Comic Book Historians

Tom Brevoort Interview, Marvel Editor & VP: Part 2 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson

November 01, 2022 Comic Book Historians Season 1 Episode 98
Comic Book Historians
Tom Brevoort Interview, Marvel Editor & VP: Part 2 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson
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Show Notes Transcript

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 second 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

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Tom Brevoort:
I’ll give you one. It’s not directly mine, although I was a part of it. One of Bill’s theories at a certain point was that comic book covers should be more like magazine covers. This started out, one of the things that would happen with Bill is what I tend to think of is sort of like mission drift. When he started out what he was reacting to is, we’d done a lot of covers that were like fight covers. Here’s the Avengers fighting the Lethal Legion and there’s 70 figures and they’re all tiny and they’re all fighting and Bill liked very simple, straightforward covers.

Tom Brevoort:
You can kind of See this if you look at all the early Ultimate Universe covers. they’re all just, here’s Spider-Man. Spider-Man’s on the package, that’s what you’re getting. So he wanted there to just be single figure covers. Past a certain point though, he got more attracted to the notion of bad girl comics. So that mission tended to drift towards, we want them to all be single character covers, and they should be effectively a porn actress bending over a Maserati.





Alex Grand:
I remember that. I remember those covers very well, very clearly too. Yes.

Tom Brevoort:
If you look at any cover to Marville past the first one, that’s kind of what he was aiming for.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, that was his manifesto, right? Marville?

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t know if it was a manifesto. It started off as a gag challenge that kind of grew into something else as it went. It’s sort of a fascinating study. I don’t know if it’s a great comic, but it’s a fascinating sort of character study if you can dig through it all. Anyway, this was the thing and in fact, there was a meeting which Bill He was unhappy with the covers and he brought the stack of comics. He proceeded to throw them at people across the table. This is shit. This is awful. This is crap.

Tom Brevoort:
There was a new assistant editor and I don’t want to mention her name because why drag her into this after all this time, who had started not that long ago, was very intelligent, was very promising. Went on to be a significant young YA author, and she had a comic thrown at her and it wanged off of her head and she left the meeting. She went to the HR department, and went, “I am done, I quit. I’m out of here.”

Tom Brevoort:
Then the HR department was like, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Bill, we need you to go and fix this. We need you to do to apologize to this woman and make sure this doesn’t become a problem. Bill apparently called her to his office to talk to her and his opening line was reportedly and I say reportedly, but I heard this from her. So I feel free really confident in it. “Don’t be a dick.”

Alex Grand:
That’s horrible.

Tom Brevoort:
That just sort of sums up the kind of, it was almost like a frat ish persona.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Did she leave after that or did she stay?

Tom Brevoort:
Oh, yeah, she left she was gone. It was sort of an Ivy League, frat ish persona. He’d also come out of the NBA, so he was very basketball focused, which was weird. He’d always want to like, take people out and play basketball with him and show you how great he was, even though I’m hardly a basketball player, but he was a middling player at best.

Alex Grand:
I see.

Tom Brevoort:
That was a part of his persona. Bill was always very effective in any room where he was the biggest guy. Again, when you talked about Tom DeFalco earlier, Tom was intimidating and didn’t really realize he was intimidating. Because as much as anything, it was the position that made him intimidating. Bill could only function in a position where he had that authority. In a fair fight, that’s a guy that would have been beaten up a hell of a lot by people because he was just such a prick in the way he interacted with human beings.

Tom Brevoort:
The only thing that kept him out of it was he was absolutely rock smart and he was very savvy and he had connections, and he knew how to make things happen. I don’t want to uncredited him. He was phenomenally instrumental, along with Joe. Without Joe, none of it would have worked because Joe creatively had the vision and had the insight that made that go.

Tom Brevoort:
So whenever Bill would have a crazy idea, like, oh, we should restart Spider-Man, it was Joe, who would go, hey, we should get this guy, Brian Bendis to write it. That was the piece that was almost more important than that initial idea. Joe was the one that actually I think, enabled all of that stuff to function, but it wasn’t just Joe, it was Bill pushing against all of this stuff and without him there, I don’t know that you could have turned around that business in the way that it happened.

Alex Grand:
So basically Bill and Joe Quesada together turned Marvel around.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. It’s proportional and like I say, I try to be as even handed with this as I can, because there’s personal feeling and there’s professional feeling. Even personally, I don’t have any particular ill will towards Bill. He’s working on the new Venture AWA right now. I’m following a bunch of those books that Axel is working on over there and that’s a very nice line, and I hope he’s successful with it. I don’t actually wish him any ill will. I don’t necessarily want to hang out with him.

Alex Grand:
No ill will. No ill Bill.

Tom Brevoort:
The persona he would put on for the public where he would do these weird wrestling style interviews and things, he would be like that internally sometimes, too and that’s when things were the craziest.

Alex Grand:
I got you. I think that’s the double edged sword with Shooter is I think, financially, he did turn Marvel around in 1980 or so, but then, creatively, there’s a lot of crazy interpersonal things, and it sounds like it’s similar like what you said.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. Again, going back to Jim, obviously, I said some things earlier that can maybe be taken as unkind, but I can only report on what Marvel was like after him. There’s no denying the fact that Jim did a lot of good in terms of getting creators incentives, in terms of building reprint structures, hell, putting the editorial staff structure that we still use today into place, and teaching a lot of people fundamentals about storytelling. I think Jim sometimes gets a little dogmatic about certain aspects of that, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of that lesson was good and necessary.

Tom Brevoort:
While when I think of the Jim Shooter era as a reader, I feel like it became a less interesting time. What I think he did was, at any given point, there’s the best comic you’re putting out and the worst comic you’re putting out and that field is the distance. Everything else is between them. So Jim maybe took the best comic down a little bit, but he raised the bottom comic up a lot.

Tom Brevoort:
So the whole of the line was a better line pound for pound that it was in the more wild west days, where you’d occasionally get this weird, miraculous jewel that Steve Gerber or somebody did, but alongside something that was just the worst kind of we’re banging out 17 pages because we have a job to fill, kind of stories. He was very good at equalizing the line and bringing up the level of craft all across the Marvel titles.

Alex Grand:
So last question that Jim takes over, is in 1998, the Blade movie comes out. Do you feel like that basically starts off the movie saga of Marvel because that movie did well, and when you watched it, when it came out, were you like, wow, they could actually make movies out of these characters pretty well now? What was your take on that?

Tom Brevoort:
The Blade movie wasn’t the one for me that made Marvel movies a thing. They did it obviously but Blade had been at best an ancillary character at that point. He never even had a book of his own until right before that. He’d been in Nightstalkers and he had been a player at Tomb of Dracula and had a couple of Black & White magazines appearances and such, but he wasn’t a big character. So the idea that you could take that and make a vampire movie out of it, it was great that it was a Marvel thing and it was great that it did well, but that didn’t translate in my head to, they’re going to make a Spider-Man movie now.

Tom Brevoort:
That property by itself came out of a certain sort of 70s blaxploitation hammer film monster thing that Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan tapped into in the 70s. They were doing the 90s version of that. It was great. It was terrific that it was successful and so forth, but it wasn’t the thing. The one that probably made it seem more like oh, yeah, you’re going to get Marvel movies now is X-Men.

Alex Grand:
Yes. Okay. So that’s really the beginning for you.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. Again, like so much of this stuff you can look back and go, well, no, really, it was blade and it was, but at the time living it, that movie opened and it was great it’s a Marvel movie, but it’s not the beginning of stuff. I don’t feel like I’m going to get Thor next week.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. You would say it’s more like a beta version of Red Sonja rather than the ending of the Marvel Studios era.

Tom Brevoort:
It was an outlier. It was a weird thing. It was the equivalent of DC having a Swamp Thing movie in 1980. Like yeah, that’s great. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to be doing The Flash next year. That’s very much on the outer edge of what we publish and it’s great that it got done and it’s great that it was successful, but it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the core of this. Whereas once you got to X-Men, and you could do not only a superhero movie, but a team of superheroes, which is, we now take it for granted, but it was a huge thing in 2000.





Tom Brevoort:
You had half a dozen superheroes, all of whom had their own weirdo power and all of whom were able to be explained and gotten across and emote and for all that, you look back at it now and it looks like such a tiny little movie in terms of its scale and in terms of its budget and all like. That seemed like a huge big thing in 2000.

Alex Grand:
Oh, yeah. Bryan Singer did a great job with that.

Tom Brevoort:
So from that you could kind of go, oh yeah, they really can make a movie of all this stuff and then following up on that with Spider-Man in 2002

Jim Thompson:
I want to raise the bar a little bit in terms of some of the characters, the people we’ve been talking about because I’m not like a huge fan of the Heroes Reborn stuff. It was not my thing. What saved me in terms of loving Marvel, this was in ’90s, so I was really into Vertigo, DC at the time. I’m just a few years older than you are. What saved me from Marvel was Kurt Busiek that he was starting with Marvel with Alex Ross, but then you came to work with them with the second or so issue of Night Thrasher?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. Night Thrasher run was the first time we actually did a comic together. We had talked a bunch. He had been on staff when I started. He was in the sales department. He was only there for maybe a year before he left and moved to Portland and became a full-time freelance writer. But he’d been on staff and so we’d had conversations and things. Particularly on his end, there was an understanding that I had a similar enough ethos to what he had that I would be a friendly port of call so to speak.

Jim Thompson:
Yes. I’m saying this is a compliment to you, that the two of you together because Busiek was the one that in some ways gave highest career accolades, right? You won an Eisner for best editor?

Tom Brevoort:
No, I was nominated for Eisner.

Jim Thompson:
You were nominated for best editor.

Tom Brevoort:
I was beaten by Dan Raspler for Kingdom Come.

Jim Thompson:
Ah. Well, okay. But that was mainly in relation to Untold Rales of Spider-Man?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. At that time that would have been just about all that anybody was paying attention to. I was editing a lot of other stuff, but in terms of getting on an Eisner ballot, it would have been from that.

Jim Thompson:
And then while in my mind Heroes Reborn is destroying everything that I like about Marvel Comics. He saves it to some degree with Thunderbolts and then in 1998, because you were talking about being associated with Avengers, he brings between Avengers Forever and Avengers with George Perez. He brings it back and saves it in a heroic way. And you were part of that as well, correct?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, I edited all of those books that you just talked about.

Jim Thompson:
And did you think that it needed saving? Was this something where you thought we’re putting it back on track from where I wasn’t necessarily going to go?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, and no which is to say at any given stage, my goal was always kind of the same thing. I just wanted to do good comics, whatever I thought was a good comic or whatever comprised that. So going into Thunderbolts, it was an idea that Kurt had. He had it years before in another context for a pitch that never had worked out called Avengers Hit Squad. So with Heroes Reborn happening, we had a retreat, a writers’ and editors’ retreat where all the editors and a couple of key writers were going to be gathering for two or three days to try and figure out what the heck do you do with the Marvel Universe and with the publishing line without all of the characters that are now going over to be as part of Heroes Reborn.

Tom Brevoort:
So leading up to that, Kurt was still working on Untold Tales of Spider-Man with me and he was coming to this retreat. He called me up and said, “I’ve got this idea.” He laid it out for me and we talked about it a little bit over the phone and then we came to the retreat. He and I, mostly he, pitched it to Bob Harris in the bar of the hotel where we were staying and Bob went, “Okay, yep. Let’s do that. Let’s go.” And that wasn’t so much about us going. “We’re going to do the right thing so much as this is a cool idea. There’s an opportunity here. The timing is great. Let’s do that.”

Tom Brevoort:
Then when the Heroes Reborn books came back for Heroes Return, it wasn’t so much about now we’re going to fix them, so much as what it really was, was those books all sold really, really well under Jim and Rob and those guys. Even by the end of it like they tapered off a little bit, but they were still super strong. So the mission statement going into that thing was really we got to show we can do these and make them perform just as well as the guys that were just shown the door.

Tom Brevoort:
So everybody, not just myself or Kurt, but everybody involved in all of those launches was very much dedicated to, “We got to put our best foot forward and we got to kill on these and load them up and really make them excellent.” In terms of Avengers, I had read Avengers for years. It was a book that I was familiar with, but I didn’t have a strong connection to it. My book was always Fantastic Four and still really kind of is.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, we’re going to get to that for sure.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. So taking over Avengers, it wasn’t so much like, “Now, I’ll edit Avengers and I’ll do it the right way.” It was more, “Okay, we’re going to do Avengers.” Kurt and I got on the phone as we often did and we would spend about three hours on the phone, on a phone call, because we used to have that amount of time and talked about the Avengers and what we thought, and which characters, and how to approach it, and all of that stuff. Then ended up with George. Especially George is a huge key part of this whole question.

Tom Brevoort:
But ended up making the comics that we made and they struck a chord with an audience like yourself, and with a young audience that had been reading the Heroes Reborn books too. Those books did well and so on that level, we succeeded in what the objective was. But it wasn’t so much, other than it was, it’s Kurt’s aesthetic, it’s my aesthetic, so there’s a lot of us, and really more Kurt and George than me, but there’s a lot of us in that run. But it wasn’t so much going, this is the right way, so much as it is let’s do a good comic.

Jim Thompson:
And what I would say is I don’t mean to imply that Heroes Reborn ruined the Avengers and that they were pretty much in a down slide way before that. I mean, the Roger Stern, John Buscema stuff was great and then after that, they started to go down pretty quickly to teenage Tony Stark and stuff that was just unreadable. So it got saved though by Burchett bringing it back in under your editorial.

Tom Brevoort:
Thank you. That’s nice of you to say. It certainly worked out okay for the Avengers in the years since then.

Jim Thompson:
Yes. Very, very much. I wanted to ask you about the ultimate universe that comes in under this. Now, it was almost like Heroes Reborn, but done much, much better and it had staying power. What was the consensus around editorial about that? Were people in favor of it? Were they nervous about it?

Tom Brevoort:
They tended to vary from person to person. The ultimate universe was very much Bill Jemas’s baby. He had a lot of belief in it and he also tended to stock it up and give it the same kind of advantages that Heroes Reborn and had before that which is to say you could spend more money on it, you could risk thinner profit margins. Those early ultimate books, not only were they priced at 2.25, which I think was less than or the same price as the other Marvel books but they had card stock covers and they spent more on the coloring and more on… He really saw that though as the thing that needed to be done to save Marvel and to save the industry because he felt rightly or wrongly that the Marvel books of the period were too in steeped in years and years of continuity, and that a civilian audience so to speak could not pick up a Marvel book and fathom it, couldn’t understand it.

Tom Brevoort:
It was just argo-bargle to them. So he wanted to build a universe that would be very clean, but also a universe that would then be contemporary. It would be the 2000 version of these things. A year or two before that, John Byrne had done Spider-Man chapter one and Spider-Man chapter one was not what Bill wanted to do. Bill looked at that and went, “This is stupid. You’re telling 1962 stories in 1997. No kid is wearing a sweater vest and no kid is fumbling around with a microscope. You have to think about your audience today. You have to build these characters, keep the essence of them the way they were, but you need to make them function for an audience today.”

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Tom Brevoort:
A young ostracized smart kid isn’t going to be the picked on nerd like the Peter Parker of 1962, he’s going to be much more an emo kid like this because if you look at the pop culture of the time, this is much more where the zeitgeist is. So Bill’s approach and all that stuff was kind of let’s do that and he really believed in that very strongly. He associated with it very strongly.

Tom Brevoort:
He was very involved in all those books and they really had his fingerprints on them in terms of that part of the mission statement, again to the point where it was almost an unfair advantage for the Marvel previews catalog, Ultimate Spider-Man was the cover six months in a row. And the only reason it wasn’t seven months is in the seventh month, they launched Ultimate X-Men. So if you were just doing Iron Man at that time, you were not getting the same level of resources that were being given to these new titles.

Jim Thompson:
So why do you think ultimately… And really the book that was a standout was obviously Ultimate Spider-Man, but why do you think that ultimately Ultimate Universe failed?

Tom Brevoort:
Well, I think it’s a couple of things. One, when those books launched, and this is really a credit to Joe, I feel like particularly they were good. They had good talent doing good work and people really responded to that. On top of which, they had an aesthetic. They had an ethos. And the longer that went on, two things happened. One, a lot of that talent tended to migrate from the Ultimate Universe further out into the mainstream Marvel Universe. Once upon a time, Brian Bendis wrote Spider-Man and then he wrote New Avengers, and that’s a different place.

Tom Brevoort:
So the specialness of the Ultimate Universe as a boutique line kind of eroded. Plus as time went on, as different creators rotated in and maybe didn’t have runs that were quite so long or weren’t seen as quite so special, that particular friction that the line had began to erode away. There were still people that loved it and were super invested in all the way up to when it was eventually stopped in 2015 or so forth, 15 years later. That’s a hell of a run for a line like that.

Jim Thompson:
And has great impact in terms of the Marvel movies today, probably more than the comics.

Tom Brevoort:
Sure, sure. But that initial moment of excitement just couldn’t be maintained at that level, partly because it got bigger, partly because its own continuity began to be just as long. Once you’ve done 160 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, you can’t pretend it’s as new reader-friendly as you wanted it to be when you started. You just can’t. All of these things together basically conspired to take the ultimate line from being this is a super boutique line. It’s like the black label of Marvel. It’s the special stuff over here that’s really, really good and really pure to being its books Marvel publishes. Not materially different or better or worse than that month’s issue of Amazing Spider-Man. You got Amazing Spider-Man, you got Ultimate Spider-Man. They’re kind of the same thing, it just kind of depends on whether you want the peppermint flavor or whether you want the butter pecan flavor.





Jim Thompson:
So one additional Spider-Man question talking about Untold Tales of Spider-Man and that revisionist going back and dwelling on the past, is there any truth to that Ditko was talking about doing something related to Spider-Man and he got mad at Untold Tales of Spider-Man and backed out of it?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes. Although, I don’t know that Untold Tales itself was the reason he backed out of it. Ralph Macchio who was then the Spider-Man editor, long-time Marvel editor, spoke to Ditko a couple of times about reuniting him and Stan for one last Spider-Man book. And Ditko had serious conversations with Ralph about this, deep enough that I know that he was saying, “Well, we’ll set it during his last summer before he graduates high school, because Ditko, his opinions over the years had only grown more intractable and he was really of the opinion that they never should have graduated Spider-Man from high school to begin with because it’s okay for a high school kid to be sort of insecure and to make mistakes and to foul up, but if a grown man does that, he’s not a hero anymore. He’s a failure. He’s not allowed the same stumbles as a kid is.

Tom Brevoort:
So Ditko said that during his last summer. So Ralph sent him some books for reference to showing what was going on and to keep him enmeshed and stuff as they were going to plot this out. As Ralph relayed the conversation to myself and Glenn Greenberg after it all happened, he got on the phone with him and Ditko said something like, “Oh, I have collaborators now, do I?” Talking to the Untold Tale stuff. And it was one of the things where the very fact that that stuff was there and whether or not… I don’t know, maybe, I would have been egotistical enough to say, “Oh, no, no, no. Ralph, you can’t let him do that because it’ll contradict Untold Tales of Spider-Man.”

Tom Brevoort:
I like to hope that I would have been smart enough to go, “Steve Ditko, let him do whatever the hell he wants on that Spider-Man story. It’ll be fine. It’s not going to hurt Untold Tales. But either way, Ditko felt like this stuff was there. It was more of an impediment and between all of that, that project never happened. It actually transformed. It turned into the Spider-Man Kingpin: To The Death book that Stan did with John Romita instead of Ditko. That was the book that took its place. If things had gone differently, it might have been a last Stan and Steve Spider-Man story.

Jim Thompson:
So in 2001, there was also sort of a becoming the end of the comics code partly because of X-Force number 116, the Allred-Milligan and a move toward maybe the precursor to what the MAX Line was going to be that you were pushing the boundaries in terms of adultness and violence. Were you involved at all in the X-Force decision how the tone that was to take?

Tom Brevoort:
No, no. That was all Axel, and Joe, and Bill. I think Bill had been looking for an excuse to get rid of the comics code because he didn’t believe in it, he didn’t understand it. We were paying these people money to tell us what we could and couldn’t publish and his take was, “My judgment is going to be as good or better than theirs, and we get to keep the money.” So whatever we feel comfortable with is what we publish, so why should we do this? The days when anybody cared whether a comics code sticker is on a cover or not are long past.

Tom Brevoort:
So he did it with theater, but he quit the code very intentionally and X-Force 116 was the first piece of that doing a book that was deliberately in “transgressive”. It’s sort of a weird thing because that seemed like a big step, but it’s not like Vertigo hadn’t been around for 10 years at that point. The sort of books that Joe had gravitated to as a reader getting back into comics. He had read comics as a kid and then outgrew them and then in his early 20s found comics again and the comics that brought him back were things like Watchmen and Dark Knight, and Preacher, and Sandman. The more vertigo skewing, more adult sensibilitied comics, Frank Miller’s work.

Tom Brevoort:
So aesthetically, that was always more in Joe’s wheelhouse to begin with and Bill was completely comfortable with that as well. He didn’t see a reason not to do any of that stuff. So coming in, these beliefs that the characters have to behave a certain way or there’s a limitation as to how far you can take it, Bill’s take on that is why? Why not? What happens if you don’t do that? What happens if you let those restrictions up and let the creators tell the best stories that they can tell and work within your own boundaries as to what is right or wrong or tasteful and not tasteful?

Jim Thompson:
You were part of it in terms of the MAX series though and talking about taking the boundaries as far as you want to take it. I think of that first page of Alias, number one.

Tom Brevoort:
Right.

Jim Thompson:
You were the editor on that. That was something.

Tom Brevoort:
No, I was not. I edited that Alias, but I edited it at the very end of the run.

Jim Thompson:
Oh, so you weren’t there for that first issue?

Tom Brevoort:
No, no. Again, I was around but I didn’t edit it. That was Brian and Michael. Again, Bill I think loved that because Bill delighted in creating controversy and turning controversy into press, into sales. He didn’t think there was any such thing as any bad publicity. So again, in a sort of Stan Lee through a broken mirror kind of approach. The idea that there’d be a book that would start off so transgressive and that maybe we could find a printer who’ll refuse to print it, and then we can make a story out of the fact that they refuse to print it and that’ll make people want to read it even more because it’s the thing that they shouldn’t have. He was very canny about how he presented that stuff.

Jim Thompson:
Was there a lot of feedback in the office? Can you believe what we just put out? Were people excited, troubled, any reaction?

Tom Brevoort:
Again, I think it differed from person to person. Was it to everybody’s tastes how strongly or poorly did they feel towards it? I think as a series, people all liked and respected Alias. Whether or not they felt that that opening bit was just sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism or not, I think that’s an individual, massive agreement on that. It was there to make a statement and the statement was MAX comics, we’re willing to go this far right up front, right on the first page. So this is not the Marvel that you’re familiar with. In fact, it doesn’t even have a Marvel name on it. So if you’re coming on board for the MAX experience, this is what you can expect to find at least at the outer edge of it.

Jim Thompson:
Once you came on board on Alias, was this your first working together with Bendis?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. I think that Alias was the first thing I did with him. Although again, I only kept the book for an issue or two before I handed it over to my associate editor Andy Schmidt, because I was busy doing a lot of other things. I know I did by hand the two issues that were the secret origin issues. And the whole reason I remember that is I know I had a conversation with Brian about how the lettering was going to be handled and the flashbacks. And the way we decided to do it was that all of the existing amazing fantasy 15 characters spoke in all caps and all of the new Jessica Jones characters spoken up or lower as they typically did. The very fact that I had a conversation about that and that was something I was thinking about is the thing that lets me go, “Right, that’s the point in which I was involved. I think it was 23. It might have been 22.

Jim Thompson:
Did you play a part in the decision to disassemble the Avengers and then turn it over to Bendis and go forward with that? Was he a choice on your part to take over the Avengers?

Tom Brevoort:
I was involved in that whole process. That wasn’t necessarily my choice. One of the things that had happened at that point is as we tend to do now routinely, we had an editorial retreat where we brought a lot of talent and all of our editors and got together for three days or so to talk about the book to chart out the future. We talked about Avengers at a certain point and what was going on, and what the book was missing and that sort of thing.

Tom Brevoort:
Mark Miller did a whole little dissertation as to what he thought Avengers should be about and what was missing from it. His take was it should be all the best characters. It should be what the Justice League is to DC. It should be all the headliners because that’s what I wanted when I was a kid. If you had all the headliners in one book and all the biggest guys that’d be the best book ever. I know that whatever, Spider-Man and Wolverine haven’t been in the Avengers, but why haven’t they? They should just be in the Avengers. They’re the biggest characters. Put them all in a book together.

Tom Brevoort:
So we walked out of that day of the meeting. Clearly something was going to change and this was a problem for me because at the time Chuck Austin had only just taken over Avengers and he was leading up to Avengers 500 and the launch of Invaders and so forth. Suddenly, all of that was being thrown out. So I was very focused at that point on managing triage on that situation. I thought, “Okay. So Mark’s going to write Avengers.” I was fine with that.

Tom Brevoort:
I had a history of Mark, the first Marvel work he did for me on Skrull Kill Krew. He did a bunch of things over the years. I knew Mark. I was comfortable with him. So I knew. And the next day of the retreat, everybody came back in and while they were out like that night, Brian and Mark were both staying in the same hotel, they had dinner together and so forth and Brian said, “Hey, I really want to do this Avengers book. Would you mind if I did it?” Mark said, “Yeah, okay. You do it.” So Brian came in and he talked to Joe and whatnot and it was okay, Brian is going to do Avengers and I sort of whiplashed like, “What? Brian is going to do Avengers now?”

Tom Brevoort:
I had no particular relationship with Brian at that point other than the understanding, the realization that he had a real favored nations situation. He was very tight with Joe. Bill was kind of out of the picture by that point so he was a non-issue and he had a contract that guaranteed him certain things that made him more difficult to edit than the average person. I mean, I say that Brian was never particularly difficult to edit your work with. I don’t want to frame it that way, but Brian had aspects of his deal that guaranteed him things like artist approval.

Tom Brevoort:
So I always work with a writer, with a creator on who the other people involved in a book are but theoretically on any given title, the final call ultimately is mine whether or not I choose to use it that way or not. And on a Brian book, it was Brian’s. So it’s just a different situation. So going into that, it was a little dicey because I didn’t know this guy and I didn’t know where he was going to be coming from or how he was going to go.

Tom Brevoort:
Brian is kind of copped to this later on. Brian came in with a, I’ll call it a punk sensibility, although Brian is not at all from punk culture. He kind of came in with, “I’m going to burn it all down,” and then build it all back up in a better way. And the part that he kind of realized particularly as fans started to respond to some of what he was doing that he really understood was, the stuff he was burning down was stuff that a bunch of people really liked. I had spent at that point 10 years, seven years, whatever working on it and you’re coming in and you’re telling me you’re going to burn it all down. There’s no way to not take some degree of umbrage at that.

Tom Brevoort:
So again, Brian and I felt each other out and over the course of a couple of issues, we got comfortable and we found a rhythm like he says that the moment he felt like, “Yeah, okay. This was pretty good and this was all going to work,” was the moment when I got George Perez to draw the very end of the Avengers finale book. That was a big thing for Brian because he was a fan of George’s and he always wanted to work with him, but also that felt like a good handing of the baton.

Tom Brevoort:
I always knew that commercially New Avengers was going to work. There was no way it wasn’t. It was the getting to it that was the rough part. So once we were there, it was a lot easier to kind of click in and go, “Right. We’re doing this now and we have to figure out how to make this go.” Obviously, I worked with Brian an awful lot for an awful long time and that was a very fruitful relationship.

Jim Thompson:
So as an editor on a group of characters that you knew very well at this point, were there ever points where you thought to yourself, “Well, that’s not what Captain America would do. That just sounds like Bendis. It doesn’t sound like Captain America.” And if so, could you say to him, I don’t like that or was he kind of in charge almost… Not self-editing, but you said he had a lot of power.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. And honestly the answer to that really comes down to is it’s all about relationships. So at that outset, I didn’t have the relationship with Brian. So I feel like it was tougher initially to get him to really listen and take on board something that I would say. At the same time, I was really in a defensive mode. For Brian’s first script, for Avengers 500, I sent him back notes and I think there were about 16 notes all told, pretty much none of which actually got done as it turned out. Some of them, I haven’t looked back. I don’t have that set of notes anymore, but some of them I suspect were notes that were more about me and the Avengers that had come before versus where things were going and where things were going to be happening now. So it’s a learning process.

Tom Brevoort:
You build the relationship with the people that you’re working with and you win not by force, but you win by convincing people that what you’re saying is correct. For all that I can look at something like the Death of Hawkeye in Avengers 502 and go, “Yeah, that’s not what I would have wanted it to be.” I also know that that’s better than the first version where Brian did a first draft and I called him on the phone or sent him reactions and he revised it to bring it more in line with what I had to say.

Tom Brevoort:
So Brian was never intractable on any of this stuff. It was just always a question as to whether or not I could convince him that what I was saying was right. And what that meant early on was I very quickly realized I have to pick and choose my shots very carefully. To use an Axel Alonso term, “I had to deal with the gut wound and not the scratches and the abrasions because I could get a scratch or an abrasion, but the patient is going to bleed out in the meantime.”

Tom Brevoort:
So really it was, at least at the outset… Again, as we worked together longer, it became a much more simpatico relationship where we could talk to one another and there was mutual respect. So at the outset… Again, a lot of this was probably on my end, more than anybody’s. I was just in a very competitive mental state because of all this stuff.

Jim Thompson:
You were editing Brubaker’s Captain America at the same time, right?





Tom Brevoort:
Yes.

Jim Thompson:
Did you feel like there was a consistency in the two Captain Americas and the voice or was it hard to juggle the two of them?

Tom Brevoort:
I didn’t worry about it on that level and that I was more focused on make the book good. In the broadest sense as long as Captain America is Captain America, does things that Captain America does, exposes the virtues that Captain America stands for, seems to behave as Captain America would, I was fine. The other piece that was there at that time that has long been forgotten now, was I was also editing Priest’s Captain america and the Falcon book, which was the third title that Cap was in and that also had a slightly different point of view on the character.

Tom Brevoort:
One of the beautiful things about the Marvel characters and most of the fictional characters in comics is that they are broad enough to contain multitudes, and there are a lot of different ways of approaching them that are valid or can be valid. I wasn’t at any point thinking about well, the guy in Avengers doesn’t seem like the guy in Captain America. It was more let’s make the Captain America issue good. Let’s make the Avengers issue good.

Jim Thompson:
You had a great stable of writers at that particular juncture, especially on Avenger related books because you had Fraction working on Iron Man and Brubaker working on Captain America. And it was as good as it ever got in terms of those core characters. They were just great. And then you had Bendis and the Avengers which was harder for me as an Avengers fan. But it had some good stories.

Tom Brevoort:
Again, I can understand that and certainly having been on Avengers for so long, I’m in the weird place where I could talk to Avengers fans of different eras and I’m either… Like you were saying earlier, I’m the guy that saved the Avengers or I’m the guy that destroyed the Avengers.

Jim Thompson:
Or both.

Tom Brevoort:
And sometimes both in the same conversation. Some of that is just the nature of you do it long enough and everybody is going to like or hate something that you do. It’s kind of inevitable, but that constant role of change and that constant need for the characters to be dynamic and to reinvent themselves and to push into areas that you’ve never seen them do before is all necessary to keep them alive and vibrant, I think.

Jim Thompson:
So speaking of destroying the Avengers, let’s talk about Civil War for a minute. Was there a point where people were concerned that you were making the entire Marvel Universe so unlikable where Reed Richard’s is like the biggest dick on the planet? He wasn’t the only one obviously. I mean, the hole that was being dug for characters like Spider-Man, where it’s like did you all see riding off a cliff that it was going to be hard to come back from some of these character developments?”

Tom Brevoort:
I would say no. Again, obviously you had a strong reaction to that storyline and that’s fair. Every reader comes at these things from a certain point of view and a certain place, but there’s no question that all of those characters have continued to be successful since then. There hasn’t been any need to repair them or fix them. Any damage that was done to anybody was not lingering, it was passing damage and it was mostly in the heads or in the emotions of the individual audience, members who felt that way about stuff.

Tom Brevoort:
I can say that there are aspects of Civil War that went further in certain respects than I would have liked, but that has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of those books were done by people who were not Mark. And this is maybe the place where I differ from the audience a little bit. Going into Civil War from the jump, I could have told you right away that the fan audience is going to be entirely on the Captain America side and not on the pro registration side. But I can also tell you absolutely that in the real world, I would be and most everybody would be on the pro registration side and not on the Captain America side.

Tom Brevoort:
This was all being done. That story developed in the shadow of 9/11 and it came from days in which I’d passed through Penn Station on my commute to work and there’d be national guardsmen in full riot gear with enormous AK-47s there in case something happened. Theoretically, those guys are there to protect me and protect the peace, but there’s nothing more unnerving than walking through an area that’s like aligned with those guys.

Tom Brevoort:
So being able to take that idea and go right, if they were superheroes, if they were guys who put on masks, who had crazy amounts of power, who ran around beating up whoever they felt like it because they said they were bad people and nobody knew who they were and nobody had any control or oversight on them, you bet everybody would be like, “We got to put a stop to this.” So that question and that metaphor was very much of its time, but also very potent and very direct.

Tom Brevoort:
So the place where some people ran into trouble. And I’m going to point to him directly now, although I don’t see this as a condemnation of him, so hopefully he’ll feel the same way. But Joe Straczynski wrote a lot of the tie-ins on Spider-Man and on a few other things. And Joe on this particular point, politically had a very strong belief. He is absolutely 100% the Captain America side. That’s Joe’s fundamental at his gut, at his core feeling. So any time he had to write a scene from the perspective of somebody that was on the other side, Joe is an excellent writer and Joe is really good at being able to put his mind in his head into viewpoints that are not his own, but for this particular issue especially then, especially in the shadow of 9/11 and the way the country had been going around that time, he couldn’t do it. His interpretations of Iron Man, and Reed, and so forth, he could not find ways to make them sympathetic in their point of view.

Jim Thompson:
He made them total fascists, didn’t he?

Tom Brevoort:
Yes. He certainly was on the most extreme end of that. There are a couple of other guys too. Paul Jenkins did a couple of things in the front line book that kind of verged that way as well. So while I feel like if you just read Civil War like the main seven issues that Mark does, I feel like it’s reasonably even-handed. I feel like everybody in that seven issues, they come off as right, they come off as wrong, they make good choices, they make bad choices and everybody kind of comes out evenly. Once you add in all of the other tie-ins and all the extended stuff, it’s a somewhat lopsided presentation.

Jim Thompson:
So is there one person that oversees all of that on some level or is it not that consolidated?

Tom Brevoort:
There is in that in theory. Technically, I was looking at all of the various scripts and things for Civil War tie-ins as they came in. On a practical level, one, it’s a lot of material and two, I don’t know that it’s smart or right from my ethos to be the one that guides every creative choice that everybody makes in the course of telling a story. I directly edited JMS on some of the Civil War tie-ins he did. I was editing Fantastic Four and he was writing it. So everything he did in those books has a full-on sign-off from me regardless of whether or not. If you ask me in the abstract, “Well, that scene he did in 541, do you agree with that? Do you think Reed or Ben or whomever would do that?”

Tom Brevoort:
I would go, “Well, I don’t know if I do entirely.” But he does and it’s his job to write the story. And particularly when you come down to writers who are working in other editorial offices and with other editors, you’re now negotiating through another editor, to another creator about what they’re doing. A lot of that is a question of degrees. Again, for all that, I could say, “Yeah, Joe really had a point of view on Civil War that was not fair and balanced because he believed in it so strongly.” The pull quote that everybody still uses, the one that ended up in the movie is a Joe Straczynski Captain America quote. Tree of truth, tree by the river of truth. You stand there.

Tom Brevoort:
So by letting him tell his story, my theory on it was you’re going to end up having creators that are all over the spectrum on this. They’re each going to believe the right and the wrong things are slightly different and if you let everybody have the same kind of equal opportunity to do their thing, in aggregate, you’re going to end up getting something that’s more or less balanced. In practice, I don’t know that that actually worked out that way, but in trying to make this all happen, that was sort of the method in which I tried to approach it.

Jim Thompson:
All right. So I have to wrap up this decade within 10 minutes. So I’m going to be fast about it on some things. But Fantastic Four, my understanding is you were a big push and advocate to bring Hickman in on Fantastic Four to give it a new feel to it. Is that, right?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. I hired Jon to do Fantastic Four, yes.

Jim Thompson:
And I love that series. The two books, I mean that’s one of my favorite Fantastic Fours right up there with just very few that are actually as good as the Stan and Jack stuff. This one really understood those characters. You were happy with it I assume?

Tom Brevoort:
Oh, yeah, yeah. John did great work on that book and I wish he had been able to do more to go longer. It was a good run. He probably ended at the right time, but I liked it and I wouldn’t have minded doing another year or two.

Jim Thompson:
I thought the death of Human Torch worked well. Do you think Marvel went to that well too many times between death of Captain America, death of Human Torch and death of Wolverine?

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t know about too many times. It’s obviously one of the, for lack of a better term levers that can be pulled that can garner reader interest and enthusiasm. And to me on the one hand, all of these characters are fictional. So they live and die by the whims of whoever’s creating them at any given point. And the idea of permanence, as a younger reader I believed in the permanence of the fictional universe and I didn’t understand the idea that people just make it up every month. I still see that from readers today, audience members who will write in upset about a particular story development or a thing, and the way they react to it is as though somewhere there’s a massive book in Lucian’s library that says everything that happens in the Marvel Universe and you’ve transcribed something wrong like they really have a belief where the fact is we make it up every month.

Tom Brevoort:
We come up with it out of our imaginations. So to me, the death of a character, the deaths in comics that I hate the most are the self-aware, self-parodying, deaths. I tend to think of this as a thing that Peter David has done more often than most people. But the example I’m going to point to is Grant Morrison who’s a writer that I like and respect an awful lot. I think it was during Final Crisis. Final Crisis opens with the Martian Manhunter dying.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah. Oh, that was a cheap one, absolutely.

Tom Brevoort:
And all of the Justice League get together at his funeral and Superman says, “I hope he has a swift resurrection.” On the one hand, you go, “Well, that’s somebody playing into the fact that we all know these are fictional characters and they’re going to come back from the dead.” On the other hand, it’s emotional bullshit because what makes the death of any character powerful is what makes the death of any human being powerful. The fact that this is an inescapable finality and a fate that is awaiting all of us. And if you can play into that truthfully, you can do stories even if the character comes back again that really carry weight and have an impact. And the ones that piss that away for a knowing joke, right, I’m as smart as the audience is, I feel like that does a disservice to the story and even to the medium. I don’t like them.

Jim Thompson:
Although, I would say Hawkeye was one of those as well, but yes.

Tom Brevoort:
Fair enough.

Jim Thompson:
My question about Fantastic Four is it must have sold reasonably well because even after Hickman left, you guys were still publishing it as two different series. Why did y’all let it die? I know that was incredibly sad to long-term Marvel people to not have a Fantastic Four. How was that decision made?





Tom Brevoort:
It’s a couple of things. One was that John was doing Secret Wars and the secret wars or the underlying idea of Secret Wars was something that he had come up with when we were working on Fantastic Four. In fact, if he had stayed on Fantastic Four, we would have gotten the Secret Wars there rather than in Avengers. But once we did AVX and decided we were going to mix all the teams up and John ended up on Avengers, we moved all of those ideas over to the Avengers side.

Tom Brevoort:
The reality of Fantastic Four, and it makes me sad as much as anybody else is it’s tough to sell a Fantastic Four book today. The audience today sees those characters as being somewhat out of step or passe. And not always, people can do good things and do good stories and do big stuff with them. But John left Fantastic Four and Matt Fraction had a very nice run on it and James Robinson had a very nice run on it, but all throughout those runs, your sales tended to taper off and go down and so forth.

Tom Brevoort:
There is a point at which sometimes the best thing you can do for a character or a property is to take it away for a while, because the month before Fantastic Four went away, 27,000 people were paying attention to that book maybe. And the month after it went away, everybody was like where is it? Why isn’t it here? You’re of the right generation for this. I liken this to the Flash. I was a huge fan of the Flash, the Barry Allen, Flash. But I stopped reading it before it went into the trial of Barry Allen.

Jim Thompson:
And that was a good place to leave too because that was hard going.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. But I came off, and a lot of people came off. And then they got up to Crisis and they announced that in the course of Crisis, on Infinite Earth Barry Allen is going to die. And not myself, but a lot of people around me were like, “How can they kill Barry? Oh, this is a tragedy.” And you would ask those people like when was the last time you actually read Flash? And they would say, “Well, it’s been five years, but I love the character and I love the…” And you kind of go, “Well, that’s the problem right there. You’ve taken this thing for granted. You assume it’s a constant. You assume it’s always going to be there.”

Tom Brevoort:
Sometimes you have to walk away from it to make it work again. The same thing was kind of true as much as I don’t necessarily want to admit it with Thor. Thor didn’t have a book for a bunch of years there. And when Thor came back, and Joe, and Olivier Coipel came on to it, that book was a top selling thing. Everybody was excited about Thor again in a way that they had not been when we closed it out two or three years earlier.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah. It needed a break, I think.

Tom Brevoort:
So between the fact that John was doing Secret Wars and that was intended to be ultimately a big Fantastic Four-centric story, and the fact that it was always difficult to keep FF going as a concern, we said, “Okay, let’s make this in ‘the last’ Fantastic Four story and take them off the board for a while.” Then our hope was we would get exactly the reaction that you’re talking about from people and build up to the point where when we bring it back, it’ll be a real event at a triumph and people will really love it and embrace it again the way we want them.

Jim Thompson:
So in 2007, that’s when you became executive editor. Besides your job title, what changed with that designation?

Tom Brevoort:
At Marvel, I think more often than not, the way it works is first you do the job and then you get the title. Becoming executive editor was a huge surprise to me. I wasn’t particularly working towards it. I had no idea that it was a thing and whatever that year was, that post-Civil War year, when I came in to do my yearly performance review with Joe which was always a fairly perfunctory thing where he’d say, “Yep, you’re doing great. Everything’s fine.” But he told me this and I was like sort of stunned by it, and I was stunned by it for about a week.

Tom Brevoort:
Basically as executive editor it means I have more eyes on more things in a broader sense. I oversee more people and have maybe a slightly louder voice, although I always have a loud voice in the shape and the direction that the Marvel Universe as a whole is taking. Nobody has an absolute voice in that, but like I was saying earlier, it’s all about being able to convince people that you’re right.

Tom Brevoort:
So I went from directly overseeing a crew of four or five other editors to pretty much sort of overseeing at least half of the line. And that doesn’t mean, I was editing it, that means I was checking in. I was another sounding board and another voice as people came up with stuff. I could keep stupid things from happening every once in a while and I could hopefully throw out ideas and improve on ideas that people already had when they had a story and there was something that was of value there. They could take it and incorporate it and if there wasn’t, they could discard it and move on with their lives.

Jim Thompson:
So was it more fun or less fun, having the additional power?

Tom Brevoort:
Honestly, I haven’t quite quantified it that way. Certainly, it’s always nice when people listen to you. But I don’t feel like for the most part people didn’t listen to me before I was executive editor. So there are days when it’s better than other days and those days tend to be the days when you have to do something bad. We just went into COVID four or five months ago and there were points where I had to call up a lot of people and go, “Hey, we don’t know when Diamond is restarting again. We don’t know when books are going to come out. I need you to halt work at the moment and I’ll be in touch when I can tell you to start up again.”

Tom Brevoort:
Those are terrible days to have to live through both for the people that you’re working with and for yourself and the rest of your staff. Having any sort of degree of authority means you have to be able and willing to do the dirty work when the time comes and it has to be done. On the flip side, it means that if I get a stupid idea for something, I could probably more often than not make it happen.

Tom Brevoort:
So consequently, the comic book racks for the last 13 years have been littered with my stupid ideas. Some of which were good and some of which were maybe not as good. Even in the worst periods, I’ve never not enjoyed doing the work, doing the job. I’ve not enjoyed parts of it. I’ve not enjoyed particular interactions or the particular vibe on the floor or whatnot or where things were, but the actual work of making comics, I’ve never not liked doing. So it’s all kind of the same to me.

Jim Thompson:
I’m going to ask you one more fanboy question and then I’m going to let Alex ask you about Disney and then he and I are going to go back and forth asking you sort of rapid fire questions for the last half hour or so. My question is I thought the Abnett and Lanning cosmic stuff was one of Marvel’s great runs in terms of that. All of those books, all those series were so much fun. Why were they pulled or left and Bendis put in charge of Guardians which never quite recovered what the cosmic aspect that Hickman had he was doing in Fantastic Four and building a lot upon the Abnett-Lanning stuff. But what happened there?

Tom Brevoort:
I think what you’re sort of asking in a sense is why did this change? And the answer to that ultimately over time is always that everything changes. People do runs, people stay on books, people transition off of books, new people come on to books. I don’t know that there was anything bigger about it than that. Certainly when Brian came in, it was with the knowledge that there was going to be a Guardians movie of some sort at some point in the future and so us bringing Brian in and Steve McNiven who I believe did his first two arcs.

Tom Brevoort:
The idea was this is going to be big and important to Marvel as an entity. So we put our biggest guys there and show that we’re committed to it and we’re behind it. It’s in a way no different than we just announced literally this past weekend that Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribić are going to be doing Eternals. And that’s the same kind of thing. We know an Eternals film is coming. We know Eternals is going to be a big thing for everybody and we’re going to put the best foot forward that we can with those characters and with that property so that hopefully not only is there some excitement in our world that helps to set up what gets done elsewhere, but also so that when it comes time to make Eternals 2 or Eternals 3, there’s a new chunk of cool material that those guys have to draw on.

Tom Brevoort:
So it was the same kind of opinion. If I’m remembering right and it’s been a while so forgive me if I’m getting my timeline wrong, it wasn’t that Dan and Andy were replaced by Brian, it was that book ended and then Brian’s book started I’m going to say six months later.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, that’s about right.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. So the end of that run was the end of that run. That was happening either way and it was really only the fact that, “Oh, there’s going to be a Guardians film and we should probably be doing something here,” that made people go, “Right, we better get on with this now.” Otherwise we might have gone two years or three years without a Guardian’s book as we often do with other properties. But there wasn’t anything especially sinister about it. If anything, it was kind of the opposite. It was trying to do the best with the biggest guys that we had.

Alex Grand:
Right, right. It sounds like you’re like, “Okay. We’re going to make this, want to keep this cool. We’re going to put some cool people on it. There’s a movie coming out.” I would say probably maybe the question would be more directed more toward Bendis and why he kind of let go of some of the stuff that the previous guys built and I think that’s probably more of an individual creator rather than a Marvel corporate kind of thing.

Tom Brevoort:
Again, I didn’t work so much directly on that book. I had some conversation with Brian at the very outset because there was two seconds when it looked like I might. And Brian approached it like he approaches everything that he does. He stared at it, he read up on a bunch of stuff. He found the pieces that spoke the most to him and he went out to try and tell stories that felt valid to his sensibility. And he doesn’t come from the same place that Dan does or that Andy does or that any of the other predecessors come from, he comes from the world he lives in.

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Tom Brevoort:
But as long as he’s telling his stories with emotional truth driving them, that’s what ultimately will make them work. But there’s no such thing as a magic bullet. We were talking about FF before and John Hickman succeeded Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch on Fantastic Four. They came on to FF after finishing up Ultimates. And that’s about as close to a slam dunk creative team as I could imagine at that point. That was going to be a monster and yet somehow for whatever reason, it’s not like the book sold poorly, but it never quite caught fire the way I would have anticipated.

Alex Grand:
It’s like making a stew, right? It doesn’t always come out.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. You just can’t tell what the zeitgeist is or what’s going to work. So when it came time to succeed them, one of the reasons I went to John was I thought about who else could do this and they had done it and before them JMS had done it. I had put a bunch of really big guys on the book. Maybe it was time then to take a guy that was not yet big, a smaller guy, but who had a voice that I liked and plugged them in there and that was John. He was doing Secret Warriors with me and was looking for other stuff to do, but he hadn’t really cracked through in a big way.

Tom Brevoort:
But from Secret Warriors I could tell he’s a guy that’s got a particular brain, a particular mindset and he’ll do some interesting things here. He hadn’t been a Fantastic Four fan at all. He was never a reader. So he read up on all that stuff and he distilled it as he tends to do down to I think three volumes of notebooks and things that were his thesis on Fantastic Four, and that worked out.

Tom Brevoort:
You never tell. Every time you end up casting a series, you take the best shot you can, whatever your instinct is for what the series needs, where the world is right now, what the last guys did that worked, what the last guys did that didn’t work so well, all of that stuff. But then it’s ultimately down to what the audience feels. It’s not math, it’s alchemy.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, right, alchemy. The stew. Throw some meat, throw some onion, we’ll see what happens. So then Marvel having the digital comics in 2007, that’s kind of a bit of a milestone. Has that improved sales or maybe even awareness of people see a digital comic and they say, “Oh, I want to go buy one”? Did that improve as far as sales goes? Was that a good step forward as far as entering the future?

Tom Brevoort:
I think it was definitely a good step and one of the things that’s proven itself out over the course of that time, for all that everybody particularly retailers were very worried about digital at the outset, was that digital doesn’t seem to cut into the sales of tangible, which is to say that whether or not there’s a digital copy of Avengers, Avengers tends to sell what it sells and there’s a reader that likes it, that likes having that physical copy whether it’s the monthly release or whether it’s the trade paperback or the hardcovers, or hopefully all three.

Tom Brevoort:
But there’s a separate audience that likes digital, whether it’s for the immediacy and not needing to go out to a store or whether it’s not having the space or the room to store it all or just being more comfortable with a screen. Whatever the case may be, that whole sales model tends to be additive. In terms of proportions, it’s still not even half of our audience, but it’s a place where clearly over time, there’s the potential for growth and a lot of growth.

Tom Brevoort:
So I think it’s an absolutely necessary step in terms of keeping Marvel and keeping the characters and the series viable into the future. There hasn’t been any real downside to it. There’s a certain number of man hours it takes to prep a comic for digital release, but once you’ve got the comic that you’ve done to print, it’s not that labor intensive. And then all the revenue is gravy.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. It sounds like it didn’t really take away from heart, it just added more sales in general.





Tom Brevoort:
Yeah, whether those are sales of… Like the digital sits on top of the monthly or there are people that buy stuff digitally and then buy collections of the stuff that they really love to have it on their shelves permanently. And that’s another way that that feeder system works.

Alex Grand:
That’s kind of cool. So now another thing as far as preserving Marvel for the future when Disney bought Marvel in 2009, were like, “Okay, here we go again. Another corporate shake-up.” Or were you like, “Hey, this is a good move. This actually is the real deal.”

Tom Brevoort:
I was relatively nonplussed having been through this kind of thing before. And what made it most or at least unsettling, let’s say was that in the run-up to it, Joe had gone out and a couple of our other key people had gone out and talked with people and taken meetings with Disney people and hung out at Pixar and done all of this stuff. So Joe coming back and saying, “Yeah. Look, I’ve talked to all these guys. I’ve seen how they operate. This is all going to be good,” makes that feel a little more real than somebody you’ve never heard of walking into the bullpen saying, “Hey, I’ve got mouse ears and I run the place now.”

Tom Brevoort:
While it was a Disney purchase there’s much more of an aspect of it being a merger creatively to it. And again, everybody, since then wants to blame Disney for whatever it is they don’t happen to like about Marvel at any given point. It’s a commonly thrown around thing in fan circles. And for the most part, it’s just not true.

Alex Grand:
So it’s more just the basis of like the current staff at the time not because Disney is diluting the brand or directing it in some way?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. Ultimately, all the Disney stuff has been positive. The one thing Disney has had and you’ve seen it happen over the last decade is they’ve always had a massive global reach. Their characters and their properties in film and television as merchandise, as tchotchkes, they’re everywhere. And that ability to get these characters out onto a worldwide stage has been absolutely invaluable to the point now where forget about like Iron Man. People on the ass end of the world know who Groot is, which is bananas. Anybody that would have thought that that was the case in 2009. Put aside the fact that he was in a movie, they know that character and they know there’s a little version that dances, because they’ve got one on their desk.

Alex Grand:
Yes, true. Disney does help that. I mean, who would have thought the Planet X guy from the ’50s would be all over the place?

Tom Brevoort:
All of that stuff is hugely helpful. And really for the most part in terms of particularly when it comes down to like comic book publishing, our day-to-day isn’t really any different. There haven’t been a lot of mandates, there haven’t been a lot of… Oh, it’s got to be this and whatnot. All the stuff that fans fulminate over, oh, they’ve lost the whatever, if it is true, that we have lost the whatever, it’s because we lost it. Not because Disney made anything happen. There’s no choking noose around anybody’s neck keeping them from making whatever imaginary comic you want them to be.

Alex Grand:
That’s why we haven’t seen, Jim, Carol Danvers as a princess and Marcus as prince charming. It’s no wonder we haven’t seen that because Disney’s not telling them to do it.

Tom Brevoort:
There might be a couple of other reasons there too.

Jim Thompson:
Tom mentioned fandom and that was going to be my next question. We live in a moment with social media and things where I read in researching this, just how vicious attacks have come against you personally bringing up your family, bringing up everything from the comics gay community and all of that, taking it very aggressively personal against you because Bobby Drake is gay now or things like that. Do you ever get nervous? How do you feel about that? When you’re making decisions and you’re fighting with people who are 50 years old about these characters, when you’re trying to sell to a younger audience, how do you balance this and how do you not lose your temper?

Tom Brevoort:
To your last point first, sometimes I do lose my temper.

Jim Thompson:
Yeah, I know.

Tom Brevoort:
But a couple of things on that. The first one is I genuinely like the fan community. For the most part, I genuinely do like the fans and I appreciate and understand their point of view. They’re no different than me. I was a fan and a reader. I’m still a fan of the reader. I buy and read books every week although now with Corona, I have to have them sent to my house rather than going to a shop. But I still do that and I understand that psychology, I understand the thing that drives them because I’ve been there.

Tom Brevoort:
That having been said, bad behavior is bad behavior. People being jerks are people being jerks. For a while, I was a good lightning rod because I would answer questions on Formspring or whatever. I have not had it as bad as a lot of people in this industry who have been hounded, and doxxed, and tortured, and tormented for the crime of being able to do a creative endeavor that the people that are poking at them would dearly love to be able to do, but can’t or haven’t. That behavior is just reprehensible and it ought to stop.

Tom Brevoort:
But that all having been said, I appreciate the idea that any given reader’s experience is going to be their own experience. So if I put out an Iron Man story, whatever story that is, there are going to be people that love it and think it is the greatest Iron Man story that’s ever been done. There are going to be people that like it and enjoy it and buy the next one. There are going to be people that are so, so about it. There are going to be people that didn’t love it, but it doesn’t ruin their lives and there are going to be people to whom I have forever destroyed the character of Iron Man.

Tom Brevoort:
And that whole range is fine. It’s all about how it gets expressed and how it gets acted upon. In terms of am I ever scared? I don’t know if I’m ever scared per se. Every once in a while there was one during the Secret Empire storyline where there was one death threat that seemed like… No, that could be a legitimate death threat and it came from a guy that had a history of mental problems and so forth. That one went up through Marvel security and so forth. And anything like that, we’ll take seriously. But I also know that most of this stuff is just people blowing smoke.

Tom Brevoort:
I go to conventions, not this year so much, but I go to conventions, I’m easy to find online. I’m not hard to get a hold of. Publicly, and to my face, nobody’s really been awful. Even people that haven’t liked a certain thing have observed the social niceties when they’ve been there. Either not saying anything or saying, “Yeah, I didn’t like that.” And that’s fine. I understand. You have a love for this just like I do and you don’t like whatever creative choice was made. That’s fair. Hopefully the choice we make next month will be better for you.

Alex Grand:
Jim brought up the comic gig people and there’s also just the flip end of it. There’s the cancer culture thing of sometimes someone sees a panel from maybe 10 years ago that was okay then, now it isn’t. That group wants that person to be fired. It all feels like social media is adding a certain toxicity to the fandom issues that used to be contained in letters, pages that you had some degree of control over. Has it ever gotten to that point emotionally where you’re like, “I just kind of want to retire and get away from this”?

Tom Brevoort:
No, it hasn’t gotten to that. I think honestly, that toxicity doesn’t come from the fandom. It doesn’t come from social media, it comes from the zeitgeist in the world. We’re in a very contentious period right now and have been for a couple of years and that’s tended to bring out the worst extremes of people on all sides of all of these issues. So this is a symptom. This isn’t the illness. When the situation itself changes, or improves, or gets better that I think you’ll see people behaving slightly better.

Alex Grand:
You’re promoted to senior vice president of publishing in 2011. So you have that title and the executive editor title, I think currently, right?





Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. I keep a lot of titles around. It’s good for impressing people.

Alex Grand:
Did that change your job titles as far as being senior VP of publishing or is that more a testament of like this guy’s been a solid company man. He’s doing a lot of things around here. Let’s throw that title there. I mean, what is it? What happened?

Tom Brevoort:
There’s more to it than just, “Hey, let’s give him a title.” It’s not like my job with the VP of publishing on it versus before that, was all that materially different. It’s a reflection of mostly honestly is the Disney structure that within the Disney hierarchy and dealing with people in other divisions, it’s helpful to have a title that makes sense to those divisions where they can go, “Oh, that guy’s a VP. So when he says, whatever, Iron Man should be red and gold, he probably knows what he’s talking about.” As opposed to anything else.

Tom Brevoort:
Again, I won’t say it was an empty or a meaningless title. I’ve got more responsibility with that than I had before. But really the free-for-all there is really more about the internal political dynamics of the engine that is all the various Disney companies.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. I think Paul Levitt said that with the Warner structure that once that happened then things were structured to reflect that, the new owner kind of thing.

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. It’s exactly that sort of thing. So my day-to-day hasn’t changed all that much, but the title just means that if I get a call or I have to interface with somebody at, I don’t know Disney parks or something, they understand instinctively, they’re dealing with somebody on whatever level I happen to be on, and not just a guy from the mail room.

Alex Grand:
Yeah, I got one more question and Jim is probably going to ask one more, then we can close it.

Jim Thompson:
I had two more, but go ahead.

Alex Grand:
Two more questions. There you go. As far as the movies, are we kind of in the movie age of comics where the movies are kind of driving a lot of the creative choices. Before it was like let’s get movies based on the comics that were made in vacuum without movie concerns. Now, that the movie concerns are here, does that create like this almost, I guess, you could call it a corporate synergy, but does that also reduce in some way the genuineness of the product? Does it in some way dilute the Marvel brand and that it’s become a bit more movie-oriented or is that not real at all?

Tom Brevoort:
I don’t think it’s done most of that stuff. What it does do is it means that everything influences everything. On a day-to-day basis as somebody working in Marvel publishing, what my job is and what my goal is always is to be doing the stories that on some level can be raw material for what studios does a couple years from now. The most obvious example of something like that is I do Winter Soldier, they make a Winter Soldier movie. Their Winter Soldier movie is not like the comic that Ed, and I, and Steve Epting did. It takes a few pieces of it. It remixes them and it’s built in a way that works really excellent for a two-hour movie structure as opposed to a serialized comic.

Tom Brevoort:
But it’s raw material and it’s stories that got a reaction and that got people excited that they can look at and go, “We could do something great with that in film.” So on all the books that we work on, we’re constantly looking to be at the forefront of stuff. That having been said, it’s not like the films don’t have a huge influence over everybody and that includes our creators. The example that we always use, and it’s not the only one is that after the first X-Men movie came out, everybody started drawing Cerebro as a giant round chamber with a catwalk in it.

Tom Brevoort:
And that wasn’t anybody at Marvel going, “Now Cerebro needs to look at that.” It was everybody coming out of the movie theaters who draws our books going, “That looked cool.” So when Cerebro shows up in a plot, that’s what they think of and that’s what they draw. There are times when the way the films will distill a character down or the way they’ll interpret them or the way an actor will portray them, will naturally translate back.

Tom Brevoort:
I believe it is impossible today for anybody reading an Iron Man comic to not read it in Robert Downey’s voice. It almost doesn’t matter who writes it or what the dialogue is, that actor is so associated with that character that you almost can’t help, but hear it as Downey when he speaks. So there’s always going to be that synergistic influence. And there are times like I said earlier, we know that an Eternals movie is coming, so we’ll do a book. The book we’re doing is not going to be their movie. Will it take bits and pieces from it?

Tom Brevoort:
If we happen to know characters are featured or that they’re doing something specific, that’ll inform our choice making and our decision process, but the stories that we tell… Again, the hope is really, maybe this will be Eternals 2 or Eternals 3 that there’ll be stuff here that they go, “Yeah.” This is in the same way that as they do whatever films that they’ve done so far and will continue to do, they get to cherry pick all the best stuff from all the stories that have existed so far.

Jim Thompson:
Okay. Very quickly, what about going for DC comics from new 52 to the recent news and the basic destruction of DC? Do you all view that as a positive or negative in terms of Marvel because isn’t it good to have a competitor to have a strong Democratic and Republican party to have a rivalry?

Tom Brevoort:
Look, I want to do better than DC on the racks, but I certainly don’t want DC to fail or to fall apart or to go away. I think the industry as a whole is better and stronger, and better for everybody, retailers, creators, editors, publishers alike. Technically, in my perfect world, there’d be three companies at a certain level, and there tends to be more like two and a half these days. But yeah, I want DC to do well. I want to do better than them and I work and fight every month to try to do better than them and they hopefully are working and fighting every month to try and do better than me.

Tom Brevoort:
Some months I win and some months they win. But again, I went through those Marvel layoffs of the ’90s and I know a bunch of the people that got taken out during this wave at DC and a bunch of the people that are still there. So I know what they’re in for and I know what they’ve experienced. It’s horrifying and heartbreaking, and I hate it. But again, all I can do is hope for the best, hope that things turn around for them and move in a positive direction, and that everything works out.

Jim Thompson:
My next question is some of my favorite books of the last two years have been published by First Second or young adult in nature and they’re really doing some interesting things. Marvel is doing it as well and they’re very aware. When fan people, sometimes at Comic Book Historians talk about Marvel failing and sales being down and everything, I think they don’t understand how much business y’all get from that kind of selling to a different audience, the book fairs and the children’s bookstores and that. I just wanted to ask you to confirm that and talk about that for a second.

Tom Brevoort:
Yes, you are absolutely right. Obviously, we don’t sell the same thing through every chain to every person. And what a particular product does in one distribution market does not reflect what it does in all of them. We are very simple folk at Marvel. We like to make money. We like to make a lot of it. As much of it as we possibly can. So if you’re looking at a situation and going, “Well, that book doesn’t seem to be performing very well. It can’t be making much money or any money at all. Why the hell are they doing it?” Chances are the answer is because it makes a lot of money over here, where you just don’t happen to be seeing it and we like having a lot of money and we don’t care so much that it doesn’t make as much money over here.

Tom Brevoort:
At the end of the day, all the loot goes into the same big bag with a dollar sign on it. As long as that money is coming in and there’s an audience there that can be tapped and we can expand the scope and the reach of the Marvel characters and further conquer the world, that’s something that we’re all about doing. Certainly that YA space has been exploding for a decade now as a category in publishing. We certainly have taken steps and will continue to take more to expand what we’re doing there and to capture a portion of that audience until we have it all.

Jim Thompson:
So you’re not doing it to bow to social justice warriors or some feminist agenda or anything else, it’s because you make money off of it, correct?

Tom Brevoort:
We are greedy. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with putting forth a positive message. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being inclusive and having comics that reflect the wide variety and spectrum of human experiences, because we want to get everybody and we want everybody to feel like there’s a place for them at Marvel. But when you dig down, we’re a very profit-oriented organization and we want to have more money at the end of the year than we started with. And that’s always going to drive our business decisions in aggregate. So yeah, the people that are like, “Oh, comic sales are failing.” I’ve been hearing that since before I was in the industry.

Tom Brevoort:
Again, if you bet on failure, long enough, sooner or later you’ll be right because eventually the sun goes nova, the universe ends, heat depth of the universe. It’s a safe money bet, but I’m doing well. Marvel is doing well. We did well last year. We’re doing better this year. Hopefully, we’ll do better next year. We’re doing really well right now in the middle of a pandemic where our whole distribution network fell apart for a couple of months. So the sky is falling rhetoric. If it serves some people, it makes them happy, whatever, God love them, there ain’t a lot of reality to it.

Jim Thompson:
I just want to close with saying that what I like about Marvel is it’s still recognizable under all circumstances. And this morning at 3:00 in the morning, I’m reading the snapshots of Fantastic Four that Dorkin wrote. It’s a beautiful book and it’s Johnny Storm, and I recognize who it is. I can’t wait for the Mark Russell Captain America. And you guys understand your characters and we appreciate it.

Tom Brevoort:
We love the fact that not only are you reading, but you have been reading for so long. I quite like the fact that you had a Kid Flash costume even though that’s not a Marvel thing. Thank you so much. We try not to take your readership for granted. We know that we have to earn your allegiance one comic at a time, one story at a time, every time you go and that’s what we try to do. Sometimes we don’t do as well and sometimes the cake doesn’t come out as good as we’d hoped, but our goal is to hit it as often as possible and provide everybody with some entertainment and some enjoyment, and some joy in their lives.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. Something I want to kind of point out is that when it comes to Marvel and your involvement with Marvel, you are that Marvel company guy that weathered all sorts of crazy storms. John Romita, Sr. was like that like the way you are with that and then Stan Lee obviously. He was there longer than anybody. But are you there longer than the years that John Romita was there?

Tom Brevoort:
Well, I think the answer is ultimately yes, because John retired in ’96.





Alex Grand:
Yeah. So that’s like 29 years or 30 years or something, right?

Tom Brevoort:
Yeah. He came back to Marvel in ’66. So that’s a 30-year thing. But when he came back, I don’t know that he was working in the office. He wasn’t necessarily on staff. He would come in and he would operate as Stan’s pair of hands to do corrections and things, and work in the office. But even assuming that you say that that’s 30 years, I’m longer than that. Stan obviously was longer than me. Ralph Macchio was still longer than me. So there are a few people who’ve been at Marvel longer or who are more long tenured than I, but not many.

Jim Thompson:
Over 30 years, wow.

Alex Grand:
Yeah. More than 30 years. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re there longer than Romita senior. That’s a testament to you being truly a Marvel guy, although it was from affidavit fraud, but still. But at any rate, thanks so much, Tom Brevoort. We had a great time chatting with you today. You gave us some great insights on some goings-on and we’re always excited to hear about what’s next coming from Marvel.

Tom Brevoort:
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for having me.

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