New Brevoort Formspring

You’re basically saying why bother trying anything, ever?

I don’t believe in that.

I think part of what’s changed is that the measurement for success is different in the modern world. It’s very unlikely that any new series is going to run infinitely. Not impossible, but unlikely. So that’s the case regardless of whether you’re launching DEATHLOK or WINTER SOLDIER or AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. We’re conditioned to think in terms of everlasting series, but that’s not really the shape of the marketplace right now.

Certainly, the prevailing wisdom was that doing a HAWKEYE book was doomed to failure, because the character had never sold as a solo hero before with any real success. But the right stories and the right execution proved that wrong. So much of the acclaim that the assorted MARVEL NOW/ALL-NEW MARVEL NOW books have found is because they each do something specific, they deliver a particular flavor and style that you can’t get anywhere else. Whether we’re talking about SHE-HULK or BLACK WIDOW or SILVER SURFER or ELEKTRA or MS MARVEL, that’s the consistent theme. Uniqueness. Scratching a different itch.

At the moment, because of his visibility on the AGENTS OF SHIELD series, Deathlok has a greater visibility and recognition-factor than at any other time in his history. And he’s a great character that a bunch of fans dig. And it’s been a while since we tried anything with him. So that makes him a prime candidate for a series in my mind.

If I only sell 6 issues of DEATHLOK, or whatever, then that’s still 6 issues that put revenue into my coffers. That helps the bottom line. And if we hit things right, maybe we do 12 issues, or 18 issues, or 24 issues. I think it’s doubtful that any DEATHLOK series launched now will hit 100 issues, but I think that’s true of literally any series that’s launched now. So that’s no longer the metric I use to define success.

We’re going to continue to attempt to tell great stories that people love. Hopefully, enough people to keep a particular book running indefinitely. But if we don’t get that, if the series goes away, like RUNAWAYS for example, that doesn’t make it a failure.