The delay for Marvel’s Civil War has given us the opportunity to see behind the scenes in today’s Marvel, as Mark Millar explains on Millarworld:

Just out of bed (unusually early at 7.55am) and just found out about this in an email from Tom B mere minutes before seeing the [press release] on Newsarama…

All I can say is that this is really good of Marvel. Why? Let me explain. Civil War is seven issues long and both the first and last issues were extra-sized. Steve is a pretty fast artist, maybe a nine or ten books a year guy, but he only had a six or seven week head start on this series. Absolutely nothing at all. And it was always going to catch up with him, especially given that 100 characters appear in every issue and it’s the most labour-intensive thing he’s ever drawn. It also happens to be the BEST work of his career and Marvel could easily– EASILY– just done what DC did and stick fill-in guys on the series. In fact, we EXPECTED it for issue five because we knew a lot of titles like FF and so on were tying in.

But you know what? They didn’t. MCW has rocketed Marvel profits lately. The new figures aren’t available yet, but we’re doubling and sometimes trebling the sales on the tie-in books, the anthology title– an ANTHOLOGY TITLE– is doing over 100K and we’re heading towards 400K with the book itself. Marvel believe in the project and they feel me and Steve have formed a good team. Something they don’t want to fuck with for the sake of squeezing a few more bucks into the next financial quarter and so, after doing their sums, decided they’ll take a hit. Now this is a pain in the arse for being reading the book because it means waiting a few more weeks for Steve to finish. It’s also a pain for people enjoying the tie-ins. But Steve is hammering away here and these books will all be done and dusted by the New Year and the series, and tie-ins, will all be published completely soon afterwards by the original teams and without some grotty fill-ins. It also means the collections remain looking great.

It’s a hiccup, sure, but I appreciate what they’re doing. Seriously, it would have been easy for them and made them MUCH more money to get someone else in to draw issue five, but they believe in our thing, it’s worked out bigger and better than any of us dreamed and they want it to look as cool as it was originally conceived.

In short, apologies for the art delays, but it’s worth it.

The important part of the above is, of course, that Steve McNiven apparently only had a six week lead time to work on the book… Something that Mark repeats later:

To answer that Q about McNiv not being given more lead time, well, remember I told you guys MCW was a very last minute thing. It came from me and Bendis thinking the planned crossover was a bit rubbish, Bryan suggesting the SHIELD versus MU thing instead and me eventually pitching Civil War. This was just MONTHS before the first issue came out. I wanted the best artist I could get for the series and that was Steve. A fill-in for issue five was no biggie, but Marvel has decided that the product is more important than profit here and, as a creator, I appreciate that. The book will go out the way we’d always hoped. It might take a couple of months longer than planned in total, but it’s not the end of the world and it looks better on the shelf this way.

What that doesn’t actually answer, of course, is why there wasn’t more lead time. “It was a last minute thing” and “Steve had no head start” assumes that the date of the first issue of Civil War was set in stone since possibly before the actual idea for the book, back when it was just “Marvel Summer Crossover 2006″ on some schedules… If the idea for the book was so last minute and a fill-in was already tentatively scheduled for the fifth issue - even though issue five was previously solicited with McNiven as artist - then the most obvious question really is, why not just launch the crossover a couple of months later?

MW poster Nathan notices the same thing:

I’m pissed about the delays, but I find the above revelations to be extremely telling about Marvel’s editorial direction. As if they can’t remember the uproar caused by fill-in art on New X-Men. I guarantee you, if they’d had a fill-in artist for one CW issue, you could take a poll and easily 80% would be upset and have preferred a delay to get more McNiven art.

What Mark alluded to but didn’t highlight, was that Marvel had a Start Date set in stone for a pre-existing crossover idea, an idea that both Millar and Bendis thought was shite, but when they replaced it with Millar’s idea they didn’t change their Start Date and figured they’d rather stick the fans with a fill-in artist on a Millar crossover event or have late books than move back their Precious Start Date by a month or two. 

We’ll see if there’s any response to that from any Marvel people soon… 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 11:15 am and is filed under Comic Books, Creators, Marvel, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.