LiveWire Review posts the first two parts of a three-part interview with writer Ed Brubaker, who talks about the creator-owned Criminal, Marvel titles Captain America, Daredevil and Uncanny X-Men, and his work on Catwoman, Gotham Central and Batman for DC:

… Gotham Central was a labour of love for all of us, it’s something I look fondly back on. They stumbled so many times with that book, it could have been a much bigger success than it was. It was never to the point that they talked about canceling it but we always felt a certain kind of ‘why aren’t we reaching more people?’

It took them forever to bring out the first trade paperback – I think we were on issue #18 or #19 before they put out the collection of #1-5, and by that point Michael [Lark] & Greg [Rucka] had already won the Eisner Award for the second storyline! I just thought that DC didn’t know how to handle the book, because it wasn’t a DC proper book and it wasn’t a Vertigo book and because of that I felt no-one knew how to deal with it. I’d have people within the company telling me it was their favourite book and I’m like ‘well then why don’t you promote it? Why are we waiting for trade paperbacks?’ to the point where by the time the third trade paperback came out the book was done, and that trade should have come out two months after the story ended. That just drove me crazy. And they genuinely did love it, too, they weren’t lying.

I remember when the people in marketing told me that they’d read the first issue and it was one of their favourite comics that DC had published in years and I said ‘oh, are we gonna get the cover of the Previews catalogue then? ‘cause we could really use it’ and they said ‘oh no, Aquaman’s getting that. Aquaman’s tenth series … Aquaman’s only going to sell as well as Aquaman ever sells, but that’s the way marketing works – they always put the money in the stuff that’s already more guaranteed to sell. They rarely put marketing money into the stuff where there’s risk. I’m excited to see they’re putting money into a push for the new Minx line that Vertigo’s doing and I think that’s a really good idea because there’s no guarantee that that stuff will make money and you’ve got to get the word out about it if you want to.

Part 3 of the interview is listed as “coming soon.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 9:58 am and is filed under Creators, DC Comics, Marvel. 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.