Anonymous
asked:
Tom, I was thinking recently about the number of fill-ins and replacements you guys do on monthly books because of your increased shipping schedule, and I started feeling that from a corporate and business standpoint the art almost doesn't matter to you guys. Like I'm sure Hawkeye or Young Avengers or Thor: God of Thunder would be very similar books if you just kept their writers and had different artists, but I feel like they wouldn't be what they are without the artists that have defined them.

The art matters to us a great deal, the whole package matters to us. But the manner in which the audience likes to consume entertainment is changing–what’s come to be known as “binge consuming.” That means that we do better if the books ship more often than once a month, and that’s an almost impossible schedule for any artist to handle. It’s funny, though, because all of the titles you listed have had fill-in artists, and HAWKEYE in particular had four separate artists on it during its first year. So you can define a series and a style while still rotating the artists that you use on it as a matter of necessity. In a perfect world, you;d just have one, because that’s easier for everybody at that point–but it’s a physical impossibility in most cases. Heck, there aren’t that many artists anymore who can do twelve issues a year.