Peter David looks back in… well, not anger, exactly:

When we did “Heroes Reborn,” there was a brief time when “Hulk” was cancelled. And due to massive groundswell from the fans, Marvel changed its mind, but it left me up against a wall because I was trying to balance the stories I was trying to tell while dealing with the ramifications of “Heroes Reborn” put me in an incredible hammerlock. Between “Onslaught” and “Heroes Reborn,” editorially the series went completely off the rails. When I found out it was going to be cancelled, and I had to write stories to accommodate this, I seriously considered resigning from the book. I didn’t feel that I could produce stories worth telling under these constrictions.

But I felt like I really owed the fans to stick it out and make the best of a bad situation. So I did the best I could, but in retrospect, when you try to make the best of a bad situation the results are bad comic books. I was extremely unhappy with the “Hulk” during that time.

Once we were past “Heroes Reborn” and Kubert came onboard, I felt the book was as good as it ever was. Unfortunately, we were hemorrhaging readers from the bad stories from the “Heroes Reborn” fiasco. By the time the story was back on track we had a different readership, but the damage had been done.

Don’t worry; he’s kind of hamstrung by editorial even today, as well:

When I took on “Friendly-Neighborhood Spider-Man,” I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. Spider-Man is the flagship character and if you are going to be doing crossovers he is going to be affected, and if you are going to do crossovers, it is going to be exceedingly tricky… I had a whole storyarc planned with the school and then all of a sudden Peter Parker is unmasking himself during “Civil War.” I was faced with a situation where all the villains would know he is at the school, so I decided to do a story where the villains attacked the school, and then was told that was happening in “Spec Spidey.” And that was problematic… [I]t’s only been since the Mysterio arc that I feel like I’ve been getting any traction. Spider-Man’s strength has always been his supporting cast, and I’ve never been sanguine about the fact that Spidey’s supporting cast is the Avengers. Why are we doing that when he has one of the best supporting casts in the history of comic books, so I’ve been aggressively bringing them back.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Creators, 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.