Anonymous
asked:
"No, appearances such as what you suggest would need to be coordinated with the home office for that character." ... Someone asked if a writer can take any character and put him into any issue. That was your response to it, but could you elaborate a little bit more on that? What exactly is a "home office"? Does Marvel have creative teams, which have certain characters under their eyes and direct them through the canon of the universe? I never even thought about that.

Not creative teams so much as editorial offices. So, for example, I edit CAPTAIN AMERICA. So if you want Cap to appear in your title, your editor needs to coordinate that appearance with me, and you need to deal with whatever I tell them is the status quo of Cap right now–so Steve Rogers is old and Sam Wilson is Captain America. And we negotiate in order to get the best stories for everyone and to allow everybody to do what they want to do within reason.

The same is true if what you’re after is a key Cap villain–if you want the Red Skull or Baron Zemo or Crossbones or whomever, I had better know about it. For a lesser Cap villain, say somebody like Everyman from back in the 80s, most likely all you need to express is a desire to use them and give a sense as to what you’re going to do with them, and that will be fine.

It’s also possible that a character like that could become ceded for a time or even permanently to another title, if you did such a quintessential Everyman story in your book such that people now associate him more with your title than with Cap. Even with the big villains–while Rick was writing both titles, the Red Skull became more of an UNCANNY AVENGERS villain than a CAP villain, though that will likely revert back at some point (and Cap was a part of the UNCANNY AVENGERS series as well.)