I am starting to feel like Marvel needs to make some SERIOUS changes, especially on top. Let’s take, for example, the Editor in Chief, Joe Quesada, who can’t get his Daredevil: Father done, and held up for an eternity the NYX series. If you’ve ever wondered why Marvel’s books often run into some SERIOUS lateness issues, let’s just say the writers and artists take their example from the top. And there’s more!
Marvel’s work environment is known to be bad towards women, as revealed by Gail Simone: http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?p=3460853#post3460853
Tom Brevoort, an editor at Marvel who handles some of their biggest titles, including Civil War and New Avengers, consistently puts his foot into his mouth when it comes to fans and to comic book retailers. Here are just a couple of examples:
He has said that what happens in comics doesn’t matter, and that fans basically shouldn’t expect dead characters to stay dead or any major event’s impact to last. http://marvel.com/blogs/Tom_Brevoort/entry/462
Basically calls retailers cry babies when they vocalized their disappointment with delays on Civil War #4: http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=80780&highlight=tom+brevoort
And, the top man at Marvel, Joe Quesada, in a true sign of support for the main thrust of their business, recently said that he believes the end of printed, single issue comics will happen within 30 years: http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays08.html
They also have been leaders in the “variant cover” market, which if you’ve ever read my opinion on that, you’ll know why I don’t like that mentality. They also do short initial print runs on books, forcing second prints, which they also cleverly call variants.
In addition, it often seems that their focus is shifting away from putting out good books to just putting out a lot of books. That’s not to say that they don’t put out some very good comics. But are you reading: Beyond? Union Jack? Agents of Atlas? Just to name a few. They seem to like to use a few of their very best to push books, rather than help grow some of the other very talented folks they have at their disposal by putting them on books that are already popular.
While I can’t quit buying Marvel comics, and I do read some of them, I really wish that they’d work on making some changes that reflect more positively on themselves and the comic book market as a whole.
2 comments:
I actually wrote a piece on Quesada's position on women in his company here if you're interested.
Honestly, the older I get the more amazed I become at the companies that dominate the market while being riddled with problems.
GREAT piece, very well written and cited. Thanks for putting the link up here.
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