New Brevoort Formspring

I didn’t get all of your numbered questions–the first part is missing. But this is the one that I’m going to respond to. Just understand that I’m missing the first part of what you’re asking about.

But what you seem to want is a formula, and an absolutely level playing field for all things. And that’s not realistic, because what we do isn’t science, it’s art, and no two characters or concepts or series are created equal.

On relaunches like this, we make what we believe to be the best most accurate choice in every instance, based on what he objectives of the book are, based on the pedigree of the creative team, and the severity of the direction switch, and a million other factors. Sometimes it simply comes down to a gut feeling–this feels like a #1 as opposed to a #684, and vice versa.

And the one certainty is that, no matter what we choose, there will be people unhappy about it on both sides of the fence: people who feel like we’re selling away the history by renumbering again (how many BLACK PANTHER #1s did we do in a short period of time before that switchover? At least two. So would a third really have done anything?) And people who like the character or the book and feel like it’s being wrong-footed will complain that they would rather have had a new #1 to give the series a better shot–often in the same breath that they complain about the bevy of new #1s on other titles.

But none of this is about “washing our hands of it quicker”, as you say in one of the other parts of your question. That’s somewhat ridiculous fanboy-style thinking about what we do. Here’s the thing: we don’t have to publish any of this stuff. If we don’t want to do a BLACK PANTHER series, nobody in the world is making us do it. Anything we launch, we want to have succeed–there is no “washing our hands of it” involved. That’s organizationally–individually, there are books I like better than other books, and the same is true for every person working up here–we all have our own individual taste. But absolutely nobody works to make a series fail. That would be completely bonkers! And nobody “sets a series up to fail.” Again, that’s crackers–what would be the point of that? We spend an insane amount of time and money and energy on every book we put out. Doing so in the hopes that they won’t work is both deranged and unnecessary–we could simply just not do that project at all.