New Brevoort Formspring

>So I’m one of those fans who is pretty furious at the apparent revelation that Magneto is not the father of the Maximoff twins.  However, I decided to reserve my judgements on this issue until the full story is told.  I know there’s a lot of unwarranted speculation going on.  Quite frankly, all we have is one of Wanda’s spells and who really even knows what that means.  Quicksilver has been my favorite character for a long time, even before I knew he was Magneto’s son.  However, that connection has been a defining characteristic of him ever since.  Without this connection, the twins really aren’t the same people.  I’m not against change at all but I also think to not give yourself boundaries shows a lack of creativity.  People can throw the Whizzer relationship at me all they want, but that relationship was not defining for the twins, it was more like an interesting factoid.  If the twins were never revealed to be Magneto’s children, their characters would have developed much differently.  Do you feel that there are some things that are off the table when you think of making some changes or is nothing allowed to be stable?  I feel that your answer would be that anything goes but that just doesn’t make sense to me.  Just as an example, changing Magneto’s name from Erik to Max is a fine change because it doesn’t change who he ultimately is.  However, a bad change would be that he never was in a Nazi death camp and he just made all those stories up to gain sympathy.  He just wouldn’t be the same person.  So if you were to make such a drastic change why not just make up a new character entirely, because that is almost what you’re doing?  Anyway, I know no amount of complaining will change things at this point in time, and like I said, no one knows anything right now.  I’m really hoping this turns out all right.  But I have been reading Marvel comics on and off for the past several years and there have been a lot of changes that I haven’t liked but this is the first time I’ve been actually furious.  You seem in previous posts to be very dismissive of fans’ anger.  However, the fact that people actually care so much about your work is a good thing.  It also wouldn’t hurt to at least consider fan criticism. >

We always consider fan criticism, we simply don’t let that stop us. If we failed to act whenever we thought somebody might not like a given story, we wouldn’t publish anything.

In any character, different people like and are attracted to different things. To use the example that you gave, you clearly like Magneto’s backstory as a concentration camp survivor. And it doesn’t bother you how that backstory doesn’t really track with several of his earlier appearances, because you don’t care as much about those. On the other hand, there have been creators such as John Byrne and Roger Stern whose view of Magneto was formed by those earlier stories, and who feel that the revelation of him as a concentration camp survivor made him sympathetic at the cost of his villainy–now he was simply misunderstood rather than evil.

Are those creators and those fans wrong? No–they just had a different reading experience from the one you had, and were attracted to different facets of the characters in question.

Every story is a choice. And every choice is something that some people will like, and some people will not. Hopefully, over the long haul, we have more successes than clunkers.

So it’s not quite “anything goes”, but in terms of keeping these characters and these stories vital over a period of decades, you need to be flexible enough to consider the new, the different, the controversial, the strange. All of Marvel’s most best-beloved stories involve a change to the status quo of one sort or another, whether it’s Spider-Man proving himself a man by lifting the big dingus off his back to save Aunt May, the fantastic Four confronting Galactus and thus stepping out for the first time into a much larger, much grander universe, or Jean Grey sacrificing her life on the moon to keep herself from destroying other inhabited worlds. Or a million other stories like them.

It is natural enough to be worried about what might happen next–that’s the impel that drives you to want to seek out the next issue. The level of anxiety that we tend to see around the Internet, though, tends to be at the extreme end. There’s plenty of time to be upset once you’ve actually read the story in question; there’s no need to torture yourself with your own imaginings as to how awful it’s all going to be.