It’s really easy to make fun of Tom Brevoort these days. Look, I’ll do it now, with this quote from his thread on the CBR board about why Speedball became Penance:

Speedball had been around for close to twenty years, and hadn’t really broken out as a character. Sure, there were some who liked him (myself included), but he was always seen to some degree as a reclamation project–whether the ones doing the reclamation were Fabian back in NEW WARRIORS or whoever handles him today. So the notion of taking this Peter Parker-style young character, putting him through the crucible and having him come out the other side completely changed was very interesting, and a journey we haven’t seen with an established character before in quite this way. Plus, it allows us to leave the Speedball name behind, which is one of the things that held the character back–nobody’s going to do an action figure or a cartoon or whatnot about a character whose name is a drug cocktail, intentional or not.

Yes, because everyone wants to do an action figure or a cartoon or whatnot about a character who enjoys pain and has a costume modelled after an iron maiden that causes him enough pain to have superpowers.

See? But it’s too easy to make fun of Tom these days. It’s much harder to get Tom to give a fascinating interview about his time at Marvel Comics, as Brian Michael Bendis has done:

[E]very once in a while folks here tend to jump towards the thing that is most shocking or the thing that seems most dangerous, the edgiest thing. The other thing that sort of differentiates me, if anything, from the other guys—which kind of goes back to what you were talking about before—is that I try to take a long-term view… I don’t always manage it necessarily, but I do try to take the long-term view and go, “OK, you’re going to do this now. Well, what’s the ‘get’? How are we going to end up better as a result of this as opposed to worse? Yes, that will be shocking this week and will be exciting this week and maybe we’ll sell some comics this week, but once we’re done with this, are we going to end up in a better position or a worse position overall?” Part of that is the mentality that I have a decent chance of actually still being here when we get to that point five years from now and are all going, “Boy, that was a mistake” or “Boy, that was a really good idea.”

It’s a very revealing interview about Brevoort and his relationship with the current regime at Marvel; well worth reading.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under 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.