Marvel Editor on Civil War Mid-Season Hiatus:”It’s Just a Hard Book to Do”

Following up on yesterday’s item about the scheduling delays in Marvel’s most prominent title… By late yesterday afternoon, Newsarama had landed a quickie interview with editor Tom Brevoort to reassure angry fans. Brevoort lay much of the problem at the feet of writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven for… well, not quite for reaching in excess of their grasp, because he insists they’re doing amazing work; it just takes time. Still, he suggests that what others have described as a short lead time to meet a pre-scheduled start date “might have been surmountable if this was an easier sort of project.”

The late issues frustrate not only readers, but retailers who were counting on the sales revenue from Civil War and its various tie-ins for the next few months. It’s also got to be a huge setback for Marvel considering all the effort they made to get the mainstream media to notice what they were doing, like editor-in-chief Joe Quesada’s Colbert Report appearance. Get folks excited about a comic, only to find out when they finally venture into a comics shop that it’s not coming out until September and November? That can’t be good. But holding back on the issue that was supposed to come out yesterday until next month, and then waiting two months for the issue after that, was deemed the only viable solution; Marvel’s willing to wait for McNiven to finish drawing because “fill-in artists suck.” And all those people who say Marvel should’ve waited until they had more of the project in the can before releasing the first issue? When companies try that approach, Brevoort says, readers just want to know when the book’s coming out. “Comic book readers as a whole aren’t really great with delayed gratification,” he observes.

If you think you could have handled this whole thing better, Brevoort’s got a challenge for you. Readers of his official Marvel blog are invited to audition to take part in an editing simulation, where he’ll select a volunteer to pretend to be a comic book editor, throw out a hypothetical set of circumstances, and let the volunteer post about how they’d respond in those situations. Repeat for two weeks. “I’m absolutely going to be stacking the deck against you,” Brevoort warns, “piling up appropriate problems along the way in a much shorter span of time than they might naturally occur in.”

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