New Brevoort Formspring

>Hey, Tom, pardon the familiarity but I just wanted to touch on something that’s been bugging me.  Every now and again, someone will ask why Marvel doesn’t do something outside of the normal course of activities and your response is often mildly frustrating.  The example that I have in mind is a recent question asking there haven’t been any Marvel/DC crossovers in a while.  Your response basically boiled down to:

1. It’s a lot of work and a lot of coordination.
2. They sell well but not better than other things that you might do with that time.
3. You need to split the revenue and the rights with some other company.

I don’t know about you but I find those responses pretty depressing.  Admittedly doing a crossover with DC doesn’t automatically guarantee a great product but stepping away from this single concrete example, these feel like pretty un-Marvel-ish comments that suggest a frustrating approach to creative endeavors.

In my mind, Marvel (and comics in general to a degree) is about being awesome, pushing the envelope, engaging with the fans, and taking opportunities to be wildly creative and fun.  These responses are mired in a purely businesslike mindset that seems largely antithetical to the spirit of Marvel as I understand it.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand Marvel is ultimately a profit-making venture.  I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do something that you expect is going to lose money and if I did ask it you would be well within your rights to tell me to buzz off.  Heck, if I asked you to do something that would make you a mint, you would still be within your rights to tell me to take a hike.

That being said, your comments seem to embrace a frustratingly corporate attitude toward maximizing productivity and a reluctance to make any money when you can’t make ALL the money.  I understand that going out of your way to do things that are going to awesome while producing frustration and failing to maximize profits is a losing proposition but I have to ask why you can’t budget for the wildly “out there” or more labor intensive stuff that might not be the objectively best uses of your time.

Going back to the DC example just as a for-instance, everything you said is almost certainly true.  Still, there is obviously at least some demand for it.  You say yourself that such a product would at the very least “sell well.”  So, why not go out of your way to be radically awesome in that way once in a while?  Maybe not every year but every five years or every ten.  Heck, even just working out the situation to be able to reprint some of the older crossovers would be fantastic.  Maybe getting the licensing back for Rom (a pretty awesome proposition) is just not possible, but if it is and it isn’t being done because of reasons similar to those above, then why not budget that as your one unproductive but undeniably awesome act of the decade?

Heck, you’ll reap benefits that may not translate easily to dollars but they will be there.  You’ll make at least some fans happy and earning “Goodwill” is an important part of building brand loyalty and engaging your customers.  On top of that, you’ll be proving to folks that Marvel isn’t just about stodgily managing their awesome to ensure that you’re using it only where it can make you the most money with the greatest efficiency.

Again, you have every right to ignore such logic but I think there’s something to it that shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed.  Just mull it over and I’d be interested in your thoughts.  I suppose the point I’m trying to make can be summed up as such:  Rather than always asking whether something is the best use of your resources, perhaps there should be managed opportunities to act on the most awesome use of your resources.>

It’s always a bit funny to see different people’s reactions to the different answers I give, and how they cover a range. Of late, I’ve been getting a lot of questions (typically about our plans to destroy the X-Men and the Fantastic Four) that insist that I should “tell it like it is”, and not obfuscate reality. Putting aside the fact that in those instances I have been telling it like it is, there are also times, like the above, where fans like yourself wish that I was less direct in giving you the straight poop.

Every Marvel release is held to the same strict standard: it needs to carry its water, to contribute to Marvel’s overall overhead and health. This is how we stay alive and thrive. We are not and never have been a charity organization. Back in the 1980s, titles would routinely be cancelled not because they weren’t selling well and making money, but because they were not selling well enough, and the feeling was that those same resources could be used to create a title that would sell better, reach more people, and generate even more income. So this is not a new thing.

It’s also not a one-sided thing. We may be completely gung-ho to do a crossover, but that is only one half of the equation. Any time you involve other parties–whether those other parties are Stephen King, the Lucas Story Group, or DC Comics, there are going to be additional demands and hurtles that need to be dealt with.

And the return on time and effort spent is a real thing. Over the years, we’ve published an awful lot of inter-company crossovers, far more than I could have dreamed of when I was a reader. And, for the most part, they’ve tended to be disappointing; even the best among them have not been universally beloved, because the mythical version of whatever meeting that exists within each fan’s head is inevitably better than what winds up on the page in the regular course of doing business. There have been plenty of crossovers that I’ve liked and I’m sure that you have as well, but as a general rule of thumb, these books are nobody’s favorite comics.

I’m all for doing awesome, crazy things, and we attempt to do that every single month. But I also have a responsibility, to the company and to the dozens of people whose jobs are on the line if we fail to make our budget in a given year. It’s very easy to say, “Hey, just one project like this won’t hurt!”, but that very quickly snowballs into a situation where you’re not meeting your numbers, because once an exception is made somewhere in the system, everybody wants to take advantage of that exception.

So we’re talking about a situation where the basic work of putting together a comic is at least doubled because of the needs of another company, where the return on that work is inevitably less than it would be if we simply published another IRON MAN book rather than BATMAN/IRON MAN because the total of the effort earned is going to us, and the result of which is likely to disappoint as many fans as it is to make them happy. I don’t think that’s a recipe for generating goodwill–and I have the experience of having been around and indeed having been the lead liaison with DC for most of the last ten years during which we did crossovers. I still get messages from fans every once in a while angry that Superman punched out Thor in AVENGERS/JLA or something similar.

You’d like to see more Marvel/DC crossovers, I get it. I can empathize. But that doesn’t really change the circumstances of my answer. And even if it did, that doesn’t mean that DC is going to suddenly feel differently as well. (We were ready to do a BATMAN/DAREDEVIL book years ago when Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker were trying to get one to happen, but at that time they weren’t.)

You’re asking me for an honest answer, and that’s what I have to give you, even though I know it’s not going to be what you want to hear.