New Brevoort Formspring

>I get that I’m not Marvel’s audience right now. I get that you have to target the books at the people who’ll buy twenty books a month at 4 bucks a pop. I’m not your audience anymore and I won’t buy crossovers and I don’t like restarting a book every six months. I get all that, and I am okay with it. Things come to an end and my time buying Marvel is pretty much at the end of its rope. No hard feelings, but reading your tumblr it seems like you’re admonishing those of us who don’t enjoy these books as people who “don’t get it.” Maybe we’re trapped in nostalgia or grumpy old readers. I really don’t think that’s the case. I genuinely don’t enjoy most of product right now and I think there has been a huge paradigm shift in how your stories are told. For example I can’t accept the Hulk as a good guy after the events of what sent him to Planet Hulk and his reaction that caused World War Hulk. That Hulk in those books, is a villain and deserves every bad thing that happened to him. I can’t accept him as a hero in any way and he deserves to be shipped off again as soon as someone can build a ship big enough to haul his big green ass out of our solar system. Now you can decide that you have to tell these stories and change the paradigm all you want, but don’t act as if I don’t get it just because I don’t like it. There is an equally large possibility that you’re telling stories that just aren’t that great.>

I don’t think that I’ve ever said to anybody that the problem was that they “didn’t get it.”

I have often said that not every comic book is for every reader. That is something I do believe in.

And I’ve said many, many times that you ultimately have freedom of choice. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to read the stories we’re making or not–and it’s incumbent on us to create stories that you want to read.

So the problem isn’t the audience. It’s never the audience.

I think where the disconnect comes is that the audience doesn’t speak with one mind. Far from it–just look at this page! On any given day, there are people who love a new story utterly, hate that same story with a passion, and are indifferent to that story. All possibilities are represented.

So we are going to tend to respond and react to what the majority of the audience is doing. That doesn’t mean that the rest is wrong or doesn’t get it. It simply means that not every story is for every reader.

You should absolutely read or not read based on whether the stories we’re creating make you want to. And it’s also good to express when those stories don’t, as you’ve done here. But you have to be aware that yours is just one voice within a din of opinions covering all ranges. So it counts, it contributes, but only as one voice in the overall chorus. It’s the song the chorus sings that we’ll respond to the most.

Make sense?