New Brevoort Formspring

Tom, can you talk a little bit about why brand new characters seem to struggle more than new legacy characters?

I’m gonna use Alpha as an example, a new character, who was introduced in the Spider-Man comics. Right now he seems to be in the character nirvana, since he could never break through.

But then there are legacy characters like Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen, the new Spider-People and for some reason people embrace those characters more.
Would Ms. Marvel have clicked with the audience, if you introduced her under a new and unique persona? I have my doubts.

To me it feels like readers don’t want to see new, actually exciting things.>

Well, yeah. Some of this is that the landscape of the Marvel Universe is already crowded with hundreds of other characters that readers are invested in to one extent or another. So it’s difficult to find a patch of absolutely unique ground to stand on, moreso than it would be in a younger shared universe. Beyond that, both readers and retailers are hesitant to spend their coin and their time on something completely new, for fear of wasting it or getting stuck with it. And that’s because of track record more than anything. So giving a new character a name and an identity like Ms Marvel helps to overcome some of this resistance–readers and retailers alike go in with some manner of understanding as to who and what this is, and a comfort level about them. If the same content had been released as Marvel Miss, chances are that it would have struggled more and maybe not caught on at all, because enough people wouldn’t have been paying attention to it.