Stories aren’t the destination. Stories are the journey.

You point to one of the most successful (albeit most controversial) stories we’ve done recently in making your argument, SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN–and that actually makes the opposite argument.

Our readers become most invested when the stories move outside of their comfort zones. That inevitably is when we see the greatest interest and the greatest return. This all assumes that we do the story well, but let’s take that as a given for the moment.

For all that you say that “everybody knew that Spider-Man would be back”, everybody also knew that SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN would only run 12 issues. And then they knew that it would only run 25. And so on. To be more accurate, they suspected, but knew nothing–and were proven wrong in each case. And again, consequently, that storyline has been incredibly successful.

You don’t know what’s going to happen in 3 MONTHS TO LIVE. You may think you do, you may feel confident in your predictions–but you don’t. And that makes it much more likely that you’re going to at least flip through that book on the racks, to see if what you predicted actually came to pass and we were exactly as foolish as you thought we would be. And that means that you’re that much more likely to buy the book in order to read it. And now we have a ballgame.

Death isn’t a gimmick. Death is one of only two universal experiences that every human being on the planet will experience at some point. Death is fundamental, and so death in fiction taps into something primal–or can, if you do it right. So of course, absolutely we’re going to do stories that explore the consequences of a life coming to an end. Those are stories that are much more likely to have something genuine to say about our readers’ lives than miscellaneous battles to save the world, and so forth.

You’ll either like 3 MONTHS TO LIVE, or you won’t. Let us know either way.