or wherever and pick a costume and that would be the Halloween costume. At that point, I don’t think there was any great thought process put into it.

Alex Grand:
You were just kind of consuming some merchandise a little bit.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, I knew Spider-Man from the ’67 cartoon, which would play regularly on afternoon television. So I was at least familiar with the character and the same thing with Batman ’66 show was still in reruns on channel 11. Spider-Man was on Channel 5.





Jim Thompson:
You were more of a DC and even Flash fan and a few years later, you had your mom actually make your Flash costume homemade, right?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, yes, my mom was very nice and very accommodating and a lot of things did in fact, create for me for one of the later Halloweens, a full on Flash costume, homemade Flash costume. There’s a couple of photos of it that are floating around because I’ve posted them over the years. It’s obviously long gone now, and it was confusing for everybody else because nobody in 1973 or ’74, ’75, whatever it would have been, nobody knew who the Flash was.

Jim Thompson:
You know, it’s so funny because I went every Monday to 7-Eleven I would get there as they delivered the packages and wait for the guy to open, use the wire cutters, put them on the racks. I wasn’t allowed to touch them until they were on the racks and then I would get my comics and my first homemade Halloween costume was Kid Flash that my mom-

Tom Brevoort:
That’s amazing. We should have gone out together. We probably would have scored some nice swag.

Alex Grand:
That’s true. I think my first comics were also at 7-Eleven on the news rack. It was Power Man and Iron Fist with Chemistro on the cover shooting up and then Gargoyles to by Demetrius and I was like, oh, what’s this? Those are great memories that rack was by the door as well, like yours was.

Jim Thompson:
I loved that, and then there was a point where my dad started taking me to Clay Book Store in Richmond, Virginia, because they had a better collection and better stuff than what I was getting at 7-Eleven, and understanding is you had a similar experience with that too. Your father took you to a card store or it was something like that.

Tom Brevoort:
In the short term 7-Eleven was kind of my main source for a long while. Eventually around, I’m going to say 1980, maybe 1979 there was a strip mall that was closer to our home and a stationery store within there that started to stock comics and they were better and more regular than the 7-Eleven. So I kind of switched over to using them. Eventually, in the mall area where my dad’s office was, there was a Chase Manhattan Bank location there that he operated out of.

Tom Brevoort:
They opened up a Heroes World, one of the early comic shops based on Ivan Snyder’s mail service. So some day he came home in, I’m guessing it’s ’78 at this point, and said, “Hey, they’ve opened up this store.” He didn’t tell me it was where he worked, because he knew that once I found that out, and in fact, I absolutely did, I would abuse the hell out of that.

Tom Brevoort:
He said, “Hey, I’ve discovered,” I assumed he’d read the newspaper or something. “They’re opening this thing. Do you want to go check it out?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I definitely want to go.” So I went out to this Heroes World, my dad drove me out to Levittown and that was my first comic book shop experience.

Jim Thompson:
Your dad was taking you into the city and conventions at this point too in the early 70s, right?

Tom Brevoort:
It was more like, it was probably closer to the beginning of the 80s. ’80, ’81. We were only in New York until November of ’81 and that’s when we moved, the family relocated to Delaware. In like 1980, ’81, maybe even ’79, we went to a bunch of conventions, which were more like, in those days, comic book shows. There were a few of them that were out on Long Island. There’s at least one I can remember that was in the Holiday Inn. That was really nothing more than a big room with a lot of dealers.

Tom Brevoort:
We would travel, take the LIRR into the city and go to the actual bigger conventions that were held in the hotels there and he let myself and whatever buddies might have come along with me loose into the place for a couple of hours and say, okay, be back here at whatever time, five o’clock and I would never make it back by five. It would always be 5:30 or six or 6:15. I would always be dreading like, oh, I’m going to get clobbered for not having been there, but it never actually became an issue.

Tom Brevoort:
I suspect him big smarter than me, he kind of figured that that was the way it was going to work. So if he wanted it to be six, he would say five.

Jim Thompson:
You were not reading right around the time of the classic Marvel stuff, but you were picking up all of the reprint books and discovering the classic era of Ditko and Kirby through reprints, is that right?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, I wasn’t the Marvel reader at first. When I started reading comics, I started obviously with the DCs and though I didn’t realize it at the time, my tastes in those days were very heavily for Julie Schwartz edited superhero comics, that what he did was what I liked. So whether it was Flash or Justice League or Superman or Batman or his stint on Wonder Woman or whatnot, that’s really the common factor that was there that really appealed to me.

Tom Brevoort:
I sampled other comics. People would buy me comics because they knew I was interested in I had three or four different attempts at reading Marvel books and the Marvel books just did not work for me as a seven year old. For one thing, they were always continued and that was always a problem because I could never be sure that I was going to be able to get a follow-up issue. It was also frustrating, because for whatever reason, I think Len Wein was the editor in chief at that time, and Len had a predilection.

Tom Brevoort:
He did it time and time again, where whatever the cover scene was, would end up being like the cliffhanger of the issue. So you’d buy a comic with whatever, Captain America is being thrown into a volcano, and you’d be like, oh, my God caps being thrown into a volcano. How’s he going to get out, and you’d read through the book, and the last page would be whatever, The Red Skull throwing Cap into the volcano going, you will never survive this volcano.

Tom Brevoort:
Star spangled schweinhund and I’d go oh, I’ve been cheated. I need the next one to find this out. Honestly too, a lot of the Marvel books at that time, we’re playing towards a much older audience than I was at seven. Some of the books that I read are just plain mediocre, but some of them are actually really good. They’re just not aimed at me. The first issue of Captain America I ever read, was the last part of the Nomad story that Steve Engelhart did and it’s a great issue now, but as a kid, it confused the heck out of me.

Tom Brevoort:
Because the lead character in this issue is Nomad, this guy running around in a black and yellow costume. Meanwhile, there’s another guy who’s Captain America who’s doing stuff with the Falcon and the Falcon is kind of training him and they run afoul of the Red Skull and it turns out that Captain America gets crucified on the top of this building by the Red Skull and Nomad shows up and it’s like, oh, my God, what’s happened? Then by the end of the issue, he puts the costume on and he’s Captain American. I went, did they just kill Captain, what is this? I didn’t have the next one. I didn’t have, all I knew was this was not what I wanted from my superhero entertainment at seven.

Alex Grand:
It was intense stuff. Yeah.

Jim Thompson:
If you had bought just two issues earlier, you would have had Nixon killing himself as the head of the Secret Empire.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, yes. Although I don’t know that I would have gotten that reference, if I’d read it that early. So for the longest time, I was not really a Marvel reader and eventually in I think it was the summer of ’77, I made the leap and I became interested in the Human Torch, because I had Jules Feiffer’s book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, that was remaindered for like years. It was published in ’65, but there were copies all throughout the 70s. I got a copy of that. I bought it and I devoured it, except I didn’t read the Marvel chapters.

Tom Brevoort:
I didn’t read the Marvel stories, because I didn’t like Marvel. So I didn’t read them, which is crazy. There was one day sometime in the summer, where there was nothing going on and I went, I was looking at the book, pulled it out for some reason, and I just kind of went, okay, I guess I’ll read these. They’re here. I haven’t read them before.

Jim Thompsont:
They’re great.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, I liked the Human Torch story. So that made me go okay, I’ll see what’s going on with this now. Through osmosis and because there was enough stuff around I knew that the Human Torch was part of the Fantastic Four. In my area, what became my other big source of comics for a while was there’s a drugstore that my family used to go to, it was part of a chain. I stopped mentioning it by name because I don’t know if they still exist that I really don’t need to be sued, but they were drugstore and they had this really big bin, like a wire, chicken wire bin filled with comics.

Tom Brevoort:
I remember it as being massive, although probably proportionally it wasn’t all that huge, but it was a bin, it was entirely Marvel pretty much. Every once in a while, a random copy of Detective Comics or Action Comics would sneak in, but it was all Marvel and it was all older books, all books that were between nine months to three years old. What I worked out years later, it took me a couple of years to have the background to figure this out is, these were all returns that had been reported destroyed, and that somebody had sold to the drugstore chain out of the back of the warehouse.

Tom Brevoort:
So there was this bin, and they would sell the books for like five for a buck. I went to the bin and I went digging around in it, and I pulled out three consecutive issues of Fantastic Four, 177, 178, 179. Cost me 50 cents and I went home and I read those, and I liked them. So the next time later on in the week, or the following week, we ended up back in the drugstore for stuff. I dug around in the bin again, and I came up with three issues of Marvel’s greatest comics, which was 58, 59 and 60 and those were Stan and Chuck books.

Tom Brevoort:
In the 70s, as you’ll remember, Marvel had a full line of reprint titles. Pretty much anything that was a mainstay book had a sister title that was reprinting stories from nine or 10 years earlier. So that’s how I experienced a lot of this stuff.

Alex Grand:
I like how affidavit return fraud is the genesis of your Marvel experience.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, and so many. Eventually again, the other big clue to that was eventually that bin went away and instead, the drugstore started selling these pre bound wrapped in plastic, five books, all with the covers stripped, and those two were still illegal returns coming from the same source, but by that point, affidavit returns had ended and they were back to normal books, and that didn’t last very long.

Tom Brevoort:
I suspect those were not as appealing to consumers, and certainly a bundle of five, where you could see one, maybe two if the back one happened to be turned around, that was not a gamble I was willing to take a lot of the time.

Jim Thompson
So I want to get you to college, but I’m going to be intelligent for a second and ask you a question. Tell me what The Five Books of Owen Deaver is and what The Hanging Cross is. Do you know?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, those are both episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel.

Jim Thompson:
Yes. Very good. You like season two, my two favorite episodes are those two from season one and we can talk about this after. I just wanted to say, I’m with you on Have Gun – Will Travel. It’s a favorite TV western.

Tom Brevoort:
That is a great show. I came to it very late. I only came to it a couple of years ago, five years ago, maybe. I never saw it. I never watched it as a kid or anything. I was just not a Western guy. I’m still really not a Western guy, but that show is top to bottom terrific.





Jim Thompson:
The storytelling and that is just fantastic. So I’m with you on that 100%. So you moved to Delaware and you attended University of Delaware as an illustration major.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes.

Jim Thompson:
So I know you as a kid, you had drawn your own comics and things from early on, and I know you thought you were going to be in the industry. Did you think you were going to be a comic book artist?

Tom Brevoortt:
Yeah, that was sort of my aspiration. I drew comics for years. Again, starting when I was a very young kid, and progressively getting better, and I worked with other people. I would meet like minded friends and we would make comics. We sold copies of at least one book that we did out of the local comic shop for a little while. I got connected to fandom. So I did stuff in fanzines and jazz like that. So I definitely had a draw towards the idea that yeah, I was going to do this professionally and I was going to be a comic book artist. I wasn’t necessarily good enough, skilled enough to do that but that was where my aspirations lie.

Jim Thompson:
In your third summer at school, 1989 you applied to all the comic book companies for an internship, correct?

Tom Brevoort::
Yes.

Jim Thompson:
Marvel is the only one that contacted you back.

Tom Brevoort:
That is also correct. Yes.

Jim Thompson:
So playing the Marvel, what if game, what if DC had responded instead of Marvel? What do you think your career would have been like?

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t know. Well, certainly I would have interned at DC. Hopefully, in a perfect case scenario, I would have performed as well and been thought of as nicely as I was at Marvel, so that when there was an opening people might have hired me on over there. My career trajectory at Marvel is an outlier. Nobody else has one like it. It’s not even duplicable. So I don’t know with all the various changes and shifts and things that DC has gone through in that same period, what the situation would have been. Would I be DC for 31 years? Would I have done some time at DC had done work for other companies? Would I have gotten out of the industry at some point? It’s impossible to say.

Jim Thompson:
Only to watch your nose.

Tom Brevoort
Yep, yep.

Alex Grand:
It could have had one of those Roy Thomas what if endings where everyone dies. Who knows what could have happened.

Jim Thompson:
So at your internship, you had a natural flair, all modesty aside, you did a great job and you got an immediate offer to work for them, which is not an easy thing to have happen.

Tom Brevoort:
It wasn’t quite immediate, but it was close enough. It was within three months.

Jim Thompson:
Now, did you take that and finish school or what happened there?

Tom Brevoort:
I was made the offer in November, and that offer was made by Danny Fingeroth, who was running the Spider-Man group. I said, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll absolutely come up and be your assistant editor, Danny.” Then because I was up at the offices, I went around to talk to the people that I knew, including Bob Budiansky who was one of the three offices that I had interned for over the summer.

Tom Brevoort:
I told Bob, I’m coming back. Danny’s going to bring beyond to do this thing and Bob thought about it for a second. He said, “You know, we’re going to need somebody in this department too, but we don’t necessarily need them right away. If I could get you hired here at the end of the year, you could finish out your term, your semester, would you be up for that?” I went, yeah, of course. Then Bob kind of metaphorically rub your hands together and went, “Let’s tell Danny.” We went back through the offices to Danny Fingeroth’s office to tell him that no, I wasn’t going to come on to work for him. I was going to come on I worked for Buda.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, that’s great, Alex.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, so and Bob Budiansky, I think they portrayed him in The Toys That Made Us they had an actor betray him. So who would have thought that he would have an accurate portray him time. So that was 1989. So this is interesting, because you’ve mentioned we’ve listened to some of your other stuff that you’ve done as far as interviews, and you were working in front of three editorial offices. You mentioned special projects, Bob Budiansky and Dwayne McDuffie that they were doing posters, license art, movie adaptations.

Alex Grand:
The cosmic office, which you’ve mentioned, which was Craig Anderson, Renee Witterstaetter, that was like, what if Silver Surfer, Guardians of the Galaxy was coming out at the time, and then the managing associate editors, Marvel Masterworks, Avenger Spotlight with Evan Skolnick.

Tom Brevoort:
And Greg Wright. Greg was actually the managing editor. Evan was his assistant.

Alex Grand:
There you go, and Greg Wright. So during that interim time, were you just kind of assisting all these people? What exactly were you doing then?

Tom Brevoort:
I was doing whatever needed to be done. Those three offices all were sort of in at the end of one corridor of Marvel. So it was a little cul-de-sac, where those three offices existed and I had like a little Workstation or table outside of the three. So whenever there was something that people needed to be done, I would do it and from my work on fanzines, and art and such, I could do any task that was needed.

Alex Grand:
So you understood their printing process and things like that.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, I’m not a professional grade letterer, but I can letter. I could do any kind of paste up that was necessary, production, things like that. When I got to Marvel, and I’ve said this a lot of times over the years, there was only one computer in the place. There was a single, I think it was an Apple II, and I walk in the door, I immediately knew more about how to use it than anybody that was on staff because it was more of my generation.

Tom Brevoort:
So I did a lot of typesetting of captions and things. If you go to the Thanos Quest, the two issue Jim Starlin series. Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of balloons in that that are lettered in a computery font and I did the typesetting on all of that on the Apple.

Alex Grand:
So you were kind of the new guy that could help the older people out a bit easier.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, I was also capable of doing whatever was needed. Again, I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but this was a common theme that came up is that people would throw me things expecting that that’s going to take four days to get done, and a day and a half later, it’d be like, here it is. It’s done. What’s next?

Alex Grand:
Yeah, that’s great. You were gung ho about it, too. It sounds like you enjoyed it.





Tom Brevoort:
Oh, yeah. It was a great experience and it was very much like, while I was still not fully formed or anything. Walking into that place and interacting there and being around that for the full working day, that was a very comfortable environment for me.

Alex Grand:
Then Dwayne McDuffie, as some people may know is that he worked on what, Milestone and comics at DC then he did some animation. He’s written Justice League Unlimited episodes and things. Do you have any particular anecdote about Dwayne McDuffie at all about working with him?

Tom Brevoort:
Shoot. I mean, it’s hard for me to find the one anecdote. Obviously, I worked under him as an intern and I worked alongside him as an editor and ultimately I edited books. He worked on Deathlok for me, years later did Beyond and Fantastic Four and a bunch of stuff and Dwayne was great. He was possibly the smartest person that was up there at the time.

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Alex Grand:
He comes off as like he knows his continuity. He knows his universes. He loves the material. Is that how it came off to you?

Tom Brevoort:
Not even so much in terms of knowing the continuity, he knew the science. He knew the stuff behind it, he’d had a diverse career, he’d done a bunch of stuff. He’d written jokes for David Letterman, he’d had a background in physics. He had a very affable personality. So it was very easy to sit and talk with him or eat lunch and whatnot. He would always eat, and I’m hardly want to talk, he would always eat the worst lunches. Lunch for Dwayne would be a box of Entenmann’s cookies and a glass of milk, but we would do ridiculous things like there was one day when he’d gotten his hands on an eggs worth of Silly Putty.

Tom Brevoort:
He decided we were going to test Silly Putty on all of the various formats that we now produced to determine which of the Silly Putty could still take an impression of the ink off of and which it no longer could. Most of them were a failure. The printing had gotten good enough and sophisticated enough that you no longer could take it off with Silly Putty, but we performed that exacting scientific experiment for the good of mankind one lunchtime in the summer of 1989.

Alex Grand:
That’s awesome. So now 1989 also Revlon and the Proman Group, they took over Marvel that year. Did you make any notices that corporate wise things were different on a functional basis when that happened?

Tom Brevoort:
Going, in starting, it’s kind of hard to say because there’s no contrast. The big change that had happened before I got there was that Jim Shooter was out and Tom DeFalco was in. Even though like I walked in, in 1989, and that had happened at the beginning of ’87, two years earlier, it was still a thing that hung over that place, like nothing. Again, I’ve had only infrequent and not terribly deep interactions with Jim over the years, and they’ve all been reasonably pleasant for all that we’ve never been able to get things to work out where he would write a book for me or whatnot.

Tom Brevoort:
In the Marvel of 1989, even people who couldn’t stand one another on staff would come together in unity to agree that Jim Shooter was an enormous monster and it was a good thing that he wasn’t there anymore. It’s stunning. So the morale situation at Marvel in 1987, or the very end of ’86 really had to be awful for it to still reverberate two years later. So that I can say for sure.

Tom Brevoort:
The stuff I remember about Revlon coming in is not so much them coming in, but eventually, within a year or so of my being there, they were going to make the first stock offering. They offered us shares of the stock. You could buy in at, I think, $16 a share, but you had to buy a minimum of 25 and that was like $400 and I didn’t have $400 to spare. I was working on staff salary. I was making maybe 16-five a year.

Tom Brevoort:
So I didn’t do it and literally the moment the stock listed, it was already up at 19. Then it climbed and then it split, and then it split again. And some people, if they were able to get out at the right point, made a ridiculous amount of money, but generally I didn’t see any of that. What was going on at Marvel at that time really was the marketplace was exploding in a big way. That was the era of what we now think of as the big image craters, but in those days, it was just Todd McFarlane and the guy that draw Spider-Man. Then Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and those guys coming in and getting hotter and hotter and these big sales happening to all these big books, and everything selling well, selling well and selling better.





Alex Grand:
There was a time when it was like booming for sure.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, it was definitely a boom time there for the first couple of years.

Alex Grand:
So then how is Tom DeFalco as editor in chief?

Tom Brevoort:
Tom DeFalco as editor in chief I think was pretty good. Again, my perspective on Tom has changed over time. Because coming in, I was a little piss ant assistant editor, and he was the editor in chief and he intimidated the shit out of me, and not necessarily deliberately. It’s funny because over the years, I’ve found myself doing the same kind of thing and I have to remind myself when I’m dealing with younger editors, they don’t have the context for this, but Tom had come up in the ranks. Tom was of the editorial staff of that time.

Tom Brevoort:
So Tom had a very comfortable and very friendly relationship with all of the editors that were now theoretically under him and now that Jim was gone, and Tom was in charge, it was like this cloud had lifted. So there was a lot of playfulness. There was a lot of joking around, and there was a lot of squeezing of shoes. As somebody coming in, you didn’t have that relationship, and you didn’t understand that relationship and Tom would every once in a while, delight in winding somebody up.

Tom Brevoort:
That was fine if you understood he’s just Tom DeFalco, that guy that used to work on the row, not really looking to do that, but if you don’t have that context, he’s a scary guy.

Alex Grand:
Interesting. Because he’s just doing business, but maybe there’s just something about that and his position that had felt intimidating.

Tom Brevoort:
Well, the story that I tell, and it didn’t happen to me. It happened to Eric Fein, who was the assistant editor eventually associate editor who ended up being hired because I didn’t take the Danny Fingeroth position. He worked with Danny on the Spidey books, and when Carnage debuted in the Spider-Man titles, and that was a huge thing. It sold out a couple of printings and whatnot and they rushed to do, and it was very rare that they would do it in those days, like a little mini trade paperback of all the Carnage stuff. Eric was assigned to put that together.

Tom Brevoort:
So he did, and he packaged it, sent it off the print and eventually weeks go by, and Eric’s sitting in his office working, and Tom DeFalco appears in his doorway and bellows at him, Fein. Eric looks up and Eric was kind of a jittery guy to begin with. So he looks up and he’s like, the editor in chief is in my doorway, and he’s bellowing loudly and Tom’s got a copy of the Carnage book in his hand, and he holds it up and he shakes it.

Tom Brevoort:
“What do you call this?” Eric starts to stammer and goes, collection of the and Tom walks into the office and he throws it down on the desk. “What do you call that? You know what I call that? I think call that a goddamn perfect trade paperback,” and Tom walks out. Tom just thinks he’s given the kind of compliment and he’s doing a little bit of theater, but I swear for the rest of the day, Eric walked around-

Alex Grand:
Kind of stared.

Tom Brevoort:
Jittering. It was all because like Tom would lose sight of the fact that people looked at him or saw him in that way. He’s actually a wonderful individual and a super good guy, and again, once he was out as editor in chief, and just working as a writer, and so forth, he wrote a bunch of stuff that I edited, and we worked together a lot. That was the point at which we could actually connect as people, but before that, he just had this ambience, and this way about him that he could be intimidating.

Alex Grand:
Nice. Interesting. Yeah, I guess, timing and position. Do you have any interactions about Mark Gruenwald you can tell us about, because I’m a big Mark Gruenwald fan. I loved his Quasar and all that.





Tom Brevoort:
Sure, sure. Well, Mark, again, I don’t know that I have like the best story.

Alex Grand:
The best story. No, that’s okay.

Tom Brevoort:
Other people will have much better stories than I do, but what I tell people about mark, because at this point, he’s been gone long enough that really, nobody is left, one or two of us that even had any interaction with him. The best analogy that I could give people, in terms of understanding what he was like, is that he was like Jim Henson. He had that sort of personality, there’s a sort of Midwestern center to him, but there’s also a zaniness and a craziness and an appreciation for certain type of chaos, and yet also very organization based, very solid.

Tom Brevoort:
So on the one hand, Mark would build the pan book of the Marvel Universe and attempt to quantify in exacting detail every aspect of every bit of this fictional universe and be very dedicated and focused on that as an objective and on the other hand, he would fill his office late literally waist high with crumpled up copies of return New Universe comics.

Tom Brevoort:
There were a couple of big things he did. Michelle Marshdae was one. In his office one weekend, he and his assistants build the platform and put the desks on a platform. It was literally like a platform stage and in theory, the reason that they did this was Jim Shooter was a big call guy. So he was intimidating. He’s been looking down on you, but if Jim came in, it was the one office where Jim would actually have to look up, but that’s not the whole of it.

Tom Brevoort:
The real secret is that the platform had a trapdoor and you could go down inside of it and inside of it, there was a little man cave, and the little man cave had like a place to sleep, and a little black and white television and so forth, and what they would do, because the amount of work that was necessary to do the handbook every month was so extensive, particularly when you come down to typesetting in a pre computer era, and paste up and so forth, is they would have guys stay the whole weekend in the office doing this.

Tom Brevoort:
At a certain point at night, a certain time at night, the building would close, and the motion sensors would go on and so forth. Before that would happen, you’d do your last bathroom run, and you’d climb into the bunker and you’d just be in there with your little mini fridge and your TV and your stuff and sleep for however many hours while the motion detectors were on, and eventually the next morning, you could get up, go out.

Tom Brevoort:
You could maybe sneak into Terry Stewart’s office where there was a shower, and then go back about the business of putting this thing out, all completely against building regulations, and certainly Marvel regulations. It was one of these things that was a secret known to very few, the few that worked on it. Mark did stuff like that all the time, and he really was the unofficial morale officer for Marvel in that generation.

Tom Brevoort:
Everybody kind of liked him. He organized all of the holiday parties and outings and he was big on games that he was big on participation, which I didn’t dig so much because I was not big on participation. I regret that a little bit in hindsight. Somebody recently put up footage from I think it was like a 1991 or a 1992 Halloween party, and I’m in it for like, two seconds. I walk through at one point, but everybody else is there and having a good time and goofing around and being silly and I can look back at that and go, yeah, maybe I should have done more of that and less of whatever it was I was doing that day.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Now there’s some other details. You were there when Walt Simonson was kind of working on X Factor and then Fantastic Four. John Jr. was there. John Romita Sr. Virginia Romita, his wife was there. She was running the bullpen any stories about the Romitas and the bullpen?

Tom Brevoort:
The Romitas were terrific. John in particular was great and was wonderful both to learn things from. You would always learn stuff dealing with John, because John was both an absolute perfectionist, and absolutely uncertain about his own abilities.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, he sounds like that in his interviews. He’s always saying something bad about his own stuff. I’m like, why? It’s cool.

Tom Brevoort:
He’s got a lot of humility about what he does, which is sort of ironic given the immense amount of talent that he has. I got to put together, when he in Virginia retired in ’96, we did an art of John Romita book and I got to prowl through his files, and pull together all the art and stuff for that and so forth. John was just a wonderful salt of the earth kind of guy. The first year I was there, I had a friend who was a huge John Romita fan. So there was a New York convention and John was going to be there and he sent me a sketchbook and said, “Could you get John to do a drawing of the Green Goblin in my sketchbook?”

Tom Brevoort:
So I went to the convention that weekend and John’s at whatever table he’s at, I stood in line, and I got up to the front of the line and John looks up at me and is like, “Kid, what are you doing here?” I said, well, I came to this thing. I got this sketch I wanted to get done. John’s like, “You don’t have to do this here. Bring it to me on Monday. I’ll do it the office.” I was like, “I don’t want to trouble you. I don’t want to,” and he’s like, “No, no. You come back, you see me and bring it to me Monday.”

Tom Brevoort:
So I got out of the line. I went down to his corner office on Monday, gave him the book and whatever, day later, beautiful Green Goblin for my buddy that I could send to him. He was just a really good guy. Virginia too, was sort of like the mother matron of the bullpen. Although she was much more of a hard ass. You could tell that within the family, she was the matriarch and she was the one that made the trains run.

Tom Brevoort:
So every week, we would have scheduling meetings, which came to be colloquially known as the Virginia meeting. All the editors would be there and she would go on the schedule and see where things were, and shake people down to make sure that books were running on time and if they weren’t, you caught a little hell for it. So, again, Virginia could be very intimidating in that scenario. She was actually a very lovely person. She oversaw the bullpen and was great there. It was nice having everybody kind of in house, it was like a family business but she was definitely more of an ass kicker than John was.

Alex Grand:
So that family vibe, that kind of changed then when Marvel went public in ’91, like that kind of changes some things, didn’t it? Other than the stocks that you were talking about.

Tom Brevoort:
The only real effects it had on Marvel internally, one, there was massive growth, that the number of editors and the number of books we were putting out, got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, because we were constantly chasing last year’s sales figures. It’s a thing that happened a couple of times over the years, and DeFalco talks about it quite a lot that the first year that they came in Marvel put out Todd McFarlane Spider-Man number one and it sold like a million and a half copies. At the end of that year, when it came time to do the next year’s budget, the higher ups said to Tom, “Okay, you did great. Now do it again, but more.”

Tom Brevoort:
Tom came downstairs and went, “I don’t know how the heck we’re going to match-”

Alex Grand:
Because they’re kind of unprecedented.

Tom Brevoort:
How we’re going to match the sales of Spider-Man Number One and they talked about it and they said, well, maybe if we do X-Men Number One, and we relaunch New Mutants as X-Force Number One at the same time, maybe between the two, we can just ick over the line and then it turned out that X-Force sold 4 million copies and X-Men sold 8 million copies. Then at the end of that year, they said to Tom, you did great now do it again, but more. Tom came downstairs and went, how the heck are we going to do this? The answer there was lines and that was the year that we launched Midnight Sons and the year that we launched 2099.

Tom Brevoort:
I think there was an epic launch line in there. I forget whether it was Heavy Hitters, or one of the earlier ones and through all of that, for three or four iterations, Marvel under Tom was able to meet those goals, but it was an ever expanding sort of house of cards that inevitably was going to fall in on itself at a certain point. You can’t sustain that growth forever and when it happened, it happened pretty much all at once.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, pretty hard. So that’s interesting. So it’s more like the corporate expectations on Tom is the change when it goes public, and the Revlon people are kind of calling the shots. So then there are a couple changes that happened, and what was your viewpoint? So Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson seemed like they were kind of replaced creatively on their titles of X-Men and mutants by even the writing direction by Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. I think Bob Harris did that. When you were seeing that, were you like, okay, cool that’s a good change, or it’s going to speak to the new generation or were you really not involved in it and you didn’t have of any of that whatsoever?

Tom Brevoort:
I wasn’t really involved because, again, Bob was editing the X-Men books. He was the line editor of X-Men at that point and had been for a number of years. I think I must have been on a certain level surprised that Chris was out, but you have to also remember that for years, at that point, the hardcore fandom had been saying Chris is tired, Chris was done. You got to get him out of here. We need somebody new there.

Tom Brevoort:
It wasn’t necessarily the whole of that audience because X-Men still sold like crazy and people really loved what Chris was doing but the vocal segment of fandom for years have been saying, oh, no, he’s no good anymore. So on that level, the fact that it happened wasn’t to be like, oh, the earth has shook. It was just, okay, he’s whatever. Bob is making a choice. He’s going in this direction.

Tom Brevoort:
With Louise on New Mutants and X-Factor, it was kind of the same sort of thing. Louise had come in on those books at a certain point. She inherited New Mutants, I think from Chris and she inherited X-Factor from Bob Layton. So her going out, it was just business as usual. Okay, somebody run is ending, somebody new is coming in. There was an overall chase of the sales figures that was going on.

Tom Brevoort:
I can remember because the other part of this that people either don’t realize or don’t remember so often is during that period, and starting, to his credit with Jim Shooter, the editors got incentives as well as the talent did. So it was proportionally a much smaller slice, but if your book did well, that resulted in actual dollars in your pocket as an editor. So particularly as this chase for sales went on, and people started to get bigger and bigger checks as a result, the expectation and the sense of proportion got all out of whack.

Tom Brevoort:
I can remember people, editors complaining, because their book had only sold 500,000 copies and feeling like they’d somehow been screwed or the book hadn’t been promoted well enough, or whatever the hell for 500,000 copies, which is bananas, but all the sense of scale was out the window. That 500,000 copies, that was whatever, three, four grand in that guy’s pocket, but if it had been 600,000 copies, maybe it would have been six, seven grand or whatever. So people were legitimately thinking about that way in that mercenary, a fashion.

Alex Grand:
There you go. That definitely explains that culture ship at Marvel at that time. So then, were you surprised then when the image revolution happened and the creators that are creating all this money for the company, they just said, we’ll just create it for ourselves somewhere else.

Tom Brevoort:
Certainly everybody was shocked that it happened, because nobody really saw it coming that way and it hadn’t been done before. By the same token, I came out of the generation who, the direct market wasn’t a new thing for me. It all kind of evolved and became a thing right at the time point that I was reading those books. I read a lot of independent comics in those days, independent whether that meant a First or an Eclipse, or whether that meant an Aardvark-Vanaheim, or an Elfquest.

Tom Brevoort:
So I had a pretty good understanding of that world. So the idea that these guys would go out and do their own thing, it wasn’t alien to me. I think what was surprising both to me and everybody else, was that it was as enormously successful as it was. I think the other part of that is, I think everybody was a little taken aback by the fact that, and this should not have been surprising to anyone. It’s just nobody had done it before. The books that they went off and did effectively felt like they were quasi Marvel books, like they were very much straight ahead, right down the middle of superhero titles of one sort or another.

Tom Brevoort:
Wildcats wasn’t X-Men, but it was a superhero team the likes of which you could have found at a Marvel or DC and Savage Dragon wasn’t the Hulk, but you could see that character existing in a Marvel line or a DC line. So in effect, what those guys did, at least at the outset, was to do the same sort of material they had been doing at Marvel and really tap into and connect with the audience that had come to really love what they did on those older characters and make that transition to these new characters.

Tom Brevoort:
It really felt, I think, to a lot of younger readers at that point, like this was the beginning of the new Marvel. I wasn’t around when Amazing Fantasy 15 came out, but I’ve got my copy of ShadowHawk number one, and it’s going to be like Amazing Fantasy 15 when I’m a 40 year old man, because people are going to look back and I was there when that happened. I think it was a huge thing.





Alex Grand:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I like ShadowHawk but they don’t make ShadowHawks as much anymore. Jim Valentino is not really drawing stuff. So it becomes one of the things that comes and goes really. So then the trading card, and hologram covers, zeitgeist of the time, who would you say kind of came up with that or push that the most?

Tom Brevoort:
Well, there’s two pieces to that. Trading cards were kind of a separate thing. One of the first things that I worked on, when I came in working with Bob Budiansky was the first line of Marvel trading cards, the 1990 Impel set. That was the licensing deal like any other and in our special projects area was a thing that we handled. So creatively, Bob, and to a lesser extent I, as the assistant put those cards together and in fact, I wrote probably a quarter of that set.

Alex Grand:
Oh, you did? That’s awesome. I got those when they came out. That’s great.

Tom Brevoort:
That first set, there was an expectation for it, but it performed way better than anybody anticipated. So we ended up doing the second year set and then beginning to expand out from there and going, well what else could we do? We did the X-Men set and we did the first Marvel masterpieces set and we did Spider-Man said and that became more and more successful, to the point where one of the things that was going on with Revlon and Marvel is, they were on a buying frenzy.

Tom Brevoort:
They were ill capitalized and they were using a lot of Marvel equity as collateral in a lot of purchases in trying to stay ahead of their debt, which is ultimately what sent everything into bankruptcy because you couldn’t generate enough money to stay ahead of the curve long enough. At the time, they were on a buying frenzy and they bought FLIR, they bought the trading card company FLIR and their thought was, we have this licensing deal with Impel which became SkyBox, but if we do it through FLIR, we get to keep all the money.

Tom Brevoort:
So they did that and then people came in along with FLIR and that became a bit of a battle for control and ultimately, they ended up taking over the cards, and then eventually that whole market kind of collapsed and crumbled. So that was a separate thing. Enhanced covers came about slightly accidentally. There’d been a little bit of evidence beforehand, like there’d been two covers on Man of Steel Number One, and the first issue of Legends of The Dark Knight, they had shipped that with four cardboardy outer covers that were different colors, but what I think of is the first real cover enhancement was an issue of Hulk.

Tom Brevoort:
It was the Peter David, Dale Keown Hulk. It was the issue in which Peter integrated the various Hulk personalities into the one unified Hulk.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Professor Hulk.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, the Professor Hulk and they did this cover where they printed it with a fifth color ink, a fluorescent green ink. That was an ink that was normally used on a cover, you had to pay for it special and they put that book out and it sold like crazy and they had to do second printings and things. So that plus the fact that we also had a trading card division where in every set of cards, you would do chase cards and the point of chase cards was, they’re harder to get.

Tom Brevoort:
You got to buy more packs to get them all and they were driver. Part of what made them unique was they’d almost all revolve around some bit of technology. They’d be holographic. They’d have foil, they’d be three dimensional. They’d have some gimmick that the trading card companies had figured out how manufacture.

Tom Brevoort:
So applying that thought process to comics, people began to be able to experiment with covers. They did the glow in the dark Ghost Rider cover, which is still a great cover and a great idea. It’s just Ghost Rider’s head on fire, and it glows in the dark. That’s super cool, but every time they did it, those books sold like crazy and consequently, particularly as the need to make that nut continued to elevate, it went from being, we’ll do one of these every once in a while to we’re going to do one of these every month, to we got to do two of them every month, to now you got to do three of them every month and not only were there not enough enhancements, like you ran out of stuff you could do, and you’re trying to come up with the weirdest thing.

Tom Brevoort:
There is some covers done in that period, that are bananas, they don’t make any sense at all and they look awful, because nobody had actually cracked whatever that technology is or figured out how to use it effectively but it had to be done. So go, let’s-

Alex Grand:
Make it happen. This sounds like the gorilla cover directive by Irwin Donenfeld at DC in like the 60s, right? Doesn’t that feel similar?

Tom Brevoort:
Sort of, although it’s kind of the opposite there. Irwin had figured out that gorillas were a thing that tended to spike sales and in fact, at a certain point, he put the brakes on it and went, we’re not going to have any more than one gorilla cover in a month. Because as people learned of this, or as he excitedly told editors about this, they immediately went, I better put a bunch of gorillas on my covers, that’s going to help me sell comics. Ultimately, Irwin was the guy that said, okay, enough, enough. We’re going to kill the golden goose. Only one of these a month from now on.

Alex Grand:
There you go. Then, whereas Marvel was like, let’s quadruple this and let’s go for it.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, but again, that was all in service of the demands from higher up. If you need to do better than your record breaking year last year by X percent 10%, 20% and you don’t even know how you’re going to match it. You are literally just throwing everything you can think of.

Alex Grand:
Whatever tool you had. Yeah. So then when the 1994 Heroes World Distribution debacle happened and Marvel says we’re going to go through a distributor. There was a whole collapse of the distributors. The Heroes World distributors couldn’t really handle all that product moving around and then Marvel ends up going with Diamond. Diamond becomes kind of the, I don’t know if monopoly is the right word but it does. When you were going through all this, it was like all this rise and almost fall. The image revolutions happening all this craziness, what’s going through your head and were you still doing special projects at this time and were you like, okay, this might fall apart soon?

Tom Brevoort:
Again, you’re talking about a lot of events over a decent amount of time. So to kind of try to walk through it, eventually two things happened. One was FLIR came in and FLIR ended up absorbing the trading cards. Trading cards as a segment became larger and larger, it became more and more of what Bob Budiansky and I were focused on. So other stuff that was typically done by special projects ended up being outsourced other editors and other places. Movie adaptations and so forth, even posters, I think by the end of it.

Tom Brevoort:
So then the next thing that happened is the thing that ended up being called marvelcusion , which is at a certain point, the business guys got fed up with Tom DeFalco always telling them no for all their great harebrained ideas that we’re sure to bring ruin to the world, including things like Heroes World. So they decided we’re going to promote him laterally out of the way and we’re going to break up the editorial division into five sub divisions, each one of which will have an editor in chief.

Tom Brevoort:
That will prevent the editor in chief position from being too powerful in any given set of hands and allow our sales department to really drive the bus. In that process, because that was all happening at around the time that the trading cards were going away, Bob Budiansky was put in charge of the Spider-Man segment of Marvel. He was the editor in chief of Spider-Man during that year, which certainly was aggravating to Danny Fingeroth who had been the senior editor on Spider-Man, had been editing the Spidey books all the way through, at least up to the point where Jim Salicrup had left a couple of years earlier, and he and Bob, they’d known each other back in college and so forth.

Tom Brevoort:
They always had a certain amount of almost like a rivalry relationship. So this was kind of a bad Mojo situation, but I then segued myself and my assistant at the time, Glenn Greenberg segued into working in the Spidey area. That having been said that lasted a year and for that year, it was the worst year of the brakes are off of, we need more blood out of the stone. We need more, we need more, we need more.

Tom Brevoort:
I tell this story to the younger editors as a cautionary tale too, because when the five editor in chiefs were set up, each one was given a goal. Bob Harris’ goal was to grow X-Men by 20%. Bob Budiansky’s goal was to grow Spider-Man by 10% and then Mark Gruenwald, Bobbie Chase and Carl Potts, who did the Marvel Heroes what was called Marvel Edge but was kind of Ghost Rider and Friends, and then the epic line. All three of them didn’t have to grow at all.

Tom Brevoort:
They just had to stay level. They couldn’t lose anything over the course of that next year. The only one of the five that actually achieved that goal was Bob Budiansky and he was subsequently fired for it.

Alex Grand:
What year was that?

Tom Brevoort:
That would have been. I’m going to say ’95.

Alex Grand:
Is this like Spidey Clone Saga era, then?





Tom Brevoort:
Yes. The Clone Saga had started and was going and was about to reach a certain level of resolution. Part of the reason it never did for the longest time was the sales guys were saying this is going too well, and it’s selling too good. Keep it going. You got to keep it going and you got to do more and what other Spidey books can you do and how can you expand the line? 10% more, we need 10% more. So that was the driving force and Buda did it honestly by strip mining the Spider-Man world. He dug deep into the bedrock there and I don’t know if he’d had to do it for a second year or third year, if it would have been able to be continued, but he was very effective at being able to do that, even though in trying to do that, he drove everybody absolutely crazy.

Tom Brevoort:
That was the mission that was set down by the company. So that was what he had to try to do, like it or not. So in the aftermath of that was we called marvelcusion which is when by this point, even the ownership of the company, my sense of the timing of this gets a little muddled in my head, but there was already beginning to be fights over control of the company, because these debts that had been accumulated were building up and people were buying the debt in the hopes of staging a hostile takeover and so forth.

Tom Brevoort:
So at a certain point, the powers that be of that day decided, nope, no more five editor-in-chiefs. We’re going to go with one editor in chief, it’s going to be Bob Harris. The market is crashing, we need to cut costs. We are going to fire tons of people, and pretty much a third to a half of the staff were all laid off in that, whatever, it was January 6.

Alex Grand:
That’s around the time when Gruenwald had a heart attack and stuff.

Tom Brevoort:
It’s a little after that. From this point of view, it’s all about the same time.

Alex Grand:
It’s all around the same time. How did you survive the calling?

Tom Brevoort:
On one level, it’s a mystery and I’ve talked to people about this over the years. Jim Sokolowski, who was at that time, the publisher told me at one point, that in the end, it came down to a choice between you, me and Joey Cavalieri and they figured that I would be more of a team player. My interpretation of that is that it came down to me and Joey and Joey was making more money than I was. So he was probably a better savings than I was, but for whatever reason, literally, everybody else that was a part of that Spider-Man team was killed all around me. Myself and Glenn, my assistant were the only ones that survived it.

Alex Grand:
This is like a Roy Thomas what if ending.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, yes, yes. This whole period for the next five years, as we descended into the point where Marvel went into bankruptcy and control of the company, who was overseeing it, who was running it and what its goals and objectives were, would change on almost a week to week basis. You’d come in on a Monday, and some guy you’d never seen before would walk into the center of the bullpen and go, all right, listen up. I’m the new president and I’m here now. Now, we’re going to do things the right way and we’re going to dig our way out of this, and we’re going to, and he’d have a bunch of things that he’d want to do. Then the next week, another guy would come in.

Alex Grand:
This is like a newspaper strip.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, and everything he would tell you would be completely the opposite of what the last guy did. So it was absolute chaos.

Alex Grand:
Were you thinking like, man, this place is going down the drain. What were you feeling about the place or were you just saying, hey, I’m just glad to still be here.

Tom Brevoort:
I think it was more of that and it was much more focused on, there’s no other thing you can do, but walk forward. There’s no other thing you can do, but keep going.

Alex Grand:
You were a good soldier through the whole thing, it sounds like.

Tom Brevoort:
Bob Budiansky was really my touch point and my mentor coming in and he was gone and I had no particular relationship with Bob Harris, other than I guest starred the X-Men and some comics and had Bob had not liked the depiction at some point. So I had no support structure at all after that was gone. It was just me, I was all that was left. So I had to figure out how to do that, and how to prove my value and my worth actively. That’s really, I think the point where it’s not like I didn’t have some editorial skills or some acumen or whatever before that, but that’s really the point where I became or started to become the Tom Brevoort that I am now, because there was no other option.

Tom Brevoort:
Your back was against the wall, and you were still here, they were still paying you, you were still employed, you want to still be employed, you still want to do this. Lots of other people went out and looked for other jobs and other things, and every once in a while, I would talk to somebody or I would entertain something, but I’d never actually really act on it because I’ve wanted to be at Marvel. This is what I wanted to do.

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Tom Brevoort:
My attitude was always just, you just got to keep slugging. Got to keep plugging on, got to do more. That very quickly turned into my philosophy of, I am going to do twice as much as any other person, because my thinking was, if they’re going to get rid of me, they’re going to need at least two guys to replace me. It almost doesn’t matter what they’re paying me, it’s going to be cheaper for it to be me than it is for anybody else.

Tom Brevoort:
So in those days, I set records in terms of the amount of stuff that you would do. On the org chart of the day and editorial workload was five monthly titles, and then maybe a sixth special project in any given month. That was objectively the amount you’re supposed to be doing. There were months in there where I put out 15 books. Once I got a head of steam, and once I started to figure out how to make the levers work a little bit, I got in tight with some of the guys that run our P&Ls. I began to understand that process.

Tom Brevoort:
I got to understand and how to make something profitable or where the lines were and I would pitch any stupid project that came into my head that I thought was halfway decent. I was pretty good at being able to understand that system well enough to go, well, if you do this and this and this, I can make the thing I want to make and it will make money. So you should let me do it because I want to do it and for the most part, the answer that came back was, okay, you want to do it? We like making money, go make money, don’t lose money. You’re good. So I did a lot of scrambling there. By any metric, it was not a fun, pleasant time.

Alex Grand:
Right. It sounds like there is a lot of stress too.

Tom Brevoort:
Oh yeah, it’s a huge period of uncertainty.

Alex Grand:
Of uncertainty. Yeah, that’s the main word. So then in 1997 when Toy Biz bought Marvel, and then Perlmutter stabilized it financially, was that the feeling on the ground floor like okay, the nightmares over or was there a thing like okay, this might go nuts too. What was the overall vibe with that purchase?

Tom Brevoort:
We didn’t think too much about that purchase, I don’t think because that was just the latest scrimmage in a series of scrimmages. Probably the bigger turning point there was when Bob Harras got fired and Joe Quesada came in as editor-in-chief. Joe had been around, Joe and Jimmy, as part of Marvel Knights and Marvel Knights was another, during this period we skipped over Heroes Reborn.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about that too. Yes.

Tom Brevoort:
Heroes Reborn was, again, the business folks upstairs saying numbers are in the toilet everywhere. We can’t seem to reverse this. When was the last time numbers were good? It was when these guys were doing the books. What if we offered them a deal where we licensed the characters to them-

Alex Grand:
To the image guys basically, to do Marvel.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, Jim and Rob will license the characters there and we’ll make out. They did that deal and that deal in particular was usually traumatic for Marvel editorial staff, because the one two punch of that is you’ve just eliminated a third to half of the staff and now you’re starting to outsource the characters. That was definitely, the feeling there was oh, this is all done. They’re going to shut this place down.

Alex Grand:
Who originated that idea? Are you able to say?

Tom Brevoort:
It wasn’t anybody in editorial. It was all above.

Alex Grand:
It was all the corporate stuff.

Tom Brevoort:
Or higher ups. I don’t know exactly who. I’m sure Rob Liefeld just did a bunch of podcasts about this recently, over the last couple of weeks. I haven’t listened to any of them, frankly, because while I’m innately curious, I’m also sure they’ll aggravate the hell out of me. So I’ve kind of stayed away from them, but I bet he talks chapter and verse about who it was that contacted him and Jim and what the deal was, and so forth. That was a whole process and that was enormously scary.

Tom Brevoort:
That was the point at which it was entirely not even possible, but likely that Marvel was just going to be broken up and sold as parts and somebody would buy Spider-Man and somebody would buy the Hulk.

Alex Grand:
That’s what it kind of feels like, like you’re licensing out the stuff.

Tom Brevoort:
Right, and ultimately for a myriad of reasons, including shifting people at the top and so forth. Again, my understanding is Rob goes into this in complete depth and while having not heard, so I can’t vouch for his account, he at least was there, so he’s probably got some good insight. By the end of the year, this was kind of done, but the idea of it perpetuated and so Marvel Knights was kind of a second attempt at doing this.





Alex Grand:
Okay, so that’s like a reaction to the, is Heroes Reborn seen as a successful endeavor?

Tom Brevoort:
I guess it depends on, do you mean at the time?

Alex Grand:
Yeah, at the time as far as like sales and did it work?

Tom Brevoort:
On the most basic level, those opening issues sold as well as those books have ever sold. Rob has continually pointed out the fact, and he’s not wrong, that his Avengers number one is the best selling issue of Avengers ever and he’s right about that. I’ve edited that Avengers now for like 20 some odd years, and I’ve never put an issue out that’s sold as well as his Avengers one. His Cap, Jim’s FF and Jim’s overseen Iron Man, those books all sold very well. That having been said, they also cost a lot more to produce, because of the deals involved and so forth.

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t know enough about the finances there to really get into it. at a certain point, for whatever reason, and again, it may have even been just a shift in who was at the top and what the goals were, somebody decided they didn’t like the deal and wanted to renegotiate the terms. There was some question about delivery, and there was some question about characters. Rob, literally, this weekend put up this drawing he had done of a piece for an upcoming Captain America issue that was going to feature Daredevil and I remember that being a huge problem at the time, because when the Heroes Reborn deal was made, those guys had access to only a certain list of characters, and Daredevil wasn’t on that list.

Tom Brevoort:
Marvel Central was still publishing a Daredevil book at that point. So the idea that suddenly that character was going to be showing up in issues of Captain America sent people spinning wildly. Whether that was something that Rob just did on his own, or whether that was something that Rob had talked to somebody up the chain at Marvel about, I can’t speak to that, but definitely that deal became problematic.

Tom Brevoort:
Rob butted heads with whomever. He got out fairly quickly. Jim stuck around for the whole of the year, and did the year and eventually all those titles and things folded back into Marvel editorial. So it was successful on a certain level. It popped the numbers, it re energized interest in those characters and things. Creatively, was it successful? Again, I don’t know. You see it now. There’s certainly a generation that grew up with those books coming out that were really excited.

Alex Grand:
If it hits you at that age, then you found love.

Tom Brevoort:
In the history of Marvel, there have been some stuff that’s been pulled out of it and there have been some things that have been used and gone on to be other stuff, but it’s not like it casts that huge of a shadow.

Alex Grand:
So now, Bill Jemas or am I saying it right? Jemas, J-E-M-A.

Tom Brevoort:
Jemas, Jemas. Bill Jemas.

Alex Grand:
Bill Jemas. So tell us about working with Bill Jemas because honestly, I kind of like the stuff that he was kind of doing it At the time, he was kind of a nerdy guy. How was working with him in comparison to Joe Quesada as editor in chief in the late 90s?

Tom Brevoort:
Well, again, there is no differentiation. Bill and Joe came in more or less together. Bill was there first and Bill had been there before. If I had any advantage at all during that time, it was the bill at first work for Marvel because he came in with FLIR. Bill was the person specifically who took over trading cars and took them away from Budiansky and myself. I had history with Bill even before he came back.

Tom Brevoort:
So my analysis of Bill is very personal and perhaps very slanted and I tried to be even handed about it. I really do, because the plain fact of the matter is, Bill is a very smart, very sharp guy. He knows a lot about a lot and when he’s in a good functioning mode, he was very good at cutting through a lot of the red tape and BS that built up around the field and he was very good at saying, why not in cases where something was an institutionalized belief or policy, that you don’t do this or you can’t do that.

Tom Brevoort:
Well, why not? We have to submit our stuff to the Comics Code, or we can’t publish it. Well, why not? He was excellent at that. He definitely had an interest in the comic book medium and the comic book field. He’s shown that even since leaving Marvel, where he’s had a number of different ventures that have been comics related. There’s something about this process in this field that speaks to him.

Tom Brevoort:
He could be sometimes, like a generous and reasonable cat, but he was a fucking monster, and a bully, and a tyrant and Mercurial and he created a work environment that was as bad as I could imagine it being. We talked at the outset of this, at least for me, other people may feel differently. Certainly other people got along with him better or worse. I don’t want to speak for a Joe Quesada or Axel Alonso or anybody else who might have been up there, Bobbie Chase. I can only speak for myself.

Tom Brevoort:
We spoke a while back about the Jim Shooter era and I don’t know what that was like I didn’t experience it. I wasn’t there, but the closest I can parallel to was when those couple of years when Bill was running Marvel. There was an analogy that Joe used and I will credit it to him, although I don’t want to, I’m saying this. So take this as coming from me that, what Bill was really good at is if you had a classic car, and if you think of Marvel as a classic car, that it’s been on the road for a while.

Tom Brevoort:
It’s kind of worn down, and he’s going to refurbish it, he’s going to restore it and polish it up and put it back and make it shine again. Bill was great at doing that, and he did it but then he wouldn’t stop and he kept polishing and he polished and he polished, and he polished his way through the hood and polished his way down into the engine and started to polish all the bits off of the engine until what was left was a wreck.

Tom Brevoort:
He couldn’t stop at a certain point. There was a point where you just don’t need to be pushing in that same way and Bill was constantly pushing in that same way.

Alex Grand:
So it’s like a proctology appointment gone wrong.

Tom Brevoort:
I’ll leave that part to your imagination.

Alex Grand:
When you say he was a monster, because I’ve one more question after the monster part, and then Jim’s going to take over on the 2000s, is, give me one example of your interaction with him that was monstrous.

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